A Brazilian bishop hates him some Tradition December 19, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, Basics, disaster, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, scandals, secularism, self-serving, Tradition.comments closed
This actually is from last spring, but I just saw this in the fall Catholic newspaper, a wonderful publication from the Transalpine Redemptorists. They quote Bishop Sergio of Sao Carlos, Brazil, as stating the following:
I cannot understand how, in the 21st century, there are people who want the return of the Latin Mass with the priest celebrating Mass with “his back turned to the people,” wearing heavy Roman chasubles. This year we will celebrate the 50th annivesary of Vatican II, and while we already sense the need to hold a third Vatican Council, [I think this statement alone qualifies him as a progressive. If you think the Church in the US has lost people, check out Brazil. Tens of millions have fallen away and the rate is increasing. And this bishop thinks we need more of the same progressive policies that have borne such wonderful fruit?] we see peoople who want a return ot the past. And what is more worrisome, these are people who attend a college, peopole who have entered the univesity, but the university has not entered their minds……these people…….are in the wrong century. [Ergo, you are not educated or intelligent if you don’t share the bishop’s views. Who says progressives aren’t open minded!] They want, at all costs, to return to the past. [No, we want the Church and God to be glorified.] They live through miracles and apparitions, devotions and ‘rose-colored’ sentiments, which unfortunately, are out of date. [Good to know that timeless Catholic spirituality is “out of date.” You think he sees in Vatican II a radical break with Tradition?]
They need only to advocate the return of the famous mantillas, covering women’s heads. I wonder: why not men’s heads? It would be nice to see men wearing lace mantillas. [Apparently, Bishop Sergio has never read St. Paul] But it would be difficult to find anyone who would want to wear them, except for ‘crazy heads’…[Wow, he’s got some issues, hasn’t he? There’s a bit of hatred here, no?]
For these puritans, hell is full, when in fact it is Heaven that is full, because God wants everyone to be saved. [There is a difference between what God “wants,” and what occurs. Work out your salvation with fear and trembling, not false, worldly overconfidence] And not just a minority of moralists who see sin everywhere and for whom the devil is more powerful than God. [Ummm…who said anything about that? I will note that Bishop Sergio is calling many great Saints “puritans” who don’t know or trust God. I think that sentiment says all that needs to be said]
Bishop Sergio is, of course, a bishop “in good standing” with the Church.
D’oh, I see Rorate already covered this.
Non Sequitur – the last Apollo moon mission ended 40 years ago today December 19, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, fun, non squitur, self-serving, silliness, Society.comments closed
Good Lord, it’s been 40 years, and we’re no closer to going back than we were 40 years ago. That Space Shuttle was sure worth trashing all the Apollo infrastructure that had been built so you could have your shiny new toy, NASA! “Cheap” and “reliable” my @#$!! Hopefully Elon Musk and company will get us back on track. In truth, government funded space exploration was always a trap doomed to go nowhere. We’ll never be in space for realz until the private sector finds reasons to be there. We’ll see.
Since I’m lazy, here are some videos covering the pre-launch, launch, flight, and landing activities:
It was probably merciful that Von Braun did not live to see the downfall of American space exploration in the 70s and 80s. He, more than anyone, was the indispensable man for the Apollo program. He died in 1977. None of the ludicrous expectations for the shuttle proved remotely accurate.
Launch:
The only nighttime launch of a Saturn V. Still nothing like it. Upgraded models with F-1A engines kicking out 2 millions lbst each and strap on boosters could have lofted half a million pounds into orbit. We should still be using all that investment in those fabulous rockets today. This video is especially good as it has the air-ground loop on audio after launch. Ron Evans was a bit nervous, I think. There is a bit of adult language.
An overview of the mission:
Cloning Frankenstein’s monster December 19, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in Abortion, asshatery, Basics, contraception, disaster, error, foolishness, horror, scandals, self-serving, sickness, Society.comments closed
Via Jill Stanek, this is just gross. A scientist in, where else?, atheist Britain is forecasting human cloning within 50 years. The particular method strikes me as repellant, taking eggs from mom and skin cells from a deceased child to create a replacement:
Sir John Gordon, whose work cloning frogs in the 1950s and 60s led to the later creation of Dolly the sheep by
Edinburgh scienticians in 1996, said that progression to human cloning could happen within half a century.
