Every family has a Prodigal Son who has lost the faith – how do we bring them back?

by Francis Phillips

posted Wednesday, 10 Feb 2016

Sister Theresa dyed her hair and went off to college determined to be “an intelligent, urbane atheist who would show the world that being a good person did not require imaginary gods.”

   

Sister Theresa Noble herself abandoned the faith in adolescence - she now explains how love ones can be brought back

Here is a book with a haunting title: The Prodigal you Love: Inviting Loved Ones back to the Church, by Sister Theresa Aletheia Noble FSP, published by Pauline Books and Media. I use the word “haunting” because in almost every family (and certainly in all the families I know) there is a prodigal son or daughter who has left the Faith, often for many years. This certainly weighs on the hearts of their parents who may feel helpless and sometimes hopeless.
They should draw courage from this hopeful book. Sister Noble, whose popular blog for the Patheos website is called “Pursued by Truth”, interweaves her own personal story and reflections on the parable of the Prodigal Son, alongside words of wisdom and common-sense to those who long to see their errant family members back in the fold. She herself, from a happy and devout Catholic family, abandoned her faith for ten years – from the ages of 14 to 24. She became an atheist, dyed her hair and went off to college determined to be “an intelligent, urbane atheist who would show the world that being a good person did not require imaginary gods.”
The trouble was that this didn’t satisfy her. Noble admits to a “natural attraction to the supernatural” so began reading Buddhist texts, attending Quaker meetings and taking classes in Eastern spiritual thinking. On graduation she spent time working among poor people in Costa Rica and it was here that her inner yearning for truth began to seriously assert itself. She notices that the people around her are poor – yet much happier than she is. They also believe in God.
She strikes up conversation with the parish priest who tells her he had once been a lawyer and engaged to be married – until God called him to the priesthood. Noble is struck by how happy he seems despite what to her is a bizarre choice. Nonetheless, shortly afterwards she experiences one of those mystical moments that people sometimes write about, when “a conviction filled me: God exists! [and] God was a Person.”
Drawing upon her insights into her own spiritual journey, Sister Noble draws thoughtful conclusions: if we want to help our loved ones we have to become humble ourselves: “If we do not model humility, then we can do little to encourage an attitude of faith [in them]”. The more we become like Jesus, “the more we are like a window drawing others to God.” Noble quotes Benedict XVI: it is not by proselytising that the Church grows “but by attraction”.
We also have to listen to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit in communicating with those we love, remembering that “every person’s soul yearns for the sacramental life of the Church” and trusting that “the Spirit can guide us to unexpected answers”. Noble is clear that either admonishing people who have lapsed or relapsing into permanent silence about their spiritual state are not truly Christian options. If we always remain silent, she says, “Our silence is impotent and weak”; it risks becoming collusion.
We must also recognise that “no matter what we have said or done, our loved ones’ decisions to leave the Church are their own.” We are not responsible for their return, either; only God can effect this change; Jesus, not us, is their Saviour. Prayer, ultimately, is the key; the most important way we can help our prodigal family members. Sister Noble’s is a book offering solace as well as sensible advice. It is worth reading, especially for those suffering a long spiritual stalemate with loved ones.

A terrifying brush with hell

 A terrifying brush with hell

What's it like to descend toward hell?

"It was an absolutely terrifying experience," according to Randall Rathbun, a research mathematician in Oregon who got a glimpse during a severe car crash back on August 30, 2002. "I could sense that my descent was quickening, faster and faster." It was like free-falling "down an empty elevator shaft."

"I was being taken to hell," repeated the engineer when we spoke to him. "It was so terrifying that the human mind can't comprehend the experience. I was bound in three chains and a very powerful spirit was holding me. It was this thing that was five feet tall but maybe three or four hundred times as strong as man. An extremely loud scream burst right beside my head." The scream came from the demon and was so loud, emphasizes Rathbun, it almost deafened him. "It was a voice that was screaming like a jet engine... an angry defiant voice... And I recognized what it now was saying... 'He's mine, he's mine. His name is liar, liar, liar, and I am taking him to the Lake of Fire.'"

Can you imagine?

