When Did the Vatican Become Communist China?

According to the lame stream media, Rome "cracks down" on liturgical abuse.

One of the main points of the Vatican document commissioned by Pope John Paul II warned against lay people delivering sermons or preaching the Gospel.

The document uses terse language to discourage the misconduct, saying some practices were "not infrequently" plaguing Masses and that in some places "the perpetration of liturgical abuses has become almost habitual, a fact which obviously cannot be allowed and must cease."

It also said anyone conscious of being in grave sin shouldn’t receive Communion without going to confession -- a regulation that prompted questions about whether priests should deny politicians, such as Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, Communion because of their support for abortion rights.

Cardinal Francis Arinze, whose Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments issued the document, said the majority of priests celebrate Mass correctly and stressed the directive was not intended to be "repressive" but merely to remind Catholics of church teaching.

The directive restated church teaching on all aspects of the liturgy, from the type of vestments a priest should wear, to the timing of his prayers and the types of bread and wine used at Communion.

Teachers' Union Co-Sponsors Pro-Abortion March

If you're a faithful Catholic and a public school teacher, opt-out of the union now and ask to have any mandatory agency fees you are required to pay the union (i.e., Moloch) be diverted to an unobjectionable charity.

Feel free to e-mail me if you have any questions on how to do this.

GOP Vets Rip Kerry in Congress

And the best that the Dems could do to counter was to have uber-liberal Baghdad Jim McDermott question Dubya's honorable service in the National Guard.

Big Fat Hypocrite

Self proclaimed champion of the working class and Hollywood limousine liberal Michael Moore outsources his website design and servers to a foreign country.

Calling All Muslims!

A Michigan city approves a local mosque's request to air prayer calls to Muslims over public loudspeakers -- 5 times a day!

Somehow I get the feeling that the same courtesy would not be extended to a local parish wishing to expressly exhort Catholics to pray the Rosary.

Race Whoring

It's still a thriving area of practice in the legal/political profession.

The usual suspects -- plus one holier-than-thou world power -- are calling on the U.S. military to repent for its treatment of Muslim chaplain James Yee (a.k.a. "Yousef" or "Yousif" Yee).

Refresher: Yee's the Army captain who ministered to al Qaeda and Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Seven months ago, Yee was arrested on suspicion of espionage. He spent 76 days in solitary confinement; the case didn't materialize; he was convicted on lesser charges of adultery and downloading pornography. Last week, the Army Southern Command chief who oversees military operations at Guantanamo dismissed those convictions.

What more do Yee and his sympathy circle want? They want the government to grovel and beg forgiveness for being too aggressive in defending against potential terrorist sympathizers and abettors. In a letter to President Bush, Yee's lawyer complained of guards who "refused to provide him with a liturgical calendar or prayer rug and refused to tell him the time of day or the direction of Mecca." Comparing it to the victimization of gay soldiers, commentator Andrew Sullivan condemned the military's enforcement of the Uniform Code of Military Justice against Yee as "disgraceful, foul and malicious." And now, along with Arab-American and Asian-American activists trying to turn Yee into an international human rights poster boy, comes the Communist government of China.

According to the Zhongguo Xinwen She news agency, the Chinese ambassador to the United Nations, Sha Zukang, blasted the U.S. for "racial discrimination" and cited "the recent case against Chinese American Yousef Yee" as an example of America's "domestic human rights situation." The absurdity of turning this into a racial issue is topped only by the sanctimony of Ambassador Sha, representative of the Falun Gong-torturing, political dissent-steamrolling, one-child-policy pioneers in Beijing, who fulminated that "the United States should look at itself in a mirror." Captain Yee's stateside defenders, such as Cecilia Chang of the San Francisco Bay Area-based grievance group Justice for New Americans, likewise pretend he was viciously singled out for being the child of "immigrant minorities." Chang complained, "Many people who don't look very 'American' are being targeted."

The Slippary Slope

Distort the definition of marriage by officially recognizing homogamous unions, then you better be able to come up with a good reason for why polygamous, or even incestuous, unions should continued to be universally outlawed.

Pretext for Homo-Indoctrination

"G@y" rights activists exploit a tran$exual murder victim in order to justify forcing public school children to accept their disordered lifestyle. That's right. If you believe tran$exual or homo$exual conduct is perverse or immoral, you are a potential murderer.

Give Me a Break

Big wig lawyers unite to oppose any splitting of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. The "bipartisan" group cites potential injustices as a reason for their opposition.

Yeah, Heaven forbid that we should ever have a Federal Circuit Court of Appeal that doesn't consistently get overturned by the SCOTUS, or has a backlog of unresolved cases that arises from a willingness to entertain and affirm the delusions of left-wing anti-Christians like the ACLU and Michael Newdow.

Happy Your Taxes Are Due by Midnight Tonight Day!

Unless, of course, you're filing for an extension. Take heart. There's only about another month or two to go until the money you earn is actually yours and not the governments.

