Modernist Abbey to host LGBT retreat……UPDATED! March 20, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, Dallas Diocese, disaster, episcopate, error, General Catholic, horror, sadness, scandals, sickness.comments closed
…… retreat focused intentionally on rejecting the concept of self-denial so central to the Christian Faith:
A retreat sponsored by the Catholic Association for Lesbian and Gay Ministry to be held at St. John’s Abbey Guesthouse in Collegeville, MN, facilitated by Bob Pileggi.
This retreat is for LGBT folks and their allies[Interesting phrase, no? Not all Catholics are welcome – just those who have succumbed to a grave sin and their “allies.”] to connect to God and themselves through the body. Life has given us this great gift of a body. We can open more to God’s love, acceptance and guidance by having a fuller experience of the body; by appreciating it. Various religious teachings might tell us to deny the body in order to get closer to God; this retreat will be healing from that idea – offering us renewed love for our body, self and God. Reconnect to your body in a compassionate way; feel rejuvenation; and open to more empowered self-expression. And in the process learn some simple spiritual practices that have foundations in most of the world’s major religions (awareness, breathing, mindful movement, etc.) that you can use on your own at home and share with others.
I’ve written two posts on the very troubled, and troubling, monastery at Collegeville, Minnesota before. One focused on “liturgical dance” in the hideous, barren, frigid modernist temple constructed there. The other highlighted an act of grave defiance to the local Ordinary by gay students from Collegeville. The stories that have circulated regarding this monastery for years are horrendous. There is no question it has been a hot-bed of dissent, active homosexuality, and the sex-abuse of adolescent males.
The gay mindset is hardly one noted for its denial of pleasures of the flesh. And where one finds heresy, one invariably finds sexual sins. Does anyone think the orthodox belief of the Church, which DOES indeed explicitly counsel self-denial as a critical element of sanctification, will be highlighted at this retreat? Am I the only mortified by the great potential for the trumpeting of sexual deviance and license as something good and holy?
In fact, it looks like this will be nothing more than the usual heretical new age garbage.
Such might be very pleasing to certain deluded individuals. It is so easy to fall into sin, especially sins of concupiscence. I’m certain we can all relate. But to embrace such as good, to hold retreats embracing this constant human temptation as a good……..its’ simply to weep.
The retreat is apparently open to anyone who “is comfortable in a Christian environment.” Will they receive the Blessed Sacrament in the abbey chapel? Not only is this retreat open to gays of any religious “belief,” but registration is through the Benedictine Fathers and they have a special reduced rate for monks. Such embrace of sin by what should be holy and devout religious smells of the smoke and cinder of hell.
This is not what St.’s Benedict and Scholastica (among many others) built with their great work and suffering. This is not what has sustained religious life for 1600+ years. This kind of behavior is what is killing so many of the religious orders out there. It is worldly, it is slatternly, it is deviant, and it is not what the founders, and certainly not what Christ, intended for this hallowed form of life.
Pardon me for my judging, but this kind of open flaunting of the Dogma of the Faith must be stopped by the competent authority. It is a breathtaking scandal.
But it can also be challenged by the laity. You can contact the abbey here:
Abbey Spokesperson
Br. Paul-Vincent Niebauer OSB
320-363-2548
pniebauer@csbsju.edu
There are souls at stake in scandals like this. Not only eternal souls, but even earthly misery weighs in the balance. I have been lost in sin. I know the horror and misery that portends in such a condition. Fr. Corapi used to talk about knowing what it was like to be in hell. I don’t know that, I think we cannot imagine the miseries of that infernal region, but I know the kind of suffering that can come from a life of dissolution. For Holy Mother Church, even in some of her members, to be seen to embrace behaviors that cause such deep suffering – earthly and otherwise – is staggering. There are not words for it. It simply must stop.
For Christ said “I call not the just, but sinners.” But if the sinners receive the same error and embrace of sin within Christ’s Church that they receive in the world, what then? “Master, where else shall we go? You have the words of eternal life!” Let this statement never again be a lie.
