Our Blaspheming Bishops Versus Charlie Kirk

Once I lamented the fact that so many Catholics in the Archdiocese of Washington seem to think that the Catholic Standard is the only publication that they need to understand the Church's teachings on various topics.  The Standard, like other publications of the nation's dioceses, is the official mouthpiece of the DC chancery.  I had noticed that the Standard was always presenting a rosy portrait of the bishops, never divulging any of the bishops' deviance from Church teaching or just plain decency.  Lately, though, the bishops and the Standard no longer bother to put lipstick on that pig, as they parade their warped priorities in their newsprint and website.  The same goes for the USCCB website - well, almost!

On the USCCB site,  Auxiliary Bishop Roy Campbell had published therein a few days ago a piece that he dubbed "DEI Means God".  Of course the "dei" refers to the leftwing mantra of "diversity, equality, inclusion".  "Dei" is also the Latin word for God.  Campbell committed sacrilege by equating the Holy Name of God with a leftist screed.  I suppose it didn't take the USCCB long to realize that they stepped in the proverbial doo-doo by publishing Campbell's piece so they yanked it down.  But once something is on the internet, it never quite disappears - thanks to Complicit Clergy.  I humbly suggest to Bishop Campbell that he reacquaint himself with the Second Commandment: thou shalt not take the name of the Lord they God in vain.

So that's the Second Commandment being violated.  On page 9 of the Sept 11th issue of the Standard, Bishop Evelio Menjivar commits sins against the Eighth Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness Against Thy Neighbor.  His screed article is entitled "Siempre Adelante - Ten Years Since Pope Francis' Visit To Washington".  I couldn't find it on the Standard's web page, but I was not too surprised to see it at the Not-At-All Catholic Reporter's site.

The targets of his angst are the enforcement of our nation's border laws and the arrests and deportation of those in the country illegally.  The key word is "illegally", a word that Menjivar and others of his ilk insist on disregarding.  Hence his sin against the Eighth Commandment.  His deliberate obfuscation of that qualifier renders laughable any pretense that he makes in trying to assume a moral high ground in this discussion.

His second gripe is against the clearing out of the tent enclaves set up by various homeless people, enclaves rife with drugs and violent behavior.  Menjivar doesn't appreciate the troops in the city.  I suppose they appear to be too mean to him.  Does it register with him that we have had several days now of not one murder in what used to be known as the Murder Capital of the World?  Oh, I hope to see those troops in Baltimore soon.

Speaking of Menjivar and his shilling for all kinds of border-crashers, he took part in a roundtable hosted by Georgetown University (who else?).  The gabfest was called "Deportations and Assault on Human Dignity".  As you look at that page, notice that with Menjivar is Sister Norma Pimentel, the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley.  How about that?  Do we all recall how we discovered that various Texas offices of Catholic Charities were receiving Federal grants totaling in the billions for "refugee resettlement" and maybe a little human trafficking thrown in there?  It also appears that Catholic Charities counsels border-crashers how to evade ICE; see for yourselves.  So maybe that roundtable is more aptly entitled "Deportations and Emptying of Catholic Charities Bank Accounts".

Getting back to the bishops, we see on the Lepanto Institute where the USCCB is partnering with the AUSCP (Association of US Catholic Priests) to consult on the USCCB's Laity document.  If anything, the bishops should be quashing the AUSCP, owing to its various heresies.  Last June the AUSCP had their annual meeting.  During that meeting, priests unabashedly proclaimed that their ongoing habits of self-abuse were gifts from God.  So besides glorying in their mortal sins of perverse sexual conduct, they blasphemed God outright.  In that last link is a recording of that conversation.  The AUSCP has yet to issue any kind of moral clarification.

Speaking of lack of statements, the USCCB and majority of the US bishops, with the happy exception of Bishop Michael Burbidge of the Diocese of Arlington (VA) have not uttered one peep in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's murder.  They haven't even tried to exploit the situation to try to disarm law-abiding citizens!  Now why is that?  Is it because the violent tendencies of the left-wing were on stark display?  Is it because we see how sexual perversion often leads to murderous violence on the part of the perverts?  All of these are true, by the way.  Or is it because Kirk spoke against the border-crashing that Trump is finally taking under control?  After all, the bishops' celebration of Catholic Migration Week is soon upon us, and nothing can be allowed to sully that - right?

Now that this blog and others have called the bishops out on their disregard for Kirk's death, expect them to issue mealy-mouth statements that are only meant to cover their derrieres.  Take them with copious grains of salt.

Catholics! Will We Fill Charlie's Shoes?

Regarding the murder of Charlie Kirk and the ramifications on our nation, I came across this excellent article entitled "The End Of Illusion: On The Assassination of Charlie Kirk And The Way Forward".  It was written by Richard Y. Rodgers and David F.X. Army and published by the Harvard Salient.   It appears here, but for the sake of discussion, I will copy and paste the article now.  Below the article will appear some thoughts on what this portends for faithful Catholics.  Now the article.

Charlie Kirk’s murder is first and last a private calamity: a wife now without her husband, children without their father, a circle of friends and kin bereft of a steady presence. That grief is immediate, awful, and beyond any contestation. We owe the dead our sorrow and the bereaved our silence and our service. But grief has its civic logic too. The taking of a life for some desperate, ill-conceived political conviction—in the courtyard of a university, in front of young witnesses—forces a public diagnosis: we are at war, and too many of us still pretend otherwise.

