Dissent, Dialogue, and %&$#@*!

So the Canadian Religious Conference has "decided to address a Message to the Bishops on the occasion of their Ad Limina visits to Rome in a spirit of openness, dialogue and trust."

Gotta love that word: dialogue. The only people who want to dialogue are the ones who want to change things; dialogue is never initiated to affirm the status quo.

So what do they want to change?

They are asking the Bishops to inform the Pope of the Conference's desire (based upon the results of a survey "sent to the major superiors of 230 religious congregations") for the Church to:

• "lend the ear to the common sense of ordinary people who also hold the Gospel in their hands"
• emphasize that "Christian faith and modernity are not in opposition"
• relay that "men and women everywhere need pastors who, with them, can sit down, ask questions, be ready to seek together and to reaffirm the truth in today'’s world"
• inform the Holy Father that "our Church is isolated: by its language and its attitudes, it moves away from being a meaningful force in our world"
  

The Conference is also eager to clarify that:

The plentiful criticism that our Church undergoes comes not from evil, bad or deviant spirits. Christian men and women who speak openly of their incomprehension and their refusal of official Catholic positions cannot be classified as a throwback of what people say and think who are marked by the "“spirit of the world", as Saint Paul
says.

Ah, good that you cleared that up for us. Now that you tell us your dissent is not directed by the evil one, we can rest assured that it truly is not. Because frankly, we were rather leaning towards that conclusion.

Now what's really interesting about this letter that the CRC sent to our Bishops is that this was "a message that was meant to be private" which "unfortunately... became public knowledge for all to see." But still, "it was sent in a spirit of dialogue and listening." This must be that special kind of dialogue and listening which is meant to be unnoticed by hoi polloi.

The CRC does state that they hope "the Message be taken in its entire context and not just one portion of it." Tough luck, I say. Sure, some of what they're asking for is good and perfectly licit, but in poring over the 26 page PDF they have sent to our bishops, I've noticed several portions that can't be reconciled with Catholic morality in any context. Here are some of the juicier ones that I openly admit I cherry-picked. Bear in mind these are direct quotes, with my own interpretation in brackets:

They Regret:

• The lack of freedom of speech among Christians; in the universal Church, the quick condemnation of theologians; the perception of the Church by the media as having no meaningful role for humanity; the loss of confidence of a growing number of people (men, women and young people) in the Church as the carrier of a message that responds to their profound search for meaning. [ie, the Inquisition continues]
  
• That our Church often gives priority to the reaffirmation of dogma and traditional morals rather than listening to the people'’s search for meaning and journeying alongside them in the discovery of their deeper motivations. [ie, the Church cares too much about what's true and not enough about what's popular]
  
• The legalistic image of the Catholic Church - and of our Canadian Church -– its rigidity and its intransigent stands on sexual morals; its lack of openness regarding access to the sacraments for divorced and remarried Catholics, its lack of compassion for them; its unwelcoming attitude towards homosexuals: images and attitudes that represent a regression from the evangelical perspectives advocated by Vatican II. [ie, stop denouncing sinful conduct, and let people eat and drink the Body and Blood of Christ to their own condemnation unhindered - I Cor. 11:29]
  
• The clear loss of autonomy of the Bishops and the CCCB in making decisions related to the Church in Canada, ignoring or not taking into account its specific reality. [ie, who's for a starting a Canadian Catholic Church, kinda like the Anglicans did?]
  
• That the ministerial role of women in our Church does not reflect their numerical importance in communities; that they do not have access to various decision-making processes or to all aspects of Church ministry [ie, forget this nonsense about the differences between the sexes actually meaning something sacramentally]
  
• The resistance of efforts to translate and update liturgical texts (which, along with the use of patriarchal language, help reinforce feelings of exclusion among women in our Church). The fact that women are still ignored in our Church, not only in the decision-making process, but also in the "exclusive" language used by the Church. [whoa there - women are ignored? If so, then Sr. Dr. Ms. Donna Geernaert, VP of the CRC, and a major contributor to this letter, just wasted a lot of time. She should take it up with Alain Ambeault, C.S.V, the exclusively male president of the CRC.]
  