Rathbun, who was working on the F-22 stealth fighter for TRW in California at the time -- formerly a brilliant student who'd been valedictorian of his high school class and was magna cum laude in engineering at Montana State University -- says he believes the entity taking him to hell was one he'd glimpsed many years before, during the early 1970s, after he was "born again." He says its head was "misshapen, not human, like a skull but not a skull, with skin that was dark leather and almost black and looked like somebody who'd been dead for a thousand years -- pure hate. Eyes that were deep-set with two fiery points of light that were like ice picks when I looked at them and they pierced mine. He had a desire to kill me."

The engineer had a history of problems, starting with a molestation when he was a seventh-grader at the hands of an older abusive student -- which he believes opened a "door" to evil (we call them "wounds") -- and graduating later in life to a pattern of viewing soft-core pornography, which led to visiting prostitutes on weekend nights even as he attended church services on Sunday.

Emotional issues. A near-nervous breakdown. A voice that told him to take his hand off the wheel of his car just before he crashed into a concrete pillar. He was in a downward spiral even before the crash. He says his wayward lifestyle began by what he viewed on the internet and worries about others, citing a recent survey by a major polling company, the Barna Group, for Proven Men Ministries, showing that more than half of Christian men view pornography (he calls that "terrifying," based on where it nearly led him!).

(It's a good Lenten goal: to have total control if the eyes tend to gravitate to the wrong thing. How many of us are constantly barraged -- everywhere -- by salacious images?)

It was only after Randall cried out to God ("Why, why is this happening to me!") that the Lord drew him from the shaft; three scriptures to do with the wages of sin were suddenly displayed before him, not just words but speaking to him (Romans 6:23, John 8:34 and Galatians 6:7). As he told the other interviewer, "I could see a long, long trail of sexual sins. Worse yet, I could see how I had deceived myself. I had truly deceived myself into believing that I could willfully sin, yet God's grace would cover me." In other words, he felt he could sin but everything would be okay if he simply asked God to forgive him afterward.

A little sin won't hurt; God will understand.

How many fall into this deception?

Getting back to the encounter with hell, Rathbun related to the reporter that as he fell down that "shaft," the atmosphere had become crushing beyond reckoning. "It began to get very warm and oppressive. I began to have trouble breathing; it was as if thick smoke was starting to smother everything," he told a reporter. He heard a roar and screams. "It was the worst screams you can imagine... thousands of people screaming... no, millions of people screaming. The screams were so awful, that you couldn't bear them. Just one scream alone would make the hair on the back of your arm stand up. But I was hearing millions of them."

"They were screams of torment, screams of pain, screams of suffering, screams of obscenities, screams of rebellion, but most of all -- screams of hell by the damned."

The roar of the flames was constant. "It sounded like continuing rolling thunder, or of flames consuming but yet not consuming. I had heard fire while living on the earth and had seen 100-foot flames incinerate hillsides in a few seconds, but the flames on earth were nothing compared to the sound I was beginning to hear." More than a single sin, it's a pattern that causes us trouble with God, Rathbun emphasizes. A pattern.

Yet, God -- so tremendous in mercy -- had pity on Rathbun and after a moment in which everything "went dark," he suddenly found himself far above the pit -- what he describes as three thousand miles above the earth.

God spoke to him and said it was the suffering of Jesus -- the Precious Blood -- that had saved him: that had given him that second chance. In his rendition, the Lord told him he had a major decision to make and that he would be given the time he needed -- returned to earth -- to make it.  "I trust you, My son," the Lord intoned -- with a Voice that Randall claims had "so much authority -- total absolutely authority -- the whole place just shook with that authority. You hear that Voice and know He is the most powerful force in the universe!"

Hearing that God trusted him "woke something inside of me. I don't want to hurt Him," says Rathbun emotionally.

This gets back to the idea of "patterns": What wrong patterns are in our lives? Do we examine our consciences in prayer?

The key to shaking his sinful habit, says the engineer, is simply drawing closer to God -- "falling in love" with Him, in Rathbun's words. "We're constantly watched by the good side and the bad side," he says, "and the dark spirit will take advantage of any opening." Rathbun believes he was allowed to return in part to let others know what he witnessed. "We're becoming lawless," he says of current society. "Disconnected more and more from God. He knows our hearts and is very interested in the purity of them."

During the alleged experience, Randall, who currently works designing programs for a financial investor, was also shown parts -- again, glimpses -- of Heaven.