Those who knew Charlie will tell you what the cameras too often obscured. He could be theatrical, florid, and exasperating in the delightfully modern register of political showmanship. He could also be unexpectedly, almost annoyingly, moderate: a man who prized argument over obliteration, outreach over insularity, whose modus operandi was to cross campus thresholds and address anyone curious enough to ask a question. He exhorted a generation, plainly and insistently, to love God, love their family, and love their country. That was enough to get him killed.

Let us be unsentimental about the nature of the enemy. Leftism is not merely a rival policy set or an alternate party program. Leftism is a mental illness. There is no risk in naming the condition plainly when the symptoms are so evident: systematic hatred for inherited institutions, a taste for moral monstrosity, and a bloodlust that sanctifies obliteration—of traditions, of customs, of human life—as signs of progress. If you are on the Right and have been told this language is excessive, look instead at the evidence of behavior: celebration when opponents are deplatformed, undone—or worse—killed. They hate you. They want you dead. To say it this way is necessary, for it is in the flowery meadows of euphemism that rot truly spreads.

This is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a warning. To those who treat conservative life on campus or in civic society as an agreeable pastime—“a club,” “a journal,” “a debating society”—recognize that there is no safe neutral. The adjective “just” in front of any conservative endeavor is an attempt to be dismissed as harmless, but it is precisely the seemingly harmless that activists of the other persuasion seek to erase first. If you wear your conviction visibly, if you sign your name to a cause, if you instruct others in the habits that sustain a free and ordered society, you place yourself on the line, and, if the Left wins, they will place you on the gallows. That is not martyr rhetoric; that is realism.

For those of conservative disposition who wish only to lead a private life, cloistered away from the political fray, I am sorry. That is not possible. They won’t allow it. The logic of our hour is simple: if our institutions and formative practices fall, the private life you cherish will be the first to go. To wish for quiet while our enemies reconfigure the moral architecture of the nation is to wish for exile in place.

And yet, despair is not an option. Charlie’s death must not be allowed to calcify into a paralyzing fatalism. It must harden into a militant diligence. Reverence must be translated into work.

First, we must outlast personalities. Charisma withers; institutions endure. Do not treat conservative talent as an end in itself but as the seedbed of durable structures: parish schools that catechize the young, neighborhood reading groups that form habits of mind, free associations that forge the brave and the learned, scholarship funds that free talent from petit politics. Endowments, curricula, and local cells of study should be built now, not as ephemeral projects but as a conservative infrastructure: slow, networked, and resilient against the fashions and fury of the moment. Make the long game irreversible.

Second, cultivate an education of courage. The modern university offers an education in the art of dissent. We must answer with an alternative catechesis: rhetoric, logic, history, theology, liturgy, and philosophy of civic friendship, whatever remains of it. Courage is an acquired disposition: to speak the truth as you see it, to stand when others flee, to accept cost without cynicism. We should produce men and women who can withstand slander, who can retain composure under siege, and who can outlast the moral fashions of an age.

Third, refuse the counterfeit civility that is merely cowardice. There was a civic civility that governed honest bargaining and, insofar as it still exists, that ethic is worth preserving. Too often, the best case scenario is that “civility” is deployed as a plea to disappear, to shrink one’s claims until the public square is emptied of all meaningful assertion. The worst case scenario is that any attempt at discourse, even of the most reasonable, accommodating kind, will be met, Left on Right, with violence. If it can happen to a lion of free speech and civil discourse like Charlie, it can happen to anyone. Regardless of whether or not the age of reasons debate ended two days ago, the counterfeit civility imposed upon the Right must be exposed. Practice a measured politeness toward persons while being implacable in defense of public truth and the institutions that sustain it.

Finally, be precise and uncompromising in your politics: the stakes are metaphysical as well as administrative. Elections are only punctuation marks in the politics of man. Family, church, law, education, and public memory are the true battlegrounds. If we cede the formative structures, policy wins will be temporary because the habits that sustain a free people will have been hollowed out. Organize, staff, fund, and harden those institutions now so that when the hour grows harder we answer with political intelligence and moral readiness, not surprise.

Charlie Kirk’s life was a mixture of exuberance and seriousness; his death should compel us to the latter without surrendering the former. To grieve is human; to pick up the mantle and persevere is a fitting tribute. We have been offered a summons by the worst of circumstances. Let us answer with the best of ourselves: with learning sharpened into resolve, with institutions of habit and formation, and with a courage that understands the cost of action—and inaction. The hour is harsh. The work is hard. The loss is great. The choice, however, is ours.

END OF ARTICLE

This article, for many faithful Catholics and pro-lifers, particularly those who consider themselves "retired from the fray", provides a much-needed kick in the pants, as it were.  Too many think that if they just concentrate on their families and churches - to the exclusion of society at large - that God will protect them and theirs.  That pipe dream needs to end yesterday!   That is why I high-lighted that paragraph in red.

This blog, as do the others on the right side bar, give information as to how to become aware of the threats to the Church and all our families, and what we can - and must - do about it.