“Opening Shots Against the New Paganism”

“One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.”
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World


(political cartoon from the Roanoke Times)

As time allows, I’m still making slight headway in the book
THE LION OF MÜNSTER–The Bishop Who Roared Against The Nazis
by Daniel Utrecht of the Oratory

If curious, here’s a link to the previous post written about this
daring Catholic prelate who took a loud vocal stand defying
Adolph Hitler and his Nazi madness.

THE LION OF MÜNSTER…we need more lions

So yesterday, picking up the book, I read the following passage
from the chapter entitled the same title of this post…
and it was like a sledgehammer hit me on the head—

I’ll let you read it, allowing you to digest this snapshot of
German schools along with The Catholic Church and how each one
clashed with the controlling policies of Nazi
Germany… and I wonder…does it sound familiar??

Bishop von Galen was consecrated and enthroned on October 28,1933.
Just over a week later, On November 6, he wrote a private letter to
the superintendent of schools for Münster.
Schools had received lesson plans “in connection with All Souls’ Day”
to teach “the theory of heredity and ethnology”
in all subjects. The details leave no doubt as to what this phrase meant:
hatred of the Jews.

“Very clearly, the Nazis meant to convince everyone, especially the young
of German racial superiority.

Thus in a letter written to the school superintendent to express his disagreement
to such racial and pagan theories, Bishop August Galen began his open disdain of
Hitler and his New World Order:

“For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching and
having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their
own likings and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander
into myths (vv.3-4, RSV),
he commented that “a Bishop dare not keep silent if false teachings
and unbelief raise their head, if what is warned of in the letter
to Titus comes to pass:
‘A word of truth is so much more necessary when enemies of religion,
such as we now see, are fighting not only against this or that
teaching of the Church but deny or falsify the very foundations
of religion itself and the most holy mysteries of revelation”‘

“Whoever undermines or destroys man’s faith in God attacks
the very foundations of religion and the whole of culture.”

Critical Race Theory…hummmm

THE LION OF MÜNSTER…we need more lions

Woe then to our poor German people. Disorder and revolutionary
convulsions will not come to an end until the batter of everyone
against everyone has spent all its power.”

Bishop von Galen


((c) Redmich/Thinkstock)

Since I’ve started reading a new book, I’ve decided we need
some lions…heck I’ll be happy to have just one lion!

What you say???!!!….I hear you smugly inquiring…

Yep, a lion.

This book is a historical book…
it’s a story about a man born in 1878,
born into a well to-do German family.

The boy would eventually grow up to become a priest…
eventually a bishop, an archbishop and later, a cardinal…
but more importantly…he became a lion….

He became a voracious and loud roaring nemesis of Adolf Hitler.

His name was Archbishop Clemens August Graf von Galen.

I won’t waste our time today with the biographical background and growth
of this man, although it does lay out who this would-be lion, a lion
who would never back down, was to grow to become…

Heck, I’m only to page 37 and WWI has just ended.
And already, with only 37 pages in, there is oh so much to share!

So today, I’ll just offer enough to give us pause to ponder.

So picture yourself looking into a mirror of the past, but
you still can see your own reflection. That’s what this book
is—a mirror.
A mirror of what was and fretfully would will most likely be.

The words I’m choosing to share today are actually words that
this lion wrote following the devastating war that was to end all wars…
that being WWI.
Later similar words would come prior to WWII…

Following WWI, Germany had been defeated and her citizens decimated—
a situation that the world perceived as fitting since
the Germans had been the obvious aggressors and instigators of this
catastrophic World War.

But this book actually examines a devout Christian’s nonobjective view
of his homeland and of the troubles his nation was preparing to
fall victim to.

Following the Treaty of Versailles…Germany was hurled
into the black hole of impotence.
It was enough of a black hole that could generate the
cataclysmic energy that would allow a man like Adolf Hitler
to rise to…an evil dominating world foe of democracies and freedom.

Before the first world war, Germany was known for being one of the most
highly educated and cultured societies that existed.

And so it is to this very day, 76 years following the end of WWII,
that I still have to study and re-study the dynamics that allow me
to wrap my head around the idea that a nation of knowledge
and refinement can grow into a mindless nation bent on
destruction, death and world dominance.

