THE CATHOLIC MONITOR

Pontius Pilate “Conservative” SCOTUS Justices “‘No Standing’… in the Election… the Same Pernicious, B.S. Doctrine was just used to Excuse Obamacare”

June 17, 2021

Constitutional lawyer Robert Barnes said it best about our RINO “right-leaning establishment legal commentators” and Pontius Pilate “conservative” SCOTUS justices:Robert Barnes@barnes_lawI wonder if all the right-leaning establishment legal commentators that celebrated #SCOTUS “no standing” decisions to play Pontius Pilate in the election cases are feeling good now that the same pernicious, b.s. doctrine was just used to excuse Obamacare? [https://twitter.com/barnes_law/status/1405591178976796672]

Again, the Pontius Pilate “conservative” Supreme Court justices apparently broke their constitutional oaths to uphold the constitution as they did in the December Texas election case. Scholar William Briggs said the SCOTUS cowardly justices didn’t “have to deal with having all the evidence about the elections bruited from a non-ignorable source. How much better to pretend it [the Biden Unconstitutional Steal] never happened”: 

SCOTUS cucked. There is no other word for it. Their entire argument for rejecting the suit brought by Texas and joined by almost half the States was Nyah nyah nyah!

Think I’m joking? Here it the Order in its entirety:

155, ORIG. TEXAS V. PENNSYLVANIA, ET AL.

The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.

Statement of Justice Alito, with whom Justice Thomas joins: In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction. See Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. ___ (Feb. 24, 2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting) [the dashes are sic]. I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.

No argument. Just “Nyah nyah nyah.” With the cringe word cognizable. Plus, Article III? The one that says “Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort”? The one that applies to Biden selling the office of the Vice Presidency to the Chinese?

Nah, not that Article III.

Roberts aligned with Breyer, Gorsuch was lost after discovering the right for men to be women hidden in the interstices of the Constitution, Kavanaugh was still assembling his all-female staff, and you were warned about Barrett. The other non-entities voted exactly how they were either told or expected to. Only Alito and Thomas stayed strong. 

Don’t bother disagreeing. Everybody reading knows with moral certainty that if this was Pennsylvania suing Texas on behalf of Tony Bobulinksi—excuse me, Joe Biden—the vote would have been in favor of taking the case, probably unanimously. 

“Conservative” justices like Gorsuch and Roberts are more than willing to make law when it aligns with the interests of our ruling elite. But they quail when they have chances to strike return blows.

The left ignores the law and does what it wants. When the right follows their example, the left screams “You must follow the law!” And the right cowers and mews and surrenders. The right uses the term, but never understood the war part of Culture War.

One of the rumors before yesterday’s order was that so many states joined with Texas, so that when SCOTUS finally ruled against Texas, the right would be left with no weapons. The media would say “IT’S OVER.” Well, they’re still saying that. But now the court is doesn’t have to deal with having all the evidence about the elections bruited from a non-ignorable source. How much better to pretend it never happened. [https://wmbriggs.com/post/33854/]

Stop for a moment of silence, ask Jesus Christ what He want you to do next. In this silence remember God, Father, Son and Holy Ghost – Three Divine Persons yet One God, has an ordered universe where you can know truth and falsehood as well as never forget that He wants you to have eternal happiness with Him as his son or daughter by grace. Make this a practice. By doing this you are doing more good than reading anything here or anywhere else on the Internet.

EPPC President Ryan T. Anderson released the following statement on Fulton: “A 9-0 win at the Supreme Court is not something to take lightly. Yes, the holding was likely narrower than it would have been had it been decided 5-4 or 6-3. Yes, there are many other questions that remain to be answered by the Court as far as the extent of the Constitutional protections for Americans who believe marriage unites husband and wife. Still, the Court ruled unanimously in favor of the free exercise of Catholic Social Services of Philadelphia. It ruled unanimously against the religious bigotry of the city of Philadelphia. This is a big win for religious liberty and for all Americans who support the truth about marriage. It also seriously undermines the leading argument from many on the Left: that support for man-woman marriage is akin to racist bigotry. Note there were not many 9-0 wins for Bob Jones University.”