Although any attempt to clone an entire human would raise a host of complex ethical issues, the biologist claimed people would soon overcome their concerns if the technique became medically useful. [After all, we are a most utilitarian culture……]
In-vitro fertilization was regarded with extreme suspicion when it was first developed but became widely accepted after the birth of Louise Brown, the first “test tube baby,” in 1978, he explained.
Major improvements in cloning methods would have to be made before they could be applied to humans because the vast majority of cloned animal embryos today are deformed, he added……[Gee…..you think that might serve as a sort of warning……]
…….During public lectures the Cambridge University scientist said he regularly asks his audience if they would be in favour of allowing parents of deceased children, who are no longer fertile, to create another using the mother’s eggs and skin cells from the first child, assuming the technique was safe and effective.
“The average vote on that is 60 per cent in favour,” he said. “The reasons for ‘no’ are usually that the new child would feel they were some sort of a replacement for something and not valid in their own right.
“But if the mother and father, if relevant, want to follow that route, why should you or I stop them?”
“The father, if relevant……..” I think we can see what we’re dealing with here. This is someone for whom the ends always justify the means, no matter how horrific. He is stating that all that is really needed for a child is a mother. And maybe not even that for long. Why not just let the state grow babies in test tubes, a la Alduous Huxley? We all know people are just “consumers” and “producers” for the state.
Thus, a culture totally detached from Christianity. If “science” can do something, who are we to stop progress? Who are we to have moral reservations, to believe erroneous things like God as the Author of all life and that messing around with elemental functions like this could have disastrous consequences. And if some nightmarish disease is created in the process that kills millions, even billions, well, that’s just the breaks, right? We have too many people anyway.
What kind of culture is this, that would countenance fabricating human life in this kind of monstrous fashion, while at the same time it kills millions of “unwanted” children a year. You see, it’s all about what we – who are outside the womb – want. If we want to kill an inconvenient child – that’s our god-given right! If we want to delay our first birth until 48 and engage in heroic, even immoral methods like in-vitor, that’s our god-given right! If we want to go even further and recreate long-dead children through some soul-crushing process, that’s our god-given right!
The funny thing is, the people most behind the promotion of all these “god-given rights” don’t even believe in God. And that, is how we have gotten into this immoral quagmire in the first place.
Another way of putting this might be….. December 19, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in asshatery, Basics, Dallas Diocese, episcopate, foolishness, General Catholic, sadness, self-serving, Society.comments closed
…..please lobby Congress for us so we can keep our funding intact, including numerous staff positions with salaries in six figures.
CRS puts together a none-too subtle video wherein they imply that if you don’t stop Congress from cutting foreign aid, you will be directly responsible for the deaths of millions. Funny they can’t work up similar energy against their pro-abort partners:
A debunking of some claims – childhood “deaths” have fallen by 1/3 in large part because the worldwide birth rate has plummeted. Period. Does CRS see births that never happen due to contraception (which their partners, and many of their staff, advocate) and abortion (which their partners advocate) as a good, something to tout?
0.5% of the federal budget is well over $100 billion. This is not chump change.
We are a nation facing the greatest fiscal crisis in its history. Everyone – EVERYONE – who gets funding from the government is screaming to prevent their pet program from getting cut. To be realistic, everyone is going to have to endure some pain. Shroud waving from CRS doesn’t help, and is not exactly what I would call a sterling display of virtue. They have a vested interest in this. They are not some group on the side dispassionately reviewing priorities.
This kind of tactic reinforces my belief and recommendation to others that CRS is not worthy of support. Not only are there massive problems with their program partners, with their staff, and with the failure to use their aid as a means of evangelization, which should be the prime consideration, but they constantly behave as if they deserve the funding they receive from the taxpayer by right. It’s the bureaucratic mentality – funding is g.o.d. – the guarantor of destiny, the means of survival and self-perpetuation, and it can never be cut for any reason whatsoever, no matter what the crisis. Since they are a bureaucracy, CRS is much less efficient with donor’s money than many other charities – and there are a lot of good charities out there worthy of your support. I am really just very opposed to this entire federally funded paradigm of charitable works – it is in essence robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Not mentioned in any of this is that if the US economy collapses in a pile of debt, there won’t be ANY money for such generous programs anymore. As I said, everyone is going to have to experience some pain if we are to get our fiscal house in order.
