Pope Francis According to Brian Lehrer

As always, Fr. Rutler doesn't disappoint with his article in Crisis about the Pope's ecology encyclical. Fr. Rutler writes, " there is a double danger in using it [the encyclical] as an economic text or scientific thesis."  

Having just listened to Brian Lehrer discuss the encyclical with Professor Christiana Peppard at Fordham University it's clear that the mainstream media will misuse, misunderstand and bungle badly what the Pope has written.

Whatever one may think of him, Pope Francis is at least a Catholic with a fairly good chance of getting to heaven.  Brian Lehrer on the other hand is an East Coast intellectual with a radio program. His knowledge of the faith is such that his follow-up show on the encyclical will consist of a phone-in to learn if and what parishioners will have heard from the pulpit on Sunday regarding climate change.  For Lehrer, apparently, this will reveal a significant truth about the Church.

Given the Brian Lehrers of the world, it's up to us Catholics not to engage in the "double danger" Fr. Rutler writes about.  Jesus came to fulfill the Law regardless of which side wins Brian Lehrer's papal encyclical phone-in derby on next week's show.

First "Stupid" Then "A Knucklehead"

Several years back, when it came time to do the college search, our oldest son decided to apply to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.  Living in Manhattan, coming from an international private school, and, for us, a family with no military background, it was an unusual path to take.

It generated not a few comments from those unflaggingly progressive New York City neighbors and friends of ours, most of whom had nothing particularly nice to say either to our son or to us as parents.  One especially angry neighbor stopped me on 14th Street just in front of the post office to ask what was going on and she (yes, it was a woman) finally could contain her distress no longer.  Her face red and her stance belligerent, she yelled after me that "only a 17-year old would be stupid enough to do something like that." Shortly thereafter, when our son was a first-semester plebe at West Point, then-Senator John Kerry delivered his own version of what most of my neighbors had been saying a few months earlier. Kerry told a college-age audience that they needed to be smart and get a good education lest they get "stuck" in the military.

Well, our son did do "something like that" and while he's not "stuck in Iraq" he is now a 25 year old soon-to-be captain in the U.S. Army.  He's been a platoon leader, planned missions and conducted training sessions. He handles and is responsible for equipment valued in the millions of dollars.  He lives in beautiful country, but he's 3,000 miles from the rest of his family.  He works long hours with modest pay.

And according to First Lady Michelle Obama he's a knucklehead. 

Oh, it's not just our son by any means, and she wasn't singling out knuckleheads in the military.  She was more sweeping in her characterization of young people as a group of knuckleheads.  I happen to have three in my family.  As Mrs. Obama puts it, my kids would be among those young people who are "cookin' for the first time and slice their finger open."  Presumably, according to the first lady, when my kids and their goofy lot aren't bungling something in the kitchen,  they're out "dancing on a bar stool," drunk enough to fall off and get a concussion I would imagine. And since they're all knuckleheads, they won't have insurance so they won't be able to get their finger stitched up, that is, if they're even smart enough to think to go to the doctor.

The First Lady's shallow humor was a push for her husband's Affordable Care Act, delivered at the expense of the young people who helped send Mrs. Obama and her husband to the White House.  Her hapless remark, like Kerry's "botched joke," has been covered by a variety of sources and there's not much more I can add except to shake my head in the disappointing knowledge that the first lady has a lot in common with my neighbors and friends of eight years ago.  They were merely speaking their minds when they let go with their opinions on young people joining the military just as Michelle Obama let us know who she thinks is stupid.  While I applaud them their honesty, I find it remarkable that these unflattering, critical labels roll so easily off the tongues of, well, liberals who pride themselves on being tolerant and well-educated and smart.

A Shepherd Among His Sheep for World Youth Day

Pope Francis is in the silver Fiat, Rio de Janeiro

This article about Pope Francis 's entrance into Brazil for World Youth Day is pleasant to read and highlights so nicely the essence of Pope Francis's papacy as he moves freely through crowds of people seeming to have little regard for his own safety and most regard for connecting with his flock.

Pope Francis simply chooses to continue his way of doing things as he’s always had when he was Archbishop of Buenos Aires. And this simple act is drawing the attention of millions as evidenced yesterday when the papal motorcade came to a standstill as the Pope’s car was surrounded by faithful wishing to greet him.Even more surprising, the Pope didn’t hide; on the contrary, he kept his window open, greeting people as if nothing. The Pope’s security detail, however, broke a sweat.It may seem irresponsible for some, or even careless that a man of the Pope’s stature be allowed to be swarmed like that but it truly is a testament to the bravery of Francis. It takes only one disgruntled or mentally unstable person to mix in with the crowd and endanger his life, yet he doesn’t shy away. He opens his window and extends his hand. He wants to be a part of their lives, he wants to comfort them; a shepherd 'who smells like his sheep.'