That was as good as hell was bad -- actually, infinitely more so; pleasant beyond imagining.

"It is totally awesome," says the engineer. "It's just going to blow you away. You'll see what an incredibly, incredibly gracious loving Father He is.

"In Heaven, everything is alive. The grass there vastly exceeds grass on earth. And there was this praise and worship music you could always tune into. Everything in Heaven is giving praise to God. I found myself among wonderful blossoms and fruit, an apricot aroma. Totally delightful and pure. When I grew up we had a special apricot tree that we really enjoyed. It bore so much fruit that the branches nearly broke with apricots. I loved that and God knew it and puts you in a place in Heaven where you fit in, and where your gifts are utilized. You still have your gifts when you die. Mathematics continues in Heaven -- a fundamental knowledge, as theology is also a fundamental knowledge. I was allowed to 'taste' Heaven but not enter the 'city.' And God saved the best for last: I was allowed to see seraphim singing -- so pure, so holy, so filled with worship of God, like nothing you have ever heard, like a 16-part harmony or higher and flames of holiness. They were exalting God so much it just melted you."

This time, good flames; this time, purity; this time the flames of the Holy Spirit.

           

The Story Behind ‘Runaround Sue’

Dion DiMucci recalls how a basement party in the Bronx in 1960 inspired ‘Runaround Sue’

         For the Beatles and many other ’60s artists, Dion marked the start of teenage male vulnerability and confusion about love. After Dion released “Runaround Sue” in September 1961, the song became his first and only No. 1 Billboard pop hit. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 200.

With his new studio album, “New York Is My Home” (Instant) due on Feb. 16, Dion, 76, recently looked back at “Runaround Sue,” the song’s evolution and subterranean roots. Edited from an interview:
Dion DiMucci: We used to have these parties in the Bronx in the late 1950s and early ’60s. They were held in the basement of an apartment building at 2308 Crotona Ave., where a friend was the superintendent. He turned space near the boiler room into a living room, with couches and chairs. One night in 1960, about 30 guys and girls from the neighborhood got together there to celebrate the birthday of a friend—Ellen.
We had a portable phonograph, but we soon turned it off and began making up our own songs. I was 21 and had recorded a few hits with the Belmonts, like “I Wonder Why” and “A Teenager in Love.” We didn’t have instruments in the basement so we had to improvise. It was a kick singing for friends at parties.

          

A lot of the people I knew growing up were there—Tony Gariano, Danny D., Jackie Serra, Joe Zinzi, Joe “B.B. Eyes,” Frankie “Yunk-Yunk,” as well as Linda, Carol, Susan, Marian, Judy, Ellen and others. That night, I got everyone to lay down a beat on boxes and bottles and to clap hands rhythmically in time.
I then came up with background vocal harmony parts and had everyone sing them over and over. It went like this [Dion sings]: “Hape-hape, bum-da hey-di hey-di hape-hape.” With this going on, I made up a melody and lyrics about Ellen. People were dancing, drinking beer and having fun.

Advertisement

When I left the party that night, I couldn’t let go of that riff and melody. They were firmly ingrained in my head. I didn’t know how to write lyrics too well then. None of us did. But I knew that the melody and rhythmic line everyone sang had something special going on.
The next morning I called my friend Ernie Maresca, who was writing songs then. I told him about Ellen’s party and asked him to meet me at my label—Laurie Records, on 54th Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. I wanted to see if we could do something with the music in one of their rooms.
The bones of the song were already in place when Ernie got there. I had the song’s sound and breaks as well as some of the lyrics: “She likes to travel around/ She’ll love you then she’ll put you down./ People let me put you wise/ Sue goes out with other guys.” After Ernie heard where I was going with the song, we went to work on the melody and lyrics. I had my guitar and Ernie was banging on the desk with his palms.