• The prohibition, by Roman authorities, from holding communal celebrations of penance with general absolution despite the fact that the People of God had expressed their positive support for this practice. [ie, let the people decide what the will of God is]
  
• The lack of equality in our Church between men and women, between ordained ministers, religious, and lay men and women. [that's right, totally unequal, oh yeah... there are absolutely no women in places of prominence in Catholicism, except this minor figure]
  
• That our Church has so little influence in the great social debates, because of its conservatism and that of Rome which it supports, and also because it does not accept any dissent, even responsible dissent. It stifles its prophets [does this really need to be rephrased?]
  

But the Canadian Religious Conference is not merely a cesspool of negativity. It's also a cesspool of distortion.

They Hope:

• That ordained ministers arriving from other countries and other cultures will receive orientation for pastoral ministry specific to the Canadian Church and its culture before practicing their ministry here (leadership, public speaking, work with women, etc.: cultural integration). [ie, stop bringing in those accented orthodox priests from Uganda and Korea if you're not going to liberalize them first]
• That, in terms of ethics and moral teaching, our Church will be open to current developments and perspectives of anthropological, social, and medical sciences, etc.; that in this field, Bishops not forget that lay people (men, women, couples, families etc.) form the People of God, acknowledging their competence and freedom of conscience. As Cardinal Josef Ratzinger pointed out in 1966: "Conscience is the supreme and ultimate tribunal, even beyond the official church, and it must be obeyed." [ie, let trends determine their own morality. Low blow with the unsourced Ratzinger quote too. Now who's taking whom out of context?]
• That the primacy of the person be effectively recognized and promoted within our Church and that any formation of conscience be carried out with respect for the individual'’s fundamental freedom. [let's temper that with the Catechism, paragraph 1791: "when a man 'takes little trouble to find out what is true and good, or when conscience is by degrees almost blinded through the habit of committing sin'... the person is culpable for the evil he commits."]
• That our Bishops create opportunities for discussion and discernment; engaging in the questions and problematic situations raised in today'’s society: separated families, reconstituted families, domestic violence, the place of women in the Church, marriage between persons of the same sex, assisted suicide, etc. [again, dialogue only happens when they want to change something, and they've given us a pretty clear list here]
• For a revision of liturgical rites, the encouragement of initiatives respecting the sacred nature of the liturgy with more reference to people'’s experience; a liturgy that is closely grounded in life. [ie, more priests dressed like clowns, and more Glorias set to the didgeridoo]
• That our Church structures will favour the need for communion over power. [oh, SNAP! Why don't you tell us how you really feel?]

You know, normally I wouldn't think too much of this type of document. But this purportedly represents the collective thoughts of 230 organizations of ordained & religious members of the Catholic Church, numbering 20,000.

The CRC maintains a list of member Sisters and Priests & Brothers, but it is missing at least two communities I've come to respect: the Companions of the Cross, and the Legionaires of Christ. So I know they're not speaking for everybody out there.

Thank God for that.

My wife recently received a survey from a local nun who was trying to understand what would bring more women through the convent's doors. Funny that the nun gave it to a married woman, eh? The survey was asking if interest would be generated by, among other things, meaningful work with competitive compensation, co-ed communities, or environmental activism. Perhaps the convent should be handing out flyers here.

You bet my wife filled it out and returned it.

For all those religious communities wondering why the average age of your disciples is 67, take this advice to heart: If you want to bring young people in, create an atmosphere of truth, fidelity to the magisterium, Marian devotion, and Eucharistic enthusiasm. You'll be surprised by the interest you generate.

Emotion

So at work they just finished a round of promotions. I need some help with the math here... where's my calculator? Ah, here it is. Let's see:

50 candidates in the initial selection pool
19 made it past the first interview (including me)

Ok, so that's 31 that are out. But I'm still in it. Great.

