Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Unfathomable on so many levels

From CWN:

Commenting on the early years of the clerical abuse scandal, retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee writes in his forthcoming memoir, “We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature.” The archbishop says he instead “accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it.’”

Had no understanding of its criminal nature? Out of any 1,000 American men at the time, how many would not know that child sexual abuse was a crime? And "the common view"?? On what planet was that view "common"?

I don't like a lot of what SNAP does, but the following comment is right on target:

Peter Isely, Midwest director of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, commented, “It's beyond belief. He's either lying or he's so self-deceived that he's inventing fanciful stories.”

My question is: how did such a licentious, deluded priest ever make it into the episcopate?

It's perhaps no surprise that another story on this perverted man discloses this not-exactly-bombshell:

In an interview with The New York Times, retired Archbishop Rembert Weakland admitted relationships with several men while he served as Archbishop of Milwaukee and questioned Catholic teaching on the immorality of homosexual acts.

Monday, May 18, 2009

Sick of "Social Justice"

I've officially had my fill of the slobbering love affair so many Catholics have carried on with "social justice" over the past decades. Especially since this has usually been expressed in a cozying up to socialism as its best implementation.

Outside St. Thomas last Sunday there was a table where we were invited to write letters urging the Federal government to be sure to continue spending large amounts of money to "help the poor".

Now, if more of the money we're already spending was going for programs that actually succeeded in teaching people how to get out of poverty, that would be worth saving. But I can remember when today's enormous social programs got their start in Lyndon Johnson's "War on Poverty". What great social changes we were promised back then! All those hundreds of billions spent, only to have poverty grow greater in scope, amid a deepening degradation in the culture in which the poor occupy the lowest and most vulnerable layer.

I may have missed something in catechism class, but why is it in the interest of the Catholic church for alms given voluntarily as an expression of personal charity to be replaced with welfare checks funded by state coercion (via taxation)? Especially when that means more and more power being concentrated in the hands of a central government?