                                      

Dion in his home in Boca Raton, Fla., in June. Photo: Alexia Fodere for The Wall Street Journal

I wanted the song to be about a girl we knew from the neighborhood who had broken every guy’s heart. Not Ellen or anyone else at the party. The girl had dated everyone—that sort of thing. What can I tell you, we were kids. But even though the girl had inspired the song, Ernie and I didn’t want to use her real name. Instead, there was this girl named Sue we had admired from a distance at the Harwyn Club in Manhattan. Her name fit the lyric line perfectly.
When we finished, I needed a solid vocal group behind me, since the Belmonts and I had already split up. One night, around this time, I was up in the Yorkville section of Manhattan and ran into these five guys singing on the street. They sounded great. I introduced myself and said I wanted to use them on a record. They called themselves the Del-Satins.
When they came down to Laurie Records, I showed them how to sing “Hape-hape, bum-da hey-di hey-di hape-hape.” They thought I was nuts at first, but that’s when “Runaround Sue” really started to rock. As we rehearsed, they got it and gave me this flexible vocal support that let me bounce around on the song and weave in and out.
We didn’t have to rehearse much. The Del-Satins got what I wanted right away. Great doo-woppers were like jazz musicians. You didn’t have to say a word. The Del-Satins sang a lot together and knew how to jump right in behind me.
As we sang, I studied the Del-Satins. I could tell they were the real deal. Their singing wasn’t frantic or forced. It all came naturally. They even picked up on the pronunciations of what I was singing and the attitude of the syllables. They were street—and the best I had heard.
When we had the song in shape, I called in [Laurie’s co-owner] Gene Schwartz, and we ran it down for him. Gene thought the song had something. He liked hooks, since hooks sold records. The “Runaround Sue” recording session was held in the summer of ’61 at Bell Sound on West 54th Street near Eighth Avenue. There, I gave the musicians rough parts. I didn’t know what I was doing musically then, but I knew what felt right.

Dion’s ‘Runaround Sue’

Fortunately, Gene had brought in some of the city’s best studio musicians. We had Teacho Wiltshire on piano, Milt Hinton on bass, Panama Francis on drums, Buddy Lucas on tenor sax, Mickey “Guitar” Baker on lead guitar and Bucky Pizzarelli on rhythm guitar.
After the guys looked over the music, they made suggestions. Bucky said, “Dion, should I play in this position or inverted in the higher register?” which would give him a different sound. I told him to go for it. I let the guys come up with great stuff. There were timpani drums in the corner of the studio covered in canvas. Panama played on top of those, giving the drum a thud factor and primitive vibe. He also put his wallet on the tom-tom so it had a deeper sound.
My grandfather used to take me to see opera as a kid at a theater on Fordham Road in the Bronx. Like those operas, I wanted “Runaround Sue” to start slow and sort of pained. It opened with Baker’s guitar chord and the Del-Satins’ street harmony. Then I started with, “Here’s my story, it’s sad but true.” People listen harder when you tell them you’re gonna tell them a story.
Then Panama took a few sharp shots on the snare and the arrangement became pure street rock 'n' roll, like at Ellen’s party, with handclapping by the Del-Satins. The shift from ballad to attitude, with a New Orleans party sound, gave the song lift.
Chuck Berry used school and cars as song themes. For me, it was stuff like love and broken hearts. I was an introverted James Dean type who was seeking love and writing about it, almost like a diary. My songs were about the journey to find love and the discovery along the way.
After Gene and I mixed and mastered the record, I listened back and knew we had something. I took a promo copy up to the Bronx and played it for my friends. But when the 45 ended, there was complete silence. Everyone looked at me, and someone said, “Dion, what did you do to it?” They were remembering that night at Ellen’s party and the spontaneity of what we had done.
I never thought I had screwed up the song, but I knew what they meant. I had had those feelings before—a record not quite capturing what I had intended. But with “Runaround Sue,” I knew I had nailed it, even though that didn’t come across for my Bronx friends.
After “Runaround Sue” came out in September ’61 and hit No. 1, I went to the old neighborhood for a party. My friends said, “You know, we couldn’t really hear how good the record was at first, but it sounds good now.” Ellen gave me a hug and said, “Wow, what a birthday gift to watch that song come together.” By then, the song’s attitude had grabbed everyone’s spirit. But you know, as great as that song sounds on the record, it was even better at Ellen’s party. Sad but true.

