THE AMERICAN CATHOLIC

Abort Anchor Babies

• Guy McClung
• June 22, 2019

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A careful, legal  treatment of two divisive issues – abortion and anchor babies –  can provide a resolution to both issues which will be a win-win for everyone. Well, almost everyone.  The simple, yet elegant, solution: a new AAB government program, Abort Anchor Babies. This treatment is based on the “law of the land,” abortion as a woman’s or girl’s right both up to the moment of birth and, as democrats now proclaim, for some hours after birth in some cases.

This article does not address what will be the inevitable  extension of the “absolute right to abortion” both to: A. some days or months after birth;  and B. the expansion of the “right” so that not only a mother, but also the government can exercise the “right.”

Issue: Anchor Babies

Some years, roughly one out of every 12 newborns in the United States can be classified as an  ‘anchor baby.  Every year around 200,000 to 300,000 babies are born here to illegal alien mothers. In the first half of 2019 alone, about 125,000 such babies have been born to  illegals. In the United States today, there  are over 4.5 million anchor babies that cost taxpayers over about two billion dollars annually;  these expenses include, among other things, health care and  hospital costs. Due to U.S. law, each of these babies is a U.S. citizen. This “birthright citizenship” is based on the provisions of the 14^th Amendment of the Constitution.

As with so many issues today, there is even a dispute about simply saying, writing, or publishing the words “anchor babies.” Of course this is the left, democrat, tyrannical, totalitarian gambit to insure that discussion and debate about the issue is stifled:  that  those who oppose their position are silenced as ‘haters;’ that the issue is then ignored;  and  that their agenda becomes reality. Democrat echo chamber Chris Cuomo has publicly apologized for politically sinning in violating the democrat speech/thought code by  saying the words “anchor baby.”

Democrats Losing Minority Support, Turning To Illegal Aliens & Legal Immigrants

As more and more minority voters, especially African-Americans, Central-Americans,  Mexican-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans learn the truth about their democrat totalitarian overlords and overladies, the democrats know they must, in future, look elsewhere to  create the docile voting blocs that have kept them in power in the past.  Across the country democrats have been stunned by minority members beginning to think and to learn, instead of, as in the past robozombie-voting for the Party of Death candidates. For example, democrats were unbelieving recently when the dreams of democrat destiny died in Florida elections. Hispanic –American voters shook off the evilming  democrat mind controls,  and two Trump allies were elected to high office in the Sunshine State –  the governorship,  and what had been a  democrat U.S. Senate seat.

Democrats Are The Party of Death For Blacks & Hispanics

Particularly Blacks and Hispanic-Americans have come to see the truths about the party that in the past was touted to them as their only  hope. These truths include:

1. The minority voter groups were simply being maintained on the democrat plantations, to be bussed to polling places every few years, then returned and ignored.
2. The democrats never delivered on their routine campaign promises to minorities to get them – the oppressed –   some of their – the oppressors’ –  money.
3. The democrats have promoted a RETA policy – racial eugenic targeted abortion – a policy that, particularly as enforced via their eugenics abortion arm, Planned Parenthood,  has resulted in half the aborted babies in America since Roe v. Wade being  minority babies. While their mothers make up less than twenty percent of the population, over 18,000,000  Black babies and over  12,000,000 Hispanic-American babies have been killed – many of whom would be of voting age today. In Pennsylvania alone, according to a recent study,  43% of abortions killed the babies of African-American women and 10%  killed the babies of Hispanic-American women,  but  only 11% of Pennsylvania women are black and only 7% are Hispanic. Mainly because of the democrat RETA policy, and Hispanic-Americans steadfastly cherishing and maintaining the value of intact mother-father families,  in districts across America Hispanic-Americans have or will soon  overtake Black Americans as the largest voting minority for the first time in American history. For Black Americans, this is truly war, abortion war, on their race. Recently for the first time on  National Public Radio the words, “black genocide” were used.
4. The destruction of minority families that is a major factor in so many minority members committing crimes and being incarcerated – a destruction of the family that is a known result of the democrat welfare agenda and its RETA abortion policy.
5. Fairly recent legal immigrants and Illegal aliens are taking jobs away from minority U.S. citizens.

Foreigners Here Vote Democrat

For some years now the democrats have realized that immigrants who fairly recently have become U.S. citizens,  and illegal aliens who vote, overwhelmingly vote for democrats. Research has proven that  foreign-born voters are more likely than native-born Americans to vote for democrats.  Democrats are successful in about 90 percent of congressional districts with above-average foreign-born populations. In some studies, it has been shown  that districts with a foreign-born population of more than 14 percent are almost certainly likely, about 90 percent certain, to vote for  a Democrat over a Republican. Clinton  received 64 percent of the immigrant population’s vote in 2016 as compared to Trump’s  31 percent.

The leaked Palmieri memo – stating that foreign-born voters are a “critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success” – and other sources show that the facts about foreign-born voters voting overwhelmingly for democrats  have not been lost on them. Hence, the democrat push to promote immigration and their opposition to controlling  the borders, or curbing illegal immigration. So, the democrat plan makes good political sense for them, never mind the effects on Hispanic-American voting strength or the dilution of Black Americans’ voting power.

More Verboten Hate Speech: ‘Chain Migration’

For democrats, anchor babies  bring along with them an ever increasing voter windfall, called ‘chain migration,’ which can exponentially increase the number of those voting democrat in a matter of a generation or less, particularly when illegal voting in taken into account. Granting legal U.S. citizenship to a single  anchor baby can result in the ‘anchoring in’ of not only a mother and father, but an  unlimited number of foreigners, relatives, or those alleged to be relatives.

Issue: Abortion

There is no need to provide much detail  about this issue here. Suffice it to say, democrats believe that the court-created court-legislated “right to abortion” – words not in the text of the U.S. Constitution or in the Bill Of Rights –  is absolute and that no limitations or restrictions of any kind should be imposed on this newly-found “right”  by law, local, state or federal. Most democrats now go so far as to proclaim that the “right to abortion” also includes the right of the mother to kill a baby of hers that is alive after surviving an abortion. This is infanticide, infant cide, infant murder. Democrats seeking the presidency in 2020 are now falling all over each other assuring their bases  that under their rule all taxpayers will pay for abortions. And democrats across America support  “Shout Your Abortion” celebrations.

A Modest Proposal

The problem of anchor babies has a simple, relatively cheap, legal, and ready-to-hand solution:  institute an AAB program, Abort Anchor Babies. Pay each illegal alien mother to abort her anchor baby if she agrees never to return to America.  If such direct, true wording – abort anchor babies –  is offensive or a problem, there are alternatives, e.g.:  “cash for your cell mass ; “pregnancy prizes;” or “ fees for your foetus”.

Some Minor Considerations

Who pays?  Either pass a law so all taxpayers pay for the murders; or fund nonfprofit businesses like Planned Parenthood with tax dollars to do the killings free of charge to the foreign mothers.  The nonprofits can solicit tax-deductible donations, which, as desired, can be used for aborting babies of a specific national origin. Immediately, the tax benefits can be calculated – cost of the murders and payments vs. ongoing costs for baby care, mother care,  chained in immigrants,  etc.

How much do we pay?  The American people are the most generous people on earth. This should be more, much more, than the $800 to $1800 Planned Parenthood makes from  a single  “termination.”  We want these mothers to be able to go back home and live, at minimum, middle class lives – and we don’t want them to return.  A good starting point is to consider a total payment of  $6500,00 –  e.g. a flat $1500 to a business like  Planned Parenthood and $5000 for the mother. Fares for taxis, bus tickets and plane tickets back home can also be included. There could be a premium for any girl or woman who agrees to be sterilized.

How to stop repeaters? The U.S. government will maintain a DNA data base for every mother and every dead baby. Upon initial presentation, e.g. at the border, or in a sanctuary city, a DNA test will be performed to determine if the woman, or girl, has previously agreed never to try to enter the U.S. again.  If they have already agreed not to try to enter the U.S. illegally again, they can be put in touch with Planned Parenthood executives or managers in their home countries, at one of their worldwide business locations , for care and baby killings.

What about abortion dangers?  The abortion businesses that become government contractors under the law will be tasked with, and trusted to inform their customers of all the dangers, possible injuries, and deaths  associated with abortions, e.g. medical malpractice injuries and deraths;  PASS – Post Abortion Stress Syndrome; the  ABC Connection, Abortion-Breast-Cancer Connection; and the typical recurring grief, despair, hopelessness, desolation, and guilt  of many women and girls who kill their baby, suffered by many  for the rest of their lives.

Must the mothers be actually, physically present on U.S. soil to be paid?  This question would be best dealt with in committee when the law is drafted and debated.

Who, if anyone, gets to market and sell the organs, brains and body parts of the dying, then dead, anchor babies (organs can only be successfully and salably harvested from a live cell mass) ?  This question would be best dealt with in committee when the law is drafted and debated.

