I unwaveringly maintain my conviction that it was envy and modernist loathing against Fr. Casarotto’s staunch defense of Catholic Tradition that led to his being summarily evicted by the ex-bishop of the diocese STRICTLY on calumnious and truly evil grounds that Bp. Kmiec SHOULD HIMSELF HAVE INVESTIGATED. I make that claim because even the District Attorney’s and the police investigators’ own comments bear itout. May God grant Fr. Casarotto justice and vindication even in this life as a reward for the tremendous labor and selflessness he poured into St. Anthony’s during his pastorship.

Msgr. Voorhees is a kind, truly gentle and able priest and I am not at all surprised that he undertook such efforts to honor his fellow priest’s legacy in this matter. May God reward him for this, as well.

I had the honor of having dinner with Bishop Benincasa ( and, yes, Mary’s excellent report has it right – he, and his nephew, the Monsignor, ARE truly the descendants of the glorious St. Catherine of Siena. ) not too long before he died. He is buried right on the grounds of the parish he oversaw ( and where I was married and our daughter was baptized ). And, although he did obey the changes that were depth-charged on top of the faithful after the 1960s, when he vested for his pontifical Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve, he wore exactly what he did in Rome, where he served many years prior to his appointment in Buffalo. You have to go to a traditional website to even find photos of such vestments.

Mary Kunz Goldman is a gift to Buffalo, NY. I will not embarrass her with any other comments than this: She’s as much a treasure to know as her literary output is to read. ( And she does have a book coming out, if it is not yet already published, which will be of keen interest to music lovers – and which I hope all of you will purchase and enjoy. )

Adoro te – you made my day!

Mille grazie!

Krikorian (anti-invasionist) gets the boot FROM

Catholic Charities(sic!)… a soviet of the USCCCP WHICH IS CONTROLLED BY

Swarms of professional USCCCP bureaucrats WHO REPRESENT

Obamanation AND the GOP elite, which are BOTH DEPENDENT UPON

$$$$$$$ FROM FOUNDATIONS, Large Corporations and Wall St., all of which

COULD GIVE A ^*%# * about American sovereignty, culture, law, etc. and see the extermination of private property, national solvency, states’ rights, etc. as the price of freedom ( for them ) to reshape the global economy in their own image…

So, technically, this is just one more instance of clueless USCCCP officials letting the inmates run the asylum while the club members devote themselves to the really important business of reading press clippings, visiting synagogues and making sure that traditionalists continue to be beaten like red-headed stepchildren.

Nothing to see here, folks. Just keep moving along….

The Lutheran-Roman Catholic Joint Commission was established in 1967 and aims at the full, visible unity of the two communions.

“A venture in triviality”

Ireland

The Most Anti-Catholic Catholic Country in the World.

C.J. O’HEHIR

During a Mass in Dublin in 1992, an Englishman turned to a friend seated beside him and whispered: “Do you ever feel English Catholics know why they are Catholics in a way that Irish Catholics don’t.” As so often happens, a foreign visitor had identified a glaringly obvious facet of Irish life that eludes most of the natives; in this case, the extraordinary lack of Catholic consciousness among the mass of the population.

Tribal Liberalism

Ireland is both the most anti-Catholic Catholic country in the world and the most monolithically Liberal of the world’s democracies. To an extent unparalleled outside Communist dictatorships and other officially non-Christian societies, the Irish cultural climate is unremittingly hostile to Catholicism. There are no non-Liberal political parties represented in parliament, no non-Liberal newspapers or magazines with a wide circulation, no non-Liberal intellectuals and very few non-Liberal journalists. For many generations Irish literature has been defined primarily, if not exclusively, by anti-Catholic themes. Likewise, few if any Irish artists who work in music, painting, theatre, or cinema profess Catholic belief.

Although, in comparison with Ireland, the U.K. has a small Catholic minority, Catholicism pervades its culture, both past and present, to an extent unimaginable in its western neighbour. A short and by no means comprehensive list of British Catholic luminaries will suffice to highlight the disparity: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton, Edward Elgar, Eric Gill, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Anscombe, Elizabeth Jennings, Michael MacMillan – the Irish equivalents of such figures simply don’t exist.