Anglican Communion suspends US Episcopal Church over same-sex “marriage”

Posted on 14 January 2016 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

   

Before anything else let me say: Anglicanorum coetibus!
Here’s something slightly interesting.
From USA Today:

Anglicans suspend Episcopal Church over stance on same-sex marriage
The Anglican Communion suspended the Episcopal Church, it’s American branch, from voting and decision-making for three years on Thursday over its acceptance of same-sex marriage.
“The traditional doctrine of the church in view of the teaching of Scripture, upholds marriage as between a man and a woman in faithful, lifelong union,” the Anglican Communion said in a statement. “The majority of those gathered reaffirm this teaching.”
The dramatic demotion follows a string of Episcopal Church decisions stretching back to 2003 when it elected Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as a bishop of New Hampshire. That decision led dozens of U.S. churches to break away from the Episcopal Church and declare their allegiance to a series of rival groups including The Anglican Church in North America.
In July, the Episcopal Church voted to allow its clergy to perform same-sex marriages, a move not taken by the majority of churches in the Anglican Communion.
Details of the suspension were first reported by Anglican Ink, which said they came from a leaked communique. The vote passed by a two-thirds margin, the publication reported, and included prominent voices among African bishops who have loudly condemned the American church for its liberal stance on gays.

A Misplaced Grief: The Vatican and David Bowie

Fr. George W. Rutler




   

In proof of Chesterton’s dictum that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly, I pound away at the piano playing the easier Chopin Nocturnes and I grind on my violin with a confidence only an amateur can flaunt. So I am not innocent of music.  I appreciate the emotive post-war French singers, and have a soft spot for the idiomatic form called “Doo-Wop” and its highly skilled harmonization and lyricism, along with some of the more whimsical Motown singers. But the world of rock and roll is to me a bewilderment, to the amazement of the same coterie who find it hard to believe that I have never had a cellular phone. It is a fact in witness to which I am willing to swear on a Douai Bible, that I have never been able to listen to an entire rock and roll song. This is not to say that I lack curiosity. In the South Pacific, I have listened to tunes on the aboriginal eucalyptus didgeridoo and the Polynesian nose flute, but what has developed as rock and roll music and metastasized into more raucous forms, remains an anthropological enigma and I leave restaurants and public gatherings where they are played.
Consequently, it was no surprise that news of the death of David Bowie was the first time I knew that he had been alive. If you find that hard to believe, you must remember that my instinctive taste for “pop music” is encoded by Gilbert and Sullivan and eclipsed by John Phillip Souza. What did surprise me was that the Vatican, just wiping up from its Climate Change light show on the façade of the Basilica of St. Peter’s, plunged into mourning for this man. At least the president of the Pontifical Council for Culture, Gianfranco Cardinal Ravasi, issued a statement quoting from some lyrics of Mr. Bowie: “Ground Control to Major Tom / Commencing countdown, engines on / Check ignition and may God’s love be with you.” What I found most intimidating, and indeed frightening, was the assumption that others would recognize the reference.
Born in 1942, Cardinal Ravisi is older than I and yet surpasses my information of pop culture, unless a junior staff member penned the elegy. His Eminence is an accomplished archeologist and was prefect of the Ambrosian Library, whose patron had musical tastes antecedent to and, dare I say, superior to, those of David Bowie.
A “celebrity psychic” named Uri Geller said of Bowie: “I was profoundly impressed by his deep understanding of mysticism, the mysterious and the universe. There is no doubt in my mind that David believed in Heaven.” I am not impressed by this, especially in light of the fact that three years ago Bowie produced an adult-rated video impersonating Jesus in pornographic positions. A statement of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Righteous said: “The switch-hitting, bisexual, senior citizen from London has resurfaced, this time playing a Jesus-like character who hangs out in a nightclub dump frequented by priests, cardinals and half-naked women.” But when Bowie died, L’Osservatore Romano, aching to be the Church of What’s Happening Now, eulogized the genius of Bowie, excusing his “ambiguous image” as one of his “excesses” but then remarking his “personal sobriety, even in his dry, almost thread-like body.”

