A Fresh Coat of Paint – “While it is far short of the sort of justice that this case demands, we have reached beyond the point in the Father Marko Rupnik scandal when concrete steps must be taken to remove the disgraced artist’s ubiquitous mosaics from public display.” It’s Time to Remove Father Rupnik’s Art (National Catholic Register)
Dynamic Parish – “I am encouraged by the fairly large number of young adults who are entering the Church. They are seeking Truth and they know they have been lied to by the culture.” Christocentric Parish Life (What We Need Now – Substack)
Bring Em’ Back – “The Catholic Stand has just released the eighth part of a series of articles aimed at bringing lapsed Catholics back to the Church with common-sense arguments.” Catholic newspaper releases new evangelization tips to bring back lapsed Catholics (CatholicVote)
Hate Crime Law – “J.K. Rowling challenges an unjust gender law, and we must challenge its roots in the sexual revolution.” A model of courage in Scotland (World)
Peak Secularism – “Forgiveness is a Christian virtue, but the New Atheists make it difficult.” ‘New Atheism,’ Twenty Years On (The American Conservative)
Miss B Converted – “I wept with abundant joy after I received the Body and the Blood of Jesus, and my life will never be the same.” From P**n Worker to the Catholic Church: The In-Depth Conversion Story of the Woman Who Quit Sex Work (Church Pop)
565 Million Deaths – “In The Devil and Communist China, Steven Mosher convincingly argues that the evil practiced by the CCP eclipses that of the USSR.” The Devil And Communist China Tries To Prevent Future CCP Victims By Remembering Past Ones (The Federalist)
Cover-Ups and Risk-Taking – “In any institution the loyalty and obedience of subordinates is maintained by some kind of reward given by superiors.” Why Do Bishops Cover Up Sexual Abuse? (The European Conservative)
Only a Man – “Regrettably, there will always be popes who welcome ultramontanism and the unconditional adherence that comes with it, just as there will always be those souls who are more than eager to kowtow to the man who happens to be pope.” The Rise of the Ultramontanists (The Catholic Thing)
Constant Existential Threats – “Americans woke up to plenty of terrifying headlines Sunday after Iran lobbed more than 300 missiles and drones at Israel. ‘The world stands at the brink of an all-out war,’ The Telegraph insisted.” If the World Sees Us Lack Resolve, ‘They Will Come with Guns Blazing,’ Johnson Warns (Washington Stand)
Atheists’ Religious Narratives – “Here is the crux of the matter: it is difficult for all my students to see that religion is not ‘a thing’ that exists between the four walls of a church.” Why Teach Atheism at a Catholic University? (Church Life Journal)
An Ongoing Battle – “View the defiance not as malice, but as potency seeking expression, actualization, fulfillment.” Hey parents: Aquinas will help you get through those grueling years (Aleteia)
Marian and Petrine Charisms Properly Understood – “When he criticized what he called the ‘masculinization’ of the Church Balthasar was in no way criticizing the reservation of the priesthood to men, but rather, the trend toward an excessive bureaucratization of the Church.” Spinning Balthasar (What We Need Now)
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Re: Rupnick
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This pestilential priest and his “art” are the perfect symbol for the papacy of his friend/benefactor/enabler, Bergoglio.
They are empty, ugly, exploitative and unholy.
Time to get rid of them all.
“Concerning constant existential threats” it must be noted that Biden released Us Air Force fighters together with Us Navy antimissile weapons to take part in battle against the attack on Israel. The UK and Israel’s neighbor Jordan also took part in the defense. Afterwards Biden said that how Israel chose to respond was their decision. He was making a feeble effort to wash his hands of whatever happened next. I share in this website’s overwhelming dislike of Biden. Nevertheless there are multiple existential powder kegs threating all humanity right now all of which have links to each other. Biden is the one who has to try to tap dance through this mad house. Repentance, prayer and penance are all that sane people have left.
The lemmings are rushing into the sea. We can save some of them, but rest are doomed.
Rupnik, again.
The comments in ‘National Catholic Register’ show that, unfortunately, many perceive a demand to demolish Rupnik’s works to be a manifestation of “cancel culture”. That means many people still do not grasp the difference between sacred and secular art. As I wrote before, Rupnik is a perfect antithesis of an iconographer – a priest who rapes and a religious artist who blasphemes and perverts the sacred. Additionally, he chose to adopt the Eastern Orthodox style for his works thus to see him as an anti-iconographer i.e. a modest monk who is serving God with his brush is not an overstatement.
