962,467 Pieces of Silver

On the 25th of March, 2010, Bishop Robert C. Morlino wrote, in the Diocese of Madison Catholic Herald, 

I cannot pass over the actions of the Catholic Health Association...who said , quite publicly, that what the Bishops have taught is false.  ...So we had a trade organization--The Catholic Health Association--that calls itself "Catholic" ...saying "Sorry bishops you got it wrong; here is the teaching of the Church."

Carol Keehan, the head of the CHA was i touch with the Obama Administration before the so called "compromise" was floated out their on a sea of administration dissimulation and double talk.  Keehan an alleged a modern  Religious Sister was courted by the White House and by the High Priestess of Anti-Catholicism Kathleen Sebelius prior to the announcement, and Keehan praised the compromise before the announcement of the "compromise" was made public.  It's notable, however, that neither the White House nor Sebelius consulted with the Bishops. 

CHA is not an outreach of the Bishops, it has no Episcopal oversight, and has never been credentialed as a Catholic Organization.  Rather, it's a association of "Catholic" care providers notable for their loose or non existent adherence to Catholic Principles in health care.  It is not a ministry of the Church.  Ministries of the Church, pretty much by definition, are extensions of the ministries of the Bishops, and CHA ain't!  It's noteworthy that the most recent hospital to be declared non-catholic for abortion practices was a member of, represented by and defended by CHA. 

CHA, under Keehan, was instrumental in muddying the waters during the debate about Obama Care.  She was a key lobbyist for it.  Keehan does not represent the Church, she represents a group of hospital administrators who saw in Obama care an increased revenue stream and an enlarged market.  The bishops were concerned about birth control, sterilization, abotificients, andabortion under the obama Care program, and were reassured by Keehan that it wouldn't be a problem, and were promised by President Obama that a new executive order would be forthcoming that would protect the conscience rights of practitioners and affiliates of the Catholic Church.  Timothy Cardinal Dolan said of Obama's promises to us catholics "I want to take him at his word, I do have to say it's getting harder and harder". 

Now CHA is trying to backtrack the endorsement given to the HHS mandate as finalized and expanded by Kathleen Sebelius under the name "compromise", saying they find it conflicts with their conscience.  The consensus seems to be that the board of CHA finds their director to be out to lunch on this issue, and some of them might be realizing that the bishops are serious enough to declare hospitals that do not comply with Catholic teaching to be non-catholic, and that can play hell with their donations and tax status. 

Carol Keehan is without the slightest credibility at this point.  For instance, she received an e-mail, in her capacity as head of the CHA from a group called Riverside For Choice, in which she was profusely thanked and praised for 'protecting the rights of all women to have free access to essential health services including...contraceptives'.  The e-mail went on to say "The members of Riverside for Choice would like to send a donation to your organization to thank you for your brave and continued efforts to defend reproductive choice and your willingness not to be intimidated by people like the catholic bishops who oppose choice in women's health".  Her reply to this bit of blatently anti-catholic business?  "Thanks so much! It would please me if you would use the money for a poor woman in California.  Keep praying,  Sr. Carol."

Before you begin to praise her sacrifice of a donation, look at the title.  Keehan received $ 962,467 in wages, benefits and compensation in 2010.  In 2009 her package was worth ca $850,000.  If the pattern holds true, in 2011 she will be reporting more than $1,000,000 in compensation.  Well, now we know why the Daughters of Charity haven't recalled her, or brought her back into obedience--she's a cash cow for them.  of course, they don't get thewhole ammount she earns, and although CHA has to report the compensation of it's officers as a non-profit, they have a cute little dodge, where they say tht everything except for "certain benefits" were paid to her order.  Of course, how much the order remits to her isn't public knowledge--one thing is clear, selling out christ still pays.  In these days, it's a lot more than 30 pieces of silver. 

