in a manger

“Augustine drew out the meaning of the manger using an idea that at first
seems almost shocking, but on closer examination contains a profound truth.
The manger is the place where animals find their food.
But now, lying in the manger, is he who called himself the true bread come down from heaven,
the true nourishment that we need in order to be fully ourselves.
This is the food that gives us true life, eternal life.
Thus the manger becomes a reference to the table of God,
to which we are invited so as to receive the bread of God.
From the poverty of Jesus’ birth emerges the miracle in which man’s
redemption is mysteriously accomplished.”
Pope Benedict XVI, p. 68
An Excerpt From
Jesus of Nazareth Infancy

(image courtesy Maxlucado.com)

I love this offering by Pope Emeritus Benedict regarding St. Augustine’s comparison in that a manger
is the place where animals are both sheltered and fed…is, in essence, the same place where mankind
finds both his shelter and food—

That the saving Bread of Life…the body and blood of our Savior, first came to us in the
way of a humble manger on a precarious night and located in a far-flung middle eastern village.

A trough turned crib, resting in an animal’s manger.

A newborn infant becomes both the sustenance and, in turn, Savior of all mankind.
The analogy of feeding and nourishing the soul of man.

We know that birth leads to life and life requires sustenance…
yet in the end, when death does come…we know that death is but a mere formality…

For the one who was born in a humble animal’s stall brings both sustenance
as well as eternal life…

Merry Christmas…
and to our Jewish brethren, Happy Hanukkah.

It’s off the to the Mayor and Sheriff…

For unto us a Child is born,
Unto us a Son is given;
And the government will be upon His shoulder.
And His name will be called
Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.
Of the increase of His government and peace
There will be no end,
Upon the throne of David and over His kingdom,
To order it and establish it with judgment and justice
From that time forward, even forever.
The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this.
Isaiah 9:6-7

Is our post modern cultural Marxism rooted in a sexual revolution that was disguised as a women’s movement?

You who are on the road
Must have a code that you can live by
And so become yourself
Because the past is just a good-bye.
Teach your children well,
Their father’s hell did slowly go by,
And feed them on your dreams
The one they picks, the one you’ll know by.
Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you will cry,
So just look at them and sigh
And know they love you.
Lyrics by Graham Nash
Teach your Children

What do Critical Theory, Marxism, Socialism, cultural liberalism, women’s equality,
homosexuality, transgenderism, and the sexual revolution all have in common?
They are the underlying lynchpins to our current day’s ills…

And they all seem to have begotten the other in some perverse orgy of thought, action and protest.

I wrote a post last week referencing a recent letter penned by Pope Emeritus Benedict
in which he states that the ills of the Chruch today can actually be traced right back
to the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.

“Pope Benedict XVI has broken his silence in a rare essay on the sex abuse crisis
in the Catholic Church, claiming that it was caused in part by the sexual revolution of the 1960s
and the liberalization of the church’s moral teaching.

“Since I myself had served in a position of responsibility as shepherd of the Church
at the time of the public outbreak of the crisis, and during the run-up to it,
I had to ask myself — even though, as emeritus,
I am no longer directly responsible —
what I could contribute to a new beginning,”
Benedict wrote, in explaining why he is speaking out now.

But his comments on the sex abuse crisis seem certain to inflame tensions between
conservative Catholics, who largely blame homosexuality and lax sexual ethics for the scandal,
and liberals, who say there is no known connection between homosexuality and pedophilia.

In the essay, Benedict asserts that the changes in traditional moral standards
on sexuality both in society and within the Catholic Church laid the groundwork
for the sex abuse crisis.

“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68,” he writes,
“was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”

Bishop Gavin Ashenden actually expanded on this notion albeit as a separate thought than that
of the former Pope’s, all of which I shared in that same previous post.

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/04/12/silent-no-more-the-absence-of-god/

Contrary to what many critics now argue, I don’t see the former Pope’s letter as some
sort of feeble excuse for the scope of predation and the decades of lies and cover-ups,
but rather I see that Benedict is identifying a marker…
A key and crucial marker, marking much of our current ills and woes.

But before we proceed, you might need to read over another previous post.
It’s a post which might refresh your memory about Critical Theory,
The Frankfurt School and Marxism—all of which have been identified and brought to our
attention by Melvin Tinker in his book
That Hideous Strength:
How The West Was Lost
The Cancer of Cultural Marxism in The Chruch,
The World And The Gospel of Change

Here is a link to one of the previous teaching posts regarding Mr. Tinker’s book:
https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2019/01/30/new-left-not-so-new-raison-detre/

In a nutshell, however, “according to Tinker–
“In 1923 a week-long symposium was organized by Felix Weil in Frankfurt,
Germany in which they laid out a vision for a Marxist think-tank and
research centre.
The original name for the centre was the Institue for Marxism (Institut fur Marxismus),
but a more innocent sounding title was subsequently given,
The Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Sozialforschung).
Since that time the ISR has usually been known simply as the Frankfurt School.”