What a lesson for some of our secular leaders, seemingly completely divorced from even the knowledge of what courage is, who display nothing of the humility due their office nor any of the enthusiasm for connecting to the people who've placed them there.  Our own anti-gun Mayor Bloomberg travels with an armed security detail and doesn't take kindly to the suggestion that he's a hypocrite (not to mention a coward).  Barack Obama made sure to sign into law coverage for himself and his family guaranteeing lifetime--lifetime!--Secret Service protection.  Celebrities spend millions on security for themselves. And then there's the Rosie O'Donnell brouhaha of several years ago in which Rosie denounces guns--for everyone but her bodyguard. 

It would do us all good to read more about the true leadership that Pope Francis demonstrates daily to the world, but, alas, the mainstream media is slow to understand.  Hmmm, perhaps I spoke too soon.  There is this coverage from MSN.  It's not a bad article either, until about the fourth paragraph from the bottom where the writers tell us that despite the million or so expected for World Youth Day, most of Brazil's Catholics have turned to evangelical religions.  Not untrue perhaps but not the point either.  Besides, maybe Francis's humble, exemplary leadership and his love for the Church will bring all those Brazilian Catholics back into the sheepfold.

Priest Abuse Scandal and John Jay College Study

Regarding the John Jay College study , Archbishop Dolan made the point up front in his statement that the Catholic Church is the only professional agency to commission a study that looks into the whys and wherefores of sexual abuse of minors.   The prevalence of sexual abuse in families, schools and other institutions of our society certainly doesn't absolve priests of their wrongdoing, but the fact that the media continually points the finger at the Catholic Church suggests they are overlooking the log in their own eye.  Dolan seems to be unflagging in his reminders to the public at large that the Church has dealt with and is dealing with the abuse scandal.

Back in 2004,  the equally unflagging Catholic League reported that less than 2% of priests have been accused of abusing minors while 2% of athletic coaches nationwide have records of sexual abuse.  The rate of sexual abuse among Protestant clergy is 2%-3%.   This report also cites the 2004 Hofstra University study on sexual abuse by Carol Shakeshaft who comments that sexual abuse is 100 times more likely in the public schools than in the Church.   Why don't we ever hear about that? This article and this one point out the media bias in reporting.  

The John Jay College study (this is apparently the second part, the first having been released in 2004) concludes that there was no one specific cause of abuse in the Catholic Church, not celibacy, not homosexuality.  Rather, the social changes of the 60s and 70s affected priests in much the same way the rest of society was afffected.  Seems to me that begs the question, doesn't it? 

The sexual revolution of the 60s certainly didn't advocate celibacy so that can't be considered a factor, but the 60s did promote a libertine lifestyle and a sexual freedom that, with very little stretch of the imagination, could easily have influenced the acceptance of homosexuals into the seminaries.  Reading the report might disabuse me of my own conviction that homosexuality, as endorsed and promoted by the social revolution of the 60s and then adopted by liberal factions within the Church in the post-Vatican II days, lies somewhere at the bottom of the priest abuse scandal.  By the way, most studies report that 80%-90% of victims in the case of the Church were adolescent boys, not girls, not young children. 

Alveda King and Restoring Honor Rally

Hopefully, Alveda King, niece of Martin Luther King, Jr. will become more of a household name now that Glenn Beck included her in his Restoring Honor Rally back on August 28th. Alveda King travels wherever Priests for Life sends her to carry her message on the "evil twins" of abortion and racism. As a Pastoral Associate for African-American Outreach of Priests for Life, King spreads the under-reported news that while blacks comprise only 12% of the general population, they have 35% of the abortions. King is one of the few in the pro-life movement to point out that a disproportionate percentage of abortion clinics are found in minority neighborhoods, supposedly to "serve" the poor. But, as King points out, "you don't serve the poor by taking their money to terminate their children."