So the picture emerges of a woman who is earning a large amount of money, especially when one considers that she has taken a vow of poverty, and the usual amount spent on the maintenance of a religious in the us is around $950 a month.  This also explains why she hasn't been reigned in by her order.  So what exactly is her legal standing?  It seems a good bet to me that she is in some degree of violation of canon 915, and she seems to be working towards or in schism, and unsupported by her own organization.  In the words of Paul Danello, an expert is civil and canon law as it pertains to Catholic Hospitals and health care, said in the National Catholic Register  "On the basis of what information and what authority did she issue this endorsement?...If the CHA board hasn't authorized this, if she has no mandate from the USCCB, and if there are no legally binding documents, she is operating without any legal, governance or regulatory basis.  That is a hell of a situation for a Roman Catholic Nun that heads the Catholic Health Association to be in."

You can't Love Christ, and hate his body the Church.  You can't serve Christ, and oppose and bind his body, the Church to evil laws and morally corrupt practices.  Carol Keehan and the Daughters of Charity have betrayed Christ with a kiss, while claiming to love him, for $962, 467, and the thrill of being in the counsels of an anti-catholic president with dictatorial aspirations.

Search Word of the Week

This weeks inexplicable search word is "Redneck Chicks".  I don't get it.  I don't publish pictures of girls, and I don't write about poultry.

Sometimes, I don't know what to think about search engines.

Fisking the H8!

This is a fisk of a letter I read today in the LEO, an independent weekly publication in Louisville. Since SOPA et al has been shelved, I'm going to do this.  I intend no copyright infringement, rather I am making a point about the current political climate in my region and the US, and the hate directed at Christians. The text of the letter will be in normal black, and my comment's in blue.  It's a sad letter, really.  Some back ground--the "museum" under consideration is actually a type of theme park, and the money is intended to generate jobs in an area of Kentucky that has very little economic activity, so tourism loos like a good bet.  It's a tourist attraction, not a church. 

I often hear from religious people that it is unfair to question or ridicule their beliefs as if there is something taboo about n adult conversation about infantile notions rooted in religious superstitions.  Well, very few adult conversations begin by denigrating the person you're speaking with.  By and large they are based on at least some measure of mutual respect.  And adult conversations about serious consideration never include ridicule.  i have to ask myself if you are capable of an adult conversation on  this topic.  If such beliefs were rooted in sanity or truth, then they would stand up in the face of truth or basic fact.  So to begin with, you say you can't figure out why one isn't supposed to ridicule another persons beliefs, then you postulate that religious belief has no grounding in sanity.  As sanity or insanity is essentially a binary choice, you think we are all insane.  may i ask where you got your MD, and did your residence in Psychiatry?  Otherwise, to diagnose us as insane you are practicing medicine without a license.  The real question that I can never get a cognizant answer to is: How much longer must we coddle the juvenile stupidity contained in the book of fiction called Genesis as if it were true?  Your sentence betrays a breathtaking lack of discrimination between various religious beliefs.  First, even though you seem to think we are all insane, not all of us are biblical literalists.  Not only that, perhaps if you displayed any familiarity with the book of Genesis,  would you  tell us, please, which chapters you are describing as "juvenile stupidity"?  And would you explain to me how, exactly, you are showing any form of acceptance of diversity or cultural sensitivity to describe someones scriptures as  a "book of fiction".  If you think it's a work of fiction, why are you upset it isn't true?  Do you range against, say, A tale of Two Cities or perhaps A Midsummer Nights Dream and discount anything they may have to say about the human condition, or is it only Jude-Christistian Scriptures you despise?

Paragraph on local politics redacted.