For Irish Catholics it would be tempting to believe that such a paucity of Catholic culture only demonstrates the gulf that exists between the ruling elite and “the plain people of Ireland.” But this would be to succumb to the democratic fallacy. Again and again history has shown that where elites lead, sooner or later the masses follow. Moreover, all the evidence suggests that the dominant Liberal coterie in Ireland reflects the philosophical outlook of a large and growing sector of the population. Several Europe-wide surveys have shown Irish attitudes towards social and moral issues to be among the most Liberal in Europe. Voting trends too, reveal that as much as a third of the Irish population is now tribally Liberal in the sense that residents of the Shankill Road are tribal Loyalists or the people of north-eastern England are tribal Labour voters, i.e., thev simply can’t conceive of voting in any other way. Tribal Liberals would not so much as contemplate supporting a candidate for office who was not “pro-choice,” pro-divorce, etc., even if they agreed with him or her on other issues.

No equivalent tribal Catholic vote exists. Irish Catholics who oppose abortion rarely allow such opposition to influence their voting behaviour or their choice of newspapers and magazines. The great Scottish convert, Hamish Fraser, once described American Catholics as “Protestants who go to Mass.” In Ireland the situation is much worse: Catholics here are secular Liberals who go to Mass. Nor is this a new phenomenon. Commentators often cite Mary Robinson’s election as the dawn of the New Ireland. Yet they usually fail to record the truly significant facet of the 1990 Presidential contest: the remarkable similarity between Mrs Robinson’s own social and political views and those of her two rivals for the Presidency.

Pernicious Prelates

In the same way, Liberal schadenfreude over the countless scandals that afflict the Irish hierarchy is somewhat disingenuous, since, on key issues, ranging from mass immigration to sex education, the Bishops invariably reflect the received Liberal wisdom [cf. "Sensual Catechesis: Irish Bishops in Bed with the State," by Michael McGrade, CO, February 1999]. In fact, apart from the single issue of abortion the Irish episcopate rarely if ever challenges the political and social consensus that emanates from the newspaper offices of central Dublin. Episcopal Liberalism in Ireland may not be of the “in your face” grandstanding variety so beloved of some American prelates but its very unobtrusiveness makes it all the more pernicious. For example, several years ago the Irish bishops Conference urged the Vatican to scrap Gospel readings that offended radical feminist sensibilities. Nobody in Ireland condemned this internationally unprecedented intervention; an indifference which underscores how, almost unnoticed, radical modernism has entered the mainstream of the Irish Church.

Predictably enough the drive towards a European state has also received the enthusiastic backing of the Irish bishops. Ironically, in this one area the media’s relentless campaign of denigration against the Church has, to some extent, backfired. Before the 2001 referendum on the Nice Treaty for European integration, the bishops strongly urged Catholics to vote yes to ratification. Unsurprisingly, the voters, nourished on a daily media diet of clerical scandals, felt no obligation to heed their shepherd’s advice and rejected the treaty. (Sixteen months later, in October 2002, it took a massively funded propaganda exercise involving all major political parties, the media, big business and the trade unions as well as the bishops – which campaign spent £10 for every £1 spent by the No camp! – to intimidate voters into reversing that decision.)

Cultural Cringe and Decomposition

The reasons for Ireland’s uniquely anti-Catholic cultural and political environment are not nearly so opaque as might appear at first glance.

For a start, it is too often forgotten that less than 40 years elapsed between the end of British rule in Ireland and the beginning of Vatican II. In other words Ireland has already been a post-Conciliar Liberal state for almost as long as it was a pre-Conciliar Liberal state. From the Elizabethan era to 1922 the most powerful Protestant nation on earth governed the country with varying degrees of brutality. For much of this period the invaders had a set policy of seeking to extirpate all vestiges of Irishness. It would have been truly remarkable, therefore, if Ireland had emerged from this lengthy occupation with its Catholic faith and culture fully intact. Instead, the new state reflected, in large measure, the Protestant materialist ethos of its former colonial master.