Alveda King offends liberal, establishment blacks, or the Black Mafia as writer Lloyd Marcus calls them, because she doesn't deliver the required blacks-as-victims rhetoric. In her open letter of 2008 to the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), King doesn't promote green jobs, free rides to community colleges or more government hand-outs. She talks about strengthening the black family, promoting marriage and family values. She reminds America's African-American leaders that the core mission of black civil rights groups is to ensure the equality of rights for all persons without recourse to violence or hatred. And, again, to the CBC, she addresses the issue of reparations saying,

the battle against oppression and segregation was not white versus black, but right versus wrong. There are no separate races divided by skin color. It was not whites who did this to blacks, it was Southern racists who even took us into a war where 300,000 whites gave their lives to end slavery. A political party based on abolition was formed by whites to free the slaves.

Hardly words that Maxine Waters, Al Sharpton, or, for that matter, Barack Obama, want to hear.

Alveda King offends white feminists when she says,

The abortion movement in this country was started by Margaret Sanger, the founder of an organization known today as Planned Parenthood. Ms. Sanger was quite open that she wanted "more children from the fit, less from the unfit." The unfit, she made clear, were blacks and poor whites. She had no qualms about speaking to as many as 12 Ku Klux Klan meetings. As I discuss in the new film, "Maafa 21: Black Genocide in 21st Century America" (produced byLifeDynamicsInc.), she targeted blacks in her eugenics-based campaigns.

And, Alveda King speaks out in a way that liberals find intolerable. When she invokes the dream of her Uncle Martin, and asks, How can the dream survive if we murder the children? she unsettles those who have whitewashed MLK, Jr. as little more than a "man of peace," a secular, kindly figure who wanted nothing more than a big group hug for the world. Columnist Johnathan Capehart scolds Ms. King for being a political opportunist at the Beck rally and "besmirching" her uncle's legacy. And columnist Bonnie Erbe is offended because Alveda King has dared to equate the pro-life movement with the civil rights movement and abortion with racism.

Erbe writes that she "supports abortion rights but I'm not sure I would go so far as to call it a human rights issue." Really? Highly doubtful considering that the operative mantra of the pro-abortion (reproductive rights) movement, the feminist (women's rights) movement, the homosexual (gay rights) movement has been to paint their respective causes as human rights violations and to create their movements in the image of the Civil Rights movement of the 60s.

Several years ago Alveda King spoke on the Barnard College campus at the request of the Columbia University pro-life student group. King arrived on a warm fall day in October wheeling her suitcase in front of her, having just come from another lecture tour. She has no entourage, no glamour, no flash and she gives her presentation by herself. Critics like Erbe and Capehart who desperately attempt to discredit King by saying she feeds on and distorts her uncle's legacy should attend one of her talks and note that there is humility in her presentation, not braggadoccio and that her message about the black experience in America, though not what the mainstream media wants to hear, is first-hand and true. Alveda King is tireless in her efforts to spread her message and Glen Beck deserves credit for supporting her.

The Sacred Meets The Profane

Oprah Winfrey recently interviewed several members of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist, a growing order near Ann Arbor, Michigan. You can read a bit about the show here and watch one of the segments below.

I'm not an Oprah follower (no TV in our household), but I do know enough about her show to have been curious as to how the splashy, pop-culture-queen Oprah would present the Sisters. I have to admit that the segment is pretty good! After all, who among us does know much about the life of the religious? Hearing these young women explain why they left the secular world to join a religious community is eye-opening and inspirational. Yes, Oprah had to sensationalize her questions about their vows of chastity, poverty and obedience, but the Sisters' answers are so articulate and thoughtful that it's easy to overlook Oprah's media hype. Oprah devoted a lot of time to the Sisters and the show's correspondent traveled to the Michigan convent and spent some time there.

Tim Tebow and His Super Bowl Ad

Yesterday, American Thinker published this short piece that I wrote on the upcoming Tim Tebow Super Bowl ad. With no TV, I listen to a lot of talk radio and thought it curious that such disparate talk-show hosts as Rush Limbaugh on the one hand and Mike Francesa on the other mentioned the Tebow ad. Part of Rush's showmanship is his claim to be the all-knowing, always-ahead-of-the-curve spokesman for relevant issues. I find he's always a little behind on the social issues like abortion and gay marriage, and his comments on the Tebow ad and so-called pro-choice women were just that, though he was accurate. As for Mike Francesa, he's almost always level-headed when he dips into subjects other than sports. (His interviews are always good, too!)