Jumping forward a bit in the book, we read that it was shortly
after Adolf Hitler seized power and the Nazi Party turned
Germany into a totalitarian state in 1933,
Blessed Cardinal Clemens August von Galen began openly speaking
out against the dictatorial regime as the new bishop of Münster.

“The book’s author notes that
the Nazis killed people for distributing von Galen’s sermons,”

“Throughout World War II, Bishop von Galen became one of Germany’s
most outspoken bishops, authoring letters and sermons that challenged
the Nazi regime’s racial ideologies.
In 1937, von Galen assisted Pope Pius XI in the writing
of his 1937 anti-Nazi encyclical “Mit brennender Sorge”
(“With Burning Anxiety”), and in 1941,
he delivered three sermons denouncing the euthanasia program,
confiscating of church property and the injustice of the Gestapo,
appropriately earning him the nickname “The Lion of Münster.”

But this wise man understood back in 1917 what would eventually
lead to the opening of door for the likes of Hitler.

He spoke of the great importance of leaders and leadership…
in particular those those in position of governmental leadership,
to know who it was they served and to always remember what it meant to be
a servant.

A servant.

“What, Galen asked, makes for a good community—
one in which people of different classes, professions, and social positions
really consider themselves to be united and to which they can give their hearts,
their loyalty, and their service?
“Why”, he continued, “did Germany not have such a community?”
For although it had the externals of a community–indeed,
a self-governing community, since all power has been given
to the people–in fact the people of different classes, professional standing,
political parties and religions felt themselves at odds with each other.

The fault, he argued, was egoism, disordered self-love,
by which everyone seeks his own interests with concern
for the good and rights of his neighbor.

Years later, Galen wrote:
“if the right of the state, today the might of the majority,
really makes right, then why only this might?
Why not also the might of the stronger fist,
why not the might of money, why not the might of craftiness
and clever business dealings?
The destruction that is introduced into the community by the
working out of this fundamental principle should open people’s
eyes to the destructiveness of this principle itself.”…

“If the state is the creator of all rights and the
all-powerful lord of all rights, the, many concluded,
their rights and freedoms would be secure only if they themselves
were the holders of state power.”

“We will not come to an inner people’s community,”
he concluded, “as long as State absolutism is the fundamental principle
of our political life.”
Such absolutism leads inevitably to centralization and attacks
on any persons or groupings that are independent of the state.
That was the reason for the Kulturkampf (culture struggle),
for the Prussian state saw the Catholic Church as the bulwark
of freedom and the rights of individuals and small communities
against arbitrary state power.

And so I will leave us today to ruminate over the notion that our
dear Western Civilization is currently looking in a mirror of decades past….
Yet what we are seeing looking back at us is the makings of a monster with nary
a lion to quell the rampage…

Then I saw in the right hand of him who was seated on the throne a scroll
written within and on the back, sealed with seven seals.
And I saw a mighty angel proclaiming with a loud voice,
“Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”
And no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth was able
to open the scroll or to look into it,
and I began to weep loudly because no one was found worthy to open
the scroll or to look into it.
And one of the elders said to me,
“Weep no more; behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah,
the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the
scroll and its seven seals.”

Revelation 5:1-5

the demonic narrative does not claim that all lives matter

So the religious soul finds in the heart of Jesus a secure refuge against the
wiles and attacks of Satan, and a delightful retreat.
But we must not rest merely at the entrance to the hole in the rock,
we must penetrate its depths. At the mouth of the deep hollow,
at the mouth of the wound in his side we shall, indeed, find the precious blood which has redeemed us.
This blood pleads for us and demands mercy for us. But the religious soul must not stay at the entrance.
When she has heard, and understood, the voice of the divine blood,
she must hasten to the very source from which it springs,
into the very innermost sanctuary of the heart of Jesus.
There she will find light, peace, and ineffable consolations.

St Anthony of Padua


(Satan from the movie The Passion of the Christ)

Do you remember the scene in the movie The Passion of the Christ when
Jesus is in the Garden of Gethsemane praying—-agonizing over what is to happen….
just before he is betrayed?
Do you remember seeing that rather androgynous and soulless figure shadowing Jesus
throughout most of the movie…that figure being Satan?

