The Cardinal’s Christ-less Prayer – “This week Cardinal Blase Cupich chose not to mention the name of Jesus in his invocation for the Democratic convention. Evidently fearful of offending against inter-faith sensitivities, he addressed the ‘God of all creation.’” Leading prayers for the culture of death (Catholic Culture)
Democratic National Joyfest – “The Democrats are gathering in Chicago this week for what they predict (and fervently hope) will be one big festival of joy and party unity.” The party of infertility and death (World)
Increasingly Shapeless People – “It is no secret that children love types. If Old MacDonald had a farm and yet did not have the typical characteristics of a farmer, the child would lose interest in him.” No Character (New Polity)
The Bookstore We Deserve – “People tell us all the time that civilization is finished, that the world is coming to an end. But then we look at our sales details and we smile.” Good News from an Independent Bookshop (First Things)
Desperate Bandwagon-jumping – “Is Thierry Breton the most loathsome figure in European politics? He is certainly one of the most authoritarian.” Thierry Breton’s Smug Authoritarianism (The European Conservative )
Payout and Apology – “Lord Frost: ‘It is incredible that people have been arrested for thought crime in modern Britain’” Woman arrested for silent prayer outside abortion clinic wins £13k payout (The Telegraph)
A Vision of Liberalism – “Rawlsian liberalism is no different from Catholicism, Islam, Confucianism or other comprehensive doctrines in ordering society according to a tendentious vision of the good. What sets it apart is that it alone deludes itself that it is any different.” Political Liberalism and Rawlsian Religion (Postliberal Order)
Integral Authenticity – Evangelization is not just a matter of preaching the Gospel. For any effectiveness at all, it requires that we first live the Gospel. Six inspiring books to jump-start your inner evangelist (Catholic Culture)
Triggered by Tools – “When I give my son a hammer, an ax, or a saw it is as if the entire woods demand to become a cabin. They no longer see thick trunks and hanging boughs; they see posts and beams. Somehow, this creative impulse written into our DNA is triggered by the handling and use of these tools.” Why Sharpen a Knife (and a Bit about How) (Hearth and Field)
A Central Thomistic Insight – “To separate the psyche or soul from the body is to sunder the most basic elements of the human person. It is to dis-integrate the self, rendering it homeless and alienated from the world and its culture.” The Cartesian Nightmare of Transgenderism (Humanum)
• Losing My Tradition – “The Vatican’s apparent openness to forgo some of its longstanding institutional privileges risks reducing the Church to the status of being merely another secular organization.” There’s a Price to Pay When the Church Dispenses With Its Traditions (National Catholic Register)
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Surprised that Blaise didn’t address the AA “God of your understanding,” as one of my late Catholic friends used to cite.
Re: Dem National Joyfest
Yes, it’s mind-boggling. Abortions and vasectomies on site. Inflatable visual aids shaped like IUD’s. Policies in favor of sterilizing children. Denial of biologically determined sexes, gonadal evidence notwithstanding.
No society has ever adopted such insane ideas and survived.
Indeed, no society has ever adopted such insane ideas, period.
But, you go ahead, you Democrat-voting Catholics. You go ahead and you vote for your Democrats.
And I, for one, am satisfied to say that the experiment has concluded.
We can now authoritatively state that, no, there is no policy so flawed, so insane, so stupid, that it will convince Catholics to stop voting for Democrats.
I’m not sure it’s our place to critique anyone’s prayer or to compare the prayers of two people, but I do wonder if it is appropriate for a priest to participate in a political convention at all. The Church has a long history of being mixed up in matters of the state and the results, for the most part, have a been abominable. Being there at all is bad enough, but being on the platform and praying gives the wrong message.
James, couldn’t agree more!!
Cdl Cupich knows this much about theology: if he had invoked the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ at the Dem convention, there would have been shrieks, convulsions, and foaming of the mouth to grip the assembly. Cupich would have felt compelled to apologize to his friends for the disruption.
The demons in attendance would have filed a formal protest.
@The Cardinal’s Christ-less Prayer
We read “This week Cardinal Blase Cupich chose not to mention the name of Jesus in his invocation for the Democratic convention. Evidently fearful of offending against inter-faith sensitivities, he addressed the ‘God of all creation’.”
Well, yes, and channeling all things American, Cupich might at least have mentioned the pre-Christian wisdom of Solomon. That is, and about the politicized and evaded abortion plank in the Democratic platform, this from our greatest American novelist, in the words of a common-sense Black man [!]:
“De’ spute warn’t ’bout a half a chile, de ’spute was ’bout a whole chile; en de man dat think he kin settle a ’spute bout a whole chile wid a half a chile, doan’ know enough to come in out’n de rain” (in the name of Jim, in “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” 1884).