There were 8 positions... ok, I'm with you so far.
Meeting with the bosses... you say I ranked in the top half of the 19? Great, so in the top 9.5...

9.5
-8.0
-----
1.5

Oh, I see... I didn't get the job...

Sometimes you just wanna cut and run from corporate life and become a carpenter.

But cancel the pity party. I'm a tough guy.

Sigh.

Ya really gotta feel sorry for that half-guy, though.

The Sound of Europe's Demographers' Collective Brains Going "Click"

It seems like the condom producer Durex has learned a lesson:





Sure, they're trying to be funny, and they probably paid some ad consultant thousands of euros to come up with this concept, but wow - this is a Freudian slip if I ever saw one.

Pope John Paul II termed such thought as contributing to the "culture of death." From his landmark 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae (paragraph 12):

...we are confronted by... a veritable structure of sin. This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of death". This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency.

With that one phrase, he set his pontificate in a new direction, and established a rallying point around which the pro-life movement could gather in solidarity.

More and more I'm seeing the mainstream media pick up on the fact that modern liberalism is not breeding itself out of existence, while religious conservatives are setting their children up to inherit the earth, literally. This topic used to get focus only from us lowly bloggers, but there are enough of us pointing this out that the alarm claxons have finally been sounded among the willfully infertile.

I think, however, that it's too late. You're not going to convince a single-child soccer mom who has achieved a fulfilling career to start popping out offspring to save the Movement; every woman in her generation has been encouraged to put her own needs first. So when Liberalism comes knocking at her door to beg her to beget, they'll have to leave a note because she's putting in overtime at the office.

This Just In #3*

The United Trinitarian Homespun Progressive Luminary First Church of Humanology has begun sales of its new Customeasure Concept Stick.

For the price of anywhere between $0.01 and infinity, you can receive unspecified quantities of this revolutionary new device.

For generations, so-called scientists have applied the rigid, unforgiving, and intolerant forms of metres, litres, and kilograms. Even these relatively new standards are spinoffs of the older yet still misguided concepts of inches, quarts, and pounds.

Progessives in the realm of measuring had high hopes with the announcement of the Second Measuring Council in the 1960's, but those hopes have ultimately not been fulfilled.

So the UTHPEFCoH has created its own standards. More accurately put, we're letting you create the standards now. Are you called short with a height of 5'3"? Well, no more. Now you can be a full 6 feet tall, or even 1000 feet tall, just by comparing yourself against the Customeasure Concept Stick.

Skeptical? Here's an example of how it works. Under the out-of-touch definitions of yesteryear, 2 inches were equal to 5.08 centimeters:




Most opinion polls confirm that the majority of people don't want external standards applied in their lives. So one possible application of the Customeasure Concept Stick is to tweak the old standards to a more modern definition:



Insecure guys, this is the one for you! Wink wink, nudge nudge!

But that's not all the Customeasure Concept Stick can do. Feeling adventurous or inspired? Or just tired of the outdated definitions of Inches and Millimeters? Come up with your own standards with our Templation line. You're the boss - fill in the blanks as the need arises!



Some people object to any sort of arbitrary standards of measurement. Why must we compare apples to apples? After intense dialogue with many different groups opposed to the traditional, conservative concepts of universal standards, we developed our flagship Clever Whatever standard. This is an inclusive, build-to-order model available to anybody for... whatever!



In addition to measuring distance, also check out our volume and weight section. Don't have enough sugar to finish making those cookies? No problem! Just use a Customeasure Approxicup and blammo! - you have enough now. [Note: please don't tell your friends that you used our product to help prepare those cookies.] Have you outgrown your favorite jeans? Simply (gingerly) hop onto the Customeasure Scaletastic and they should fit afterwards. [Note: if they don't, then you used it wrong.]

Don't hesitate to act on this offer. If history repeats itself, our products will soon be overwhelmed by a revival of archaic standards again.