In his landmark work, The Framework of a Christian State, Fr Edward Cahill contrasted the vulgar mass culture he saw in 1930s Ireland with the still authentically Catholic ambience of Italy and Spain during the same era. These differences persist to this day. Irish Catholics who have spent time in Latin Europe must surely perceive a vast gulf between the vibrant publicly proclaimed Catholicism still often encountered there and the virtual invisibility of the Faith in modern Ireland.

Even Protestants determined to be scandalised by public expressions of papist “superstition” will find nothing to disturb them in modern Ireland. During the 1999 Orange Order stand-off at Drumcree, an interviewer challenged the Ulster Loyalist politician David Ervine to provide examples of Catholic sectarianism in Irish society. Ervine hesitated for several seconds before citing religious festivals he had witnessed while on holidays … in Spain!

Of course, no Catholic country has escaped the ravages of the Conciliar revolution. But continental Catholics differ from their Irish counterparts in one vital respect: they are not ashamed to be Catholic.

Indeed, cultural cringe may be the most decisive factor of all in the decomposition of Irish Catholicism. The Irish people suffer deeply from post-colonial guilt; only in our case it is the guilt of the colonised, not the coloniser. We overcompensate for a supposedly “repressive” Catholic past by feeling duty-bound to joyfully accept all manifestations of modern secularism no matter how sordid or vulgar. Hence we must be the only country in the world to indulge a Prime Minister who publicly flaunts his mistress at state functions. Mr Ahern, incidentally, is not the first of our leaders to have a publicly acknowledged extra-marital “partner.” In the early 1990s, the gossip columnist for Ireland’s largest selling Sunday newspaper regularly made smutty, innuendo-laden references to her relationship with the then Prime Minister C.J. Haughey. To object to any of this would be to risk being labeled a “relic of old repressive Ireland;” an accusation that strikes the same kind of terror in Irish hearts that charges of “bourgeois deviationism” aroused in 1930s Russia.

Pluralist Sophistry

Ireland’s political heritage, too, differs markedly from that of continental Europe in never having had an integrally Catholic component. The two great political traditions on this island, Unionism and Republicanism, both have deep anti-Catholic roots. Irish Liberals often decry the influence of “conservative, Catholic nationalism” on the body politic but for the most part such influence has been negligible. There were Catholic elements in the Irish nationalist movement but they jostled for space with powerful anti-Catholic currents. English Puritanism, French Jacobinism, Ulster Presbyterianism, Masonic Liberalism and European Socialism all contributed their share to the singular brew that became Irish Republicanism. The contradictions that ensued manifest themselves in the colour scheme of the national flag, which honours the Orange Order – the most notoriously and violently anti-Catholic organization in the world.

In its equality of treatment for all religions de Valera’s 1937 Constitution exhibits the same Pluralist sophistry. Nothing could be more calculated to undermine Catholic belief than a Pluralist political system since it exalts spurious notions of equality and fraternity at the expense of religious conviction. The former editor of The Irish Catholic, David Quinn, used sometimes complain that Irish Liberals distort the true meaning of the word Pluralism. But such criticism misses the point. There is no true meaning of Pluralism. By definition, Pluralism must always contradict itself since truth and falsehood cannot co-exist. To put it at its most basic level: it is not possible to envisage a state that protects both the right to property and the right to steal. In reality, Pluralist rhetoric is nothing more than a convenient device for imposing Liberal precepts in the name of tolerance and good will.

Failure of Fianna Fail

Until quite recently, it is true, the Republican grassroots of de Valera’s party, Fianna Fail, had a certain inchoate loyalty to solid Catholic values. But it was precisely its inchoate nature that rendered such loyalty irrelevant in the struggle for the soul of modern Ireland. By contrast there was nothing inchoate about the Liberalism of the national broadcaster RTE or The Irish Times and the other main parties. These forces understood exactly what they stood for and exactly how they intended to go about achieving it. If, for no other reason, then, anti-nationalist Liberals (a.k.a., Revisionists) have been much more influential than Fianna Fail-style nationalists in shaping Irish society over the last 40 years. Dire consequences have ensued for the Church, since, from the Progressive Democrats on the right, to the Worker’s Party on the left, Revisionists have generally displayed unrelenting hostility to Catholic belief.