In the garden, as Jesus is in engaged in anguished prayer with his Father, the snake slithers
ever closer toward Jesus…coming within striking range of his foot…
that is until Jesus, suddenly resolute and committed to the role he is about to play,
slams his foot down upon the head of the snake—crushing it.
Just as he knows he will do the same when he descends into Hell in order to free all of
mankind from eternal damnation.


(Image from the movie The Passion when Jesus slams his foot down upon the serpent in the Garden of Gethsemane)

Powerful stuff.
As so it should be.
That’s because it is powerful.
God is powerful–all-powerful.

I think it’s safe in saying that we all know that my time for the last three years or so
has not been much my own.
Between illnesses, deaths, births, retirements and now what with pandemics and the demise
of society as we all know it…I’m just lucky to come up for air.

You may recall that I use to often post segments from Anglican Unscripted—
an Anglican weekly televised ministry.

The segments featured my favorite rogue Anglican Bishop Gavin Ashenden…former
Bishop to the Queen and former bishop in the Chruch of England.

The good Bishop left the Church of England over the ever-growing and blatant liberalism
of the Chruch as she and her leadership are quickly turning from the word of God.

He landed for a time in the greater Anglican Church here in the US, which is the church body
that split away from the American Episcopal Chruch over the same growing liberal issues
and divide.

You may have missed it but Dr. Ashenden officially left the Anglican fold altogether
late last year, as he has been fully accepted into the Catechism of the Catholic fold.

A move I greatly applaud.

So Anglican Unscripted now has a sister ministry, Catholic Unscripted..featuring
none other than Gavin Ashenden.

Over the weekend, I finally had the opportunity of watching the latest episode of Catholic Unscripted–
an episode that dealt with much of what is currently taking place here in the US and now spreading
like wildfire throughout the UK…
That of riots, violence, cries of racism, moves to defund the police, Black lives matter, Antifa,
radicalism, the destruction of statues on both sides of the pond, and at the heart of it all…
is this destructive movements of identity politics and cultural marxism.

In this particular segment, Dr. Ashenden is joined by Dr. Jules Gomes—
another brilliant and now former rouge priest.
In the episode, the two men explore the notion of a demonic movent taking place throughout
much of our Western Society.
As Christians, we should understand this.
Remember, our ancient foe prowls like a lion,
waiting in the shadows in order to devour us. (1 Peter 5:8)

Each man notes that most of those in our society, the majority being those who are
under the age of 40, have no real solid sense of identity.
Yet whereas Christians find their identity as the children of God…
and thus we as Christians are charged by God with living responsibly with and for our neighbors.

Unfortunately, it appears that that is not how most of those 40 and younger see their role.

There is a powerful and frightening movement now taking place globally,
one that is bent on the destruction of the nuclear family, the sexual identity of a man and a woman,
law, order, civility, and the annihilation of our Judaeo Christian foundation.

Dr. Gomes explains that as Christians, our identity and value are to be found in the power of Love–
and not in the love of power.
It is in this love of power that organizations such as Antifa and Black Lives Matter now find
their sole source of strength.

The segment is about 35 minutes long.
And if you care anything about what is now taking place all around you, whether you are
a believer or not–a Catholic, Protestant, or Jew…
I encourage you to take the time to watch, listen, as well as learn, what these two gentlemen
are sharing regarding this evergrowing crisis and what many are deeming a coming
civil war of sorts.

Blessedly, Dr. Ashenden does not leave us feeling isolated or defeated as he reminds us all
that we have been made in the image of God.
“That we are deeply loved and He considers us utterly precious.
He comes looking for us and it is there that we find our
true identity.”

See what kind of love the Father has given to us,
that we should be called children of God; and so we are.
The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

1 John 3:1

Catholic Unscripted 11. “All lives matter. From Floyd to Rowling. Reflecting on Marxism & racism.”

my highlighter dried up

“Despite the violence of the attacks that she may suffer,
the Chruch will not die. This is the Lord’s promise,
and His word is infallible.”
…theologians amuse themselves by deconstructing dogmas and emptying morality
of its profound meaning
Relativism is the mask Judas disguised as an intellectual.

Robert Cardinal Sarah


(morning skies / Rosemary Beach, FL / Julie Cook / 2019)

Here are a few more gems gleaned from Cardinal Sarah and his latest book,
The Day Is Now Far Spent.