If some priest and artist had affair(s) with some women at some point of his life that would never be a reason to take his works down. In fact, we have such an example of such an artist, Fra Filippo Lippi, a Carmelite painter. He had an affair with a nun, they had two children together and were eventually released from their vows. I saw his frescos and tempera panels, they are of breathtaking beauty. There are many other artists who worked for the Roman Catholic Church and did similar things. They are natural sins of passion. I have no reason to question the sincerity of faith of those people. We are all sinners.
However, Rupnik did entirely different things, unnatural and openly diabolical. He did not have affairs with some Sisters (or whoever). He made up his blasphemous and perverse “sex theology” which he forced the religious Sisters to put in practice with him. If he just slept with some women for the sake of a mutual pleasure that would be one thing (a natural sin), but the man is a pervert who spoke about threesomes as an expression of a love between the Persons of the Holy Trinity. This one fact is enough for demolishing his work, simply because an iconographer’s job is to depict the true image; if Rupnik thinks of threesomes as a symbol of the Holy Trinity that means he simply cannot do the sacred art – because he does not know what “the sacred” is. I am not sure if I should prove this point, to me it is self-evident. An iconographer cannot engage, cannot preach and practice “theology” that perverts and blasphemes God and then pick up his blush and paint the Face of Christ. His psyche will affect that very Face – and this is precisely what we can see in his works, including abuse.
NB: In icons, poor skills with big piety are preferred to great skills and zero piety. Big piety expressed via poor skills cannot harm the soul while great skills without piety certainly can and do. This is not to say that Rupnik’s skills are great but to rule out the argument “but they are nice”.
As a former atheist, I agree with much of what Paul Heck has to say. Atheism is almost never an organized belief system. It is rather, a system of reactive emotional moodiness. And absolute atheism is an impossibility. God doesn’t leave anyone alone. Professed atheists work hard at continuously trying to prove to themselves that they are atheists.
There are those who are mostly atheistic in their thought who work hard at trying to convince themselves they are theists. I believe Francis is one. When you have preposterous notions of God, you essentially reject humility before God.
Many have been abused by the religious, and many like to abuse the religious. Others prefer to focus on self-worship by altering their own established religion, not to continuously pick on Francis. But then, why not, given how what he destroys in the Church destroys the faith of millions.
@ Only a Man, The Rise of the Ultramontanists
Fr Kirby’s riot act denouncement of the stupidity of those radical papists [glossary for ultramontanists] and the moral foibles of the current pontiff, “So, when a pope blurs the Church’s ability to judge and instruct in the areas of moral truth…” is reading that moistens the eyes of this writer. Not only that, but wonderful humor, the story when “Pope Gregory XVI first saw a steam locomotive, he cursed it and called it the road to hell”. Gregory was absolutely not a modernist. He not only banned those diabolic railroads within the Papal States, but condemned newfangled lighting by gas lamps.
What if he met Francis? Well, there’s the rub. Pope Francis is only a man, which Fr Kirby argues well insofar as the limits of papal authority. Although this man, using his eminence, the long history of faith in papal infallibility has managed to circumvent his papal limitations by suggestion, innuendo if you wish, by many and all means of clever tactic to wreck the faith of not simply the ultramontanists, but the confidence of the many more poor Church going ordinary Catholic, armed [if lucky] with decent [and lately not so decent] catechesis leaving him flummoxed. For the issue is the ordinary Catholic struggles to perceive the difference of informal, non binding words from those that are formal and binding. I’ve had difficulty explaining that to faithful Catholics, partly due to the aura of Church infallibility. Which indeed is truly infallible insofar as it is the authentic mind of the Church. But when multitudes of priests and an unhealthy number of bishops decline to address the difference, laity flounder. This wrecking ball of a pontificate must be followed by a moral giant, someone with temper like Gregory XVI but with keener vision of good and evil.
You are right, dear Fr Peter.
Let’s all be fasting and praying the next pope is completely given to knowing, loving, and obeying the commands of our king, Jesus Christ, in his thoughts, words, deeds and leadership. That’s the ONE WAY the Church is certain to flourish in unity and world-changing witness.
Ever in the love of King Jesus Christ; blessings from marty