Oh, good.

Sometime in the next few days, I hope to write a bit about the goings-on described in this article. As soon as I get my teeth to stop gnashing.

A Pope on the rights of Indians, 1537

The anti-Catholic propaganda of Protestantism, which has now morphed into the anti-Catholic propaganda of militant secularism, has long maintained that the Catholic Church did nothing to fight for the natural rights of the native inhabitants of the New World, and actually abetted their cruel treatment at the hands of Spanish and Portuguese explorers.

Well, OK, let's start at the top; let's start with the Pope. What did Pope Paul III write in 1537, just 18 years after Cortez landed in Mexico, and only eight years after Pizarro invaded Peru? "Nice going, guys, those heathens sure deserved to be exploited to the hilt for your enrichment?"

Not exactly.

From the encyclical Sublimus Dei:

... notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect.

Read the whole thing (it's short) here.

Obama economic advisor Robert Reich does us all a favor:

I will actually give you a speech made up entirely almost at the spur of the moment of what a candidate for president would say if that candidate did not care about becoming president. In other words, this is what the truth is and a candidate will never say, but what candidates should say if we were in a kind of democracy where citizens were honored.

...

I'm so glad to see you, and I would like to be president. Let me tell you a few things on healthcare. Look, we are we have the only healthcare system in the world that is designed to avoid sick people. That's true.

...

And by the way, we are going to have to, if you are very old, we're not going to give you all that technology and all those drugs for the last couple of years of your life to keep you maybe going for another couple of months. It's too expensive. So we're going to let you die.


Catholics who voted for Obama should ponder Mr. Reich's words. Is this what you wanted? If not, what are you doing about it? Remember, Reich isn't some unknown kook or talk show host; he's a former governor and Secretary of Labor, and Obama picked him as an advisor.

Listen to the complete audio of this 2007 speech at Berkeley here.

"Is there no virtue among us?"

I believe our Church took a terribly wrong turn when, beginning after Vatican II, it de-emphasized the cultivation of individual virtue (as an expression of the love of Christ) and threw all its attention upon cultivation of the Corporal Works of Mercy (i.e., feeding the hungry, relieving poverty), but in a very peculiar way -- by cultivating the power of the government to coerce from unwilling donors the counterfeit of Christian charity via taxation and redistribution -- that is, socialist solutions to societal problems.

So I guess I'm agreeing with James Madison, who said in 1788:

Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks -- no form of government -- can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea...

Had the Church concentrated on its immemorial task, bringing individuals to a love of Christ which would express itself in sacrificial love of neighbor, we would have a much healthier nation now, and ironically, the conditions of social justice which are so often prayed for would be far closer to realization -- through the virtue of sacred Charity in millions of ordinary people.

"Streets" smarts

Lately, we've been enjoying reruns of the early '70's TV series The Streets of San Francisco, and something from a recently-aired show seemed worth noting.

In this episode, a young woman called Barbara (played by Kitty Winn, of The Exorcist and The Panic in Needle Park fame) chooses to have her out-of-wedlock baby at a home for unwed mothers, against the wishes of her hyper-feminist mother, who wants her to get an abortion. But it turns out that the home is in cahoots with a doctor who lost his license for doing abortions back in the '50's, and who has a nice scam going. When one of these mothers is ready to deliver, the doc over-anesthetizes her and then tells her, when she awakes, that the baby was stillborn. He then sells the baby on the illegal-adoption market.

Barbara doesn't buy that story, though, and goes hunting for the child. In the final confrontation scene, her mother tells her she isn't being reasonable. She rounds on her mother and says:

What's your idea of "reasonable", Mother? Pill in the morning? Sex at night? Abortion at the end of a careless month? That's not my idea of "reason". I know what it is to have life inside of me -- growing, through me. You never taught me that. You never taught me that life and love are the same. You didn't want me to have my baby. Nobody does. Nobody.

This episode aired in 1973, shortly after Roe v. Wade. You probably couldn't get such an intelligent and forthright challenge to abortion on the air today, but back then, the issue was still new and raw enough, maybe, to allow for a wider range of expression.