I shared with you the other day that I had practically highlighted the entire first
two pages of his introduction and since then, the highlighter I was using has run dry.

The following snippets offer some very powerful words…words offered to
to the collective body of Christian believers who are finding themselves bewildered by the
attacks taking place on the bride of Christ, that being his Church.

Cardinal Sarah shares…
This book is the cry of my soul!
It is a cry of love for God and for my brethren.
I owe to you, to you Christians, the only truth that saves.
The Chruch is dying because her pastors are afraid to speak in all truth and clarity.
We are afraid of the media,
afraid of public opinion,
afraid of our own brethren!
The good shepherd gives his life for his sheep.

Today, in these pages, I offer you what is at the heart of my life:
faith in God.

In a little while, I will appear before the eternal Judge.
If I do not hand on to you the truth that I received, what will I say to him then?
We bishops ought to tremble at the thought of our guilty silences,
our complicit silences, our over-indulging silences in dealing with the world.

Christians are trembling, wavering, doubting.
I want this book to be for them.
To tell them: do not doubt!
Hold fast to doctrine.
Hold fast to prayer!
I want this book to strengthen faithful Christians and priests.

Cardinal Sarah has likened our current time to the mystery of Judas.
The mystery of betrayal.
He tells us that “The mystery of Judas, the mystery of betrayal, is a subtle poison.
The devil seeks to make us doubt the Church.
He wants us to regard her as a human organization in crisis.
However, she is so much more
than that: she is the continuation of Christ.
The devil drives us to division and schism.
He wants to make us believe that the Chruch has betrayed us.
But the Church does not betray.
The Chruch, full of sinners, is herself without sin!
There will always be enough light in her for those who seek God.

Judas is for all of eternity the traitor’s name, and his shadow hangs over us today.
Yes, like him, we have betrayed!
We have abandoned prayer.
The evil of efficient activism has infiltrated everywhere.
We seek to imitate the organization of big businesses.
We forget that prayer alone is the blood that can course through the heart of the Chruch.
We say that we have no time to waste.
We want to use this time for useful social works.
Someone who no longer prays has already betrayed.
Already he is willing to make all sorts of compromises with the world.
He is walking on the path of Judas.

I will leave us today with one last thought offered by Cardinal Sarah.
One last thought that we must all ruminate over…that of our purpose as believes in Christ.

Do we Christians, priests, bishops have some reason for existing other than to stand before
God and to lead others to him?
It is time to teach this!
It is time to put it into practice!
The one who prays is saved, the one who does not pray is damned, St Alphonsus said.
I want to insist on this point,
because a church that does not have a prayer as its most precious treasure is headed for ruin.
If we do not rediscover the meaning of long, patient vigils with the Lord, we will betray him.
The apostles did this: Do we think we are better than they were?

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

just running with it…

I can understand a person believing in God without knowing science;
I cannot understand a person knowing science and not believing in God.

Oneta Hayes


(detail painting on a column within Cathedral of Our Lady of Bayeux, France / Julie Cook/ 2018)

Yesterday I offered a few quotes.

Life is still hectic as I continue playing catch-up.

So, therefore, spending the proper amount of time and energy necessary for more
meatier posts continue to be proving elusive.
And so I offer thoughts and observations that I find to be heavenly and even Grace
filled in their offerings…

Yesterday I had found some rather interesting quotes…quotes regarding both
science and Christian faith…
as there seems to always be some sort of friction between the two.

And probably the most famous clash was between Galileo and the Catholic Chruch.

We all know that Galileo actually got had gotten it right…
he had realized that the planets revolved around the sun rather than the sun revolving
around the planets…with the particular planet being that of the earth…
as the earth was and continues to be, the seemingly center of all of our little universe.

Yet his thoughts, observations, and theories challenged a church that was unsure
and even afraid…as the hierarchy was unwilling to think outside of the box.
And so Galileo, who was a devout Catholic and whose daughter was actually a nun,
was in a bit of a pickle.

The Chruch demanded Galileo recant his conclusion…or if he chose not to,
he would be imprisoned as well as excommunicated.

History affords us the answer to this quandary.
He was imprisoned, living his life under house arrest and was indeed excommunicated
from the Church he respected and loved.