EPPC Fellow Andrew T. Walkerwrites: “While religious liberty proponents will undoubtedly wish that the Court had chipped away at the Smith test that has hobbled religious liberty for over two decades now, we should still celebrate today’s ruling as a significant win…we should pray that it has cascading effects elsewhere in demonstrating the intrinsic reasonableness of Christian viewpoints about sexuality and family.”

And EPPC Senior Fellow Roger Severino praised the decision on Twitter, noting that “the constitution requires space for people of good will to live according to their views of marriage, family, and human flourishing in their daily lives even today, when it has fallen out of favor with some woke governments.”

A Quick Guide to Today’s Opinions in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia

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Published in National Review Online on June 17, 2021

BY EDWARD WHELAN
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In one of the most-watched cases of the term, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled today in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia that the city of Philadelphia violated the free-exercise rights of Catholic Social Services, a Catholic foster-care agency, by conditioning CSS’s continued provision of foster-care services on its agreeing to certify same-sex couples as foster parents.

The unanimity on the bottom-line judgment is a big surprise. But it masks a deep divide over whether the Court should have used this case to revisit Employment Division v. Smith, the controversial 1990 case in which a five-justice majority, in an opinion by Justice Scalia, ruled that laws that are neutral and generally applicable do not violate the free-exercise clause even if they burden religious liberty.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote the 15-page majority opinion, joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. The Chief concludes that it was unnecessary to revisit Smith because Philadelphia’s contractual nondiscrimination requirement incorporated a system of discretionary exemptions that rendered it not generally applicable and thus outside the scope of Smith.

In a three-paragraph concurring opinion, Justice Barrett offers her view that the “textual and structural arguments against Smith are more compelling” than the historical arguments against it. But, asking “what should replace Smith?” if it were to be overruled, she says that she is “skeptical about swapping Smith’s categorical antidiscrimination approach for an equally categorical strict scrutiny regime.” Justice Kavanaugh joined Barrett’s opinion in full. Justice Breyer joined two of its paragraphs, but not the one expressing doubts about the correctness of Smith.

In a 77-page opinion concurring in the judgment — an opinion that I have not yet been able to read with care — Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, calls for Smith to be overruled and laments that the Court has instead “emitted a wisp of a decision that leaves religious liberty in a confused and vulnerable state.” Alito observes that the Chief’s ruling rests “on what appears to be a superfluous (and likely to be short-lived) feature of the City’s standard annual contract” and that, once the city eliminates that feature, “the parties will be back where they started.” Further, the Court’s ruling “provides no guidance regarding similar controversies in other jurisdictions” and “will be even less significant in all the other important religious liberty cases that are bubbling up.”

As to what should replace Smith, Alito responds:

The answer that comes most readily to mind is the standard that Smith replaced: A law that imposes a substantial burden on religious exercise can be sustained only if it is narrowly tailored to serve a compelling government interest.

In his own concurrence in the judgment, Gorsuch, joined by Thomas and Alito, criticizes the majority for a “dizzying series of maneuvers” that enable it to avoid addressing Smith.

Overall, there would appear to be at least five justices ready (Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch) or disposed (Barrett and Kavanaugh) to overturn Smith. But Barrett and Kavanaugh are not yet confident what rules should replace Smith.

Edward Whelan is a Distinguished Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and holds EPPC’s Antonin Scalia Chair in Constitutional Studies.