UPDATE: I had to move Woody’s comment into the post proper (with a couple of my own additions). Woody is a funny man:
I am sure that the abbey received permission from the Archdiocese of Detroit to use the name catholic and that Dr. Peters found correct canon legal grounds to go ahead with the retreat. Remember, we don’t want to deny anyone anything within the church. [Well, unless it’s orthodoxy, and then that should be viciously punished] As for your request for pardoning of your judgment, that request is denied as it might be construed to be non-pastoral towards some or all of the participants. [Woody should read Iota Unum. It makes me want to cry and punch someone at the same time] It is not your place to know what grave or mortal sin is and how it effects one’s soul. That ability to know such things may have been easy to know prior to 1965 but this is the 21st Century and we don’t know what those things are now. Come on now and get with the program. [I think Woody has nailed the post-conciliar zeitgeist]
Without the sarcasm, it makes one want to cry.
You can’t make a baby by hugging a tree March 20, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in Abortion, Basics, foolishness, General Catholic, Immigration, scandals, sickness, Society.comments closed
Great line by James Taranto. The leftward side of the political spectrum is slowly dying, voluntarily, of hostility towards children, including its own:
It’s been more than 40 years since the first “Earth Day” in 1970 and close to a quarter-century since hysteria over global warming began. In recent decades schoolchildren have been relentlessly propagandized about “the environment.” Turns out it hasn’t worked.
“An academic analysis of surveys spanning more than 40 years has found that today’s young Americans are less interested in the environment and in conserving resources . . . than their elders were when they were young,” reports the Associated Press. The data come from a survey of college freshmen:
Researchers found that, when surveyed decades ago, about a third of young baby boomers said it was important to become personally involved in programs to clean up the environment. In comparison, only about a quarter of young Gen Xers–and 21 percent of Millennials–said the same.
Meanwhile, 15 percent of Millennials said they had made no effort to help the environment, compared with 8 percent of young Gen Xers and 5 percent of young baby boomers.
The AP’s Martha Irvine goes in search of explanations. Jean Twenge, one of the study’s authors and apparently an environmentalist herself, says: “We have the perception that we’re getting through to people. But at least compared to previous eras, we’re not.” Mark Potosnak, an “environmental science” professor, blames, in Irvine’s words, “skepticism–or confusion–about climate change,” which “leads to fatigue.” [Well, it’s the classic reaction to a gross over-reach, which all the global warming cooling climate change weather scheme has been. It’s Chicken Little, writ large, or the boy who cried wolf. If you keep telling people disaster is right around the corner, and then nothing happens, or, worse, your data is found to be false and you are found guilty of scientific fraud in order to push your agenda, that tends to make people recoil from the whole movement. They’ve done this largely to themselves.]
We have another thought as to why environmentalism seems to have peaked with the baby boom. The key is in that generation’s moniker: “baby boom.” The baby boomers’ parents were unusually fertile, especially when compared with subsequent generations, including the boomers themselves. But the decline in fertility was not evenly distributed throughout American society.
This columnist has posited that the polarization of the electorate around the issue of abortion, combined with the direct effect of abortion itself on fertility, over the long term has a conservatizing effect on the electorate. We call it the Roe Effect. Although environmentalism is not sharply polarizing in the way that abortion is, it seems to us quite probable that a similar and overlapping effect is at work here.
After all, you can’t make a baby by hugging a tree. Attitudes about “the environment” are very much tied up with attitudes about human fertility. The prevailing view on the environmentalist left is, and has been since at least the early 1970s, that to bring a child into the world is an act of violence against Mother Earth. Along with feminism, which devalued motherhood and women’s domestic work, environmentalism motivated left-liberal baby boomers to have smaller families, or none at all.
If ideology drives one segment of the population to reproduce less, the effect compounds over time. Whereas big families get bigger with each generation, a childless couple (or single woman) is unlikely to have grandchildren either. The future belongs to the fruitful.
