Southern Baptist Convention was pro-abort….. January 25, 2013
Posted by Tantumblogo in Abortion, Basics, blogfoolery, contraception, Ecumenism, error, foolishness, General Catholic, sadness, scandals, Society, Tradition.comments closed
….for a while in the late 60s and 70s. Apparently, they didn’t get on board with their pro-life stance until about the time Reagan got elected, which implies it may have been as much a political move as anything? This comes from no less a source than Dr. Albert Mohler, perhaps the premier theologian at the Baptist’s premiere seminary (h/t to commenter skeinster):
Two years before Roe, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution calling for “legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such circumstances as rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal abnormality, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”
That resolution reveals two very important aspects of this story. First, that the language of “the emotional, mental, and physical life of the mother” was already in use and, second, that the convention called for the legalization of what would become abortion on demand. After Roe, the language about emotional and mental health would be used to allow virtually any abortion for any reason. [that’s right – “limitations” on abortion that include provisions for rape, incest, and the life/health of the mother, wind up being absolutely no limitation at all, because there is always some demonic doctor out there who will attest that a woman just absolutely MUST have an abortion for her “health,” even if there is no real health concern at all]Did Southern Baptists have any idea what they were doing? The leadership of the denomination’s ethics agency was then pro-abortion, but the convention itself passed the resolution. Clearly, no pro-life consensus then prevailed among Southern Baptists.
While most evangelicals were either on the wrong side of the issue or politically disengaged, Roman Catholic leaders were on the front lines opposing abortion as a fundamental assault on human dignity. By the late 1960s, the Roman Catholic Church was fighting demands for the legalization of abortion nationally and state by state – opposition that preceded the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae.
By the time Roe was handed down, Catholic leaders had developed sophisticated arguments and growing organizations to fight for the pro-life cause. In 1967, six years before Roe, Catholics had led in the creation of the National Right to Life Committee. The Catholic tradition, drawn largely from the natural law, became the foundational intellectual contribution to the development of a united front against abortion. Nevertheless, for evangelicals to join the movement in a decisive way, arguments drawn directly from Scripture had to be formed and then preached from the pulpits of evangelical churches.Those arguments captured the conscience of the evangelical movement and produced a seismic shift within the movement and within the political life of the nation. From the 1980 U. S. presidential election until the present, the pro-life movement has been populated, funded, and directed, for the most part, by evangelical and Roman Catholic leaders
Pro-life efforts hamstrung by episcopal cowardice January 25, 2013
Posted by Tantumblogo in abdication of duty, Abortion, Basics, contraception, episcopate, error, foolishness, General Catholic, sadness, scandals, secularism, Society.comments closed
Phil Lawler lines up his shot, approaches the tee, and knocks it 500 yds to the green on a Par 5 (I add emphasis and comments):
Pro-lifers have been fighting the political battle against abortion for 40 years, and still the bloodshed continues. Perhaps it is time to recognize that the culture of death is one of those evils that “cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”
Yes, certainly we should fast and pray. It’s appropriate to use spiritual weapons in spiritual combat……….
But there is one powerful tool that has not yet been put to use in the pro-life struggle, and one group of people who have not yet done what they can do for the cause. I refer to the American Catholic bishops, and the use of ecclesiastical discipline.
Forty years after Roe there remain dozens of prominent politicians who identify themselves as Catholics, but actively promote the culture of death. These “pro-choice Catholics” are a source of confusion to the public and scandal to the Church. [Indeed. Aside from allowing homosexual depravity, even to the point of many legally proven cases of rape of minors, to run rampant in the priesthood for decades, there is no bigger scandal the bishops have collectively CAUSED – not permitted, but caused – through their failure to implement ecclesiastical discipline. In point of fact, bishops refuse to do so because they fear the consequences, which could lead to the loss of the precious tax exempt status, or some other retribution. Or, it could be, because they really just don’t care very much. I mean, sure, if it would take no effort and cost them little or nothing, they’d love to see abortion go away, but when it comes to really trying, to the point of making it hurt…..forget about it. But, then again, I’m the kind of Catholic who would love to go to Heaven without trying very hard. So it’s easy for me to say.]