In the early 1940s, many of these German philosophers made a mad dash to the US once
the Nazis had shuttered their Institute—bringing with them not merely an academic philosophy
but rather a desire for a “new world order” of Marxism—
bringing it directly to the forefront of America’s academic schools of thought.

Their “school” of philosophy (a cultural Marxism) was readily accepted and absorbed into
America’s academic elite thinkers and schools.
New, refreshing and cutting edge, or so it seemed.

Fast forward to today…

As we now stand bewildered and nearly helpless while looking at the nation we thought we once knew,
I believe a key and crucial breadcrumb will be found if we look back to those heady days of 60s.

Those days of protests, revolutionary movements and a summer of love.

While we painfully scan the horizon, looking for reasons as to why we are currently in
a terrible mess, I believe we need to not only re-explore but we need to understand…
we need to understand that what appeared to be a movement by and for women vying for
equality in the mid-1960s was far more serious and far more sinister than equal
pay for equal work.
So much so that most of the women protesting had
no idea how their “movement” was to morph into a damning Sexual revolution.

Vietnam, Civil Rights, Women rights, peace, and love…
what a churning boiling toxic kettle of foreboding ills.

A movement shattering certain social norms set the stage for our
current culture’s spiraling demise.

And sex was going to be a key factor, if not the pivotal factor.

According to Max Horkheimer (one of the German philosophers) and his fellow scholars,
bourgeois society is inherently sexually repressed,
which is a major factor in neurosis and other forms of mental illness.
‘They believed,’ as Breshears makes clear, ‘that a revolutionary,
post-capitalist and post-Christian society could liberate humanity
from this repression, so sexual liberation from the restrictions of a patriarchal society
was a major theme in their ideology.’

Both Eric Fromm and Wilhelm Reich (more of the German philosophers) re-worked
Freudianism into the neo-Marxist ideology.
Fromm argued that sexual orientation is merely a social construct,
that there are no innate differences between men and
women, and furthermore that sexuality and gender roles are socially determined.
It was Reich who coined the term
‘the sexual revolution’ (the title of his 1936 book) and contended that the
innate sexual impulse should be liberated
from artificial and man-made moral restrictions.

But perhaps more than any other member of the Frankfurt School it was
Herbert Marcuse who was to have the most far-reaching influence in this aspect of
the neo-Marxist ideology.
In Eros and Civilization he
sought to bring together neo-Marxism with a version of neo-Freudianism in order
to turn the power of the throwing off of all traditional values and sexual restraints
in favour of ‘polymorphous perversity.’ The very idea of marital love and
fidelity was considered by Marcuse to be counter-revolutionary.
Although cultural change was the ultimate goal, Marcuse understood the tactical appeal
if the pleasure principle. For we are often reminded, ‘sex sells,’
and it sells politics too, what better way
to recruit revolutionaries than to convince them that sexual promiscuity
is a sure way to bring
about the revolution?
Dinesh D’Souza notes in ‘What’s so great about Christianity?’
the centrality of this tactic by quoting neo-Marxist,
‘Against the power of religion, we employ an equal if not greater power—
the power of hormones.’/em>

These are names that are mostly foreign to those of us today who are looking for answers,
yet they are names of men who were to play pivotal roles in ushering in the mess
you and I are currently living in today…

Yet as there is much more to write, share and say…I’m off to Atlanta.
So this is part I….Part II and possibly Part III will be forthcoming…

But the Mayor is calling.

It seems her chief aides are going on a little date night prior to the arrival of their new addition
and of course, the Mayor needed a babysitter.
Plus I’ll be on baby watch this weekend standing in while my son is out of town for a wedding.
His overtly pregnant wife is in no condition to trek a couple of hours away from home
this late in the ballgame…

Stay tuned…

Oh, by the way… Percy is still at the Vets…
the surgery seems to have been successful as long as he stays
in a cage, unable to jump…sigh

Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil,
for the devil has been sinning from the beginning.
The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the works of the devil.
1 John 3:8

silent no more…the absence of God

“If I were to remain silent,
I’d be guilty of complicity.”
Albert Einstein

(image courtesy the web)

If you haven’t noticed, we have a crisis in our Chruch.

And I’m using the capital C because when one denomination within the
Christian body ails we, the collective body ails.

The Catholic Church has found herself in a near death knell over the heinous revelations of
child predation.

A decades-old crime and yet the cover-ups, lies, the sweeping under of carpets, ad infinitum,
are so deep… it’s a wonder if we will ever uncover the real facts let alone the
actual truth.