 If the mass delusions of ignorant religious people are to be taught to enslave others into their way of thinking, then why must the state pay for it? The state isn't paying for it!  The state has given tax breaks to a business that will generate jobs in a depressed region, and is improving the roads to the attraction.  The total tax breaks are less than those given to Churchill Downs, and less is being spent on road improvement that is being spent on road improvement to the Downs.  I don't see you complaining about state support for gambling, or horse racing, or horse farming. More than that, to describe the world view of well over 80% of thecitizens of the State as a mass delusion is at best hate speech. Why must the rest of us fund religious museums that teach things that most domesticated animals know aren't true?  Really? Do you spend a lot of time debating philosophy and theology with domestic animals?  Or are you engaging in telepathic communion with them?  how do you know what Dexter, our cat know is or isn't true?  If you want the freedom to worship your imaginary friend in the sky why must you steal precious resources from kids who might otherwise learn something useful like calculus?  First, we have the freedom to worship.  We don't want it, we have it. we want to preserve it from the bigotry of Atheists who wish us to disappear.  Second off, tax breaks to a business for job creation, and road improvements are not theft.  perhaps you could invest in a Websters New Collegian Dictionary to figure that out.  By the way, I have to say it's very smooth the way you have tied religious liberty to mental instability, blasphemy and accusation of criminality in one sentence of bigoted hate speech breathtaking in it's holism. Would you have us "believe" that teacing the outright lies contained in the book of Genesis has done more to help mankind than, say, Isaak Newton, Jonas Salk, Einstein Galileo or Darwin?  Einstein famously said that "God does not shoot dice with the universe!"  he was a theist.  Newtons word count is higher in his works of theology than his works of physics.  Jonas Salk was the product of an Ashkenazi Jewish home, born of parents who fled Czarist Russia to escape religious persecution at the hands of the the Imperial Secret Police.  They were all formed in an intellectual system that predicated a predictable and orderly universe on the idea it was created by a Rational Intelligence, as was Galileo.  All drew their basic presuppositions on the laws of nature from...wait for it...the Creation Accounts in Genesis.  In fact the roots of modern empirical science arose from this world view, in Europe.  Which is why science and technology lagged behind in other regions.

The rest of the letter goes on in this vein, and I have no desire to continue to read it.  The author is upset that a business that is generating tourist dollars and creating jobs in a poor area caters to Fundamentalist Christians, and so accuses everyone of malfeasance, while showering Theists with contempt, insult hate speech and bigotry.  The whole time he seems oblivious to the fact that if the state excluded a business from it's policies to increase tourism in a depressed region because of it's clientele and the fact that's it's them park has a christian theme, that would be violating the separation of Church and State.

Will You Join Us?

On Wednesday, 29 Feb 2012, the St. Martin of Tours Parish family (Louisville, KY) will observe a special day of prayer and fasting for the removal of the HHS Mandate.  The Fast can be food, TV, soda/alcohol, or any personal activity in which we normally engage for pleasure.  It can be meat.  It can be music, etc.

Our pastor is having two days , this Sunday and next, in which we are encouraged to sign up and make a commitment.  If you would like to join us, just put your name, handle, nickname, etc i the comm box and I will add them to the list. 

Fasting is one of our Big Guns in the spiritual war in which we find ourselves, please, praise the Lord and be the ammunition! 

Thanks.

ARRRRGHHHHHHH!!!!!! I B all et up Wit'it!

OK sometimes we are more effective than others, some days we're more on top of it than others, ans some weeks just go better than others.

But this week?  This week I think I'm just ODF*!

Tuesday I went to the range.  I took my new and wonderful Marlin Model 60, "Snowflake" and just ate those cans and plastic bottles alive! (Do not shoot glass bottles with a .22!  You can actually send bits of glass back to your face, with enough force to do unpleasant and embarrassing things to your complexion!)  So Wednesday, I decide to tear Snowflake down, and give her a thorough cleaning.  Which I did, all the carbon and fouling removed, a light lubrication with Breakfree CLP (TM), and a spotless bore.  Then I reassembled her.  Except for the fact that I broke her at that point.  I kinked the recoil spring.  Horrid, a point source failure, and now I have to buy a new part, for a brand new gun.  They're pretty inexpensive, so all things considered I ought to buy her a couple, just in case.