The US Catholic bishops have issued many fine statements on the evils of abortion and the dignity of human life. But statements are one thing, actions another; and when one’s actions do not match one’s public pronouncements, those statements lose value. The bishops have warned that Catholic politicians who promote abortion are separating themselves from the communion of the Church. But they have not followed up, as necessary, by taking disciplinary action against those politicians who have not heeded their warning.
If a Catholic in his diocese is promoting abortion, a Catholic bishop has a solemn obligation to take three steps:
First, admonition. The bishop should call the erring politician to a private meeting, rebuke him, and warn him that he is putting his soul in jeopardy.
Second, denunciation. If the politician remains obstinate, the bishop should make his rebuke public, letting the world know that the Church views the politician’s actions as gravely wrong. A specific public statement, naming names, is necessary to address a public scandal, and to counteract the widespread impression that abortion is only one of many issues in which the Church takes an interest.
Third, exclusion from Communion. The Code of Canon Law (#915) instructs clerics to protect the Eucharist from scandal, by refusing to administer the sacrament to those who “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin.” The enforcement of Canon 915 is not optional; it is a moral obligation. Yet the American bishops have chosen to ignore that obligation. [And this is the key point. Enforcement of ecclesiastical duty isn’t an option; it’s A DUTY! It’s not just about the perpetuation of the nightmare of abortion, the greatest moral evil this country has ever known. It’s not just about saving the souls of the politicians in question by trying to shock them back into piety. It’s about protecting the millions of other souls from scandal of epic proportions! It’s about confirming to the faithful that the things you preach about on Sunday are operative and imperative ALL the time, not causing doubt because the actions don’t match the rhetoric! Without action, it’s just so many words. And words, as they say, are cheap.]
As long as our bishops are not doing all that they can do (and only they can do), the American pro-life movement is not doing its utmost to fight for an end to abortion.
I’ll go even farther. So long as the bishops fail to perform their solemn duty – and I don’t care what stupid, secret, backroom-deal policy the USCCB has – abortion will never go away. That includes PREACHING regularly againt the sin of contraceptive use on an ongoing basis, and taking action against those Catholics who continually apostasize publicly and work totally against what the Church knows to be true. I would add further that there should be very serious meetings with the priests in every deanery where expectations will be handed down relative to what is counseled in the Confessional regarding contraception. So that the faithful won’t hear things like “you’ve had 4 kids, that’s enough, you can use contraception if you want,” as my wife did.
This is one of the foremost topics of prayer for me. I’m afraid it will continue to be such for some time.
Update on Fr. Corapi – UPDATED again January 25, 2013
Posted by Tantumblogo in Admin, General Catholic, priests, sadness, scandals, sickness.comments closed
NOTICE: I know Fr. Corapi is still a priest. But in saying below he “left the priesthood,” I mean that he voluntarily left active/public ministry and seemingly “abandoned” the millions of souls who admired him and looked to him for spiritual sustenance.
I got the following update last night from a Montana resident who claims to be in the know. They say Fr. Corapi lives in a gated community in Whitefish, Montana, on Whitefish Lake. He is seen about riding his Harley. He never wears clerics or any religious garb. He is not known to be active in any parish.
He appears to have left the priesthood for good. I have known many people who held out pious hopes that he would turn up in a monastery somewhere, offering prayer and penance. That isn’t likely to occur. He seems to be very happy with his millions and his secular life.
He needs as many prayers as can be spared. Obviously, he was an enormous target for satan. His fall scandalized millions of faithful Catholics. It is likely that many – probably thousands or tens of thousands – experienced total or near total loss of faith after his ministry collapsed. That’s a sign of a cult of personality gone out of control.
He was very famous. He had all kinds of money. He had a history of addictions and other problems (maybe – there are allegations much of his famous life story was fabricated). Those were all avenues for satan to come in and peel him away from his vocation, and the Faith. It appears that is what happened. I am told, it started with his stopping his Breviary because he was “too busy.”
All of the above is anecdotal. It was conveyed to me by someone who lives in the area. I cannot confirm it, but it would seem to make sense. There were details given that would seem hard to make up.
The main point was that he’s still living in his big house on the lake.