It’s the biological solution. Which is why the left is so focused on dominating the curricula in schools – they don’t have their own children, so they must corrupt other’s children to perpetuate their ideology. My analysis is crude, but I think there is a great deal of truth to it. Since the days of Antonio Gramsci and the Frankfurt School, the left has focused it’s efforts on those cultural institutions where their efforts would have the most effect – academia, the arts, media, and the schools. Without their domination of these institutions (which all started in the early 20th century, in academia), what consitutes the current left – outright socialism with tendencies towards communism – would be no more popular than Lyndon LaRouche.
Pray for me! March 20, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, fun, General Catholic, Our Lady, silliness.comments closed
I found an old school skateboarding site. They sell all the old boards I rode back in the 80’s! In the 90’s, I bought a new style deck. I don’t like it. all the skateboards are like that now – skinny, upturned at both ends, with crappy trucks and crappier wheels. Now, I can buy one just like I skated back in the day! I am sorely tempted!
Even back then, when I was garage hopping* beer swilling skateboarding pagan, I demurred from many of the skateboard designs because of the overweening satanism that seemed to be in it. This was probably the most popular deck of that time:
Satanic? I don’t know, but I was too…….something…….to buy a deck like that. I bought ones like this:
Very 80’s, that. In fact, I think I still have my Mark Gonzalez (as above) somewhere up in my attic. I think finding this site will make me go dig it out of its prison.
But, forget the skeleton garbage, I found a deck with Our Lady of Guadalupe on it!
I loved loved loved skateboarding back in the day. It’s good exercise. And I need to lose some weight. And I always need to increase my devotion to the Blessed Mother. So…….I could buy that deck and paint over Jessee’s name, and be good to go, right?
Right???????
I’m a man of many parts, apparently. Who can’t quite grow up. But……I could skate with the kids! They love it when I do that!
* Garage hopping – the process of “skateboarding,” whereby one rides down various alleys looking for open garages with refrigerators, from which to remove the contents thereof. Especially the contents that were unavailable for sale to those under 21. It was a bad, bad business. Drinking luke warm Budweiser on a 95 degree July night and with a great inexperience with alcohol was a very good way to get sick. Which I did.
It can be easy to cross the line into uncharitability March 20, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, Dallas Diocese, error, General Catholic.comments closed
I got called out by a commenter for being uncharitable. I admit, it’s a constant temptation lying in wait, when one cares passionately about the state of the Church and the salvation of individual souls. It’s easy to succumb to the dread elixir of rage-a-hol and cross the bounds into calumny or other unmerciful acts. The post in question was my fisking of an op-ed written by a young girl in Texas Catholic. I don’t normally turn comments received into posts, but this one, I think, merited special consideration. First, the comment, unedited:
Hi,
Regarding Madison Ford’s article in the Texas Catholic and your extensive rebuttal. I don’t think that Madison was looking to debate the finer points of Catholicism and Christianity. She was merely expressing her opinion regarding the life of a young Catholic growing up amongst a largely Protestant community in the Bible Belt. Many of her points are valid and her feelings cannot be argued. The priest in our church, in a Sunday sermon, told the teenagers that they shouldn’t try to convert other Protestant Christians to Catholicism. He said they were already Christians. He said if they encounter another youth that is troubled and in need of Christ’s help, that it would be appropriate to invite them to the Parish’s youth activities. Also, I don’t think that rudeness and sarcasm is a good example of “loving one another.” i.e. (Because of her searing insights into the Faith? Because she so well represented the top-notch catechesis our young people are receiving?) I believe that living by example is an excellent way of evangelizing. If Catholics had a reputation for being kind and forgiving and always willing to help others, it would be a lot more effective than debating the streetcorner preachers with Bible quotes.
My reply, edited to fix some spelling mistakes and expound further on one idea:
It was a pretty hard fisking of a young girl. I had some trepidation in writing it. Yes, I was hard on her, but to make a point – what she has been taught, or come to believe, is at best sadly deficient and at worst so wrong as to be potentially damning. As I made clear at the beginning of the post, my problem was less with a young girl having written a poorly formed opinion piece on the Faith than with the fact that it ran in the diocesan newspaper. Why would the official organ of the Diocese of Dallas run such a piece? That, ultimately, is the reason that I tore it to shreds. And perhaps that was uncharitable of me, using the young girl as a vehicle to attack the root source of the problem, which is the deficient catechesis which has been in operation in this Diocese, and so many others, for decades. The point of the fisking was to try to chasten those who would publish such a piece, with the hope that greater scrutiny would be paid to the views of the Faith presented in the Diocesan newspaper.