Who gets paid? Mother only? Father?  Grandparents?  Siblings? Aunts and Uncles?  Cousins?  BFFs? How far down the anchor chain  ?  There is no apparent reason this win-win program cannot be extended, so long as all who benefit agree to the DNA testing and to never return here.

Win Win For Everyone . . .Almost

This is a win-win for all Americans; for all  that are opposed to illegal immigration, for the would-be anchor mamas, and even for the abortion-celebrating democrats.

It will also be infinitely cheaper for all taxpayers as compared to the ongoing government support of millions of those anchored on the democrat welfare plantations and those living in democrat enclaves like Detroit, New York,  Los Angeles, Chicago, and Baltimore .

The win-win for the anchor mothers means that they can be all that they can be,  Casting off the dead weight of a baby impeding their dreams, they will be freed  to pursue all they desire. They can be truly fulfilled as women, or girls. They can return home successful, and, with a nest egg to start a business of which they can be the President or CEO, they will have a career, a future.

Win-Win for democrats too – the new law will  enshrine their “abortion-as-absolute-right” fantasy and they will have tens of thousands more abortion deaths to celebrate –   in multiple languages; e.g. , “Arriba, arriba, Celebracion!  Grita tu aborto.” Thre will be sufficient killings that they can have daily “Fiestas De Aborto!”

Totalitarians usually have no problem saying white is white and black is white and white is whatever we say it is,  all simultaneously; so democrats will have no objection to the AAB  program because they have proclaimed for decades that, unlike any other right of a U.S. citizen,  the right to abortion is sancrosanct and absolutely absolute.

One Tiny Exception

An AAB program is a win-win for everyone, except, of course, for the innocent  anchor babies, murdered in their mamas’ warm wombs.

Jeff JacobyDemocrats are having a socialist moment, but it won’t lastby Jeff Jacoby The Boston Globe June 30, 2019 http://www.jeffjacoby.com/22887/democrats-are-having-a-socialist-moment-but-it        IN THE SUMMER of 2009, a few months into Barack Obama’s first term, posters bearing the caption “Socialism” appeared, on which the president was depicted as the Joker from the Batman movie The Dark Knight. The poster was promptly denounced as racist. “All that’s missing is a noose,” a columnist for LA Weekly asserted.That wasn’t the only time Obama’s defenders blasted those associating him with socialism as racist. “Right-wing attempts to paint Barack Obama as a socialist,” argued an essay in The American Prospect, are “rooted in a history of conservative smears against black leaders.” The Christian Science Monitor published an analysis of the “racist undertones of the ‘socialist’ epithet.” In Salon, Michael Lind accused John McCain of blowing a “racial dog whistle” by linking Obama’s policies to socialism.A decade ago, the S-word was taken by Democrats as a decided insult.Of course the racism charge was preposterous. Free-market advocates on the right have long decried leftist economic nostrums as socialist without anyone imputing racial animus to the criticism. But with Obama’s rise as a political leader, the R-word became an all-purpose retort, no matter how far-fetched, to anything perceived as a put-down of the nation’s first black presidential nominee. And for Democrats a decade ago, “socialist” was an insult to be rejected.Is it still?Senator Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, galvanized Democratic presidential primary voters in 2016 and is a leading candidate in the race for the 2020 nomination. Two members of the Democratic Socialists of America, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, were elected to Congress in last year’s midterms. At California’s Democratic state convention in San Francisco this month, former Colorado Governor John Hickenloooper was booed when he warned his party: “Socialism is not the answer.”According to a new survey from the Pew Research Center, socialism is now in quite good odor in the Democratic camp. Democrats holding a positive view of socialism (65 percent) dramatically outnumber those with a negative view (33 percent). Republicans, by contrast, overwhelmingly reject socialism; 84 percent express a negative view. Similarly, Gallup reportedlast summer that 57 percent of Democrats have a positive image of socialism, while only 47 percent expressed support for capitalism. To be sure, socialism remains decidedly unpopular among Americans in the aggregate. It is viewed favorably by only 37 percent. Democrats, however, do seem to be having something of a socialist moment.I don’t think it will last.Sanders’s unexpectedly robust campaign in 2016 wasn’t just a political phenomenon but a cultural phenomenon. As millions of Democrats came to “feel the Bern” for the septuagenarian with the thick Brooklyn accent and the uncombed hair, the socialism which he had always espoused acquired a cachet as well. Last November’s election of Ocasio-Cortez, and her sudden fame as a Democratic rock star, added to the buzz.But buzz fades. Sanders is running a distant second among the 2020 Democratic hopefuls. There is less excitement about “feeling the Bern” than there was four years ago. When Sanders gave a speech this month that was billed as his definitive defense of socialism, it landed with barely a splash.Meanwhile, leading Democrats steer clear of the socialist label.”I do reject socialism,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said flatly on “60 Minutes.” “That is not the view of the Democratic Party.” Sanders claims with justification that he has pushed Democrats’ Overton Window leftward, yet even as his rivals endorse some of the most socialistic proposals ever aired in a presidential campaign (Medicare for All, the Green New Deal), none but Sanders identifies as socialist. Even Elizabeth Warren, running hard to the left, identifies herself as “a capitalist to my bones.”A candidate who criticizes socialism may be jeered at the California Democratic convention. But most candidates know that embracing socialism will, even in 2019, put them outside the circle of respectability among voters in general.As it should.”Socialism is not the answer,” former Colorado Governor John Hickenloooper told delegates to California’s Democratic state convention in San Francisco this month. He was booed.Socialism is profoundly at odds with the American experience, and always has been. The Mayflower passengers who settled in Plymouth sought to build a socialist society avant la lettre, one in which, as Governor William Bradford later recounted, there would be no private ownership of property and “all profits and benefits” were to be part of “the common stock.” The settlers wanted a system in which everyone would work for the common good, and there would be no inequality of wealth. What they got was a painful lesson in socialism’s failures, with rising levels of hunger, corruption, and persecution. Only after the colony reversed course in 1623 and established private property rights did its fortunes change for the better.It might be going too far to say that that early experience inoculated Americans against socialism. Still, mainstream America has never been tempted by the socialist claim that letting government control all property and direct the economy will lead to prosperity. Most of us know better. We see that wherever socialism has been imposed, its failures have been comprehensive: more poverty, less freedom, fewer resources, crippled agriculture, stunted growth, rising authoritarianism, and heartbreaking desperation. In just the last few years, socialism has destroyed Venezuela, turning the country with the highest standard of living in Latin America into an impoverished basket case.Democrats may be beguiled these days by the seductive allure of the “socialist” label. Socialism in practice, however, is as much a nonstarter as ever. American voters have made some wild and crazy choices in recent years. But are they ready to go socialist? Not a chance.(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe).– ##

Conservative Rationalism Has Failed

Yoram Hazony

Essay06.24.2019

THE AMERICAN MIND

Part I: Unfettered reason cannot conserve anything.

Yoram Hazony is playing a significant role in reviving the notion of nationalism in America. As the National Conservatism conference draws closer, we will publish critiques of the following essay on conservatism, which is based on the Herbert W. Vaughan Lecture he delivered at Harvard Law School on April 2, 2019.

For now, and for some friendly criticism of Hazony’s argument, watch the recent “Nationalism and Sovereignty” panel the Claremont Institute co-sponsored with Hillsdale College’s Kirby Center and read Claremont Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla’s review of Hazony’s The Virtue of Nationalism in the Winter 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

In recent decades, American and European elites have devoted themselves to the project of rethinking society from scratch.

What were once linchpin concepts such as family and nation, man and woman, God and Scripture, the honorable and the sacred, have been found wanting and severely damaged, if not overthrown. The resulting void has been filled by new doctrines, until now mostly neo-Marxist or libertarian in character. But a racialist “white identity” politics in a Darwinian key is gathering momentum as well.

All three of these approaches to political and moral questions are, in a sense, creatures of the Enlightenment, claiming to be founded on a universally accessible reason and to play by its rules. This is another way of saying that none of them have much regard for inherited tradition, seeing it as contributing little to our understanding of politics and morals.

Because contemporary political doctrines claim to play by Enlightenment rules, conservatives seeking to stem the tide of the revolution have often felt that they would be on the strongest possible ground if they appealed to universal reason themselves: Catholic scholars, for example, have led the effort to develop an updated political theory based on natural law. Whereas Straussians, to cite another prominent school, have sought to elaborate the theory of Lockean natural right, fortifying it with the assertion that the American Declaration of Independence commits the United States to such a view as a kind of official ideology of the state.