Yesterday, my daughter was feeling poorly and it fell to me to make dinner.  I went down stairs early and pulled chicken breasts from the freezer to thaw, with a view towards making baked chicken with rice.  You know, where you put the rice in a baking pan with the appropriate amount of water,  cream of whatever (I uses celery) soup and perhaps some chopped celery and onion, then you season the chicken, drape it in bacon and throw it into the oven?  Super simple, and tasty!  Except I didn't watch the chicken, and it got stacked one on top of the other in such a way that it didn't thaw in time.  Dinner was late, and to be sure that The Queen of the House got to prayer group on time I had to pull the chicken, and nuke it to finish out dinner, which meant that the rice suffered from not having enough chicken drippings in it, and tasted sub standard.  Yep, dinner was icky, because of me!

Today?  Today shouldn't even be discussed!  Today should be erased from our collective memory and cultural deposit!  I got to the office 1/2 hour late, and then every time I got near the photocopier, it jammed up!  Not only did it jam up, it jammed up to the point that I couldn't get it back working.  I had to call the secretary.  Sure, she knows more about it than me, but think of this--I'm a 52 year old Redneck Male, and I had to call a 20 something girl to come and fix a piece of electro-mechanical equipment I couldn't!!!!!  Man, talk about mammaries on a male swine!  My forebears are spinning in their graves, unless they're laughing at me.

Then, just to add insult to injury, I find out today that a band I really like (although I shouldn't) Eluveitie, is coming to Louisville next week.  I don't know how I didn't find out earlier, but I didn't.   And since I didn't, I didn't  budget for concert tickets, etc.  I will be left out, dangling, as it were, in a cultural vacuum dominated by I-didn't-get-to-see-the-showness!

As far as weeks go, this one has been an exercise in humiliation.

*ODF=Out Dere a Flappin'

Why I'm Bad at Blogging

It's simple--there is so much that catches my attention, that affects my basic rights as an American, and that impinges upon my faith that sometimes, I just can't make up my mind.

Perhaps it's the downside of the communications revolution, but there is so much happening, so rapidly, that I find it difficult to keep up.  I eliminate from considerations as trivial perhaps 85% of what I read.  Yet that 15% remaining is huge!  And in many many ways, it's interrelated as part of a tide tide that needs to be considered, yet is interrelated in such complex ways that it doesn't lend itself to short essays or quick reflections.

To delineate what's happening in America today, and the in the Church Today, would take at least two thick books, and by the tie these books were ready for publication, I suspect that events would have moved with such rapidity that they would either be dreadfully behind the times, or perhaps proscribed by the secret police.

I'll try to do better.

Range Day!

My Son-in-Law and I went to the rifle range today.  I have a new Marlin model 60 .22 I wanted to shoot on the range, and he has an H & R "PAL" single shot .22 he just bought.  That particular gun is between 63 and 65 years old, so we wanted to see what it can do.  We also took my Mosin-Nagant, a WWII surplus Russian army rifle designed in 1891 and build in 1943. 

We had a lot of fun, and fired a lot of .22s, and about 60 7.62X52R through the Mosin.  I haven't adjusted the sights on the Model 60, (Which my granddaughter proclaimed to be named "Snowflake") so I didn't know what to expect on an outdoor range.  I had benched it on an indoor range and got groups about the size of a quarter. 

On one of my favorite targets, aluminum cans, I was able to do the "can dance" 80% of the time at 50 yards, and about 60% of the time at 75.  At 75 I can barely discern a pop can or a bulls eye, so that's not so bad, considering that I haven't adjusted the sights at all yet.  I've got a scope and rings to fit, so I'll mount the scope to deal with the old guy eye issues.  But I can safely say, Snowflake is alright.