Defending the Faith

Patrick Buchanan asks if the Church Militant is back. Judging from Bishop Tobin's parting remarks to Catholic-detractor Patrick Kennedy as well as other Catholic news, the answer is yes. As mentioned in my previous blog, Tobin dispatched Kennedy much as one would cut off an obstreperous, sulking teen, saying, "I have no desire to continue the discussion of Congressman Kennedy's spiritual life in public." But, the bishop added, "At the same time, I will absolutely respond publicly and strongly whenever he attacks the Catholic Church, misrepresents the teachings of the Church, or issues inaccurate statements about my pastoral ministry. " Bishop Tobin then agreed to appear on a couple TV shows.

A word about the Tobin-Chris Matthews and Tobin-O'Reilly interviews. Not having owned a TV for the last 20 years, I suppose this is always what these shows are like? Or were Matthews and O'Reilly just especially gruff and shallow because they were interviewing a bishop? The interviews are remarkable only for the extent to which they showcase Matthews and O'Reilly as empty-headed loud-mouths who pass off their own grand-standing as hard-hitting journalism. These guys are jerks! There is just nothing between the ears.

Media types are so enamored of nuance and reflection when it's their own cause they are trumpeting, but when trying to wrestle with a weighty issue that in fact does require some thought, all they want is a quick-fix-type answer. The reason these interviews are so bad is that issues such as the sin of scandal, the matter of denying communion or the Church's position on the death penalty aren't five-second issues, no matter how loud and fast O'Reilly talks and no matter how many times Matthews tries to bulldoze the Bishop. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is not comparable to a cloud of spun sugar that melts in your mouth.

Bishop Tobin has already spoken eloquently, and, if nothing else, he was clear in these interviews as to where a Catholic politician's first allegiance must lie--to his faith and to God.

Speaking further of defending the faith, it is noteworthy that our own Archbishop Timothy Dolan also took to the fray a few weeks ago when the New York Times indulged in a wave of anti-Catholic reporting and opinion. Since the New York Times wouldn't publish Dolan's piece, the archbishop has posted it on his blog. (Scroll down to 'Anti-Catholicism' on October 29th, 2009.)

Dolan responds to the Times bias in its coverge of child sex abuse in an orthodox Jewish community. He (finally) mentions the way the Times and other media shamelessly drop the ball in covering the sexual abuse of minors in the public school system, yet the same media never fail to revive coverage of the priest-abuse scandals. Dolan points out the predictability of the Times coverage of a Franciscan priest who fathered a child saying only a Catholic "ever seems to merit such attention." Dolan noted that Maureen Dowd's "intemperate and scurrilous" piece would never have seen the light of day in the Times were she denigrating anyone other than Catholics.

Another redoubtable defender of Catholicism, Father George Rutler, of the Church of Our Saviour here in New York City, often has an apt word or two for the Times. He had this to say about the Times's anti-Catholic reporting. As a matter of fact, his words apply to the O'Reilly/Matthews syndrome as well:

Hostility raised to such a pitch that journalistic standards are abandoned, is provoked by an awareness that the Catholic Church continues to be the substantial voice for classical moral standards and supernatural confidence amid the noise of a disintegrating behaviorist culture. A tabloid is still a tabloid even if its editors dress in tweeds. Churchill said, “No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism.” Not to worry. Christ promised that the gates of Hell will not prevail against his Church.

Fort Hood and the Compassionate Mainstream Media

One of the things I still remember from my fifth grade Quaker Sunday School class is our teacher, Mrs. Taylor, telling us sternly never to pity anybody. After all, she said, it may make you feel better, but it doesn't help anybody else!

Follow along with me for a moment.

The liberal media are crafty as they bend over backwards not to call an Islamic terrorist an Islamic terrorist. First they invite us to pity poor Hasan, not because he's a Muslim or a terrorist, but because he serves in the U.S. military! Thus, we are asked to believe that Muslim shooter Hasan murdered American soldiers, not because he was killing Americans for Allah, but because he was stressed and pained! Now, having taken the focus off of the murderer, the mainstream media is free to go where it feels most comfortable, namely, engaging in a hand-wringing session, a pity party over the sadsack life of military service.

Under the guise of compassionate concern, the concerned, peace-loving media pule and moan about the hardships of war and indulge in photos of battle-scarred troops to show the misery of a soldier's existence. The liberal media may mouth the words 'honor' and 'support the troops' but it is a stretch to believe they even know what those words mean. Sara Albrycht's article below is a soldier's response to such sophistry, particularly around the middle of the article when she declares: 'We are not your sons and daughters, whom you must protect and defend. We are your sword and your shield.'