One last point, just opinion, from me – he fell into something bad a few years before the allegations surfaced – we all saw his behavior and appearance change around 2008 or 9 – blacksheepdog.us was an attempt to keep income flowing after he left the priesthood, but it wasn’t generating much, so he shut it down and walked away.
UPDATE: Before you freak out and accuse me of being a Corapi-hater, a mainstream media apparatchik, or anything else, please search the site for Corapi. I think you’ll find I defended Corapi for a long time. I think you’ll also find that I was a big fan of his. But sometimes we have to face reality, and the reality is that he chose to leave the priesthood. And that fact scandalized many. But, yes, he was a voice that many were dying and needing to hear. He gave sustenance to pious souls who were in parishes and even dioceses where orthodox presentations of the Faith were not available. And those were really good things. But they are colored by the end of his apostolate and his leaving the priesthood voluntarily, without much of a fight.
UPDATE II: Look, folks Corapi himself talked about living in a house on a lake. He talked about owning a boat and having a boat dock. He talked about having a Harley. He talked about having a personal trainer, “Gina,” whom he saw everyday. So, as far as any “revelations,” or “gossip,” there were three: one, he lives in a gated community, one of many in Montana, two, he is still there, and three, he stopped praying his Breviary first. That’s it. If you want to call that “gossip,” go ahead, but almost all of what I said, Fr. Corapi himself had already confirmed. This post here at another blog describes in detail what I heard when I saw Fr. Corapi at the AT&T Center in San Antonio in fall of 2010. I heard all the same things this blogger reports – the big house, the lake, the boats, the Harley, the guns. That was most of what he talked about.
Another UPDATE: I disagree strongly with Mark Shea, who has linked this post, that those who had an admiration for Corapi were deluded conservative Catholic hero-worshippers. A small percentage might be characterized as such, but I think the vast majority of those who listened to or watched Corapi over the years were people desperate for spiritual sustenance they did not get from their local parish. That is one of the reasons for the cult of Saints – to give the pious someone to look up to, to imitate and follow as a spiritual example. Some people also look to living Catholics, especially clergy and religious, as such examples of holiness for both catachesis and spiritual edification. All faithful Catholics must, and I think, do, look to Christ as the ultimate. But since Christ was God Incarnate, and possessing all the infinite beneficences of God, some find the need for examples of a holy life among those who are not Divine. Many Saints have spoken on the need for such good example from the clergy – Pope St. Pius X held that it was critical for the local priest to be a supreme exemplar of moral and spiritual virtue. Tragically, many good Catholics today don’t have such an example in their parish, and possibly even very few in their Diocese. Many have been scandalized and even radicalized by the homosexual rape crisis in the priesthood and ongoing sexual depravity in Dioceses like Miami. So I don’t blame them in the slightest in developing a devotion to a priest or other Catholic who provides that sustenance they so badly need. That was a role Corapi filled admirably for years. It is to Mr. Shea’s discredit that he cannot but demagogue those whom he disagrees with – all the while he performs that same role of exemplar for other souls, himself.
As far as the character Mr. Shea describes, there have been two three (don’t make this number go up!) commenters who reacted with anger to what is admittedly a non-confirmed revelation – if it even is such. The vast majority have reacted with concern for Corapi and sadness at how his aposolate ended. I have not been disedified by the anger – I imagine it reflects profound hurt. It is very difficult to realize that those whom we looked up to have let us down.
I almost sense a protestant view from Mr. Shea – that our soul focus should be on Christ and we should never look to mere humans for any spiritual guidance and support. I’ll do that as soon as he shuts down his blog and stops writing books, making speaking tours, stops the radio, etc.
The radical misanthropy of the environmental movement January 25, 2013
Posted by Tantumblogo in Abortion, Basics, contraception, disaster, error, foolishness, General Catholic, horror, sadness, secularism, sickness, silliness, Society, unadulterated evil.comments closed
It seems among the environmental movement, there are twin unassailable characteristics: first, watermelons abound, which is to say, communists/extreme socialists who have found in the environmental movement a potential way to inflict their mass, forced reorganizations of society and the economy on their fellow man, and, second, a profound misanthropy which seems to suffuse the entire movement. That is not to say that there are not individuals concerned about the environment who have a great love for their fellow man and in fact pursue their environmentalism on that basis, but among the leadership of the environmental movement, and among definitely among the more radical side, there is a prevalent and I am afraid growing hatred of mankind in general. In fact, the radical side of the environmental movement – also growing, I’m afraid – sees their cause as so just and noble as to justify any means in its pursuit. Coupled with their cozy view of state power via communism/extreme socialism, this has all the makings of a nightmare of human misery, suffering, and death.