Religious Liberty Case to Keep and Eye On

The SCOTUS will be reviewing an employment case that focuses on the question of whether state law enforcement agencies are exempt from having to comply with the religious accommodation provisions of Title VII (a.k.a. the Federal Civil Rights Act).

The Indiana State Police in South Bend assigned Benjamin Endres Jr. as a full-time gaming commission agent at the Blue Chips Casino in Michigan City, Ind. His job description listed gambling-related responsibilities, such as verifying gambling profits, investigating public complaints about the gaming system and performing license investigations for the casinos and their employees.

Endres claimed these duties would force him to violate his Baptist beliefs, which bar him from participating in or facilitating gambling. Endres asked his employer to reassign him. His request was denied, and when Endres failed to report to work he was fired.

After Endres filed a suit in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Indiana, the police agency sought to have the case dismissed, arguing that Indiana officials were protected from the Title VII claim by the state's sovereign immunity. But in December 2001, U.S. District Judge Robert Miller Jr. ruled against the state, saying that Endres could go ahead with his Title VII claim.

On appeal, the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals saw the case differently. In an opinion last year by Judge Frank Easterbrook, the 7th Circuit reversed Miller, ruling that Endres had not made a valid Title VII claim. Judges Richard Posner and William Bauer joined in the opinion, which did not touch on the state immunity question.

Easterbrook said the law could not be interpreted to allow police or firefighters to pick and choose which laws to enforce or which fires to extinguish. Noting religious preferences such as Catholics' opposition to abortions and Jewish and Muslim bans on eating pork, Easterbrook asked rhetorically whether the law requires the state police "to assign Unitarians to guard the abortion clinic, Catholics to prevent thefts from liquor stores, and Baptists to investigate claims that supermarkets misweigh bacon and shellfish?"

Easterbrook continued: "Juggling assignments to make each compatible with the varying religious beliefs of a heterogeneous police force would be daunting to managers and difficult for other officers who would be called on to fill in for the objectors."

OK, I've never read the full decision by the 7th Circuit, but the quoted comments by Easterbrook are incredibly asinine if only because he ignores that part of Title VII which states that employers do not have to accommodate the religious beliefs of an employee if doing so would impose an "undue hardship" on them (the employers). Certainly, not having enough people to put out a fire would give rise to an undue hardship, but for Easterbrook to effectively compare firefighting to something like verifying the gambling profits of a casino is out there, and seems to be reflective of a personal hostility to people of religious faith.

Update: The SCOTUS has declined to review the case. Speculation is that the Court has "religion fatigue."

Catholic Politician Scorecard

Brought to you by the Democrat Party, and coming soon to a political campaign near you. Look for the scorecards to show that pro-abortion and pro-homogamy Catholic Democrats are legislatively "more faithful" to the Church than pro-life and pro-family Catholic Republicans. In the meantime, the USCCB continues to collectively show it's lack of backbone in dealing with blatantly disobedient Catholic politicians.

A preliminary copy of the scorecard obtained by The Hill, which a Lampson aide emphasized is still unfinished, shows that the 67 Catholic House Democrats received an average score of 76 percent, while the 49 Catholic Republican members averaged 64 percent.

Republican Catholic members were quick to criticize the scorecard.

Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said both the bishops and the Democrats are confusing means with motives. “Many of the issues they’re talking about really have nothing to do with actual Catholic teaching or religion,” he said. “It is interpretation of economic policy.”

(...)

Meanwhile, Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, archbishop of Washington, told “Fox News Sunday” that he is reluctant to deprive a Catholic politician who deviates from Catholic teaching of Communion and would only do so as a last resort.

Monahan said a task force in the conference has been assembled to develop a policy for dealing with Catholic politicians whose positions do not reflect Catholic teaching.

But in a report published in March, the conference stated that Catholics should not become single-issue voters: “The Christian faith is an integral unity, and thus it is incoherent to isolate some particular element to the detriment of the whole of Catholic doctrine.”

The task force “is looking at everything,” said Monahan, adding, “It’s not formed around Senator Kerry or members of Congress. It’s dealing with Catholic politicians at all levels. Everything is on the table. They haven’t got too far down the line in their work yet. You’re dealing with a lot of bishops and a lot of points of view.”

Liberal and Deadbeats?

The new liberal talk radio network featuring "Stuart Smalley" has been suddenly yanked off the air in L.A. and Chicago. The shutdown is being attributed to a bounced check that the network apparently issued to the radio station owner. (news link via Drudge)

(Snicker...)

Forget Nader

Vader 2004!

Had enough of traditional politicians? Even the best of them can be intimidated by the likes of Tom Daschle. The kind of tough, uncompromising leadership that the Free World requires likely only exists in the land of fictional characters.

Enter Lord Vader. It is impossible to imagine Lord Vader bending over backwards to a pipsqueak like Daschle. Rather if Daschle got out of line at a meeting, Lord Vader would simply use the Force to constrict his windpipe and achieve what had hitherto been considered impossible: he'd shut him up.