A Prediction, Repeated From the Past

In World War II, Pope Pius XII helped countless Jews escape death by the Nazis. His efforts were lauded by Albert Einstein, Golda Meir, and many other prominent Jews in politics, religion, and art.

Nowadays, the average Joe tends to think that the Church did nothing to stand in the face of fascism. The esteem held for Pius XII by the Jewish community has changed with a historical distortion. There's an excellent explanation of it by a rabbi here.

The purpose of this post, however, isn't to defend Pius; abler minds have taken up that task.

I'm making a prediction. In 30-40 years, when abortion has been outlawed, or at least severely restricted, the futuristic naysayers and heretics will accuse the Catholic Church of silence in the face of the Second Holocaust, which to date has killed almost 1 billion people.

Sidebar: want a fun experiment? Search Google for abortion "one billion" killed and you get this:


That's rather revisionist, wouldn't you say?

Back on track: I cannot substantiate that BILLION figure, as no serious organization will research it in this era. But it's an estimate that I've seen in many sources.

We will realize as a species how heinous this slaughter has become, and we will stop it, if for no other reason than to make more taxpayers. When the crunch comes, when the baby boomers are in their 80's and 90's, slowly dying in nursing homes with nobody to look after them except the robots, the new generations will ask why the Church didn't stop the Second Holocaust. They will accuse Paul VI, John XXIII, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and probably one or two more popes of being complacent and doing nothing.

There. I've predicted it. I sure hope they still have the internet in 30 years so they can see this coming.

Laughing Out Loud

This evening I had to laugh at Tie Domi, the notorious hockey fisticuffs tough guy.

He had played his 1000th game prior to tonight's Ottawa Senators 4-2 victory over the Toronto Maple Syrup (oh, by the way - HA HA HA!), and prior to tonight's home game the buds put on a little video montage and awarded him with a bunch of gifts.

Obviously moved, he gave a brief speech to the crowd. The third item on his list of thank-you's was the medical staff. THE MEDICAL STAFF!

Nice one, Tie. That was funny.

Finally, Here It Is

A while back I promised a big, important post. The time has come.

Readers of my site will know that having the internet in my home is a dangerous thing for me, as I struggle with a certain vice which the internet makes easy to give in to.

My wife and I agreed that to get the net again, we'd need to install some filtering software to keep out the bad stuff, and to that end we forked over some coin for CyberPatrol.

Now I'm a sinful man, and a relatively smart techy guy, so I'll admit that I tried to get around it a few times; partly to see merely if I could, and partly to get around it.

Thankfully, I was unsuccessful. It can't be shut down in system services or msconfig, it can't be uninstalled, it still applies when you create a new system user; in short, it is a very well protected program.

Sure, there's the drastic step of reformatting and starting everything from scratch again - but also thankfully, my laziness trumps by sinfulness.

Then I figured it out. I figured out a way around CyberPatrol. It is quite simple, really.

No, I'm not going to post it. That would be scandalous.

So this internet thing is going to become an issue of self-control, instead of external control, all over again.

Scary.

But I feel up to it. I can do this.

Please, all of you, keep me accountable. Don't be afraid to email me to check on my progress in this struggle.

This post probably wouldn't have happened, but Owen (::thrive!) sent me a follow up email to a post from a few weeks ago. His words - although obviously not intended as such - were like a slap across the face to a man suddenly going insane.

Thanks Owen! You may well have saved my blog, and my soul!

Following Through

May history never forget Cpl. Paul James Davis, the Canadian soldier who died on duty (but not in combat) defending democracy and Western civilization.

I was especially moved by the words of his father, Jim Davis, who in an interview aired on CBC Radio's The World At 6, said that he knew when the towers fell that his son, already enlisted, would go to war. He urged those listening not to give up, but to "follow through" with the mission.

But darned if I can't find that quote anywhere on the news sites. I guess "following through" in Afghanistan is about a popular topic for the media as success in Iraq.

