Another good thing June 4, 2010
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, awesomeness.comments closed
My nephew graduating from Atonement Academy at Our Lady of Atonement Parish in San Antonio. Good job, William!
He’s second from the right, standing next to Fr. Phillips.
Some good news for a change June 4, 2010
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Basics, Dallas Diocese, General Catholic, North Deanery.comments closed
Yesterday was the traditional day for celebrating the Feast of Corpus Chrisit, the Body of Christ. Like so many of our great feast days, Corpus Christi has been moved from its traditional day to a Sunday, in order for more people to be able to celebrate the feast. The problem is, most people are completely unaware that it is a feast day, and that day tends to lose its special meaning. But, I digress……
The big thing is, I got to attend a beautiful celebration of the Mass with a Eucharistic Procession afterward. Man, I wish we would have more processions. At one time, Eucharistic Processions were very common, but today they are quite rare, especially in this diocese. But, they are gradually making a comeback. I, for one, am really, really glad, because I think Processions are an absolutely fantastic witness to the world and a great way to strengthen our Catholic identity. But most of all, they show an increasingly skeptical, and, frankly, dark, world, the Light of Christ and the great love that Catholics should have for the Body of Christ. The Eucharistic Procession I attended was not as public as the one below, but I pray that one day in this diocese we will again see hundreds, perhaps thousands of Catholics marching through the streets boldly proclaiming the love they have for God Incarnate in the Body of Christ, the Body we literally consume and take into ourselves at every Mass. I can think of little that would help witness our Faith to the world more than the love we have for Christ in the Eucharist.
Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services deeply involved in ‘social justice’ work June 4, 2010
Posted by Tantumblogo in Abortion, Dallas Diocese, General Catholic, North Deanery, scandals.comments closed
One aspect of the ‘social ministry’ training planned at St. Elizabeth Seton is the tie ins with Catholic Charities and Catholic Relief Services. Both of these organizations, which most Catholics view as being agencies to help those in need with material assistance, are deeply involved in Alinksy-style community organizaing and ‘social justice.’ The upcoming conference at Seton is indeed being co-sponsored by Catholic Charities of Dallas – in fact, the on-line registration is run through the Catholic Charities USA website. The conference itself is billed as a ‘Catholic Charities Regional Conference.‘ In addition, one of the presenters, Tom Ulrich, is a director of consituency relations (another euphemism used to describe efforts aimed at community organizing) at Catholic Relief Services, and he has spoken at numerous events aimed at increasing involvement in community organizing.
In this context, community organizing always means forming small groups of people to ‘represent the diocese’ in Industrial Areas Foundation affiliate or similar organizations. These ‘representatives’ will then lobby local, county, state, and federal government bodies, claiming to represent the entire church, when in truth only a very small percentage of a given church, say, St. Joseph in Richardson, will actually be members. To understand the scope, a large parish social ministry team may consist of 20 people at a parish that has thousands of families as members. The vast majority of the parishioners are ignorant of the actions being taken in their name, and a great many of them would oppose such efforts as being unrepresentative of their political, or religious, views.
The relationships between Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, CCHD, and Alinskyite Industrial Areas Foundation organizations are numerous and very close. They are so close, in fact, that it is at times very difficult to determine where funding for a given Industrial Areas Foundation group comes from – sometimes it is from CCHD, and other times it is from Catholic Charities. This is why I advised people to be very careful in giving to any of these organizations, or the bishop’s annual appeal, because all of these Catholic agencies have very close ties to leftist community organizing groups.
At the parish level, these groups conduct training under the guise of ‘social ministry’ training, to recruit new members to go out and join in the community organizing efforts. As I said, they tend to recruit only a few people to their cause – a ‘regional’ training conference held at St. Mark the Evangelist parish in Plano, TX, in 2007 drew about 40 people from five to seven different parishes. But, these limited numbers do have some success, and work to lobby for increased funding from the parishes involved to these Industrial Areas Foundation groups. It’s a circular relationship – large national Catholic organizations give money and draw membership to IAF organizations at the local level, where the locals then lobby for more money to be given to the IAF organizations and back up to Catholic Charities or CRS. It’s like a perpetual motion machine – brilliant, but insidious. And it all tends to be driven by a small, narrow cabal, taking money from the general parish fund and routing it to these various community organizing groups.
For instance – the ‘Seton Soles’ annual 5K run is for the benefit of the ‘social ministry.’ Many people participate, but only a very few people know that the money being raised is being used to help fund community organizing.
UPDATE: An interesting note. I had seen several days ago that Catholic Charities Dallas was advertising for the St. Elizabeth Seton ‘social ministry’ training conference. Now, that page has been pulled. However, the cache page still remains. This action is consistent with attempts to ‘scrub’ the USCCB website of the links showing various other IAF pro-abortion groups being funded, which was found by American Life League and Bellarmine Veritas Ministries.
UPDATE2: This is almost worthy of an eleventy!11!! if it wasn’t so tired. Bellarmine Veritas Ministries and American Life League find that CCHD is still supporting almost 50 groups with views that are directly contrary to those of the Church on issues like abortion, gay marriage, contraception, etc. This is the problem with funding Alinsky style community action groups. They are all far left wing, and little is more sacrosanct to the far left that ‘a woman’s right to choose’ (to kill her baby), or gay rights, or free contraception for all, etc. ‘Reforming’ CCHD (and other Church charities, it appears), must involve terminating the deep relationships between these charities and the Alinskyite IAF and similar organizations. Without termination, the money defunded from one group will find its way to another group that holds the exact same, anti-Catholic views.
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