A great book which affords us a small snapshot into this moment of history…
is a collection of intimate letters written between a father and his beloved daughter–
Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel

Letters that were written from a father, who was currently under house arrest
by the Chruch, written to his daughter who was living her life for that very Chruch.

It wasn’t until 1992 that the Chruch actually owned up to the fact that they, the Chruch
as a whole, was wrong in their treatment of Galileo.

More than 350 years after the Roman Catholic Church condemned Galileo,
Pope John Paul II is poised to rectify one of the Church’s most infamous wrongs —
the persecution of the Italian astronomer and physicist for proving the
Earth moves around the Sun.

With a formal statement at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on Saturday,
Vatican officials said the Pope will formally close a 13-year investigation into
the Church’s condemnation of Galileo in 1633.
The condemnation, which forced the astronomer and physicist to recant his discoveries,
led to Galileo’s house arrest for eight years before his death in 1642 at the age of 77.

(New York Times)

Pope John Paul II, who had one of several degrees in Philosophy, and who actually delved
deeply into the study of both science and philosophy, understood better than most,
the relationship between Science and the Church.
“Karol Wojtyla’s second doctoral dissertation,
submitted in 1953 to the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland,
concerned the thought of Max Scheler (1874-1928)
a leading exponent of the philosophical school known as phenomenology.
Phenomenology, together with the more conventional Aristotelian-Thomistic
tradition, proved to be the two great influences on the philosophical development
of Karol Wojtyla.
From the latter, he learned to be a philosophical realist.
From the former, he learned to develop of rich sense of the moral life of the human person.
It is worth considering these two influences in a little detail.

(Encyclopedia Britannica)

And so thus we know that Pope John Paul II understood the importance of science,
and that he worked to rewrite the previous wrong with his “pardon” of Galileo.

I find the quotes by renowned scientists regarding their studies along with their deep
faith to be so refreshingly uplifting.

There are so many who are rabidly anti-church and who claim that atheists
cannot abide by the Chruch’s lack of acceptance of science…
and yet we have so many notable scientists who are deeply committed Christians…
so perhaps that arugument simply doesn’t hold water.

I find much of their arguments actually mute.

Thus after reading my post yesterday, our dear freind Oneta offered such a wonderful
reflection—a reflection that actually reminded me of something Albert Einstein had once
noted about his belief in God…

The more I study science, the more I believe in God.”
Albert Einstein
(The Wall Street Journal, Dec 24, 1997, article by Jim Holt, “Science Resurrects God.”)

My response to Oneta was that her comment to my post was quite the quote—
as she then resonded with the idea that I could then “run with it”…
and so run I have…

If the universe were a product of chance,
we would not expect to find such order and intelligibility and laws.
We would find chaos. Anyone who has studied the second law of thermodynamics
knows that any system, like the molecules of air and gases in this room,
by their natural state are in the maximum of disorder.
The molecules don’t line themselves up; they’re just bouncing around.
That’s what we would expect to find in the whole universe—absolute chaos.
This led Albert Einstein to make this famous statement:
‘The most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it’s comprehensible.’

Fr. John Flader
from God and Science

A sickly mayor, lies, truth and the notion of an a-political life

“A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
Mark Twain


(the mayor thankfully on the mend / Julie Cook / 2018)

Having been gone for nearly three weeks, I walked into the seemingly empty house
putting down my bags while grabbing a different smaller bag and immediately headed to
Atlanta in order to see the Mayor.

Jet lag??!!
What jet lag???

So what was to be a few days stay to help out during schedule changes and
overlapping work hours which came before the daycare lady opened her doors,
actually turned out to be a week
of nursing.

When I got to Atlanta, I was met at the door by a set of worried parents noting a sudden
spate of tiny little red spots covering two tiny little legs and arms coupled
with a puny little girl.

The following day a slight fever developed so an after-hours visit to Urgent Care was
in quick order.

A lingering sinus infection mixed with severe teething woes made for one miserable little
girl and several troubled adults.
She refused to take a bottle and shunned her applesauce.
Sleep was something that alluded us all as laying down exacerbated the difficulty in
breathing and the throbbing little gums.
When the Mayor is awake, all of her aides are awake.