The impulsive effusions of grief from the Holy See remind one of an extravagant tribute that the editor of L’Osservatore Romano paid to the crooner Michael Jackson when he died of acute Propofol and Benzodiazepine intoxication. The headline asked as if it were Holy Saturday: “But will he actually be dead?” Ignoring the epicene Jackson’s mockery of Jesus in his video “Thriller,” the Vatican newspaper lauded the star as a “great dancer” (“grande ballerina”) and declared that he would “never die in the imagination of his fans.” According to L’Osservatore, Jackson’s transgenderizing surgeries were “a process of self definition that was beyond race.” As for Jackson’s piroquettes with young boys, the unofficial voice of the Holy See commented: “Everybody knows his problems with the law after the pedophilia accusations. But no accusation, however serious or shameful, is enough to tarnish his myth among his millions of fans throughout the entire world.”
In his Republic, Plato said that music

is a more potent instrument than any other, because rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful, or of him who is ill-educated ungraceful; and also because he who has received this true education of the inner being will most shrewdly perceive omissions or faults in art and nature, and with a true taste, while he praises and rejoices over and receives into his soul the good, and becomes noble and good, he will justify blame and hate the bad, now in the days of his youth, even before he will recognize and salute the friend with whom his education has made him long familiar.

Plato also knew the dangers of “anti-music” or Corybanticism, which perverted rhythms to stimulate the bodily humors in defiance of the good purposes of the muses. Its consequence would be a moral chain reaction, dissonant music deranging society and inverting virtue. The Corybants were priests of the Phrygian goddess Cybele, and their music was atonal, ecstatic, and dissolute. It was inimical to the ideal republic. But it incubated the ethereal realms of David Bowie and Michael Jackson and their sort.
In speaking of the rock and roll genre, I certainly do not want to be lumped with those preachers who once condemned Ragtime music, or even Chesterton who in an unmeasured moment called Jazz “the song of the treadmill.” But I am a pastor of a section of Manhattan called Hell’s Kitchen. I recently had the funeral of a young man who died of a drug overdose, and whose musical world was Corybantic. His cousin, a client of the rock and drug scene, is in prison for murder. So I speak not only as an aesthete who publicly avows that he prefers Mozart and Chopin to Jackson and Bowie, but as a priest who has to pick up the pieces of those who never knew they had a choice. And I object to comfortable prelates in a higher realm, penning panegyrics for the doyens of a culture that destroys my children.
Like a new Plato, Pope Benedict XVI said in his Spirit of the Liturgy:

On the one hand, there is pop music, which is certainly no longer supported by the people in the ancient senses (populous). It’s aimed at the phenomenon of the masses, is industrially produced, and ultimately has to be described as a cult of the banal. “Rock,” on the other hand, is the expression of elemental passions, and at rock festivals it assumed a cultic character, a form of worship, in fact, in opposition to Christian worship. People are, so to speak, released from themselves by the experience of being part of a crowd and by the emotional shock of rhythm, noise, and special lighting effects. However, in the ecstasy of having all their defenses torn down, the participants sink, as it were, beneath the elemental force of the universe. The music of the Holy Spirit’s sober inebriation seems to have little chance when self has become a prison, the mind is a shackle, and breaking out from both appears as a true promise of redemption that can be tasted at least for a few moments.

Young people are embarrassed when their mothers try to be “cool.” These youths may tread wrong paths unadvisedly on occasion, for such is the indiscretion of nascent years, but they want their mothers to be mature and not adolescent. Mother Church appears ridiculous as Adolescent Church, as in the case of the Holy See lamenting David Bowie. The insatiable desire for approval by pop culture is beneath the dignity of the Church as the Mother of Nations.
One thinks of the breathless Catholic News Service commentary in 2009 on the murder of the fashion designer Gianni Versace, whose obsequies in a Miami church were attended by men dressed as women, and whose final Requiem in the Duomo of Milan featured Elton John and “Sting” sobbing on each other’s shoulders: “ Versace was noted for his sensual lines and eye-catching combinations of textural shades.” This simply is the diction of political correctness and it compromises the prophetic charism of the Church; for, as sages have observed one way or another, political correctness is the speech of those who are terrified by what might happen if they spoke the truth. Perhaps the next nervous surrender to fashion will be a declaration of Bruce/Caitlin Jenner as “Person of the Year” by the editors of the gender-neutral New American Bible. Asserting his prophetic, priestly, and regal credentials as the Rock, Saint Peter warned the Christians in Rome against the celebrities of the Forum:

For, talking empty bombast, they seduce with licentious desires of the flesh those who have barely escaped from people who live in error. They promise them freedom, though they themselves are slaves of corruption, for a man is a slave of whatever overcomes him. For if they, having escaped the defilements of the world through the knowledge of our Lord and savior Jesus Christ, again become entangled and overcome by them, their last condition is worse than their first. (2 Peter 2: 18-20)

Christ was a carpenter and his apostles were mostly fishermen and none of them was what is called today a “metrosexual.” I am not sure what that term fully means, but it embraces anyone who weeps for paragons of degeneracy and paladins of vice.