These efforts have generally been conducted by individuals who are personally sympathetic to political conservatism—that is, to the preservation of the inherited political and moral traditions of Western nations. And yet it is striking that these attempts to revive natural law and natural right defend a conservative political understanding that is itself created in the image of their opponents: The rationalist school of Enlightenment political theory—Hobbes’ Leviathan,Locke’s Second Treatise, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Spinoza, Kant—insisted that it was speaking in the name of a universal reason that is supposed to be accessible to everyone, in all times and places, and to provide the one correct answer to all foundational political questions. In just the same way, present-day “conservative rationalists” insist that their own political thinking is the product of universal reason, accessible to all, and leading to the one true answer on political things. Missing from such conservative rationalism is any significant place for tradition—any reason to prefer political and moral concepts that have held good and done good for our ancestors and for us over centuries, if not thousands of years.

Although conservative rationalism can boast of certain impressive achievements, as a general matter it is fair to say that conservative rationalism has failed: It has not visibly retarded the progress of the revolution that has so damaged the most basic of inherited Jewish and Christian concepts. But beyond this, by endorsing the methods and assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism, conservative rationalism has contributed something to the calamity, leaving the traditions that once upheld the political order in America and other Western countries—understood as the inherited customs of particular nations—largely without defenders.

This is a decisive point, because traditions of ideas, regardless of their content, are never disembodied things that float free of the families, tribes and nations into which real human beings are born and in which they are educated. Our ideas, no matter how much we may develop and revise them or rebel against them in part, are still the product of the traditions we inherit (or adopt later in life). Because conservative rationalists mistake their ideas for universal thoughts that can be accessed universally, they pay little attention to way in which the traditions of nations are formed and what it takes to strengthen them or even to maintain them. Their students are therefore largely unaware, for example, that it is not freedom, but honor and self-restraint that are primarily responsible for the solidity of national traditions. Without understanding and practice in these things, “conservative rationalists” cannot in fact conserve much of anything, and often end up taking part, on a daily basis, in the general undermining of the very things that they say they wish to conserve.

Conservative rationalism has led not to a flourishing of the conservative impulse in America, the UK, and other nations, but rather to its extinction. If there is any hope of a conservative rebirth, it must be in the direction of a more “conservative conservatism”—one that is based on the particular biblical and common law traditions of these nations, and on the thought of individuals such as John Selden and Edmund Burke who spoke with force about the outcome if political philosophy were to set its hopes on the accessibility of universal reason. If we wish for anything at all to be conserved out of the current conflagration, it will have to be through the recovery and inculcation of the particular Anglo-American political and religious traditions that were the original source of the English-speaking nations’  cohesion and strength.

World War II and the Displacement of Christian Tradition by Liberalism 

On January 4, 1939, Franklin Roosevelt gave the State of the Union address to an American nation he believed would soon be at war. Roosevelt knew that America, Britain, and their allies would have to fight not only Nazism and its imitators, but possibly Soviet Communism as well. What would the Western allies be fighting for in the coming struggle? In Roosevelt’s eyes, the war would be fought for three things. As he put it:

[Events] abroad directly challenge three institutions indispensable to Americans, now as always. The first is religion. It is the source of the other two—democracy and international good faith.

According to this view, both the freedoms that are the inheritance of Americans as individuals, and the freedom of Americans as an independent nation among others, have their source in one place—which is the Christian inheritance (or, if you like, the Jewish and Christian inheritance) of this nation and of the West. FDR supposed that the Nazis and the Marxists knew this as well as he did and were seeking to overthrow not only democracy but its Christian source too. Their aim, he said, was to achieve

[a]n ordering of society which relegates religion, democracy, and good faith among nations to the background… [but] the United States rejects such an ordering and retains its ancient faith.

FDR’s framing of what was at stake made the impending conflict not only a war about freedom, although it was surely that. It was also a war about religion. In fact, in the same address, Roosevelt described the conflict as one between the “God-fearing democracies” and their enemies—those nations that did not fear God, the biblical Amalek.

It is striking how far this framing of the war differs from what is taught in most schools and universities today. It is a rare instructor in history or politics who describes the struggle against Nazism and Marxism as one fought between “God-fearing democracy” and its enemies. It is usually said that the war was fought between “liberal democracy” and its enemies. But Roosevelt seems not to have been aware that liberalism was the cause in whose name hundreds of thousands of Americans were about to give their lives. In fact, the words “liberal” and “liberalism” appear nowhere in the eight pages of his address.

This shift isn’t just about word-choice. The fact is that America, Britain, and other Western countries have undergone a dramatic change in self-understanding in the wake of the trauma of the Second World War. Somehow, a war fought to defend God-fearing democracy inadvertently ended up destroying the religious foundations of the victorious Western nations. Over the course of a few generations, the God-fearing democracies came to see themselves as liberal democracies, and liberalism replaced Christianity as the fundamental framework within which these nations lived and conducted their affairs.

We can see the beginning of this change immediately after the Second World War in the U.S. Supreme Court’s determination in 1947 that state governments may no longer support and encourage a particular religion or any religion. Technically, this decision is deduced from the First Amendment of the Constitution as applied through the Fourteenth. But of course, the Fourteenth amendment (1868) had already been on the books for 79 years without anyone recognizing that support and encouragement for religion by the states was a violation of individual’s right to due process.

What had changed in the interim was not the letter of the law, but the narrative framework through which the Justices of the Supreme Court, as representatives of elite opinion, understood the relationship between Christian tradition and the American nation. That there has been such a change is obvious from the fact that by the time one reaches Everson v Board of Education (1947), Justice Hugo Black feels constrained to provide a new story of the American founding broadly hostile to government encouragement of religion. Among other things he writes:

“[I]t is not inappropriate briefly to review the background and environment of the period in which that constitutional language was fashioned and adopted. A large proportion of the early settlers of this country came here from Europe to escape the bondage of laws which compelled them to support and attend government favored churches. The centuries immediately before and contemporaneous with the colonization of America had been filled with turmoil, civil strife, and persecutions, generated in large part by established sects determined to maintain their absolute political and religious supremacy. With the power of government supporting them, at various times and places, Catholics had persecuted Protestants, Protestants had persecuted Catholics, Protestant sects had persecuted other Protestant sects, Catholics of one shade of belief had persecuted Catholics of another shade of belief, and all of these had from time to time persecuted Jews. In efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place, men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed.”

In Black’s retelling, religion is no longer the source of American democracy and independence, as it had been in FDR’s State of the Union address eight years earlier. Religion is now portrayed as a danger and a threat to democratic freedoms, the very form of the American Constitution having been the result of the excesses of religion that drove the first Europeans to settle in America.

It is here that we find the transition from a God-fearing democracy to a liberal democracy: One in which religion is perceived as being so great a threat that the federal government must act to ensure that no child in the country is taught religion in any publicly supported school. Within less than two decades, the Supreme Court had banned not only religious instruction but prayer and devotional reading from the Bible in schools, placing the great majority of the nation’s children in the care of a safe space scrubbed clean of any reference to the place of Christianity and Judaism in laying the foundations of the American republic. Instead of arising out of longstanding Christian tradition, America was reimagined as a product of Enlightenment rationalism: In the high school I attended in New Jersey, we heard not a word about the Bible or the common law, but we were taught about Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau.

The public schools and the elite universities provide the public space in which the American mind is shaped. What is legitimate in these institutions is what ends up being legitimate in the public life of the country a generation later. A nation that honors its religious traditions in the schools will end up honoring traditions in the broader public sphere. A nation that heaps dishonor on its religious traditions by banning them from the schools will end up dishonoring its traditions in the broader public sphere as America consistently does today.

Why Rationalism Does Not, Cannot, and Will Not Work

It is a commonplace among conservative commentators that the demolition of traditional concepts and norms is being driven by Marxists (also called “neo-Marxists,” “cultural Marxists,” or just “the Left”), especially in the universities. Marxists are an easy target for criticism because they say explicitly that their aim is to critique the concepts employed by existing power structures with the aim of undermining them.

But the neo-Marxists are not sufficient as an explanation of what we’re seeing. Even in the universities, where the Marxists are strongest, they remain a minority. In government and among the public, they have not, until very recently, been more than a curiosity, and could not by themselves have affected the sweeping civilizational changes that have been under way for decades. Think, for instance, of the elimination of references to God, the Bible and prayer from the schools; the public embrace of new sexual norms, easy divorce and abortion; or the collapse of Western nations’ will to pay back their debts or regulate immigration. In these cases, as in many others, it wasn’t the Marxist minority that determined the course of events. These things happened because they were supported by a broad liberal public, and were promoted by its elected representatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties in America, and on both the center-left and center-right in Europe.

The key to understanding our present condition, then, is this:

If liberals had been willing and able to mount a vigorous defense of inherited political and moral norms against the conceptual revolutions proposed by the neo-Marxist left, these challenges would have been defeated easily. But liberalism has proved itself either unwilling or unable to successfully defend almost any inherited political ideals or norms once a focused attack on them has been under way for twenty or thirty years.