In any event, over the last decade and a half, Fianna Fail has been catching up fast on its rivals, in its commitment to anti-Christian policies. Fianna Fail-led governments legislated for much of the Liberal agenda throughout the 1990s and the party thus became all but indistinguishable from the anti-Catholic mainstream. By the early 1990s so stifling had the cross-party and cross-media consensus become that Garret Fitzgerald, one of the elder statesmen of Irish Liberalism, felt compelled to lament, in a newspaper article, the sheer mindlessness of Irish political and moral discourse.

Urgent Necessity

Unsurprisingly perhaps, this new anti-Catholic tendency in Fianna Fail has coincided with a retreat from nationalist aspirations. The Good Friday Agreement, which, by conferring automatic citizenship on any child born in the State, is facilitating unrestricted mass immigration into Ireland, is surely the reductio ad absurdem of Liberal anti-nationalism. It will, if allowed to remain in place unamended, inexorably destroy the Irish nation. It is also worth noting, incidentally, that nothing has undermined the logic of Republicanism more than its embrace of Liberalism; an embrace which tacitly accepts the wisdom of Revisionist and Unionist positions on Church-State relations.

What should be obvious from all of the above is that the absence of a coherent Catholic nationalist political position has led in no small measure to the rapid demise of the Catholic faith in Ireland. The development of an authentic Catholic politics has therefore never been a greater necessity.

For the conversion of lapsed Catholics,
For the Holy Father,
For the protection and salvation of our family and loved ones.
In union with everyone’s intentions.

Who Really Was John Galt, Anyway?

The name of Ayn Rand is used to tarnish the likes of Paul Ryan. But what if there is much to Rand that defies the caricature?

By Rev. Robert A. Sirico, June 09, 2011
www.patheos.com/Resources/Additional-Resources/Who-Really-Was-John-Galt-Anyway-Robert-Sirico-06-09-2011.html

Let us leave aside, for the moment, that a politically left operative group in search of the election ‘game changer’ has sets its sights on Rep. Paul Ryan and other conservatives who have said positive things about the philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand. Let us also concede that Rand was a nasty personality who seemed to relish making outrageous claims about her own originality and blunt—make that brutal—criticisms of anyone who would disagree with her, either on the left or the right.

Leaving all this to one side, it remains a fair question: What are we to make of Rand as a thinker and as one who has had undeniable influence within sectors of the conservative and liberty movement in the last half century?

Given the interest in the writings of Ayn Rand in the years since her death, and the intensification of that interest in the present American political climate brought to a head with the release of the first part of the Atlas Shrugged film trilogy, it is sorely disappointing to read and hear such hyperbolic and personal critiques of the woman and her thought.

That there are problems with Rand’s anthropology, aesthetics, epistemology, and egoism, no Christian would deny. What is needed, even more than a point-by-point analysis of each of Rand’s contradictions, is a hermeneutical key to her whole approach.

In the following, I would like to outline this hermeneutical key using Atlas Shrugged, what Rand called her most complete philosophical statement (one sure hopes so, at 1,168 pages), in order to get to what I think Rand was really looking for.

As most people familiar with the Russian-born novelist-turned-philosopher know, Rand grew up Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum in the nascent USSR as the seeds of Lenin’s revolution were coming into fruition in Stalin’s Murder-Machine. What people tend to forget in this regard is that this was also Orthodox Mother Russia, unavoidably imbued by the Christian message in a thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways that even a non-observant Jewish girl who says she dismissed the idea of God at age 9, would not have escaped.

When I first read Rand’s magnum opus in the 1970s, like many at an early stage of intellectual development, and away from the faith in which I was raised and at the time all too active in activism for activism’s sake, I recognized something vaguely familiar in her work, something which I longed to retrieve, but could not at the time identify. To be sure, there was the page-turning captivation of the plot, the hilarious philosophical sneers condensed into the quick-witted quips of her heroes; the bluntly cut and bloodless characters containing little nuance and which might be seen as cartoon figures by adults. I would only later come to see how flat—indeed icon-like—these depictions were as I read and studied literature more widely. But Atlas Shrugged served as an entrée into the life of the mind—as defective as I now see that intellectual portal to have been.