Gone was the happy perky little girl which was replaced with a very fussy miserable baby
who only wanted to held and rocked.


(an ailing little Mayor / Julie Cook / 2018)

Yet blessedly today, finally, I could tell the antibiotics were kicking in as breathing
was no longer regulated through a tiny mouth agape while the angry tugging at ears and hair
had happily abated.
A smile sporting two tiny little teeth replaced the upturned frown and protruding bottom lip.

As she and I sat outside this afternoon, actually enjoying the sun and a crystal blue sky
following yesterday’s ominous stormy weather thanks to the passing of a monster named Michael,
I simply marveled over what I held in my lap while basking in the moment of engulfing peace.

No Right
No Left
No hate
No news
No crime
No fear
No lawlessness
No bashing
No distrust
No disrespect…

It was the only thing that really mattered…just she and me…
a rare moment of simple care and simple peace.

There was nothing outside of the moment…because right then and there, life was that moment.

No cries from Democrats about kicking hard and low at the Republicans.

No issues over preferring to be moralistic while eschewing the current cultural push
for all-inclusiveness total acceptance of whatever floats one’s boat.

No ridicule over desiring to live a Christian life.
No persecution for believing in the traditional family.
No news media pushing personal liberal agendas…

And so it dawned on me…
since this culture of ours is now all about lifestyles that are
basically asexual—meaning our society wants so badly to be gender neutral,
not male, not female, but simply whatever one chooses at the moment…
Why then not opt for what is a-political…meaning…
to hell with politics and politicians??
Who needs them?

Because I for one have grown weary of the hoopla and the hype that screams for our
attention each time we turn on a television, open a paper, click on a computer…

The latest idiocy over the Kavanaugh hearing was such a travesty of humanity…
of what it means to be a decent human being to another human being,
that I really wish I could just cut all of the politics and politicians
out of our lives.

Which reminded me of our recent trip to Rome.

We had the opportunity to visit a relatively infamous oddity—
the hauntingly odd Bocca della Verità—otherwise known as
The Mouth of Fate.


(Bocca della Verità / Rome, Italy / Julie Cook / 2018)

According to those in the know,
Long before the modern lie detector and its harmlessly jittering graphs and
wires were invented,
the superstitious and untruthful faced a much more severe fate between the jaws
of the Bocca della Verità, or Mouth of Fate, an ancient carving which is said to bite
the hands off of liars.
While no one is exactly sure when or why the frieze was created,
there are a number of theories.
Dating back to around the 1st century CE, the Mouth of Truth is a tall stone disc carved
into a humanoid face with hollow holes for eyes and its gaping mouth.
The original purpose of the large medallion has been theorized as everything from a
ceremonial well cover, to a piece of fountain decoration, to a manhole cover.
The face itself has been said to represent a pagan god although exactly
which one is up for debate with scholars guessing at everyone from forest god Faunus,
to sea god Oceanus, to a local river god.

While the origin is up for debate the one unifying legend surrounding the stone carving is
that if one were to stick their hand inside the disc’s mouth and tell a lie,
the rocky maw would bite the offending hand off.
This belief seems to have originated during the Middle Ages when the disc was supposedly
used during trials having the accused put their hand in the slot and if found to be untruthful
a hidden axeman would lop off the appendage.
While this use seems to be apocryphal, the superstition persists to this day.

The Mouth of Truth, which now rests outside the doors of the Santa Maria in Cosmedin church,
has been used as a whimsical lie detector in a number of movies and video games,
most famously in the 1953 romance, Roman Holiday, in which the carving was a major plot device.

Excerpt from Atlas Obscura

So with this notion of a Mouth of Truth in the works, how many then of our current
mob mentality, rabidly progressive politicians, bounty hunting news media
and hateful cultural demigods would be willing to place a hand into the Mouth of Fate?
How many would emerge with hands intact?

How many of the lies that are thrown at us on a daily basis would then not simply be
cut out of our lives?

My life has been so grossly full as of late, in so many areas of this tiny world of ours,
that I have fallen woefully behind in my reading of the good Bishop Gavin Ashenden
and of our friend the Wee Flea, the Scottish Pastor David Roberston.