For Once, It's Not A Jesuit School

Not that it makes it any better, of course. From LifeSite:

Catholic Seton Hall University to Award Pro-Abortion Judge

SOUTH ORANGE, NJ, April 12, 2004 (LifeSiteNews.com) - On Friday, April 16, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, a notoriously pro-abortion judge who voted to strike down the partial-birth abortion laws of more than 30 states, is presenting the annual "Sandra Day O'Connor Medal of Honor" to Judge Maryanne Trump Barry (Sister of Donald Trump) of the U.S. Court of Appeals. Trump Barry is the pro-abortion author of the opinion striking down the New Jersey partial-birth abortion statute.

Seton Hall is a Catholic arm of the Archdiocese of Newark. The Seton Hall website states that it is "the oldest diocesan university in the United States" and testifies that "Seton Hall is Catholic not only by its charter and mission, but also by its ongoing spirit and activity."

Despite this lip service to its Catholic tradition, Seton Hall Law School -- which has a faculty riddled with pro-abortion professors and has no record of honoring any pro-life heroes -- is once again creating a major scandal by honoring prominent pro-abortion figures.

Critics are encouraging concerned citizens to contact the Archbishop of Newark, the President of the University and the Dean of the Law School to protest the awards and to demand that the award ceremony be canceled and that the Law School's sponsorship of this annual award be terminated.

Contact information
Archbishop John Myers
973-497-4190
goodneja@rcan.org

Msgr. Robert Sheeran
973-761-9620
sheeraro@shu.edu

Dean Patrick Hobbs
973-642-8750
hobbspat@shu.edu

http://law.shu.edu/
http://law.shu.edu/administration/office.html
http://www.spc.edu/
http://www.spc.edu/about/contact.shtml

Cynical Old Fart

Did somebody forget to take his pills?

Andy Rooney: U.S. soldiers in Iraq aren't heroes. (link via Drudge)

Treating soldiers fighting their war as brave heroes is an old civilian trick designed to keep the soldiers at it. But you can be sure our soldiers in Iraq are not all brave heroes gladly risking their lives for us sitting comfortably back here at home.

Our soldiers in Iraq are people, young men and women, and they behave like people - sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes brave, sometimes fearful. It's disingenuous of the rest of us to encourage them to fight this war by idolizing them.

We pin medals on their chests to keep them going. We speak of them as if they volunteered to risk their lives to save ours, but there isn't much voluntary about what most of them have done. A relatively small number are professional soldiers. During the last few years, when millions of jobs disappeared, many young people, desperate for some income, enlisted in the Army. About 40 percent of our soldiers in Iraq enlisted in the National Guard or the Army Reserve to pick up some extra money and never thought they'd be called on to fight. They want to come home.

One indication that not all soldiers in Iraq are happy warriors is the report recently released by the Army showing that 23 of them committed suicide there last year. This is a dismaying figure. If 22 young men and one woman killed themselves because they couldn't take it, think how many more are desperately unhappy but unwilling to die.

Renewed Debate Over the Shroud of Turin

Recent findings appear to undermine 15 year old proclamations that the Shroud is fake.

Raymond Rogers is a retired physical chemist and former leader of the explosives research and development group at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. He proposes that the samples used to date the shroud in 1988 were flawed and the experiment should be repeated. His conclusion is based on a recent chemical analysis of the shroud and previous observations made during a 1978 examination.

Rogers was one of two dozen American scientists who participated in the 1978 Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP)—an intense five-day scientific investigation of the shroud in Turin, Italy.

(...)

The 1988 carbon dating results satisfied many skeptics that the Shroud of Turin was a clever hoax, and the findings stymied further research.

But some scientists have persisted. In 1999 Avinoam Danin, a botanist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, stated at the 16th International Botanical Congress that he found pollen grains on the shroud from plants that could only be found in and around Jerusalem, placing its origins in the Middle East.

Further comparison of the shroud with another ancient cloth, the Sudarium of Oviedo (thought to be the burial face cloth of Jesus), revealed it was embedded with pollen grains from the same species of plant as found on the Shroud of Turin.

The Sudarium even carries the same AB blood type, with bloodstains in a similar pattern. Since the Sudarium has been stored in a cathedral in Spain since the eighth century, the evidence suggests that the Shroud of Turin is at least as old.

Breaking Up is Hard to Do

In the case of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, it's almost been impossible. However, efforts to break up the most left-leaning and reversed federal appeals court in the country have started up again, and it looks as though it may end up going somewhere.

CNN = Credibility Not Necessary

It's not been a good two weeks for the all "news" network. First, CNN attributed a comment to the White House that it never made about a David Letterman bit, and this past Sunday it wrongly reported that the state of Missouri was considering a bill that would fire any public school teacher who refused to teach alternatives to evolution.

And Yet, Voluntary Abortion is Still Legal

The California State Supreme Court declares that murdering a pregnant woman counts as two homicides even if the accused didn't know the victim was pregnant. Just goes to further prove that recognition of the unborn as legally protected persons ultimately comes down to a matter of will.