Mutterers

Not "murmurers". If you want a good read about them I suggest that you take a look at The Rule of St. Benedict, it has some good, direct commentary about murmurers.

I'm thinking about those folks one meets down town in any major city (and not a few minor ones as well). You know, the homeless folks that are carrying on conversations with people who aren't there.

By and large, talking with people who aren't there, except via an electronic link, is not a sign of robust mental health. It's a sign of severe mental illness. And that's part of the homeless problem.

Now there have always been, and always will be, homeless people. Sad but true. But the problem of chronic homelessness on the scale we see in the US has a definite origin. (I am speaking here not of the upsurge in homelessness one finds during hard times--it's tragic, but not a permanent feature of many of it's victims lives.) It's a truism that many of the chronically homeless in the US are mentally ill. We forget the genesis of the problem in the closing of sanitaria for the mentally ill in the 70s. This was under taken and sold to us as a way to protect their "rights" and their "dignity". But even a simple look at the documentation sees that it was actually done to stop spending money housing and treating them.

BTW--did you know that the largest provider of mental health care in the US is the system of jails and prisons? Not the best place for a lunatic to recover, I'm sure.

Back to mutterers. These folks are obviously seriously ill, yet live on the street, untreated and shunned. When ever I see one I ask myself, were they mutterers when they became homeless, or did the lack of hope, the constant exposure to the contempt of the public, the deprivation and absence of a place drive them to it? Face it, if they were marginally mentally ill, or perhaps even seriously ill, and then ended up on the streets, did they begin to seek refuge in an inner world? An unreality that was more bearable than the reality in which they found themselves? Maybe they retreated into the world of fantasy so long, and so deeply that they developed this problem.

Or perhaps they were just bug shit nuts to start with--too crazy to hold a job or pay rent, too crazy to be tolerated in an apartment house even. Then they ended up on the streets with the most gossamer of ties to reality.

But--and here is the only question about this matter that is important--what does it say about our society that we either allow our members to go mad from isolation and suffering, or cast out our mad into a realm of isolation and suffering? It says nothing good. And it's just one more facet of a culture that worships death--a culture of death. For we so devalue the dignity of a human being that we will murder them before birth, murder them when they are old or ill, and that we will simply throw them away into our streets, like cigarette butts or empty fast food wrappers, when they become inconvenient or disturbing.

We will spend large amounts of money on riders and earmarks in the defense appropriations bill, but we won't even house and feed our mentally ill, let alone treat them.

So, I guess we better all pray to St. Dymphna, because if we go around the bend, there will be nothing for most of us.

Shame.

Just Short Notes.

1--Well, that was clear! The Archbishop-elect of Milwaukee has spoken out clearly and unequivocally about a group called "Young Catholics for Choice", pointing out to them, and to the world at large, that they are not Catholic in their morality and their theology.

Bishop Jerome Listecki deserves our thanks, and some publicity on the 'net! Perhaps if enough good things are said about him it will encourage the other bishops to exercise some intestinal fortitude when confronting such blatant challenges to the teachings of the Faith.

2--The Anglican bishop of Quebec says his diocese is "all but dead". Rt. Rev. Dennis Drainville is good enough a man to face this fact, which he supports with figures. But I have to wonder:
When a church starts declining, wouldn't it make sense for it's leaders to look at what their doing and perhaps make some changes?

All across Canada, the mainline protestant churches are withering. Yet those churches that experience growth or stability are not rare--they're all the traditional protestant churches. Likewise in Canada, marked by a"progressive" hierarchy, the Catholic church is likewise in decline--except those parishes staffed by traditional clergy.

How blind does one have to be not to draw a conclusion from this?

3--Australian Prime Minister Rudd showed up at a Catholic chapel for Mass. He is a former Catholic who now attends (and receives "communion" in) the Anglican Church.

The chaplain didn't give him communion.

The Religious sister who was EEM did.

Sad

A report by the IU School of Medicine, published in the Dec. 2009 Archieves of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, says that 50% of teenage girls who become sexualy active will aquire an STI within two years.

Three quarters of those girls will be re-infected within two years of their initial diagnosis.

Here we are, with every body and his brother throwing condoms and safe sex info at these girls, and what message do they hear? They hear the message that it's just fine to go out and fuck around. Excuse my French, but that's what they're hearing.

I don't think safe sex education works very well.

untitled

But meaning is not derived from knowledge. To try to manufacture it in this way, that is, out of the provable knowledge of what can be made, would resemble Baron Munchhausen's absurd attempt to pull himself up out of the bog by his own hair. ... Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand and live, cannot be made but only received.

...For to believe as a Christian means in fact entrusting oneself to the meaning that upholds me and the world: taking it as the firm ground on which I can stand fearlessly....we could say that to believe as a Christian means understanding our existence as a response to the word, the logos, that upholds and maintains all things.

Introduction to Christianity, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Ignatious Press, San Francisco, 2004

Two things I never pray for.

At least, not in my personal prayer life.

And I wonder about those who in fact do pray for these things. I will admit to not standing up and shouting when they are offered in the intercessions at Mass. But I wonder about the people who put them there.

I wonder, because asking for them seems to indicate that the petitioners have either never read the Gospel, or have decided that what it says is less important than what they want it to say.

These two petitions are for "world peace" and "an end to poverty".

Jesus himself spoke of these two things. He said that there would be wars and rumors of wars until the end. And he said that the poor would be with us always.

So I wonder why people ask these things in prayer. It seems clear to me that the Lord has told us what the deal was himself.

And I wonder about offices and groups in the church itself that work for these two (admittedly desirable) goals. I have to wonder, didn't they read the Gospel? Or, could it be that they are still so enamoured of the sin of Babel that they think that we humans can collectively be God?
Or is it that they have concept of ecclesiology that means that we Catholics can somehow use the Power of the Keys to reorder the universe?

But most of all, it indicates that people have gotten so enmeshed in their own causes, whether these causes are worthy or not, that they mistake their own desires and aspirations for the Gospel.