Back to the cardinals Christ-less Prayer to the Creator-God….a different message might have gone thusly:
“My fellow freedom-loving Americans, as a sinner not unlike yourselves, I humbly invite each of you to consider that, as a Christian, I am MORE FREE than any of the elitist damned among you…since I freely allow the possibility [!] that Christ is real–rather than not…
“And, so, before we fully mount to the heights of Aztec theology, at the center of the DNC platform, might we finally clarify what has been mutilated by the cafeteria-Catholic President Biden, lo, these many years of the modern Dark Ages? Allow me to channel a dead-white-dude theologian:
. . . “The responses of the Old Testament and a fortiori of Islam (which remains essentially in the enclosure of the religion of Israel) are incapable of giving a satisfactory answer to the question of WHY Yahweh, why Allah, created a world [!] of which he did not have need in order to be God. Only the fact is affirmed in the two religions, not the why. The Christian response [!] is contained in these two fundamental dogmas: that of the Trinity and that of the Incarnation” (Balthasar, “My Work in Retrospect,” Ignatius Press, 1993).
“So, may the Triune One truly bless us all and our posterity, and preserve us from the collapse of post-modern civilization–both parties working together as if well-grounded national unity is still “possible.” But, about posterity and real families, also feel invited to hang with your puppet master Planned Parenthood, for the free vasectomies offered right here on site! That is, if you dudes have the stomach for it, or whatever.”
Amen.
@ A Central Thomistic Insight
A genius who outsmarted himself, Renee Descartes Catholic by disposition is initially responsible [the disparity reinforced by Hume finalized by Kant] for the chasm that grew in the West between the mind and the external world, between spirit and matter.
Writer Caitlin Gilson studies the ramifications centering on transgender madness. I use the word madness because the basic premise of appreciating the body as a peripheral something to be subject to the will [Caitlin Gilson makes the distinction of transferring management of the body from the intellect to the will] is a disorder, an abrogation of the order of nature. Natural correspondence between the human intellect and the external world severed, foreign, the body an intimate alien.
Scholasticism and the misinterpretations of Aquinas’ thought, long hardly comprehensible treatises on his works were largely responsible for the absence of appreciation, perhaps the knowledge of his demonstrations of the intimate unity of body and soul, and to wit the paramount principle that Man knows through the senses – that the first principle of all knowledge is sensible perception. Descartes’ followed by Kant, the latter who retains influence today has made inroads into Catholic thought. As Ms Gilson alludes, the will subject to sentiment and disordered passions articulates the process of moral disintegration collapsing Mankind. A cultural rebirth of the intrinsic unity in Man of soul and body can be achieved by conversion to the truths of Catholic Christianity.
Addendum to the absolute priority of the fact of sensible perception as the initial knowledge of the intellect, therefore the first principle of all knowledge is that this fact is irreducible, and not subject to after the fact imaginative speculation of which Descartes, Hume, and Kant are guilty.
I want to thank CWR for these “compilation articles”! I always find a great article or two that I know I never would have otherwise found in the morass of the internet!
Every time I click on the link to this article Thierry Breton’s Smug Authoritarianism (The European Conservative ) it takes me to the aricle at First Things. Please fix.
Thanks, Duane, and apologies for the mistake. It has been fixed. You can directly access it here as well.
@ Increasingly Shapeless People
Man’s search for identity. Or is it rather loss of a reason to search because there’s no specifying identity out there for folks to search. Author Barnes tells us prior to technology as supreme eliminating identity with what we do, the hard gritty stuff or management of such labor we more easily drift from occupations. Reduced to an indefinable man wearing t shirts with some suggestion even if it’s simply spoof or humor or love of dogs. “We need not wonder why modern nations are characterized by the language of revolution and a rote antipathy between the young and the old” (Barnes). Although the insight is excellent, it should be obvious that it goes deeper.
When the answer has a material solution it means the spiritual, Man’s spiritual identity has been lost. Lost by the cognoscenti able to perceive the problem although limited by the scope of their intellectual vision to perceive the answer. Literally they don’t see the forest for the trees. We’ve surrendered the irrefutable fact that our identity is found exclusively in the one person Jesus Christ.
Birds of a feather flock together. Cupich reminds me of the false prophets in Jeremiah who were proclaiming peace and safety in the years just before the Babylonian Captivity. They were false shepherds preaching a false message, and they fell under God’s judgment. Not surprising that he failed to mention the Savior in his prayer. You can’t share what you don’t have.
It’s the thin end of the wedge