But for all of my negligence, these brave Christian men are continuing to the fight
the good fight.
So much so that the good Bishop was actually recently banned from Twitter for
hate speech…hate speech because the good Bishop noted that the seemingly endless revelation
of the pedophilia plague unraveling within the Catholic Chruch actually has its roots
stemming from that of homosexuality…an observation that the Gay community took to task
and didn’t much find to their liking–and therefore crying foul…
while Twitter acquiesced.

While we must remember that before he was an ordained Anglican priest,
our friend earned degrees in, practiced and taught both law and psychology.

Archbishop Cranmer on Twitter censoring Gavin Ashenden for describing the facts…

And yet it was what I read today from Bishop Ashenden’s take on the Kavanaugh confirmation
that I wish to also share.
Wisdom from across the pond concerning our latest American dirty laundry.

The presumption of innocence saves both bodies and souls in this civil war with ‘Identity Politics’.

So I must confess that I have gravely missed those voices of reason and Spiritual groundedness
throughout my recent travels and nursing duties while the madness has simply been allowed
to run amuck.

May we pray for those who continue to sound the bells of Truth, fighting the good fight
during these such dark days of falsehoods and lies…

And here is to a happy and healthy Mayor!!!!

Sin and Confession

“No conflict is more pivotal to the heart and soul of America than the sin battle.”
David Fiorazo

“If forces of sexual deviancy prevail, every part of our culture will be corrupted
and contaminated beyond repair…
Religious principle, tolerance, and rights of conscience mean nothing to pro-sodomy advocates.
They will remorselessly crush anyone and anything that gets in their path…
In their quest for cultural domination,
they will relentlessly extinguish the light of sexual normalcy and morality,
as well as the light of Christianity.”

Bryan Fischer
former Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association


(fungus growing on a fallen tree / Cades Cove, TN / Julie Cook / 2018)

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.

And yet sadly, once again, we hear of the scandal and predation from those very
souls who are entrusted to represent this bride of Christ, the Church.

We are betrayed.
We are complicit.
We are quiet.
We are culpable.

The following quote by the martyred Confessing Church pastor Deitrich Bonhoeffer could have
easily been stated today rather than 78 years ago.

Bonhoeffer was speaking of Nazi Germany and of the German Lutheran Chruch’s blood
it bore upon it hands… but his words could readily speak to us today…
speaking to the Catholic Chruch, the Anglican and Episcopal Church, the Methodist Chruch,
the Presbyterian Church…
his words could be directed to most of us who claim to be Christians of the 21st century.

We the church must confess that we have not proclaimed often or clearly enough
the message of the One God who has revealed Himself for all time in Christ Jesus,
and who will tolerate no other gods beside Himself.

She must confess her timidity, her cowardice, her evasiveness and her dangerous concessions.

She was silent when she should have cried out because the blood of the innocent was
crying aloud to heaven.
The church must confess that she has witnessed the lawless application of brutal force,
the physical and spiritual suffering of countless innocent people,
oppression, hatred, and murder.

And that she has not raised her voice on behalf of the victims.
And has not found a way to hasten to their aid.
The church is guilty of the deaths of the weakest and most defenseless brothers
of Jesus Christ.
The church must confess that she has desired security and peace, quiet,
possession, and honor to which she has desired security and peace, quiet, possession,
and honor to which she has no right.
She has not born witness to the truth of God and by her silence,
she has rendered herself guilty,
because of her unwillingness to suffer for what she knows to be right.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, 1940

Bishop Gavin Ashenden has recently addressed the tragic issue of predation in the church
and of the current need for the Chruch to speak up while she owns up to her responsibility–
finally speaking the Truth while she gets busy with a much-needed Spring cleaning…

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

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses,
let us throw off everything that hinders and the sine that so easily entangles.
And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us…

Hebrews 12:1

sanity remains despite insanity’s fight for dominance

For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important.
We tend to forget how huge a part of a man’s life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate,
under Nero or St. Louis.
Daybreak is a never-ending glory,
getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance;
food and friends will be welcomed;
work and strangers must be accepted and endured;
birds will go bedwards and children won’t,
to the end of the last evening.

—G.K. Chesterton
from the essay What’s Right with the World,
found in In Defense of Sanity

Two things…well maybe even more but two things first.