The Mosin, well what can I say?  We don't have shots long enough to challenge it.  The vernier sights on it are calibrated to 2000 meters, although that's not for point targets.  People using the iron sights hit 8" gongs at 800 yards with them.  We were shooting a max of 100yards.  We shot some milk jugs filled with koolade, which just disappeared when hit.  We also shot at some small plastic water bottles, about 4.5" high.  I shot at one and it burst in a most gratifying splatter of grape koolaid.  But when we picked up our litter, we found I hadn't hit it at all--I had hit next to it, and the concussion from the bullet impact into the berm burst it, and stripped the label off.  I have to admit, that shy an invasion of SS Nazis, there isn't a game animal in indiana big enough to shoot with this thing!  It's still fun though, shooting a piece of history.

But I feel much better, more grounded, and I found myself wondering why.  On the drive back out of the State Forest I realized why.  The terrain there is variegated, hills with deep hollows, water features, no houses.  It's very heavily wooded.  It's what I think, deep down inside, the world is supposed to look like.  I feel best in the woods.  It's where I feel most competent, it's the environment I grew up in.  It's soothing to me, and I don't always have some sort of guard up wondering what damned fool is going to try what where next, like I do in town.  Wasn't indoors or on pavement.  I could smell the damp in the air, and the snow on the ground.  It was the kind of place I should be in.  I am not made for the city, perhaps not even for small villages or thorpes.  I seem to need, for some reason, to leave this stuff behind and just be in the woods.  Even a little while is like a dose of medicine, a balm.

I guess if I could, I'd pull out of the City, and go s deep into the Upland woods as I could get.  And the family  would come too--they don't like town either.

I'm done with consideration and tact...

...and calling it Charity when it's really just an unwillingness to say the things that are true, but hard.

I put up a 'status" on Face Book about the truncation of our religious liberties.  Then I got attacked for it by a self professed atheist, who posts a lot of things about how having a cross in public is shoving our religion down his throat.  Not publicly financed crosses, mind you, but just a cross.

The gist of his argument was this, that it wasn't an infringement on our religious liberties to pay for contraception, sterilization or chemical/hormonal abortion meds, but our refusal to do so was actually forcing our morality on others.  I tired a reasonable rebuttal--in it I asked him for the sake of argument, to accept our position that these things were sinful, and then he could see that making us pay for them was making us participate in an intrinsic, manifest evil.  I also pointed out that the figure he was using that 98% of Catholic women had used contraception (Why does it always say "women"? Don't Catholic men never get involved with this decision?  Like in married couples, is it only the women who say, "Gee, getting pregnant now would suck, so we'll contracept?"  I wonder why men are not involved in this reporting--do we not count? could it be sexism?)  doesn't address ow many stopped, and of the ones who stopped how many stopped for religious reasons--anecdotal information indicates there are more than a few!  I also pointed out that Catholic laity do not vote on doctrine and dogma, that that resides with the Magisterium.

His response was really, really revealing.  First, he said he would not accept, for the sake of argument to see our point, the idea that we find the practices we are forced to finance under the HHS mandate sinful, and that our beliefs were immaterial.  Second, he said that if a poll said 98% of Catholic Women had used birth control, then it was obvious that it wasn't an important teaching of the Church, because that would be the final determiner of what those teachings were.  He went on to say that it was impossible to accept the very idea of the Magisterium until it became more diverse, included women and ceased it's hate speech and hateful policies against gays.  This person also went so far as to say that social outreach isn't religious activity, but were really just activity, generic, or business ventures.

So what this reveals is this--there are Secular people, many of whom are atheists, who actually believe--passionately believe--we have no right to differ from them in belief, because we will not tailor our beliefs to meet their expectations.  More over, these people believe that the coercive power of the State should be brought to bear upon us, to force us to conform to their ethical and moral beliefs.  The arrogance is breathtaking.

It's also interesting that Christians, and Christian symbols are regularly dragged into court with an eye toward removing them, silencing them, or otherwise pushing them to the margins of American Public Discourse, yet we are the ones accused of "shoving our religion down (someones) throat".  I submit, that the true perpetrators of religious intolerance, coercion bigotry and bullying are atheists and seculars, who seek to make us not only be silent, but to live and think as they do.  Yes, I said they want us to be silent--BTW, the status thread this discussion occurred on isn't showing up on my wall or F B home page.  It seems at this point to have disappeared.  Maybe it will reappear,  Because FB is flakey.