Cardinal Pell at Eighty

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Published in George Weigel’s weekly column The Catholic Difference on June 16, 2021

BY GEORGE WEIGEL

Fifteen months ago, it looked as if Cardinal George Pell might spend his eightieth birthday in prison. A malicious trolling expedition by the police department of the State of Victoria in his native Australia had led to the cardinal’s indictment on manifestly absurd charges of “historic sexual abuse.” His first trial ended with a hung jury heavily in favor of acquittal; but because of a court-imposed media blackout on the trial, the public did not know that the defense had shredded the prosecution’s case by demonstrating that the alleged crimes couldn’t have happened how, when, and where the complainant said they’d happened. The cardinal’s retrial ended in an incomprehensible conviction, which was followed by an even more incomprehensible (and feckless) rejection of the cardinal’s appeal. Happily—for the sake of an innocent man’s liberty and the reputation of Australia’s justice system—the country’s High Court unanimously quashed the guilty verdict on April 7, 2020, and entered a judgment of “innocent” in the case of Pell v. The Queen.

Cardinal Pell did not waste his 404 days in prison, most of them in solitary confinement. He wrote a daily journal that has become something of a modern spiritual classic; Ignatius Press has been publishing it in three volumes, the last of which will appear in October. Through his Prison Journal, thousands of people around the world have discovered the real George Pell: a man of rock-solid faith, keen intelligence, deep compassion for the confusions that beset the human race, and a determination to live out the priestly ministry to which he committed himself when he was ordained by Cardinal Gregory Peter Agagianian (runner-up to John XXIII in the conclave of 1958) on December 16, 1966.

I’m happy that so many others have now discovered the truth about this good and great man, not least because he and I have been friends since he spent his post-ordination summer in my Baltimore parish, in between his Roman theological studies and his doctoral work at Oxford. Over that half-century, we’ve discussed just about everything. And while the cardinal has not converted me to the virtues of cricket, we are of one mind on so many other things that we’ve worked in close harness on several occasions.

Thus it strikes me as providential that Cardinal Pell’s eightieth birthday falls while the universal Church is being roiled by the German “Synodal Way”: a process that, absent a decisive Roman intervention (and perhaps even in the face of that), seems likely to confirm that institutional Catholicism in Germany is in a state of apostasy. Providential because, without George Pell’s leadership as archbishop of Melbourne and then cardinal archbishop of Sydney, Australia might well have become the kind of ecclesiastical disaster area Germany is today—although the Aussies would have gotten there twenty-five years earlier.

His enemies will never admit it, but Cardinal George Pell saved the Church in Australia from dissolving into a Liquid Catholicism indistinguishable from Liberal Protestantism. He did so by his defense of Vatican II as renewal within tradition; by his reform of the priesthood and his care for sexual abuse victims in the dioceses he led; by his unwavering support of Catholic orthodoxy in the teeth of fierce cultural headwinds that cowed many of his brother bishops; by championing serious Catholic intellectual life in a variety of initiatives; and by hosting Sydney’s World Youth Day 2008, which evangelically energized young Australian Catholics as Denver’s World Youth Day 1993 had done for young American Catholics. Without George Pell’s leadership and his willingness to stand for the truth against vicious criticism, Catholicism Down Under in 2021 might well look like the moribund Church in much of Germany today, but absent the Germans’ vast, tax-supported wealth.

Cardinal Pell’s work to clean the Augean stables of Vatican finance remains to be completed and questions about possible links between that work and his prosecution remain to be answered. Nonetheless, the cardinal’s grace under extraordinary pressure and the dignity with which he conducted himself before, during, and after his imprisonment have made him one of the most influential elders in the Catholic Church today. That he lost his vote in a future conclave on June 8 does not mean that he will be sidelined in the really consequential discussions of the Church’s future. He will be very much at the center of those conversations, now wielding the moral authority he has rightly won as a contemporary confessor.

The man I have known and cherished since the summer of 1967 was not built for quiescence. His voice will be heard. And it will be heard where it counts.

George Weigel is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at The Ethics and Public Policy Center.

ABUSED FATHERS

NEWS:COMMENTARY

   by Rodney Pelletier  •  ChurchMilitant.com  •  June 17, 2021    2 Comments

Priests speak out against abuse by their bishops

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Nine priests gathered on Tuesday at Church Militant studios to reveal how egregiously they’ve been treated by their bishops. It’s called the Persecuted Priest Summit.