First…I saw this shelf fungus, or full blown mushroom, growing directly out of the side
of a tree…and at first glance, I asked my husband…
“is that thing real???”
with his woodsy savvy response, “of course it’s real”

“Huh….who knew?!” is all I could muster in reply.


(a fungus among us / The Great Smokey Mts National Park / Julie Cook / 2018

Secondly…what about G.K.???

Is Mr. Chesterton not hitting the proverbial nail on the head with his very current
words???

For those of you who are unfamiliar with Mr. Chesterton…Gilbert Keith to be exact,
Mr. Chesterton came into this world in 1874 in London and died in 1936 at his home
in Buckinghamshire, England.

He was a prolific writer, being considered by many, the greatest writer of the 20th century.
He never attended college however but rather opted to attend art school,
earning a degree in illustration.
Yet it was after being asked to contribute an essay on art criticism to a magazine that
his lifelong passion for writing and his career as a writer, would not stop until
his death at age of 62…
and yet it never really has stopped as his words live on most enthusiastically
to this day.

And it is due to his prolific writing that Mr. Chesterton remains as current and
as relevant as he did at the turn of the century…that being the turn of the 19th
to the 20th century.

It was actually from the writings of Chesterton that lead a young atheist by the name
of C.S. Lewis to conversion to Christianity…
but Chesterton first would have to come to conversion himself.

Born of Unitarian parents, as a young man Chesterton and his brother veered toward a
fascination with the occult and that of Qujia Boards…as this was a time of a cultural
interest in such…a time when seances were all the rage and much in vogue with most of
cultured society.

Intellectualism and science were both coming into their own as Christianity was
being seen as the stuff of fables and fairy tales as well as too stringent for
those seeking to dabble in all things ‘other than’…
for this was an age of enlightenment.

Chesterton credits his wife Frances, who he married in 1901, with actually leading
him back to the fold of believers.
They became members of the Anglican Church…yet Chesterton would refer to
Anglicanism as a “pale imitation” and eventually joined the Catholic Church in 1922.

It was at this point that Chesterton became what many consider to be one of the
staunchest of all times apologists for the Christian Faith.

Chesterton was equally blessed with the gift of gab and debated the likes of
H.G. Wells, Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell and Clarence Darrow and not only
lived to tell about it but was considered to be the victor of each debate leading
George Bernard Shaw to proclaim that “the world is not thankful enough for Chesterton.”

And so as I read today’s quote, I found it amazingly instep and even quite timely.

In fact, reading the quote and not knowing it was from Chesterton,
I would have thought any ardent
Christian living today might have said such.

And so it was on our recent trip to the mountains–Cades Cove to be exact, that we
found ourselves wandering into an old creaking white clappered church…
This small mountain Methodist church’s original log hewn structure, built in 1820,
is long gone …leaving in its place the current surviving structure which dates to 1902.


(a pic of the church I took several years back during the fall of the year / Cades Cove /
Julie Cook)

I find that there is something not only peaceful about this long empty church but
actually inviting…

The setting which surrounds this bastion of faith beckons to my soul.


(a view looking back to the right of the Chruch / Julie Cook / 2018)

As we walked inside this glimpse of days gone by, breathing in the stale dusty old air,
feeling the ancient wooden planks gently give and squeak underfoot,
I immediately saw the same simple altar with the same simple wooden cross
hung on the wall…of which was still standing after 25 years when I first took a picture
of our son standing at that very same altar as he once thought seminary was in his future,
I felt an immediate sense of coming home.

Yet on this particular visit, splayed open in reverent fashion on the ancient plain
wooden altar, sat a Bible.
A worn open Bible…
And whenever I find a lonely open Bible,
I am always intrigued as to where might this bible be opened…
what passage did a previous visitor find important to leave for
those who followed after…

The Bible was opened to the Book of Lamentations…
with one section of verse shining like a blinding light…
Lamentations 3:20-24

My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me.

This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.

It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not.

They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.

The Lord is my portion, saith my soul; therefore will I hope in him.

So given Mr. Chesterton’s words regarding our tendency to take politics
(and our current state of events) way too seriously,
of which is oh so easy to do with one click of a button, it is a deep comfort
to see those long-standing words still there, still consistant, still constant…
a reminder that despite our dire current state of affairs,
the Lord remains my portion as my hope rests only in Him…