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ISSUES: CHRISTIANS AND THE WORLD

Ultimo Aggiornamento: 06/03/2012 20:19
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23/12/2010 13:19
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I think the title is an exaggeration - in the same way that Fr. James Martin, SJ, of AMERICA magazine has asserted that 'We have lost the war on Christmas'... But nonetheless, these are new aggravations to add to the load on the camel's back, though not yet the last straw... Buchanan is a Catholic.


Christian rout in the culture war
by Patrick J. Buchanan

12/21/2010


A Democratic Congress, discharged by the voters on Nov. 2, has as one of its last official acts, imposed its San Francisco values on the armed forces of the United States.

"Don't ask, don't tell" is to be repealed. Open homosexuals are to be welcomed with open arms in all branches of the armed services.

Let us hope this works out better for the Marine Corps than it did for the Catholic Church.

Remarkable. The least respected of American institutions, Congress, with an approval rating of 13 percent, is imposing its cultural and moral values on the most respected of American institutions, the U.S. military.

Why are we undertaking this social experiment with the finest military on earth? Does justice demand it? Was there a national clamor for it?

No. It is being imposed from above by people, few of whom have ever served or seen combat, but all of whom are aware of the power of the homosexual rights lobby. This is a political payoff, at the expense of our military, to a militant minority inside the Democratic Party that is demanding this as the price of that special interest's financial and political support.

Among the soldiers most opposed to bringing open homosexuals into the ranks are combat veterans, who warn that this will create grave problems of unit cohesion and morale.

One Marine commandant after another asked Congress to consider the issue from a single standpoint:

Will the admission of gay men into barracks at Pendleton and Parris Island enhance the fighting effectiveness of the Corps?

Common sense suggests that the opposite is the almost certain result.

Can anyone believe that mixing small-town and rural 18-, 19- and 20-year-old Christian kids, aspiring Marines, in with men sexually attracted to them is not going to cause hellish problems?

The Marines have been sacrificed by the Democratic Party and Barack Obama to the homosexual lobby, with the collusion of no fewer than eight Republican senators.

This is a victory in the culture war for the new morality of the social revolution of the 1960s and a defeat for traditional Judeo-Christian values. For only in secularist ideology is it an article of faith that all sexual relations are morally equal and that to declare homosexual acts immoral is bigotry.

I think we should nonetheless be happy about the following:

But while this new morality may be orthodoxy among our elites in the academy, media, culture and the arts, Middle America has never signed on and still regards homosexuality as an aberrant lifestyle, both socially and spiritually ruinous.

To these folks, homosexuality is associated with a high incidence of disease, HIV/AIDS, early death, cultural decadence and civilizational decline. And no sensitivity training at Camp Lejeune is going to change that.

Behind these traditionalist beliefs lie the primary sources of moral authority for traditionalist America: the Old and New Testaments, Christian doctrine, natural law. Thomas Jefferson believed homosexuality should be treated with the same severity as rape.

And 31 consecutive defeats for same-sex marriage in state referenda testifies that Middle America sees the new morality as the artificial invention of pseudo-intellectuals to put a high gloss on a low lifestyle.


Not until recent decades have many in America or the West argued that homosexuality is natural and normal. As late as 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Today, anyone who agrees with that original APA assessment is himself or herself said to be afflicted with a mental disorder: homophobia.

The world has turned upside down. What was criminal vice in the 1950s -- homosexuality and abortion -- is not only constitutionally protected, but a mark of social progress.

Yet, just as busing for racial balance led to violence, white flight and the ruin of urban schools, this social experiment is not going to be without consequences. And it is the military that will endure those consequences.

Yet, again, if we believe our armed forces to be the best in the world, why are we doing this, against the advice of countless senior officers and NCOs? What is the motivation other than the payoff of a campaign debt?

What happens now to Evangelical Christian and conservative Catholic chaplains who preach that homosexuality is a sinful and shameful practice? Will they be severed from the service as homophobes?

That cannot be far behind when the Family Research Council, a respected organization of religious and social conservatives that has fought the homosexual agenda from same-sex marriage to gay adoptions, has now been declared by the Southern Poverty Law Center to be a "hate group."

The advance of what was once a radical agenda has accelerated.

In 2004, John Kerry may have lost Ohio and the presidency because same-sex marriage was on the ballot in almost a dozen states, bringing out committed social conservatives to the polls. Six years later, the gay rights agenda is imposed by Congress and Obama on the 82nd and 101st.

Let the reader decide if the direction America is headed in is toward those "sunny uplands," or straight downhill.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/02/2011 17:26]
23/12/2010 16:09
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I am posting this here, because the story per se - about some second-level diplomat's impressions of Vatican diplomacy - is peripheral to the Holocaust-Pius XII narrative, but on the other hand, emblematic for wider issues, in this case, the now-ingrained MSM bias against Pius XII and the by now-ingrained second nature in MSM to twist the news to their purposes.

The following story carries a deliberately false headline - as the story clearly shows, the Vatican did not veto anything (nor is it in a position to do so in international organizations where it only has observer status); if the US cables are to be believed, it simply decided not to press for observer status in this Holocaust task force, where, one imagines, it would simply be a whipping boy endlessly castigated because of the Black Legend about Pius XII's 'silence' about the H9locaust....It must be remembered the Guardian leads the UK establishment media in anti-Church hostility, and always seeks to paint the Church in the worst light in anything it reports about the Church, the Vatican or the Pope.