A gross sin perpetrated by those whose very vocation has been to teach and preach against
the very sins they were committing.

The scope is inconceivable.
The pain and betrayal are unbearable.

And the sad fact is that we are slowly discovering the same sins within
other denominations…

This growing scandal of sin has only fueled the mistrust and disdain held by many believers
and nonbelievers alike for and of the Catholic Church.

Yet we must remember that before we pick up and prepare to throw our stones that
no denomination, no Christian, no Christian body is without sin and no church body
is exempt from sin, scandal or betrayal.

Being raised in the Episcopal /Anglican church fold, I hold a very close affinity for
the Catholic Church and my love of history draws me to a deep appreciation for our original
Christian roots found in that very Latin West Chruch.

The myriad of Christian denominations has only but one place to look for the original
congregant body—
back to the throne of Peter.

And so I was pleased to see that Pope Emeritus Benedict has broken his silence during his reclusion
in order to address this latest burden of the Chruch.

The breaking of the dam began at the beginning of his election as pope.

There has been a cataclysmic revelation ever since.

The article is linked here:
https://start.att.net/news/read/article/cnn-expope_benedict_xvi_breaks_silence_on_churchs_sex-cnn2/category/news+

So in case your holy indignation for all things Catholic remains at the high end of the Richter scale…
be reminded Catholic, in our religion means globally or the wide body of who we are…
‘Catholic derived via Late Latin Catholics, from the Greek adjective καθολικός (katholikos), meaning “universal’

Our dear friend and ever brave rogue former Anglican bishop addressed this very issue
with a post back in August of 2018—
in which I wrote a post based on the good Bishops teachings…
both links are found below.

Gay predators, telling the truth and spring-cleaning the Church.

https://cookiecrumbstoliveby.wordpress.com/2018/09/01/sin-and-confession/

My post began with the very notion of sin and our Church’s response:

Sin.

It’s a word that we take for granted yet it is a word whose actions are destroying us.
For we are its actions and we seem not to even care.

Our culture has opted to expunge the word from our vocabulary while blindly
embracing its very nuances.

And what of the Chruch?

She is either impotently silent or either she busies herself by embracing those
very nuances in order to appear more viable, more likable, more cultural.

Benedict who, as a cardinal, served as the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
the powerful Vatican department responsible for enforcing doctrinal orthodoxy,
and the successor to the Inquisition…was known as God’s rottweiler.

“Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ’68,” he writes,
“was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”

Benedict says that this mentality also affected bishops and Catholic seminaries and caused,
“the extensive collapse of the next generation of priests.”

“There were — not only in the United States of America —
individual bishops who rejected the Catholic tradition as a whole and sought to
bring about a kind of new, modern Catholicity,” he writes.

“In various seminaries, homosexual cliques were established,”
he writes, “which acted more or less openly and significantly changed the
climate in the seminaries.”

Benedict cites one bishop who showed seminarians pornographic films,
“allegedly with the intention of thus making them resistant to behavior
contrary to the faith.”

Benedict also reveals that the Vatican’s two investigations into US seminaries,
called Apostolic Visitations, were thwarted by cover-up.
Benedict also reveals a tug-of-war between the Vatican and
US bishops over zero-tolerance.

The Pope Emeritus says that Church lawyers in Rome
“had difficulty” with the US proposal for zero-tolerance and preferred that priests guilty
of sexual abuse of minors receive only a temporary suspension.

“This could not be accepted by the American bishops,” he writes,
“because the priests thus remained in the service of the bishop and thereby
could be taken to be still directly associated with him.”

As a result, the former Pope writes, a new code of Church criminal law was created
and cases of child sexual abuse were judged by the Vatican office of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, of which then-
Cardinal Ratzinger was the head.

But Benedict admits that the prospect of full criminal trials for sex abuse
was “overwhelming” for the Vatican.

“Because all of this actually went beyond the capacities of the Congregation
for the Doctrine of the Faith and because delays arose which had to be prevented
owing to the nature of the matter,
Pope Francis has undertaken further reforms,” he writes.

And yet in the end…the bottom line, in a nutshell…

“Why did pedophilia reach such proportions?” he asks.
“Ultimately the reason is the absence of God.”

“God is dead” so proclaimed Nietzsche—and according to an article in the Big Think,
by Scotty Hendricks God is dead’: What Nietzsche really meant’—
Nietzche was an atheist for his adult life and didn’t mean that there was a God who had
actually died, rather that our idea of one had.”

So perhaps it would behoove those of us who continue to cling to the faith that
Satan delights in the sin of man as we do his dirty work free of charge…

May we remain silent no more!

Indeed, there is not a righteous man on earth who continually does good and who never sins.
Ecclesiastes 7:20