Why is liberal political thought systematically incapable of defending inherited traditions? Virtually all of liberal thought today— including that of “social liberals” such as John Rawls; and that of “classical liberals” or “libertarians” such as Robert Nozick—is based on Enlightenment rationalist political theories that were purposely designed to be independent of all inherited political traditions. In fact, the central claim of Enlightenment political theories was that they were based on “reason alone,” which meant that they could, in principle, be understood and agreed upon by anyone, regardless of the particular religious or national traditions in which they were raised. Reason alone was said to be all you needed to derive and wield ideas like individual freedom, equality, consent, and universal rights—the central ideas in the toolkit of contemporary liberalism.

The trouble with these Enlightenment rationalist claims is that they aren’t actually true. In fact, individuals exercising “reason alone” do not come to any kind of stable consensus about anything. As the great English political theorist John Selden wrote already in the 17th century, reason alone is capable of coming to virtually any conclusion.

This brings us to the uncertainty and inconsistency with which the free and unadorned application of reason has always been burdened….  [N]o one of any education can be unaware that in ancient times even the masters and practitioners of right reason, i.e., the philosophers, took part in endless discussions about good and evil, and the boundaries that separated them, in which they were completely at odds with one another. There was no one to put an end to these disputes. The number of sectarian groups multiplied, and so many new doctrines sprouted up that even though the study of philosophy was based upon the most careful reasoning possible given the intelligence and talents of its practitioners, the number of its schools would easily have reached [the apocryphal figure of] 288 if every difference in doctrine had been formalized. …

Thus people who have set about seeking the universal principles of living well have arrived at very different conclusions, among which everyone considers his own to be the best, and usually either condemns or criticizes everyone else’s. … Hence both Zeno and Chrysippus, as well as the Persian Magi, considered relations with one’s mother and even with one’s daughter to be permitted, just as were relations with other men; and the philosopher Theodorus said the same about theft, sacrilege, and adultery. And yet the jurist Ulpian (who was not even a Christian) and others of the pagans said explicitly that these are crimes against nature; while Theodotus, Diagoras of Melos, and some other well-known writers completely undermined all the fear and respect that rein in humanity by claiming that the gods did not exist. Add to these Plato, the most divinely inspired of all philosophers, who believed that women should be held in common and people should be able to have sex with almost anyone they want; and the others who thought that all possessions should be shared as though the law required it. Then there are the teachings of Archelaus, Aristippus and Carneades, according to which nothing at all that is just depends upon nature; rather, what we call “just” is based in fact on written law, and on the preferences or interests of human beings…. And yet we hear everywhere that law (especially natural law) is right reason; and everyone agrees with this sentiment, even those who disagree fiercely about what “right reason” is. …

We should therefore use with caution, and not be too quick to depend upon, the unfettered and simple application of analytical reason alone, which is often thought to be so unpredictable and unstable that what one person sees (particularly in this kind of investigation) as a very evident principle, or a conclusion which follows from a principle, will often seem to another person of equal intelligence to be obviously false and worthless, or at least inadmissible as truth. This is just what happened all the time among those heroes of the discipline who used free and untrammeled reason to argue about the nature of good and evil, the shameful and the honorable, as everyone knows who is even slightly familiar with their writings. This is why Tertullian says as follows about the philosophy of the gentiles, i.e. about using the kind of reason which they generally called “right:” It reserves nothing for divine authority; it makes its own opinions into laws of nature. Considering the variety of philosophical schools and sects, you are not likely to find anything as unclear and contradictory as these “laws of nature.”

Selden published these words in 1640, but they might as well have been written today. Enlightenment-inspired liberals insist that “reason alone,” exercised through the sole instrument of open debate in the universities and in the public sphere, will lead everyone to their preferred conclusions about politics and morals. The reality, however, is that the exercise of free human reasoning leads to Marxism or to a quasi-Darwinian “white identity politics” just as easily as it leads to social liberalism or libertarianism. And tomorrow, it will lead somewhere else entirely, abandoning the results of today’s reasoning as relics of a bygone and benighted past.

We can now understand the causes of the present trajectory of public life in the Western nations. Until the eve of the Second World War, these were still, in many respects, traditional societies. True, these “God-fearing democracies” respected Enlightenment philosophy and liked the idea of “having to do your own thinking” (as FDR put it). But it was not “doing your own thinking” that had produced the basis for a stable nation. It was Protestant religious and political tradition that determined the fundamentals of the political order. The power of the Enlightenment’s “critique” of all inherited tradition continued to be balanced and contained by the force of Christian tradition. Within two decades of the conclusion of the war, this balancing force had collapsed. In despair over its horrors, Americans and Europeans were now prepared to embrace Enlightenment, and to accept whatever political truths might be dictated by reason alone.

The revolution unleashed in this way did have certain positive consequences. Among these I would count the elimination of state-sanctioned racial segregation in the American South, and other items could certainly be named. But the new era of what Selden called “free and untrammeled reason” as the sole guide for our understanding of what is good and right has thrown us into a perpetual revolution that is devouring all inherited wisdom and common sense. As is now obvious to many, this revolution has no natural stopping point. If its course cannot be deflected, it will end with the destruction of the Western democracies and their replacement by a despotism sufficiently vicious to be able to put a stop to the revolution by force. 

Yoram Hazony is the author of The Virtue of Nationalism, winner of the ISI Conservative Book of the Year Award for 2019. He is currently serving on the presidium of the Edmund Burke Foundation’s inaugural National Conservatism Conference, to be convened this July in Washington, DC. He lives in Jerusalem with his wife and children.

https://catholicmonitor.blogspot.com/2019/06/30-days-that-shock-church-top-catholic.html?m=1

Saturday, June 29, 2019

60 Days that Shook the Church: Top Catholic Scholars: Francis is a Heretic then Top Cardinal: Francis’s Amazon Synod is “Heretical” & “Apostasy” 

The Catholic Resistance has scored major victories against Francis and his Vatican in the last 60 days that shook the Church.

They are losing not just because they have covered-up for sex-abuse predators as well as teach that the sacrilege of Communion for adulterers is morally acceptable and in the recent Amazon Synod promote heresy and apostasy.

Most of all they are losing because we are fighting them for God and He will not forsake us.

April 30 was the first major victory, 19 top Catholic scholars led by the world renowned theologian Fr. Aidan Nichols declared that “A heretical papacy may not be tolerated”:

“[T]he world’s bishops [must]… admonish the Pope and [he] must publicly reject heresy or face losing the papacy.”
(EdwardPentin.ci.uk, ” Father Aidan Nichols Signs Open Letter Charging Pope Francis with Heresy,” May 1, 2019),

The last remnant of the enablers of Francis and his Vatican who claim to believe in the orthodox infallible teachings of the Catholic faith led by Jimmy Akins who came to the defense of the indefensible were humiliated and are in hiding.

The Theodore McCarrick liberal “Catholics” represented by the National Catholic Reporter and it’s imitators who defend Francis are pure heretics who either believe in abortion or homosexuality or both.

No real Catholics listens to their pure nonsense except for the McCarrick sex abuse cover-up bishops who apparently are about to face justice in numerous States for their criminal sex abuse cover-ups.

Next, in the 60 days that shook the Church came Francis’s Vatican Amazon Synod which a few days ago Dubia Cardinal Walter Brandmuller declared was “heretical” and “apostasy.”

So far Akins nor any of his follow defenders of the indefensible have come out of their hiding places to claim that the doctrines of Amazonian witch doctors are really not heretical and can teach us to be better Catholics by “acculturation” if we stand on our heads, close our eyes and listen to the pantheistic cry of the earth.

Francis is losing his last totally non-heretical defenders. Even the defenders of the indefensible such as Akins don’t want to be associated with a ship that appears about to sink. In other words, the rats are abandoning a sinking ship.

Yes, we have scored some major victories. But, don’t think for one minute that Francis and his inner circle will not fight to the bitter end. We still have a long way to go before this war is won and Francis’s ship is sunk.

Always remember what the almost penniless St. Theresa of Avila said when all the forces of hell fought against her founding convents for the glory and praise of God:

Theresa and a penny is nothing. Theresa, a penny and God is everything.

The Catholic Resistance is nothing. The Catholic Resistance and God is everything.

Keep fighting. We are winning. Victory is getting closer.

Pray an Our Father now for the restoration of the Church. Remember Francis and his inner circle are not the Church. We pray for their conversion, but most of all we pray for them to be expelled from the Church.

Remember what Doctor of the Church St. Francis de Sales said:

“The Pope… when he is explicitly a heretic… the Church must either deprive him or as some say declare him deprived of his Apostolic See.”

The week forced abortion nearly arrived in Britain 

David Alton 27 June, 2019

Coercive abortion wouldn’t happen in Britain, surely? Thanks to an NHS Trust and a judge, it nearly did 

In a fast-moving story over the past few days, a baby’s life has hung in the balance, weighed on the scales of justice. 

