A History Lesson on Abortion:The Catholic Clownfish

 An Evangelical Theologian credits the American Catholic Church for taking the lead from the get-go over the monstrosity of ruling -Roe v. Wade, or the start of the decline in America's greatness.  This article from the Washington Post by R. Albert Mohler, Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary provides a historical perspective that is all too often lacking these days.

By the time Roe was handed down, Catholic leaders had developed sophisticated arguments and growing organizations to fight for the pro-life cause. In 1967, six years before Roe, Catholics had led in the creation of the National Right to Life Committee. The Catholic tradition, drawn largely from the natural law, became the foundational intellectual contribution to the development of a united front against abortion. Nevertheless, for evangelicals to join the movement in a decisive way, arguments drawn directly from Scripture had to be formed and then preached from the pulpits of evangelical churches.
Those arguments captured the conscience of the evangelical movement and produced a seismic shift within the movement and within the political life of the nation. From the 1980 U. S. presidential election until the present, the pro-life movement has been populated, funded, and directed, for the most part, by evangelical and Roman Catholic leaders. Beyond that, the emergence of crisis pregnancy centers and support systems for women considering abortion have come from the work of millions of pro-life Roman Catholics and evangelicals at the grassroots.
Does this represent a new ecumenism? The reality is actually quite counter-intuitive. The fact that Roman Catholics and evangelicals work together on the front lines of moral and cultural issues should not mislead. The cooperation is genuine and necessary, as we both understand. At the same time, the very Roman Catholics who remain stalwartly pro-life are those Roman Catholics who most closely adhere to the doctrinal teachings of their church. The same is true on the evangelical side, where moral conviction is most clear where doctrinal convictions have the greatest hold.

A devout Jew, who happens to be one of Illinois' most influential civic and business leaders, once told me about the reality of Chicago philanthropy - "It's a Catholic thing."  To paraphrase his words he explained,  without Catholic leadership in philanthropy, like most other public endeavors, Chicago would be one big smoking hole in the ground.  He suggested that I  look at the governing boards of all of the great charities, museums, art galleries, opera, symphony as well as hospitals and social services and you will them dominated by the same big Catholic money people.  To be sure there are Jewish names in abundance, but not any where near the number of Catholics.

My cynical self reflected on the political symbioses that must be considered - the Catholic as clownfish*?  Catholics do not have a tradition of tithing, because of its echo to British Penal Laws that required Irish Catholics to pay tithes in support of the Anglican Church.  The Micks set the table for the American Church for better and worse. Catholics bought pews, kneelers, glass and plumbing in order to build cathedrals.  Pennies made Billion$.  Philanthropy was tribal.  Germans built German national churches, Italians built Italian, French, the French and the Poles the most magnificent Catholic infrastructure in the city of Chicago.  The Irish were called, ironically enough American. That all changed with Cardinal Mundelein in 1916.  Chicago was going to be an America Catholic city.  It is, for better, or worse.

For Better - Mundelein adopted and rivaled the far-sighted Jewish United Fund of Chicago and pulled together a massive social contract with all Chicagoans -

• The CYO
• CISCA, or Catholic Action in all schools
• St. Vincent De Paul Society
• Catholic Charities
• Chicago Catholic Schools Office and hundreds of schools
• Catholic Labor
• St. Mary of Lake Seminary
• Mundelein, IL
• Leading Church voice voice against International Fascism and the "Paper Hanger" & American Communism in Labor and Progressive politics
• Demanded Catholic lay philanthopy

Cardinal Mundelein made the Chicago Catholic Church singularly and unashamedly American.  This is the 'worse' coming into play.

• Priests and nuns mistook the gospels for John Dewey social lab notes
• Some priests and far too many lay persons demanded that Ecumenism replace Catholicism until many parishes became indistinguishable from a Universalist-Unitarian meeting house
• Democracy is hard to parse in hierarchy
• Catholics wanted to become less Catholic and more spiritual - Jocists movement may have had too much to do with this
• Bishop Shiel is forgotten and Saul Alinsky is taught in Catholic schools ( DePaul most especially)
• Democratic politicians used their Catholic identity and helped undermine the faith and the faithful
• Turned Catholic institutions over to the State only to have those institutions gelded

Catholics are not as strong as they were in the 1920's and have far less clout e.g. The HHS Mandate, Government Definition of Marriage and the American Holocaust - Roe v. Wade.  Catholics still pump millions of dollars into Chicago charities and philanthropic ventures, but seem to have ignored the fundamental  reason for philanthropy in the first place - it's an obligation of faith.  Now, too many Catholics give to Planned Parenthood and Gay Marriage initiatives.

Cardinal Mundelein once said , "that not war, nor famine, nor pestilence have brought so much suffering and pain to the human race, as have hasty, ill-advised marriages, unions entered into without the knowledge, the preparation, the thought even an important commercial contract merits and receives. God made marriage an indissoluble contract, Christ made it a sacrament, the world today has made it a plaything of passion, an accompaniment of sex, a scrap of paper to be torn up at the whim of the participants." That was in 1935 and nothing on that truth has changed, except some Catholics and the people they are trying to please.  Cardinal George has said the very same thing for years.

A Clownfish is a good thing. A Catholic Clownfish does great things.  Catholic clowns have not anyone much good.

Baptists and devout Jews are keeping the Church honest about itself anyway.

* Clownfish live in a "symbiotic" relationship with certain anemones. This means they benefit from living with the sea anemone, and the sea anemone benefits from the presence of the clownfish. They are the only fish that are able to live in sea anemones and not get stung by their tentacles. Clownfish are very active fish and are extremely aggressive. Because they are quite active, the clownfish are thought to be "clowning around". They defend their territory and the sea anemone that they live in. Clownfish eat the leftovers from fish on the anemone and algae. The leftovers include copepods, isopods and zooplankton. 