I recognized something in Rand and over time I came to understand what it was. She was explicit in her debt to Aristotle (and even begrudgingly to St. Thomas Aquinas), and saw herself operating within the Natural Law Tradition (though I doubt she would have used the word “tradition,” that being too collectivist for her taste). Rand, in fact, saw herself as the capstone of that Tradition and claimed to be its greatest living philosopher. But there was something else, something fully present, yet unidentified in her ardor.

Rev. Robert A. Sirico is president and co-founder of the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan. [An understatement; for more on Fr. Sirico, see The Sirico Brief by Randy Engel www.romancatholicreport.com/id119.html ]

by Kirsten Andersen

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 18, 2013 (LifeSiteNews) – In the wake of a 100-page report by the Republican National Committee and another document from the College Republicans claiming the path to Republican victory in 2014 is to focus on the economy and avoid social issues like abortion and homosexual “marriage,” evangelical social conservatives rallied in large numbers last weekend to tell the GOP not to turn their back on their church-going base.

The Faith and Freedom Coalition met last weekend and told national leaders that now more than ever, it’s time for the GOP to play offense on social issues, especially abortion.

Former presidential candidate Gary Bauer said he finds the GOP’s insistence that common-sense restrictions on abortions are too controversial to be ironic, given the party’s commitment to preserving tax breaks for billionaires which are highly unpopular. “They’ve got it upside down,” Bauer said. “The social issues we believe in are more popular than the Republican economic agenda.”

In March, Bauer told thousands of demonstrators at the March for Marriage that he would leave the party if it abandoned its principles on the issue of same-sex “marriage.”

“I’m a Republican,” Bauer said. “Let me say to my party: If you bail out on this issue, I will leave the party, and I will take as many people with me as I possibly can!”

Some likely contenders for the 2016 presidential nomination spoke at the conference. All highlighted their pro-life stances and activities. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) reminded the crowd that he introduced the Life at Conception Act, which would constitutionally protect unborn human life from the moment of conception. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) said the House will continue investigations into whether the Internal Revenue Service targeted pro-life groups with audits and harassing inquiries.

Social conservatives are warning the GOP that abandoning social issues will deprive the party of its most valuable commodity: votes.

“If they want to just run on economic issues, you’re not going to get the church people,” said Bob West founder of VoterDNA.org, who attended the conference, according to Politico. “That’s the bottom line.”

Former Congresswoman Marilyn Musgrave, who now works for the Susan B. Anthony list, told the conference that in the aftermath of the horrific trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, the pro-life movement has an opportunity to highlight the brutal reality of abortion.

“This is a time for the pro-life movement like we have not had in decades,” said Musgrave “We must seize the moment.”

Pro-life activists said they also want Congress to hold hearings featuring those who testified at the Gosnell trial, former clinic workers, and abortion survivors.

“It will not happen with namby-pamby conservative politicians who are convinced that the only way to win an election is to sit on top of that really high gray fence,” said Day Gardner, president of the National Black Pro-Life Union. “If you’re going to run for office, especially for House or Senate, don’t bother running if you’re going to leave your backbone in your state.”

A piece of good news, but how will he keep his political clout?

Possibly with the help of his good friend in new York City:

According to the LifeSiteNews account of the same event (www.lifesitenews.com/news/cuomos-abortion-expansion-act-dies-in-ny-state-senate):

Cardinal Timothy Dolan stated that the state’s Catholics would also support [the other] nine of the 10 points of the Women’s Equality Act …

BTW, I agree. Conservatism is slow liberalism — slowly pulling the recalcitrants along so the leftward slide continues smoothly. The only good thing that’s happened recently is that the left got so arrogant that they may cause a backlash, but I’m not holding my breath.

While reading more of the bald-faced lies coming from DC today, our bishops came to mind. They’ve been lying to us for 50+ years now, playing the same liberal-conservative game that the pols do. The hierarchy’s abuse of authority is infinitely worse, however, because they represent the Infinite One. Until they start telling the truth again, there is hardly a chance that secular society will right itself.

In the meantime, I’ll keep voting for pro-life morally upright candidates when they pop up.

And one more thing, the article that started this thread is truly despicable. That this could come from a nominal Catholic is a shame.