Your comment regarding the priest and the youth group I find very troubling. It is a terribly widespread phenomenon and it is as wrong as can be. Protestants are not, prima facie, on a path to salvation. They do not have the Sacrament of Confession, meaning that any mortal sin they commit can only be remitted by having perfect contrition for it. Perfect contrition means having a perfect sorrow for the sin, to the extent that it would never be committed again, and having a purpose of amendment so great that all guilt from the offense is wiped out. Suffice it to say, very few people, especially in the present culture, have such contrition. So, right off the bat, the claim that protestants should not be evangelized is wrong and fundamentally uncharitable – you are in essence placing their salvation, at best, in grave jeopardy, leaving them in error and without recourse to the Sacraments. Imagine, saying that we shouldn’t try to bring someone to the glory that is the Blessed Sacrament. Such a view denies protestants the greatest gift in the universe, the Body and Blood of Our Lord, available only in its completeness in the Church of Rome. Failing to evangelize protestants – it’s tantamount to leaving people in their sin. Yes, there is the possiblity of salvation by baptism by desire, but that is an extremis situation that is relied on too much to “cover” those outside open communion with the Faith. No one really knows how, or under what conditions, baptism by desire might save a soul. As such, relying on it is also uncharitable, leaving the fate of souls to an unknowable conversion, a situation beyond the bounds of guidance by the wisdom of the Church and muddy in its clarity, at best. I must add, that denigrating use of Sacred Scripture in apologetical/catechetical work is quite amazing.
You don’t like my approach. It is very strong – I am a protestant convert to the Faith, and I have a very passionate belief that what the Church has traditionally believed is the Truth is absolutely necessary for salvation. You could say, I have the zeal of the converted. All of my family is protestant. I am very troubled at their prospects of salvation. I pray for their conversion daily, often several times a day as an intention for various prayers and always at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. You are probably right that I am harsh, but certain Saints (Jerome, Hilary of Poitiers, Athanasius, Peter Damian, etc) have been far more harsh than I am, and I know from experience that the ostensibly loving, “don’t dare mention error or fault” approach is very frequently a mask for indifferentism of the worst kind. I believe with great fervor that the Church has had far too much of this indifferentist approach, of “charity” and “don’t judge, lest ye be judged.” It is well past time for voices in the Church that unequivocally proclaim the Dogmas the Church holds without apology – that is the sine qua non of the popularity of Michael Voris. I can state that there is a substantial hunger in the Church for such clarity.
But, forgive me, I am a sinner and constantly err on this blog. All of your criticisms are likely correct. I do my best, but perhaps give too free reign to my passions, and to my desire to see the Church much different than it is at present.
One final bit – on Matt 7:1 “Judge not, that you may not be judged.” From the notes of Fr. George Leo Haydock, one of the greatest biblical exegetes in English-language history, from his seminal work:
Chap VII Ver. 1: Judge not…..or condemn others rashly, that you may not be judged or condemned. St. Jerome observes, Christ does not forbid judging, but directs us how to judge……Barefaced vice and notorious error should be condemned and reprobated by all. We should always strive to put the best face on any action that is indifferent to us or does not have any bearing on us.
I’ll leave it to my readers to decide if I crossed the bounds of charity in the fisking of that op-ed in Texas Catholic. Keeping up my reading of Divine Intimacy, I feel chastened at even defending myself, as numerous readings from that classic of Discalced Carmelite spirituality have recently highlighted how we should abase ourselves in humility, accepting correction even when in the right. But, then again, a certain Reverend Mother I know strongly counsels to fight the evil and error of our time.
I do look to my readers, however, to point out error or excess when it occurs, and call me on it. I pray I may have the humility to accept correction and rebuttal.
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