Wikileaks cables: Vatican vetoed
Holocaust memorial over Pius XII row

by Andrew Brown

Dec. 21, 2011


The Vatican has withdrawn from a written agreement to join an international Holocaust memorial organisation because of tensions over the activity of Pope Pius XII, the pope during the second world war, American diplomatic cables show.

Relations have become so frosty that the Vatican "rowed back on a prior written agreement" to take up observer status on an international organisation dedicated to remembering the Holocaust and transmitting its lessons to the future, according to Julieta Valls Noyes, the number two at the American embassy to the Holy See.

In October 2009, she reported that the plans for the Vatican to take up observer status at the Task Force for International Cooperation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance, and Research "had fallen apart completely … due to Vatican back-pedalling".

She was unclear whether this was attributable to the newly-appointed deputy foreign minister of the Vatican, Mgr Ettore Balestrero, whom she described as "relatively inexperienced", adding that "this would not be the first time he has complicated Vatican foreign relations".

But she thought it might also indicate that the Vatican "may ... be pulling back due to concerns about ITF pressure to declassify records from the WWII-era pontificate of Pope Pius XII".

Pius XII has long been a controversial figure for his failure publicly to denounce the Holocaust in 1941 or 1942, when the Vatican was first informed of what was going on.

Before becoming pope, he had served as the Vatican ambassador in Berlin. Some Jewish groups have accused him of anti-semitic attitudes; his defenders, among them many other Jews, have argued that any more overt resistance to the Nazis would have been counter-productive, citing the example of the church in the Netherlands, where savage repression and the deportation of many more Jews followed a denunciation of Nazi policies from the pulpit.

Both sides believe they will be proved right by papers in the Vatican archives, but their release has been extremely slow.

The American diplomatic cables show a long and increasingly futile effort on behalf of the embassy to mediate between the Vatican archivists and outside historians, bedevilled by mutual mistrust. [What a presumption to think the US embassy could 'mediate' this in any way. It's a physical problem - too many documents available - with a magnitude that the Vatican cannot be expected to consider a priority in its disbursement of resources better spent in its many social projects around the world. The Vatican has already said that all the Pius XII archives will be open to researchers by 2014. Meanwhile, the critics are completely ignoring that the most important and pertinent documents were already published in a monumental 12-volume undertaking from the 1960s. Do none of these obvious factors come in at all into Ms. Noyes's cavalier conclusions????]

The story starts in 2001, when the first attempt to negotiate a solution had already broken down. Father Peter Gumpel, a German Jesuit priest and admirer of Pius XII, who was keeper of the archives, threatened to sue a journalist who suggested that he or his family had been Nazis, the cables show.

"Gumpel also expressed concern about references in the media and in other comments to him as the 'German Jesuit'. Gumpel [said] his family had been victims of Nazi persecution and several had been killed by the Nazis.

He himself had to flee Nazi Germany as a refugee, first to France and then later to Holland. He recalled that at one point a reporter had planned to print an assertion that Gumpel was a Nazi himself – something Gumpel said was libellous, and which he was more than willing to go to court to fight."

The next year, Cardinal Walter Kasper, another German, attempted to restart the dialogue over the papers. The-then American ambassador, Jim Nicholson, reported a conversation with him on December 18 2001. "[Kasper] said that Father Gumpel was the Vatican's best informed living expert on the papacy of Pius XII."

Two months later, partly responding to American pressure, Pope John Paul II, who also wanted his predecessor canonised, authorised the early release of documents relating to Pius XII's earlier career as the Vatican's ambassador to Germany.

Nicholson reported: "The decision … appears to be an attempt by the pope to silence accusations of anti-semitism levelled against his predecessor Pius XII. It may also herald renewed Vatican interest in beatifying Pius XII – free from the pall of scandal and derision.

The decision by Pope John Paul II to dispense with standard operating procedures in this case comes after years of Vatican protestations that this material could not be released because it was not yet properly catalogued. The decision shows that whatever the pope wants, does in fact happen."


[I must check back on these assertions, because as I understood it, those documents of Pius XII's pre-papal career were made public because they were part of the Vatican Archives of the 1930s that had already been catalogued, and even more were released later during this Pontificate as the archivists progressed in their cataloguing.]

But this would not be true for very much longer. As John Paul II sank into the Parkinsonian condition that would eventually kill him in 2005, the Vatican drifted. There is reference to the shortage of researchers, and by the time the subject resurfaces in 2009 all hope of compromise seems gone. [Whatever that dubious phantom compromise is, the fact is that more documents from the 1930s were made public during this Pontificate.]

Noyes reported that only six or eight researchers were working on the 16m documents, stored in hundreds of crates, that are left over from Pius XII's papacy. It had earlier taken a team of four Jesuits, working full time, 17 years to produce 12 volumes of his diplomatic correspondence.

One well-informed Jewish observer remarked that the desire to canonise Pius XII stems almost entirely from internal Catholic dynamics.

What really mattered in the struggle between liberals and conservatives was the interpretation of the reforming Second Vatican Council, called by his successor, John XXIII.

Was this a break with the past, as liberals believe, or merely a development, as conservatives see it?

So long as John XXIII is on the road to sainthood, and Pius is blocked, it is harder to maintain that the two men pursued that same policy.


[PHOOEY AND BALONEY! The Jewish observer cited is obviously making self-serving statements. And the rest is idle conjecture.]

In this context, the Holocaust is not the most important fact about Pius's pontificate, as for Jews it must be. This kind of disagreement could not be solved even if the archives were entirely open, and all the facts were known, and agreed.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 23/12/2010 16:22]
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