Less than a week ago, Mrs Justice Lieven had presided at a hearing in London at the Court of Protection. The Court deals with issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions. In this case, a woman with mental disabilities was 22 weeks pregnant. She wanted to have the baby, but Justice Lieven concluded that
an abortion was “in the woman’s best interests.” 

The judge admitted that it was an “enormous” decision, and said she was “acutely conscious of the fact that for the State to order a woman to have a termination where it appears that she doesn’t want it is an immense intrusion”. But she dismissed the woman’s stated wishes, saying: “I think she would like to have a baby in the same way she would like to have a nice doll.”

According to Justice Lieven, the mother “would suffer greater trauma from having a baby removed” to be adopted than from an abortion.

In contrast to this appalling verdict, it was moving to hear of the determined courage and dignity of the family caught in the crossfire of the legal arguments. Despite the difficulties of persevering, the family took on the secretive and all-powerful Leviathan that had determined that the death of an unborn child was required. The woman’s mother, a former midwife, took the case to the Court of Appeals, where on Monday three judges unanimously overruled the earlier decision.

Those judges, Lord Justice McCombe, Lady Justice King and Lord Justice Peter Jackson, have restored my faith in our judicial system. They said they would give reasons for their decision at a later date. For now, we must congratulate them for overturning the Court of Protection ruling.

However, the implications of their decision should now be carefully considered by those who arrogantly tried to supplant the rights of the family and the rights of a vulnerable pregnant woman – and sought to trample on the foundational, paramount human right, the very right to life itself.

If they had their way, the history books would have had to be rewritten: currently, they say that James Hanratty was the last person to be subjected to the death penalty and to be executed by the British state. 

The truly chilling decision to end the life of a child, against the wishes of its mother and grandmother, and against the advice of a social worker, would have been a coercive abortion worthy of the brutality of the People’s Republic of China, where forced abortions are a regular practice.

If the decision had not been overturned, it would have represented a gross violation of human rights, and the tyrannical suppression of the rights of a family. 

Despite the mother’s learning difficulties, the baby’s grandmother, a Nigerian and a Catholic, had told the Court of Protection that she was willing to bring up her grandchild. 

It was a way forward supported by the girl’s social worker. And the mother, herself, has clearly said that she wants her child to be born. But an NHS Trust decided that they knew better and they went to court against the family. 

Apart from the judge – whose previous advocacy and support for abortion and an extension of abortion laws is in the public realm – anonymity and secrecy stacked all of the cards against this family. 

Why should the NHS Trust, a publicly funded body, be able to hide behind anonymity, and not have to justify itself and be answerable to Parliament for its actions?

This was compounded by the Kafkaesque, misnamed, Court of Protection, failing to protect the family and a baby of 22 weeks gestation while protecting the identity of those who wanted to end this baby’s life.

The Court’s decision – which it said was in the mother’s “best interests” – meant that she and her family were stripped of their rights and that a viable baby had to lose its life.

And what were the considerations taken into account in reaching this decision? Did the Court ask for evidence about the negative effects of abortion on women with mental health issues – especially when the woman categorically says that she does not want one? If not, far from protecting this vulnerable woman, the Court of Protection, was willing to expose her to further distress and harm.

A traumatic late-term abortion can hardly be construed as more “in the interests of the mother” than a well-managed child birth. Did the judge actually know what happens in a late abortion? 

A group of Parliamentarians have recently been examining the likely suffering and pain experienced by the baby in abortions. We were struck that the aborted baby receives no such pain relief. In the United States, those executed by lethal injection are given anaesthesia, to reduce the pain caused by the potassium chloride used in their execution. There is no such mercy for Britain’s unborn children.

Meanwhile, the tiny child has no Court of Protection or NHS Trust to protect it. Who speaks in the Court as the amicus curiae of the child? What was said about the baby’s “best interests”, what consideration was given to the ability of this baby, at 22 weeks gestation, with the loving care of NHS paediatricians, to survive birth? 

In addition to trampling on the rights of a family and the right to life, is there really no responsibility or duty to protect?

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares that all human beings have the right to life. It emphatically does not say that there is a right to abortion. Nor does it say that Courts have the right to impose one.

If human rights organisations like Amnesty International weren’t so busy trying to foist abortion laws on Northern Ireland surely they would have been campaigning for this child and its family. Amnesty’s founder, the redoubtable Peter Benenson, most certainly would have done so. 

But the activists’ silence and the injustice represented by this lethal, tragic case, tells you all you need to know about the country we have become.

The outraged thousands who signed on-line petitions, contacted MPs, and stood by the family, in various ways, put the lobbyists for human rights to shame. 

There is an old saying that the person who saves a single life saves the world. The saving of this single life has saved our judicial system from being brought into contempt. Perhaps this little child will one day open our eyes to the loss of so many others.

Lord Alton of Liverpool is an independent crossbench peer. Visit davidalton.net

kassiblog.com

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Carolyn Jones Has Passed Away – May Her Memory Be Eternal Posted: 27 Jun 2019 02:25 PM PDT I posted an update about Mrs. Jones recently letting you all know that she had been moved to a long-term nursing facility. I learned yesterday that she has passed away. Texas Right to Life announced it, which I quote in full: HOUSTON – Carolyn Jones passed away Tuesday from natural causes following her high-profile battle with the Texas 10-Day Rule. In May, a hospital committee pulled the plug on Carolyn against her family’s will, but she lived without a ventilator or dialysis for over 60 hours until escaping the hostile hospital in a private ambulance in the dead of night. Carolyn stopped breathing early Tuesday morning at the long-term nursing facility in which she resided and was rushed to a nearby hospital. Hours later, Carolyn passed away peacefully – on God’s time, not on a countdown forced by a hospital committee or at a time prescribed by state law. Carolyn’s husband and daughter, Donald and Kina Jones, labored tirelessly to protect her from death imposed by the 10-Day Rule. The Jones family is grateful for countless concerned well-wishers and supporters who sent love as well as donations to Carolyn’s aid.  The generosity of people from across the United States afforded the Jones family 43 extra days to cherish with their wife and mother whose life would have otherwise been cut short in May. Texas Right to Life is honored to have played some small role in aiding Donald and Kina as they endured this tragic circumstance. Texas Right to Life requests prayers and privacy for the Jones family, and we pray that Carolyn is at rest now with our Heavenly Father. I, like Texas Right to Life, am very grateful that Mrs. Jones was able to pass away in her own time, with appropriate care maintained, and not because her care had been prematurely withdrawn in order to hasten her death. I am grateful that she was given more time with her family and they with her. That is how it should be for every patient and family. No one should have their death hastened against their will by the withdrawal of care.  What this family went through to allow that to happen because of the state of Texas law is diabolical and must be stopped. And, for those who accuse those of us who oppose TADA of trying to keep “corpses” alive (appalling, disgusting language I’ve heard repeatedly, even during testimony by a Catholic hospital administrator “ethicist” in opposition to the reform efforts this session), and including by the Usual Suspects: NOTE that when it was Mrs. Jones’ time, it was her time. No one denies that. But it should not be someone’s time because a doctor or hospital decided to take away their effective life-sustaining care in order to hasten their death because they didn’t think that life was worth living or had value. This is a distinction with a difference. What TADA allows doctors and hospitals to do is eugenics and euthanasia, which are not moral or ethical. Nor should this practice be legal.  Let us pray for the repose of Mrs. Jones’ soul and for comfort to her family in their time of loss and grief. As we say in Orthodoxy: Memory Eternal! ☦  I will now add her to my diptychs for the reposed, as I have Chris Dunn, other actual or would-be victims of TADA, my own family members, friends, etc., as is the practice of Catholics and Orthodox alike.   Let us also offer prayers of thanksgiving for Texas Right to Life and those who worked to help the Jones’ – whether they donated, prayed, helped in the transfer of her – or did some combination of things; the other families put in harm’s way by this law (and it’s happening continually); and those that utilize it. We must never cease to be grateful and thankful. Perhaps you could even make a donation to TRTL in honor of Mrs. Jones. Let us also pray incessantly for this law to be abolished one way or the other.

JUNE 27, 2019

Has Science Run Its Course?

REGIS NICOLL

One year after scientists flipped the switch on Large Hadron Collider (LHC), physicist Lawrence Krauss fretted, “I worry whether we’ve come to the limits of empirical science.” His worry was not unfounded—for in the last eleven years at the cost of over $13B, the sole accomplishment of the LHC has been the confirmation of the Higgs boson, the elusive particle thought to give rise to the property of mass in the universe.