So I've given up on tact and consideration, because these bastards are trying to remove my freedomof speech and my freedom to act on my religious beliefs.

A Disappointment

Crystal Renn is a model who wrote a book about how the industry damaged her through twisting her body image, leading her into eating disorders and unhealthy dieting to maintain a body weight more appropriate to a refugee than an example of feminine beauty.  She managed to cast off her chains and eat something.

She became a full sized woman, very curvy, perhaps even well described as zaftig, yet very beautiful and graceful.  And she still got work.  She had managed to get away from the idea that what we looklike, what we are shaped like is a determiner of our worth, and can be dictated to us wordlessly by the images those with money and power in the apparel industry choose to present.  She broke away, it seemed, from the related industries of weight loss, diet, faddish exercise programs.  I was proud of her, for she seemed like a young woman who had managed to free her mind and body from the Mordor like servitude that the fashion and entertainment industry attempts to shackle women.


So imagine my disappointment when I read the news sights this morning.  They were full of breathless anticipation of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition--the best selling issue of each year, and sure proof that guys like girls better than they like sports--with pictures plastered up where I had hoped to find some tidbits of real news.  Some of those pictures were of Miss Renn.

Except she is all dieted down, her curves and individual, unique beauty gone, replaced by "tit model, generic, one each (brunette, token)".  It seems the industry, the anti-woman objectification of an ideal based in the build of young teens and our cultures latent descent into both immaturity and  ephebophilia has won again.  I can't help but wonder if she has done herself any physical harm in the dieting process she used to get the approved shape for the magazine.  I do not wonder at what sort of psychological harm she has done, because in the absence of a threat to health, the motive to change ones shape to match an unreal ideal is based always in some sort of self disapproval, often, I have seen in self loathing.

So young women--all women--have lost a role model that says you don't have to look like like the women in the ads for Vicky's to be beautiful .  And to that extent, my grand daughters are impoverished, and their ability to choose for themselves is restricted.

America, especially American Media, hate women.  Sometimes it even hates them to death.

That Whole Guy Fawkes Thing

I'm pretty tired of the way that Hipsters, Occupiers and Anarchists have commandeered Guy Fawkes for themselves.  I guess I blame the movie V for Vendetta for this, and it's understandable.  After all, Natalie Portman is considered kinda cool, she's a gifted actress, and she's nice to look at.  But still, he doesn't belong to them.


He belongs to Catholics, because he was one of us.  In fact, Guy Fawkes night is marked by the quaint and picturesque custom of burning the Pope in effigy and screaming out about bad Catholics are.

Look at history.  Fawkes was a recusant--a Catholic who wouldn't decide that the king was the rightful head of the Church,enter into schism, fall into heresy and end up simulating sacraments.  Laboring under ruinous fines, the threat of imprisonment and the risk of execution, he fought back.  Too bad that he chose to do so in a way that can only be regarded as sinful, and that he picked such undependable co conspirators.  Least we get a little too far from reality we need to remember that Fawkes died, not as a martyr, but as a convicted criminal and failed mass murderer.

Yet he has become an instantly recognizable symbol of resistance to an over reaching government, and we need to claim him back from the dung-brained poltroons who have co-opted us, especially now as we have Chief Executive who feels he has the authority, right and power to dictate to the Church how she lives out her beliefs.  Perhaps if we were to make his name more connected to the Catholic Resistance, the government would take us more seriously--realize that we have beliefs we will not compromise to make our wana-be-king happy.


I've started growing a Guy Fawkes Beard, just to be obnoxious, and to make them wonder.  I think it looks stupid, and it doesn't fit my face, but heck, nobody wants to date me anyway so what do I have to lose.