(Photo credit: Brian Rasic / Rex Features)

Catholic care home sued for refusing euthanasia

by Simon Caldwell

posted Friday, 8 Jan 2016

The Belgian flag flies outside the Belgian federal parliament in Brussels. Some politicians have been demanding that the Church should be stripped of public funding unless it allowed euthanasia on its premises (Photo: AP)

   

Family of elderly cancer sufferer are suing the care home for not allowing a doctor to administer a lethal injection on its premises

The family of an elderly cancer sufferer who wanted to die by euthanasia is suing a Belgian Catholic care home for refusing to let a doctor give the woman a lethal injection on Church-run premises.
Mariette Buntjens was instead removed from the Sint-Augustinus rest home in Diest and died days later in the “peaceful surroundings” of a private residence at the hands of a doctor.
Nadine Engelen, the daughter of the woman, is now claiming that the care home caused Mrs Buntjens unnecessary “physical and mental suffering” by refusing her request to die within its walls.
She is taking the care home to a civil court in Louvain in April in a test case which could determine whether Church-run institutions have the right to refuse to be involved in acts of euthanasia.
At present, Belgian law permits doctors to conscientiously object to euthanasia but is silent on whether institutions enjoy the same right.
The care home is insisting that although the woman’s euthanasia death had been planned for six months it was delayed by just a matter of days by the refusal.
Miss Engelen claims, however, that Mrs Buntjens, who had metastatic cancer, suffered as a result.
“It was terrible for my mother,” Miss Engelen told Belgian media. “She was still very alert mentally.”
Mrs Buntjens died in 2011, at the age of 74, but the case has come into the public arena this week for the first time.
The revelations have followed an announcement shortly before Christmas by Archbishop Jozef De Kesel of Brussels, that no Church-run hospital or care home would permit euthanasia under any circumstance.
Belgian euthanasia doctors and liberal politicians have since been demanding that the Church should be stripped of public funding unless it allowed such killing on its premises.
Euthanasia pioneer Dr Wim Distelmans, a man who has been dubbed Belgium’s “Dr Death”, complained to Flemish media that “a majority of hospitals and nursing homes in Flanders are still Catholic today”.
“If the right to euthanasia is refused there, that will be a problem,” he said.
In Britain, campaigners said that the case demonstrated the extent to which euthanasia was changing Belgian society since the practice was legalised there in 2002.
Lord Carlile of Berriew, the Lib Dem peer who served on the Lords committee that rejected euthanasia a decade ago, said the legal action showed that euthanasia in Belgium was “out of control”.
“We must ensure that in the European human rights setting the human rights of sick people who may not be in a position to express their preferences are protected,” he added.
Technically, euthanasia remains a criminal offence in Belgium with the law protecting doctors from prosecution if they abide by carefully set criteria.
It is limited to adults and “emancipated children” who are suffering unbearably and who are able to consent.
But critics say that the law is interpreted so liberally that euthanasia is available on demand, with doctors giving lethal injections to the disabled, the mentally ill and those with dementia, as well as patients who are terminally ill.
Last year, a paper published in the highly respected Journal of Medical Ethics reported that the majority of euthanasia cases in Belgium involve patients who are illegally “put to death” by doctors without ever giving their consent.
Numbers of deaths by euthanasia have also soared incrementally over a decade, from 235 in 2003 to 1,807 in 2013.

A Pontificate Of War

Posted on 9 January 2016 by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

   

US HERE UK HERE ITALY HERE

The Nazi Reich feared and hated the Catholic Church and its chief pastor, Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII. The Reich had a special unit of ex-priests which worked to undermine the Church and do intelligence analysis. One of this unit, Albert Hartl, was in charge of the dossier on the new Pope Pius. They wanted to know what sort of man he was in the case of full scale war between the Reich and the Church.
Hartl summed up Pius in these terms.