ObamaCare vs. ChristCare

Quite apart from the issue of providing abortion funding either by specific inclusion or by a lack of well-defined exclusion (as has been proposed and repeatedly rejected by House Democrats), there is the larger question of whether the Catholic Church should be cheering this enormous extension of government control over the lives of Americans, funded by the coercive power of taxation. I don't think it should.

Our Church is about saving souls, first and foremost. Yes, our cooperation in that process will naturally lead us to care for the material needs of the poor and unfortunate. But it profits us nothing to provide that care through government, since that simply forces someone else to pay for it. Forcing someone else to give their money is not a virtue. Only if that care is enabled through our own direct, intentional, sacrificial giving, does it form a part of the change of heart that our Savior is asking of us.

If it's common now to refer to the president's proposals as ObamaCare, I would say that we Catholics should be focusing on ChristCare: an organized voluntary taking up of other people's healthcare burdens through the voluntary, sacrificial giving of ordinary Catholics.

What else went wrong

At a local book sale recently I picked up a book with the intriguing title The Catholic Heritage, by one Lawrence S. Cunningham. I'm always interested in learning more about the contributions that Catholics have made over the span of the Church's history. Given the book's title, it seemed reasonable to expect that I might find out some new things along that line.

I stopped reading at the following:

It is no longer possible to think of Catholic theology; there are a number of theologies which work within the larger tradition which we call the "Catholic tradition".

And what are some of those "theologies"? Liberation theology. Feminist theology, including the execrable work of Mary Daly.

It's not so much that I think Mr. Cunningham was wrong when he was writing back in 1983. The big problem is that he was probably right. And that's another thing that went wrong after Vatican II: knowledge of and respect for the theological heritage of the Church took a back seat to the feelings of us Boomers, who were by then thoroughly accustomed to having our demands for "relevance" and "meaningfulness" catered to.

It was the beginning of a Church of teenagers, not a Church of adults. Maybe -- just maybe -- the generation of young Catholics we see today is actually willing to grow up, at an age when my generation was not.

The "mass" I left behind me

The recent nauseating "Mass" depicted in this video is a perfect example of what drove me away from attendance at Sunday Mass back in the 1970's. The irony is that the "reformers" thought that this kind of thing was going to be the key to keeping my generation in the Church. Think again, guys. And, another thing: ask God to forgive you for dragging His Church down into this relativistic, self-indulgent, politicized, ugly muck.

"The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" claims another fine old church

Catholic Culture noted the closing of 170-year-old St. John the Baptist church in Schenectady, NY, by the Diocese of Albany, which is boldly spreading the Faith by closing 33 parishes in the next three years. Bishop Howard Hubbard has presided over the collapse of Catholicism in his diocese since 1977, closing 36 parishes previously.

With considerable irony, the date of SJB's closing was June 24, the feast of -- as the lone commenter (a priest) pointed out on the Albany Business Review's story -- you guessed it, St. John the Baptist.

The parish still has a forlorn little website up. You can see the stained glass windows here. The altar had long ago undergone the mandatory wreckovation, though most of the basic architecture was still to be seen. Behind the altar is a huge wooden carving depicting St. John (I guess) being engulfed by a tidal wave on the Jordan or possibly consumed by a large carnivorous plant. The last worship schedule listed a single Sunday Mass, a "folk Mass" at 10:00 AM.

"Folk Mass"?? When did "aggiornamento" get defined as "keeping the Church tied to the pop culture of 1964"?

At least it won't be torn down. It's going to become the new performing home of Schenectady Light Opera. Maybe they'll treat St. John better than the diocese did.

Some things don't change

It seems to me that, in a sense, the Cross of Calvary was no anomaly, no betrayal of Christ unique to its place in time, or the people who actually took part in it. The Cross is always what happens to Jesus, to the Word Made Flesh, whenever He appears in this world we chose in place of the one He made; either in His full form in Jesus of Nazareth, the Second Person of the Trinity; or in His partial form, in His followers who, now and then, trust Him with their lives. Jesus could have dropped in anytime in human history and our charming species would have done Him in just the same.

More than that: if God's plan of salvation had been different, and Jesus had re-entered time every year somewhere on January 1, every generation would still have found a reason and a way to get Him to someplace like Calvary by 11:59PM on December 31. And probably much sooner: it was a quick five days from Palm Sunday to Good Friday, after all.