An important discovery to be sure, but one that points to an ever-receding black hole of inquiry as to where the Higgs comes from, why it has the properties it has, along with some other unsolved mysteries that keep researchers scratching their heads well into the wee hours of the morning:

What is dark energy and dark matter?
In 1929 Edwin Hubble discovered redshifts in the light emissions from stars, indicating that the universe was not static, but expanding. Nearly seventy years later, light spectra measurements of supernovae indicated that the universe is not only expanding, but accelerating! Mystified by this unknown cosmic power source, physicists dubbed it, “dark energy.” Subsequent measurements revealed that dark energy accounts for 70 percent of all the stuff in the universe.

What’s more, gravitational anomalies observed in stellar objects indicated a sizeable source of invisible (“dark”) matter affecting their movements. When “dark matter” is added to dark energy, it turns out that dark stuff makes up 95 percent of the cosmos. But what it is, no one knows; and the answer is as elusive as ever. For that reason, a number of leading physicists, including Krauss, have called it the biggest mystery in physics.

What is the nature of the vacuum?
The “vacuum”—that is, the quantum vacuum (“field” or “potential,” as it is alternately called)—is a gossamer fabric of reality comprised of neither matter nor energy, but “potentiality.” As quantum theory pioneer Werner Heisenberg once wrote, it is a realm “of potentialities or possibilities rather than one of things and facts.” And yet, this mysteriously numinous essence is a well-spring of limitless power from which the entire universe materializes. As to how, the reigning scientific narrative goes something like this:

Before time and space, there was only the quantum vacuum. Then, some thirteen or so billion years ago, a succession of extraordinary events occurred:

Out of the ineffable nothingness, a colossal amount of energy suddenly appeared in a space much smaller than that of an atom. Instantly, the sub-atomic nugget exploded, spewing forth all the matter and energy of our soon-to-be universe.

But before the cosmic newborn was overcome by gravitational collapse, another strange thing happened: inflation. Inexplicably, something akin to anti-gravity kicked in to take cosmic expansion into hyperdrive. The expansion was so rapid that if the tiny nugget had been a piece of sand, it would have grown to the size of the known universe within a trillionth of a second.

At the same time, the rate and strength of inflation were in perfect pitch to keep the Big Bang from becoming either a Big Crunch or a runaway explosion. By this exceptional process, the universe was placed delicately on the razor’s edge between immediate annihilation and unending expansion, allowing it to become the birthing center of quarks, electrons, and muons—seeds of what would become stars, planets, and galaxies.

In short, the universe was created by something that consisted of nothing—instantly. Think of a rabbit being pulled out of a hat … without the hat or a magician, and you get the hang of it.

It is not hard to imagine that scientists are a bit uneasy with this “Creator”—one that is omnipresent and omnipotent, yet immaterial and non-physical, except by definition. Those features infer something or Someone that is disqualified in their strictly, and unapologetically, materialistic discipline.

Why is the universe so exquisitely balanced, such that life can exist?
It is commonly, if uncomfortably, acknowledged in scientific precincts that our universe is a very special place—an “against-all-odds” place, really, whose existence depends on a host of delicately-balanced parameters. Newton’s gravitational constant, the mass and charge of the electron, and the strengths of the weak and strong nuclear forces are just a few of the factors that, if varied but a smidgeon, would make our cosmic home quite different—perhaps, one in which apples fall up!

Fidgeting over the apparent “decking-stacking,” scientists have been scratching around for something, anything, to explain our cosmos as the inevitable product of natural, unintelligent processes. Today, a favorite construct is the “multiverse”: a vast menagerie of universes where every imaginable (and unimaginable!) combination of parameters is realized somewhere. Despite its growing popularity, the multiverse hinges on propositions that far overreach what has been, or even can be, demonstrated.

For example, according to the “many worlds” scenario advanced in the 1950s, at the quantum level, every slice of the cosmos splits off in every moment of time to form a parallel universe. The mind-numbing production of worlds, contingent upon a controversial reading of quantum mechanics, has provoked many researchers to look elsewhere for answers to our Goldilocks existence— specifically, to black holes and “inflation.”

In black hole theory, universes are birthed from the digested contents of black holes—those invisible, massive objects gobbling up everything, including light, falling into their gravitational web. However, calculations on mass and energy conservation indicate that whatever enters a black hole’s digestive tract remains in this universe, rather than becoming the seeds of a new one.

According to inflation theory, the Big Bang turned into a Big Fizz, creating an initial burst of energy that quickly fizzled into a constellation of bubbles—much like that created when popping the top on a well-shaken can of soda—with each bubble ballooning into a new, unique universe. It is a tale of cosmic proportions, held together by a string of mathematical abstractions and the will to believe.

All three of these theories share a couple of fundamental difficulties: 1) If another world did exist with its own unique set of physical parameters, it would be undetectable with instruments constrained by the distinctive parameters of our universe; and 2) instead of explanations, they are assertions that our world has to exist because, in an infinite number of universes, all configurations are possible and we’re here, so that proves it! Understandably, such contrived reasoning leaves some researchers cold. For a theory in which anything is possible, is a theory that explains nothing.

What will be the fate of our universe?
One theory is that cosmic expansion will continue until galaxies are rent asunder sending everything into darkness and deep freeze. The other is that gravitation will eventually overcome expansion and the universe will implode in a Big Crunch. Either way, cosmic doom is billions of years in the future.

Like the companion question concerning the origin of the universe, cosmic fate is more appropriately a matter for metaphysics than physics. That’s because they are questions not amenable to empirical science. Although theories can be floated, the fate of the universe cannot be tested, falsified, or replicated.

The same goes for its origin. Whether the universe is the result of the Void of Buddhism, the Vacuum of scientism, or the God of theism, it is a question that can’t be settled by science, except by fiat. In fact, these are not questions at all; they are presuppositions upon which our search for purpose and meaning are founded.

Lawrence Krauss was right to imagine that science has run its course, for each of the questions above hinges on the ultimate question: What is Ultimate Reality, the thing that is self-existent and non-contingent, preceding all that exists? Is it matter, energy, the vacuum, or God?

Ultimate Reality is the fountain from which all knowledge springs, yet is beyond the “limits of empirical science,” whether from light spectra captured by the Hubble, exotic particles detected by the Large Hadron Collider, or cellular structures unraveled by the electron microscope. It is something or Someone, that must be revealed and, in fact, has been: “In the beginning, was the Logos.”

Tagged as astronomy, creatio ex nihilo, Creation, science and religion, Scientific Method140

By Regis Nicoll

Regis Nicoll is a retired nuclear engineer and a fellow of the Colson Center who writes commentary on faith and culture. His new book is titled Why There Is a God: And Why It Matters.

Settimo Cielodi Sandro Magister 27 giu 

Heretical and apostate. Cardinal Brandmüller excommunicates the Amazon Synod

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A Critique of the “Instrumentum Laboris” for the Amazon Synod

by Card. Walter Brandmüller

Introduction

It can truly cause astonishment that, in opposition to earlier assemblies, this time the Synod of Bishops is exclusively to deal with a region of the earth whose population is just half of that one of Mexico City, that is to say, 4 million. This is also a cause for suspicion concerning the true intentions which are to be implemented in a clandestine fashion. But one has especially to ask what is the understanding of religion, of Christianity, and of the Church, which is the basis of the recently published Instrumentum Laboris. This shall be examined with the help of individual elements from the text.

Why a Synod on this region?

One has to ask in principle why a Synod of Bishops should deal with topics, which – as is now the case with ¾ of the Instrumentum Laboris – have, at the most, marginally anything to do with the Gospels and the Church. Obviously, there takes place here on the part of the Synod of Bishops an aggressive intrusion into the purely worldly affairs of the state and society of Brazil. One asks oneself: what do ecology, economy, and politics have to do with the mandate and mission of the Church?

And most of all: which professional expertise authorizes an ecclesial Synod of Bishops to make statements in these fields?

Should the Synod of Bishops truly do this, this would be a stepping over bounderies and a clericalist presumption, which the state authorities would then have to reject.

On Natural Religions and Inculturation

A further aspect is being added, which is to be found throughout the whole Instrumentum Laboris: namely, the very positive assessment of natural religions, to include indigenous healing practices and the like, yes, even mythical-religious practices and forms of cults. In the context of the call for harmony with nature, there is even talk about the dialogue with the spirits (no. 75).

It is not only the ideal of the “noble savage” as presented by Rousseau and the Enlightenment that is being contrasted with the decadent European. This line of thought goes further, up to the turn to the 20^th century, when it ends in a pantheistic idolatry of nature. Hermann Claudius (1913) created the hymn of the Socialist Worker’s Movement, “When we walk side by side…,” a stanza of which reads: “Birches’ green and the green of seeds, how the old Mother Earth extends her full hands, with a pleading gesture, that man may become her own…” It is remarkable that this text was later copied into the song book of the Hitler Youth, probably because it corresponded to the National-Socialist blood-and-soil myth. This ideological proximity is remarkable. This anti-rational rejection of the “western” culture which stresses the importance of reason is characteristic for the Instrumentum Laboris, which speaks in no. 44 of “Mother Earth” and of the “cry of the earth and of the peoples” (no. 101) respectively.