Pacelli would not act rashly. His public statements against Nazism reflected Pius the Eleventh’s stormy style more than Pacelli’s. The new pope was not a ranting mystic but a careful watcher, a shrewd perceiver of things that coarser natures missed. “What he does, he hides within. What he feels, he does not show. The expression in his eyes does not change.” Pacelli measured each word and controlled each move. That could make him seem superficial, pedantic, or fussy. Only rarely, with Americans or children, did his eyes glow and his voice rise.

In  Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler by Mark Riebling.
This book is fascinating, utterly engrossing.  It deals with the deep espionage during the War, within and without the Church.
There is a riveting section about how listening and recording equipment was installed in the Apostolic Palace…

Most likely on the night of 5– 6 March, Vatican Radio technicians set to work. To avoid staining the anteroom floor, and to collate their gear for quick exit, they unrolled a rubber mat. On it they set their tools: drills and bits, pipe-pushers, collapsible ladders. Because power tools would draw attention, the team used hand-turned drills. They worked in shifts, each man cranking hard, then resting while another spelled him. At the highest turn rates, however, even hand drills made a telltale din. The techs decided that greasing their bits would reduce the noise. A Jesuit reportedly went to fetch some olive oil, perhaps from the papal apartments. The team then wet its drill heads, and the work progressed quietly. But as the bits warmed, so did the coating oil. Soon the site smelled like fried food. To evacuate the odor, the team had to pause and open a door onto the Cortile del Pappagallo, the Courtyard of the Parrot.  Finally, after some tense and tiring hours, they broke through to the library side. Using a small bit, the techs made a pinhole— creating a passage for audio pickup and a wire. Book spines on the library wall presented natural concealment cavities. It remains unclear whether the techs hid a microphone in a hollowed-out book, which Father Leiber possessed, or whether they enlarged their side of the wall to fit the device. In any case, they apparently used a teat-shaped condenser microphone. They plugged it into a portable pre-amplifier that looked like a brown leather briefcase.
From the pre-amp they ran wires to the recording post. A stable link of coaxial cables passed through a tunnel, beneath an oak grove in the Vatican Gardens, and into a ninth-century dragon-toothed tower. There, amid frescoes of shipwrecks with Jesus calming the storm, Jesuits operated the largest audio recorder ever built. Bigger than two refrigerators stacked on their sides, the Marconi-Stille machine registered sound on ribboned razor wire, which could break free and behead the operators. They worked it only by remote control from a separate room. A half-hour recording used 1.8 miles of spooled steel. On the morning of 6 March, the available evidence suggests, an operator flicked a wall switch. A white lamp on the machine lit up. The operator waited a full minute to warm the cathodes, then moved the control handle to the “record” position.

There is a great page in which Pacelli’s coronation is paralleled with Hitler’s state ceremony in Berlin, on the same day that he signed the order to occupy Czechoslovakia.
The stakes were high indeed.

Perhaps no pope in nearly a millennium had taken power amid such general fear. The scene paralleled that in 1073, when Charlemagne’s old empire imploded, and Europe needed only a spark to burn. “Even the election of the pope stood in the shadow of the Swastika,” Nazi labor leader Robert Ley boasted. “I am sure they spoke of nothing else than how to find a candidate for the chair of St. Peter who was more or less up to dealing with Adolf Hitler.”

The Papacy is a horrible burden, but some times are more burdensome than others.  A Pope will suffer the consequences of office, if he takes the office somewhat less cavalierly than Leo X, Medici.

At first Pius carried on normally, papally. He shuffled to his private chapel and bent in prayer. Then, after a cold shower and an electric shave, he celebrated Mass, attended by Bavarian nuns. But at breakfast, Sister Pascalina recalled, he probed his rolls and coffee warily, “as if opening a stack of bills in the mail.” He ate little for the next six years. By war’s end, although he stood six feet tall, he would weigh only 125 pounds. His nerves frayed from moral and political burdens, he would remind Pascalina of a “famished robin or an overdriven horse.” With the sigh of a great sadness, his undersecretary of state, Domenico Tardini, reflected: “This man, who was peace-loving by temperament, education, and conviction, was to have what might be called a pontificate of war.”

Friends, we may be living in more dangerous days than those of the 30’s.