In truth, for most of the denizens at the USCCB, the only good funding to cut is defense. But even if defense were zeroed out, we’d still have a deficit of many hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Entitlements appear to be sacrosanct, or nearly so. It’s much safer to cut things like foreign aid. And I think this is a good thing. Because I think all Catholic charities need to get off the public dole and start raising funds the old fashioned way, the dirty, unreliable way they don’t like, by rolling up their sleeves, being truly Catholic, selling the Faith, converting souls, and getting the laity fired up to support them. Taking money from the government entails so many compromises. I’m sure CRS would argue they have to be careful in how they evangelize, so that they don’t offend Uncle Sugar. Perhaps that explains why the CRS head of operations in Darfur a few years back acted like he’d rather die than ever distribute Bibles with aid as protestants do. We certainly wouldn’t want to get Uncle Sugar mad at us for violating church and state! And thus, the problem.
All in all, I’d say it’s a pretty sad display. I find CRS to be one of the most repulsive organizations around.
Will the CRS blog police come around to take me to task?
Post-Christian culture: McDonald’s urges restaurants to stay open on Christmas December 19, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in Basics, error, foolishness, General Catholic, scandals, secularism, sickness, Society.comments closed
Whatever you think of them, there is probably no restaurant chain more ubiquitous or representative of Americana than McDonald’s. So it is perhaps revealing that McDonalds is now encouraging their franchisees to be open on Christmas day:
After a greater number of McDonald’s stores stayed open on Thanksgiving, resulting in an estimated $36 million additional sales this year, an internal memo from the company is urging franchisees to remain open on Christmas. According to an analysis in Advertising Age, that one day accounted for almost one percentage point of their 2.5-percent increase in sale growth for the month of November:
Opening on holidays didn’t happen much in the company’s Christmases past. Richard Adams, a consultant and former McDonald’s franchisee, said that “Thanksgiving was never open. Then 15 to 16 years ago, some started staying open.” As recently as five or six years ago, “you would never even talk about being open on Christmas, even if some were open on Thanksgiving. For the franchisees, this is a big cultural shift.”
When I was a kid, I remember everything – everything – was shut down on Christmas day. Even convenience stores were closed. Then, in the mid-late 80s, a few convenience stores started to open around noon or a little after on Christmas. That rapidly exploded to all convenience stores being open. Now many restaurants and other business types are open on Christmas, just as so many shops opened on Thanksgiving trying to gin up sales with big markdowns on certain items. That led to unedifying scenes of chaos as people fought and shoved to get the limited amounts of cheap merchandise.
That is our god in America now – commerce. The sanctity of the day Christ was born can’t compare at all to the worship given to the almight god of commerce in our society today. The sad thing is, the reason people want to be able to buy, buy, BUY every day of the year at every time is because they’re trying to fill that great big empty space in their heart, but it’s the false god of commerce that put that empty place there to begin with! It’s like an addiction – getting a fix may make you temporarily feel better, but every fix you get makes you more a slave to your own destruction.
Lord, have mercy on us.
Confession available at all parishes Dec. 19 December 19, 2012
Posted by Tantumblogo in awesomeness, Dallas Diocese, episcopate, General Catholic, Interior Life, North Deanery, Sacraments, Tradition, Virtue.comments closed
The Diocese of Dallas is once again, like last year, making a special effort to make Confession available during Advent. I laud this practice, and pray Bishop Farrell may enact edicts requiring daily Confession at all parishes in the Diocese, to return this vital and foundational Sacrament to the active participation of the faithful on a regular basis. One way or another, it does appear a fair number of parishes have increased their regular Confession times from 1 hour to 2 hours a week. That is still insufficient to make Confession reasonably available to even a small portion of active church members.
Confession should, then, be available at all parishes from 7-9pm on Wednesday December 19.
It does appear not all parishes are taking part in this special availability of the Sacrament, for whatever reason, or evidence for participation is not on the website or in the bulletin. These include St. Philip the Apostle in Lewisville (although, their priest was apparently sick recently, but they appear not to have regularly scheduled Confession, period), Holy Cross in The Colony, St. Anthony in Wylie (A commenter says they are having it, which I would think they would, but I looked through the bulletin twice and didn’t find any announcement, but I could have missed it), Holy Cross in Dallas (they appear not to have Confession regularly available, ever), Our Lady of Lourdes in Dallas, these just of the few I checked. Many parishes in Dallas have websites that are ancient and not updated, but it appears a fair number of hispanic parishes don’t have regularly scheduled Confession, and their participation in this event is an open question.
Anyway, hopefully I’m wrong and all parishes are having Confession. I cannot recommend receiving Confession regularly highly enough – at least monthly if not every two weeks. Doing so will do wonders for your spiritual life.
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