Accordingly, the territory – that is to say, the forests of the Amazon region – is even being declared to be a locus theologicus, a special source of Divine Revelation. Here are places of an epiphany where the planet’s reserves of life and wisdom show themselves, which speak of God (no. 19). The anti-rational rejection of the “western” culture which stresses the importance of reason is characteristic of the  Instrumentum Laboris.  Meanwhile, the subsequent regression from Logos to Mythos is being raised to a criterion of that which the Instrumentum Laboris calls the inculturation of the Church. The result is a natural religion with a Christian masquerade.

The notion of inculturation is here virtually being perverted, since it really means the opposite of what the International Theological Commission had presented in 1988 and of what the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity,  Ad Gentes, had earlier taught.

On the Abolishment of Celibacy and the Introduction of a Female Priesthood

It is impossible to conceal that the “synod” is especially to help implement two most cherished projects that heretofore have never been implemented: namely, the abolishment of celibacy and the introduction of a female priesthood – starting first with female deacons. In any event, it is about “accepting the role, the leadership of the woman inside the Church” (129a3). In a similar manner, there now “open up new spaces for the creation of new ministries, as this historic moment calls for it. It is time to listen to the voice of the Amazon region…” (no. 43).

But here the fact is omitted that, lastly, John Paul II also stated with highest magisterial authority that it is not in the power of the Church to administer the Sacrament of Holy Orders to women. Indeed, in two thousand years, the Church has never administered the Sacrament of Holy Orders to a woman. The demand which stands in direct opposition to this fact shows that the word “Church” is now being used purely as a sociological term on the part of the authors of the Instrumentum Laboris, thus implicitly denying the sacramental-hierarchical character of the Church.

On Denying the Sacramental-Hierarchical Character of the Church

In a similar manner – though expressed rather in passing – no. 127 contains a direct attack on the hierarchical-sacramental constitution of the Church, when it is being asked as to whether it would not be opportune “to reconsider the notion that the exercise of jurisdiction (power of government) must be linked in all areas (sacramental, judicial, administrative) and in a permanent way to the Sacrament of Holy Orders.” From such a wrong view stems then (in no. 129) the call for the creation of new offices which correspond to the needs of the Amazonian peoples.

The liturgy, the cult, however, is the field in which the ideology of a falsely understood inculturation finds its expression in an especially spectacular manner. Here, certain forms from the natural religions shall be positively adopted. The Instrumentum Laboris does not hold back from demanding that the “poor and simple peoples” may express “their (!) faith with the help of pictures, symbols, traditions, rites, and other sacraments” (!!) (no. 126e).

This certainly does not correspond to the precepts of the Constitution “Sacrosanctum Concilium,” nor to the ones of the Decree on the Church’s Missionary Activity, Ad Gentes, and it shows a purely horizontal understanding of liturgy.

Conclusion

Summa summarum: The Instrumentum Laboris burdens the Synod of Bishops, and finally the Pope, with a grave breach with the depositum fidei, which in its consequence means the self-destruction of the Church or the change of the Corpus Christi mysticum into a secular NGO with an ecological-social-psychological mandate.

After these observations, of course there are questions: is there to be found, especially with regard to the sacramental-hierarchical structure of the Church, a decisive breach with the Apostolic Tradition as it is constitutive for the Church, or do the authors rather have a notion of the development of doctrine which is theologically presented in order to justify these above-mentioned breaches?

This seems to be indeed the case. We are witnessing a new form of the classical Modernism of the early  20^th century. At the time, starting with a decisively evolutionary approach, one presented the idea that, in accord with the continuous higher development of man, are found also higher levels of consciousness and of culture, whereby it can turn out that that which had been false yesterday, can be true today. This evolutionary dynamic then applies to religion, as well, that is to say, to the religious consciousness with its manifestations in doctrine and in cult – of course also in morality.

However, the understanding of the development of dogma presupposed to this view is sharply opposed to the genuine Catholic understanding. The latter understands development of dogma and of Church, not as a change, but, rather, as an organic development of the subject which remains true to its own identity.

That is what the two Vatican Councils teach us in their Constitutions “Dei Filius,” “Lumen Gentium,” and “Dei Verbum.”

It is to be stated now with insistence that the Instrumentum Laboriscontradicts the binding teaching of the Church in decisive points and thus has to be qualified as heretical.

Inasmuch as even the fact of Divine Revelation is here being questioned, or misunderstood, one also now has to speak, additionally, of apostasy.

This is even more justified in light of the fact that the Instrumentum Laborisuses a purely immanentist notion of religion and that it considers religion as the result and form of expression of man’s own spiritual self-experience. The use of Christian words and notions cannot conceal that these are being merely used as empty words, despite their original meaning.

The Instrumentum Laboris for the Amazon Synod constitutes an attack on the foundations of the Faith,  and in a way that has not heretofore been thought possible. Thus it must be rejected with all decisiveness.

(Translated by Maike Hickson for LifeSite News)Condividi:

•  27 giugno 2019
•  English

FROM A READER OF ABYSSUM WHO WISHES TO REMAIN ANONYMOUS.

I have a degree in Political Science, and I am a card-carrying Libertarian. I’ve been studying politics and political history for the past 30 years. My specialty is U.S. Presidents. That said, I hope that the House of Representatives impeaches Trump. Let me tell you what will happen next.   

1. The House can pass articles of impeachment over the objections of the Republicans, and refer to the Senate for trial.

2. The Senate will conduct a trial. There will be a vote, and the Republicans will vote unanimously, along with a small number of Democrats, to not convict the President. Legally, it will all be over at that point.

3. However, during the trial, and this is what no one is thinking about right now, the President’s attorneys will have the right to subpoena and question ANYONE THAT THEY WANT.. That is different than the special counsel investigation, which was very one-sided. So, during the impeachment trial, we will be hearing testimony from James Comey, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Bruce Ohr, Glenn Simpson, Donna Brazille, Eric Holder, Loretta Lynch, Christopher Steele, Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, James Clapper, and a whole host of other participants in this whole sordid affair and the ensuing coverup activities. A lot of dirt will be dug up; a lot of truth will be unveiled. Finger pointing will occur. Deals will start being made, and suddenly, a lot of democrats will start being charged and going to prison. All this, because, remember, the President’s team will now, for the first time, have the RIGHT to question all of these people under oath – and they will turn on each other. That’s already starting.

4. Lastly, one more thing will happen – the Senate will not convict the President. Nothing will happen to Trump. Most Americans are clueless about political processes, the law, and the Constitution. Most Americans believe that being impeached results in removal from office. They don’t understand that phase 2 is a trial in and by the Senate, where he has zero chance of conviction. Remember, the Senate is controlled by Republicans; they will determine what testimony is allowed — and **everything** will be allowed, including: DNC collusion with the Clinton campaign to fix the election in favor of Hillary, the creation of the Trump dossier, the cover up and destruction of emails that very likely included incriminating information. They’ll incriminate each other for lying to the FISA court, for spying and wiretapping the Trump campaign, and for colluding with foreign political actors, especially George Soros. After the Senate declines to convict the President, we will have an election, and Trump will win. It will be a backlash against democrat petulance, temper tantrums, hypocrisy and dishonesty. Even minorities will vote for Trump, because, for the first time, they will see that democrats have spent 2+ years focused on maintaining their own power, and not doing anything at all about black murders in Chicago, homelessness, opioids, and other important issues that are actually killing people. And, we will spend the following four years listening to politicians and pundits claim that the whole impeachment was rigged. 

JUNE 26, 2019

U.S. Bishops Approve the Pope’s Capital Punishment Ban

FR. GEORGE W. RUTLER

Sæva indignatio. Few writers in the history of English letters could express “savage indignation” at human folly as did Jonathan Swift who wrote those words for his own epitaph. Our times give ample opportunity to empathize with him, and that is never more so than when clerics get together in large numbers.

Bishops have many daunting responsibilities and, if they are reasonable, they are not fleet of foot to beat a path to synods and conferences and plenary sessions and other impositions on their august office. Their patience in such meetings is exemplary, and so lesser souls should be patient with them when they sometimes fail to match up to Athanasius or Borromeo.

At the U.S. bishops’ General Assembly that took place June 11-14 in Baltimore, there were many items to discuss, chief of which was a protocol on how to handle prurient offenders, which passed under the lumbering title “Directives for the Implementation of the Provisions of Vos estis lux mundi Concerning Bishops and their Equivalents.” Vos estis lux mundi is the papal motu proprio issued on May 9, 2019, which prescribed procedures for holding bishops and Religious superiors accountable for handling cases of sex abuse. Working within the framework of the Church’s hierarchical constitution, it keeps bishops as their own regulators, while acknowledging that their failures in the past have cost the Church billions of dollars in fines and punitive damages.