I scoured every online news source I could think of: CBC, CTV, Global, Yahoo. The articles on newspaper sites for The Globe and Mail and the National Post had a similar dearth. They all did include the following phrase from the grieving father:

"He died in the service of his country and he died doing the service for the free world."

But none of them mention the "follow through" comment. CTV comes close:

"I believed in what he was doing 100 per cent and to his friends in Afghanistan, if they're listening to me, I want them to know I'm 100 per cent behind all of them."

I'm amazed at this dad's character: to recognize the importance of the sacrifice his son had made is a tremendously selfless act. One thing's for sure, he's no Cindy Sheehan.

What I'm really wondering is how can the CBC's radio network's flagship evening news program, with time at a premium, let us know more of what this man had to say than any of the Canadian media websites? Does the internet not have capacity for the "follow through" phrase? Or are the editors of these sites all of the mindset that it's not worthy of print?

Grrrrr.

Still, a widow and two toddlers are in mourning here, and I don't want to distract from that. May the peace of the Lord be with them. May these kids grow up well, and understand.

I always find it tacky when people put poems on their blogs, but I feel this is somewhat warranted:



Ode to the Known Unto God


I stand in front of your casket,
You whose bones have rotted for eighty years,
And a single tear forces its way past my control.

I whisper, "Thank you,"
And pray, "God, bless this man,"
Then turn and quietly walk away.

You did not die in splendor
Or even in glorious self-sacrifice.
You were probably quite frightened,
Merely obeying the orders of your superior
To taste the enemy's lead.

You may have died poorly.
Perhaps you cried for your mother
Or lost control of your bowels.
Perhaps you were completely dismembered
And felt no pain at all.

Would the Hun have conquered here if you had lived?
Does your death have meaning by itself
Or does it require the company of thousands?
Or do we simply require one death less than the enemy?

How mysterious, that the dead can free the unborn!

And now, eighty years later,
I remember you.
I will not forget your loss,

Lest I forget my fortune.


*written May 27, 2000 - the day before the Unknown Soldier was entombed at the National War Memorial in Ottawa

Since I Can't Say it Any Better...

...here's how Diogenes phrased it:

Multiculturalism, at root, is an assault on Christianity, and its enforcement of the norms of "diversity" and "tolerance" displays those Stalinist-style asymmetries we've all come to take for granted. But the enforcers overreached themselves. Having defined intolerance as synonymous with Christianity -- such that they became interchangeable terms -- the rainbow coalitionists found they had no weapon with which to combat hostility trained on them by non-Christians. If Nigerian Muslims bury adultresses alive, we must celebrate the practice as part of the rich tapestry of cultural diversity.

By the same token, the hysterical vocabulary of oppression has bled oppression itself of its shock value, such that this ploy too has turned out to be an autogol. If you call the CDF's letter on the Care of the Homosexual Person a case of gay-bashing, fine. If you call the Instruction on Seminary Admissions an act of violence, great. But then, after some transgressive playwright is found in an alley with his throat sliced through to the spine, you can't blame folks -- the folks you coached -- if they yawn and turn to the baseball scores.

'nuff said - I can't top that. Check out the whole piece.

Lenten Sacrifice

In the spirit of Lent, my posts for the next 40 days + intervening Sundays will be in purple.


Normally I try to do something directly spiritual for Lent, such as increased time in daily prayer as well as intense journaling.

This year, I've decided to do something a little different.

Stew Smith, as retired Navy SEAL and fitness instructor, has a Lenten gift: a free 45 day workout plan, complete with diagrams. Here's the file (evil .pdf format!).

Those of you who know me, or who have at least seen me, would know that I'm inclined to be grateful for Stew's expertise in this matter. In other words, I feel more comfortable with Fat Tuesday than with Ash Wednesday. So starting a workout plan, while still focusing on the needs of the spirit, will be a big challenge and sacrifice for me.

That's all for now... but let me publicly pledge that I have a more important post coming, when I can find the time to compose it.