A recent example was provided by David Attenborough, host of various British TV nature programs (the British seem to loooove them some nature programs), who derided humanity as a “plague” and a “scourge,” and seeming to indicate it would be better if most of us would just die. Not him, of course. Nor would the environmental elites be denied their once-a-quarter high-power meetings in 5 star resorts in such welcoming places as Bali, Cancun, Copenhagen, and Rio. They get to continue jetting around the world, living lavishly, while the rest of us freeze and starve to death in the dark. But the problem extends far beyond Attenborough, as Wesley Smith at First Things notes:
David Attenborough—famous for hosting BBC’s The Living Planet and other nature documentaries—has recently drawn headlines for lambasting humans as a “plague on the Earth.”
That someone of Attenborough’s stature (he has been knighted, among other official honors, and is so popular in the U.K. that he was named one the One-Hundred Greatest Britons in a 2002 BBC poll) would compare us to cholera evidences how mainstream anti-humanism has become within the environmental movement. Indeed, in the wake of the media firestorm about Attenborough’s remark, Population Matters—the U.K.’s largest population control trust, for which Attenborough serves as a patron—affirmed the analogy as “apt,” stating that we are indeed “like a plague of locusts, which consumes all it sees and then dies off.”
…….Deep misanthropy has helped renew the Malthusian drive to radically depopulate the planet of people as a remedy for environmental ills and human deprivation. Population Matters, for example, would have us voluntarily reduce our current population of seven billion by about half to save the planet. Another Population Matters patron, Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, says the optimal human count would be much lower, around 1.5 billion……
…..But actual population reduction to the extent for which the Malthusians yearn can’t be accomplished voluntarily. Consider China’s infamous “one child” policy. Despite more than forty years of forced abortion, ubiquitous female infanticide, eugenics, and other draconian population control policies, the population in China continues to grow. Indeed, while China’s tyrannical policies have succeeded in slowing of the rate of growth, today the country has a larger population than any time in its history.
Massive depopulation would also require mass euthanasia of the aging and infirm—in part in order to balance the population pyramid. In this regard, the Japanese Finance Minister recently opined that his country’s elderly should “hurry up and die,” and yet, he retains his position.
Smith goes on to note that another fundamental aspect of the environmental movement is “wealth redistribution”……radical wealth transfer schemes which would leave people in countries like the US much, much poorer, while ostensibly raising the standard of living of the world’s poor. In truth, what will occur is that the entire world will be made poor and denied access to wealth and technology, including medical technology.
That’s the way to radically reduce population. And to get people to agree to suffer immensely, you have to frighten them out of their wits. To do that, you need some super-scary world-destroying myth. Thus, the environmental religion has cooked up global cooling warming climate change, telling anyone who will listen that if they don’t go back to an 18th century level of existence, the earth will rise up in terrible wrath and smite us all. I note in passing that the population sizes mentioned above, correspond to the world’s population in the early 19th century. That is about the level of technology the environmentalist zealouts are prepared to allow us to have…..all except them, of course. They’ll still enjoy what advanced technology remains, because they are there to “lead us” and deserve such comforts. Just like the “world leader” in Huxley’s Brave New World. Only he had books, and didn’t have to take the drugs.
Of course, none of its true. More and more evidence shows climate change, to the extent that it is occurring, to be a natural phenomenon entirely outside mankind’s reach. I also note the correlation between lack of faith in God, and the more environmental extremists. As Chesterton said, when one doesn’t believe in God, it’s not that you don’t believe in something, it’s that you’ll believe anything. Except God.
To the extent these people have gained power and influenced policy, they have only spread misery. California’s electric rates are projected to increase by 1/3 over the next few years due to the mandated use of “renewable energy.” And entire species of bats and birds are being wiped out in Britain from the windmill farms. Which break much faster than forecast, produce usable power rarely, and are entirely uneconomic without massive subsidies. But it’s all for the good!
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