That brought to mind the poet Juvenal, a match for Jonathan Swift when it comes to savage indignation, when he asked in his Satires: “Who will guard the guards?” Swift and Juvenal together at a conference of bishops would have provided lively commentary, and for that matter so would have Samuel Johnson. Dr. Johnson loathed Swift, probably because they were so alike in their instinct for righteous irritation, expressed in colorful ways in part perhaps because Swift was aggravated by an equilibrium disorder called Maniere’s disease while Johnson almost certainly had Tourette syndrome. Juvenal’s apostrophe, Quis ipsos custodes custodiet?, concerned the problem of randy guards guarding sex offenders. He proposed replacing them with eunuchs, not a practical solution today even with the current trend of “sex reassignment surgery.”

The saeve idignatio emerging from the Baltimore meeting, however, was not the response to the Vos estis document. After all, that issue has been a muddle for a long while. Rather, a more astonishing matter, though little noted by the multitude, was the Assembly’s handling of the controversial issue of capital punishment. Indeed, the bishops were informed that they were not to discuss the doctrine itself, but were only to consider the translation of a papal revision of the Catechism on the matter, specifically paragraph 2267. In 1992, John Paul II had revised that section, problematically inserting a prudential opinion discouraging lethal executions. But he also allowed: “Assuming that the guilty party’s identity and responsibility have been fully determined, the traditional teaching of the Church does not exclude recourse to the death penalty, if this is the only possible way of effectively defending human lives against the unjust aggressor.” Supposedly, the latest revision exalts mercy at the expense of justice, neglectful of what the newly elected John Paul II said in a general audience in 1978: “There is no love without justice.” Until the present day’s climate of disdain for doctrine, “mercy and truth are met together” (Psalm 85:10), but in the new dialectic, mercy has devoured truth altogether.

While John Paul’s revision text maintained the authentic teaching and the legitimacy of such punishment, the inclusion of a prudential opinion in a catechetical exposition of established doctrine opened the way for abuse, as this writer among others predicted. Now that has happened, in a blatant way, all the more confusing for its inarticulateness. Specifically, the new section calls capital punishment “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.” Not for the first time in recent years, this woolgathering has opened a real can of worms. “Inadmissible” is not a theological term, and use of it without explanation is contentious. As a legal term, “inadmissible” means that it is not relevant to the case. In other words, capital punishment is to be treated as no longer relevant to justice, thus dismissing the magisterial structures based on natural law and Scripture. The cavalier treatment of natural law and Scriptural evidence, makes prospects for maintaining all moral doctrine fragile and all moral praxis subjective.

Aware of the monumental dangers of this, a group of prelates published a “Declaration of the Truths Relating to Some of the Most Common Errors in the Life of the Church of Our Time” which included a relevant point (n. 28):

In accordance with Holy Scripture and the constant tradition of the ordinary and universal Magisterium, the Church did not err in teaching that the civil power may lawfully exercise capital punishment on malefactors where this is truly necessary to preserve the existence or just order of societies (cf. Gen. 9:6; John 19:11; Rom. 13:1-7; Innocent III, Professio fidei Waldensibuspraescripta; Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent, p. III, 5, n. 4; Pius XII, Address to Catholic jurists on December 5, 1954).

There have even been bishops so impatient with the subtleties that make theology logical, that they have turned two thousand years of Christianity upside down by announcing that the death penalty is absolutely immoral. This epistemological novocaine contradicts an advisory of Cardinal Ratzinger in 1992: “If a Catholic were to be at odds with the Holy Father on the application of capital punishment … he would not for that reason be considered unworthy to present himself to receive Holy Communion.”

One supposes that the use of the term “inadmissible,” clumsy as it is, is an attempt to shy from being explicit and even heretical on the matter. The canon lawyer Edward Peters wrote that “declaring the death penalty as immoral per se puts one at risk of asserting something that many qualified scholars argue powerfully is opposed to infallible Church teaching, and possibly even to contradicting something divinely revealed. The real possibility of so offending the truth should, I think, trigger more respectful caution by those in positions of authority when speaking on these matters.”

When the proposed revision of the Catechism’s section on the death penalty was introduced at the Baltimore assembly, one perceptive bishop asked what “inadmissible” means. The bishop selected to present the text said that the proposed draft provided “a context and justification for the development of this teaching on the dignity of the human person, but also emphasizes the continuity of Catholic teaching on the topic.” Here at work is George Orwell’s Doublethink which mitigates cognitive dissonance by proposing two contradictory statements as mutually complimentary. Thus, Doublethink claims with a straight face that to declare the death penalty inadmissible is identical to the Church’s uninterrupted magisterium which maintained that capital punishment is admissible and even sometimes necessary. In 2019 as in 1984, anyone who can make dissonance mellifluous by condescending facility of expression is considered an intellectual beacon, even when his intelligence is above average when that average is modest. And this is because, as Erasmus wrote in his Adagia: “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” But our Lord warned that there is a peril in following disseminators of cognitive dissonance: “Let them alone: they be blind leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch” (Matt. 15:14).

But things got worse. For when pressed to the specific point of what “inadmissible” means as used in the proposed text, the responding bishop said: “To my mind, the pope maintains and our version imitates a certain, if you want, eloquent ambiguity on that point.” Eloquent ambiguity. No bishop asked for further explanation and a silence fell on the room, like the silence when the sons of Noah covered their father’s nakedness, but this time the shame was rhetorical. It was this writer’s pleasure to have been a priest for William F. Buckley who, like Newman’s gentleman, was “merciful to the absurd.” But had anyone described confused and potentially heretical thought as “eloquent ambiguity,” Bill would have replied, as he did indeed do to a guest on his Firing Linetelevision program: “I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting that you really believe what you just said.” To that we might add that executing a man is swifter and more humane than torturing him with clichés and hanging him with a frayed syllogism.

There is a time and place for ambiguity when it is an exercise of temperate expression. The ancient Greeks even had a deity or daimon, Sophrosyne, who represented a strength of character exemplified by discretion, circumspection, and restraint, according to Socrates in Plato’s Charmedes. But such venerable shrewdness is not the cynicism that cajoles bureaucrats into calculation for the sake of obfuscation and servile ambition. Significantly, when Sophrosyne escaped Pandora’s box, she retreated to Mount Olympus leaving the human race, including its clergymen, bereft of her guidance. But “sophrosyne,” meaning moral sanity or restraint, was for Stoics like Zeno one of the four chief virtues and it remains a cardinal virtue for Christians. It is far different from ambiguity in the sense of obfuscation. That “uncertain trumpet” helps explain why 50 percent of millennial Catholics have left the Church, leaving it “unprepared for battle” (1 Cor. 14:8).

If “inadmissible” does not mean something essentially different from what has already been said magisterially about capital punishment, why is it necessary to revise the Catechism to include it? Secondly, if the word “inadmissible” is deliberately ambiguous, why does it belong in a catechism whose purpose is to eschew ambiguity? After all, in a catechism, ambiguity is even more problematic than a prudential opinion. Thirdly, how can ambiguity be eloquent, since the etymology of eloquence means forcefully expressive and revelatory and is thus the opposite of verbal camouflage?

Only the angels of light know what would happen if assemblies of bishops spoke like the Lord “with authority and not as the scribes” (Mark 1:22). Or suppose the bishops operated on the dominical principle: “But let your speech be yea, yea: no, no: and that which is over and above these, is of evil” (Matt. 5:37). An incapacity for indignation at calculated ambiguity is the consequence of a bureaucratic culture which melds ayes and nays into maybes. At the Baltimore assembly, the bishops approved the eloquently ambiguous statement by a vote of 194 for, 8 against, with 3 abstentions. Perhaps they were thinking like Nancy Pelosi who said of the Affordable Care Act: “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.” Years from now, whether the Church has risen from its present slough of despondency to a shining new eminence, or lies battered in a heap of broken basilicas and quivering banalities, the wonderful question will be: “How was it that at a meeting in 2019, almost all of the American bishops voted for something without knowing what it means?”

(Photo credit: Kate Veik/CNA)

Tagged as capital punishment, Catholic Catechism, Church hierarchy, Church scandal / corruption, mediocrity / accommodation, Pope Francis, USCCB121

By Fr. George W. Rutler

Fr. George W. Rutler is pastor of St. Michael’s church in New York City. He is the author of many books including Principalities and Powers: Spiritual Combat 1942-1943 (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press) and Hints of Heaven (Sophia Institute Press). His latest books are He Spoke To Us (Ignatius, 2016); The Stories of Hymns (EWTN Publishing, 2017); and Calm in Chaos (Ignatius, 2018).