It’s the first time so many priests have gone public to expose how they’re being persecuted for speaking out and preaching the unvarnished gospel. The following is a list of the priests who were at the gathering and a short description of their respective situations:

• Father Michael Suhy (was booted from his parish for reporting a Detroit archdiocesan employee who was grooming and sexually harassing a young man at his parish) 
• Father Eduard Perrone, a well-loved Detroit Archdiocese priest (was allegedly framed by Msgr. Michael Bugarin, delegate for clergy misconduct for the archdiocese of Detroit; Bugarin fabricated a sodomy charge against Perrone in July 2019)
• Father James Altman (gained notoriety last fall for releasing a video titled “You cannot be Catholic and a Democrat. Period.” Since then his criticism has gotten him in hot water with the bishop of his diocese of La Crosse, Wisconsin, William Patrick Callahan; in May, Callahan demanded Altman’s resignation as pastor of St. James parish)
• Father Paul Kalchik (was a pastor in Chicago till he was forced out of his parish on orders of Cdl. Blase Cupich for burning a sacrilegious banner that once hung over the high altar of Resurrection Parish)

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• Father Mark White (was suspended by Bp. Barry Knestout of Richmond, Virginia; White became upset when high-ranking homosexual abuser Theodore McCarrick was outed since White was ordained by McCarrick; he rightly blamed the bishops for allowing a sexual predator free reign in the Church)
• Father Ryszard Biernat, a Polish priest (was the secretary to disgraced Buffalo, New York bishop Richard Mallone; he was forced into silence when he complained to the diocese that a priest had sexually assaulted him)
• San Antonio, Texas’ Fr. Clay Hunt (ran afoul of his archbishop, Gustavo García-Siller, in 2020 when he warned the infamously flamboyant homosexual mayor of his town of the spiritual dangers of his very public lifestyle of supporting sodomy; García-Siller revoked his faculties for merely upholding the gospel)

It’s the first time so many priests have gone public to expose how they’re being persecuted for speaking out and preaching the unvarnished gospel.GabTweet

• Father Stephen Lefort from the diocese of Houma-Thibodaux, Louisiana (spent years preparing for the priesthood; he was canned by his bishop after being in a parish for six months and also ordered to get psychological counseling; his “great sin” was helping a penitent examine his conscience in the confessional; Lefort has resorted to working at a hardware store in order to make a living)
• Father Jeff Fasching of the diocese of Wichita, Kansas (is being sidelined by his bishop simply for preaching the Faith: Several parishioners complained to his bishop, Carl Kemme, who ultimately took Fasching out of ministry due to their complaints; he has never been told who is complaining or what they are complaining about)

These priests can be supported by clicking here.

Learn more by watching The Download — Abused Fathers.

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An Angel of the Lord

July 1, 2020

“Nothing now happens that has not been foretold, 

But much that was foretold has been hidden.  

So what seems to be unexpected 

Is unexpected only by those who trusted 

That all had been shown.  

But those who find these things not to be unexpected at all 

Are the very ones who have hidden them away.  

There are secrets that now must be unfolded 

And brought out into the light, 

But they are secrets that will not know the light 

Without blood being shed, 

And therefore count these secrets not as trivial things.  

There are things that have been claimed 

As a king claims a throne, 

But as claims on a throne can only be made 

By one who is the true heir, 

These things can only be claimed 

By one who has truly been chosen.  

But in this case, who has done the choosing 

Is of the utmost importance.

There are secrets that reveal 

The arrival of an imposter 

Who has claimed what can not be claimed, but only given.  

And what is given must be given 

Only to the one who has been chosen 

By the means of what has been set in place 

By the one who has set all things in place.  

These secrets will be contained only until called forth.  

And now is the time of the calling forth.”

-S