Clownfish have a few ocean predators, but their greatest threat is humans. People who catch clownfish and keep them as pets in aquariums are making a mistake. There are only ten out of more than one thousand types of anemone that are able to host these fish. Many people put the fish in a tank with the wrong anemone. In captivity, the clownfish can live from 3 to 5 years. In the wild, they live 6 to 10 years.

The Full Mundelein: Chicago's Cardinal George Teaches America History

Francis Cardinal George, Archbishop of Chicago, is a great teacher, This week, His Eminence gives Americans the Full Mundelein. 

Pay attention.  Take notes.  Form Study Groups, if necessary.  There will be a Final on this Lesson.

The wrong side of history

 Cardinal George's Schedule

1. Nov. 1: 7:30 a.m., 54 Day Rosary Novena, Morning Air Program, Relevant Radio
2. Nov. 2: 10 a.m., Episcopal Council Meeting, Residence

Cardinal's Appointments

Cardinal George approved the following clergy appointment August 29:

Rector

Rev. Theodore Ploplis to rector of the National Shrine of St. Francis Xavier Cabrini effective Sept. 1, while retaining his duties as coordinator of spiritual services at St. Joseph Hospital.

Text of Cardinal Mundelein speech

October is the month of the Most Holy Rosary, a devotion associated in modern times with the apparitions of the Blessed Virgin Mary at Fatima in 1917, during the First World War. Mary asked for prayer and penance, which she always requests in these private revelations that echo the public revelation in the Gospel: “Repent, the kingdom of God is at hand.”

Mary at Fatima also entered into the history of the modern world when she told three unlettered peasant children that the Great War then being waged, President Wilson’s “war to end all wars,” would soon end, but that a greater menace to world peace would arise in Russia, whose errors would spread throughout the world and bring untold millions to violent death. In the end, however, Mary promised that her Immaculate Heart would triumph. This promise, too, echoes the Gospel itself: the risen Christ is victorious over sin and death.

Eternity enters into human history in often incomprehensible ways. God makes promises but gives no timelines. Visiting the shrine at Fatima, pilgrims enter a huge plaza, with the spot of the apparitions marked by a small chapel to one side, a large church at one end, an equally large adoration chapel at the other end, and a center for visitors and for the hearing of confessions. Just outside the main grounds, a section of the Berlin Wall has been re-built, a stark witness to what Mary had talked about almost a century ago. Communism in Russia and its satellite nations has collapsed, although many of its sinful effects are still with us.

Communism imposed a total way of life based upon the belief that God does not exist. Secularism is communism’s better-scrubbed bedfellow. A small irony of history cropped up at the United Nations a few weeks ago when Russia joined the majority of other nations to defeat the United States and the western European nations that wanted to declare that killing the unborn should be a universal human right. Who is on the wrong side of history now?

The present political campaign has brought to the surface of our public life the anti-religious sentiment, much of it explicitly anti-Catholic, that has been growing in this country for several decades. The secularizing of our culture is a much larger issue than political causes or the outcome of the current electoral campaign, important though that is.

Speaking a few years ago to a group of priests, entirely outside of the current political debate, I was trying to express in overly dramatic fashion what the complete secularization of our society could bring. I was responding to a question and I never wrote down what I said, but the words were captured on somebody’s smart phone and have now gone viral on Wikipedia and elsewhere in the electronic communications world. I am (correctly) quoted as saying that I expected to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. What is omitted from the reports is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.” What I said is not “prophetic” but a way to force people to think outside of the usual categories that limit and sometimes poison both private and public discourse.

An earlier Archbishop of Chicago once tried his hand at reading the signs of his times. On May 18, 1937, Cardinal Mundelein, in a conference to priests of the archdiocese, called the then-German chancellor “an Austrian paper-hanger, and a darn poor one at that, I am told.” Why did Cardinal Mundelein speak in a way that drew applause from the New York Times and local papers and brought the German government to complain bitterly to the Holy See? The government of Germany, declaring its ideology the wave of the future, had dissolved Catholic youth groups and tried to discredit the church’s work among young people through trials of monks, priests and religious sisters accused of immorality. Cardinal Mundelein spoke of how the public protests of the bishops had been silenced in the German media, leaving the church in Germany more “helpless” than it had ever been.

He then added: “There is no guarantee that the battle-front may not stretch some day into our own land. Hodie mihi cras tibi. (Today it’s me; tomorrow, you). If we show no interest in this matter now, if we shrug our shoulders and mutter … it is not our fight, if we don’t back up the Holy Father when we have a chance, well, when our turn comes, we too will be fighting alone.”

“When our turn comes …” Was Cardinal Mundelein a prophet as well as an administrative genius? Hardly. At his death in 1939 he was well known as an American patriot and a friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he also had a Catholic conviction that no nation state has been immaculately conceived. The unofficial anthem of secularism today is John Lennon’s “Imagine,” in which we are encouraged to imagine a world without religion. We don’t have to imagine such a world; the 20th century has given us horrific examples of such worlds.

Instead of a world living in peace because it is without religion, why not imagine a world without nation states? After all, there would be no American ambassador recently killed in Libya if there were no America and no Libya! There are, obviously, individuals and groups who still misuse religion as a reason for violent behavior, but modern nation states don’t need religion as an excuse for going to war. Every major war in the last 300 years has been fought by nation states, not by the church. In our own history, the re-conquest of the secessionist states in the Civil War was far bloodier than the re-conquest of the Holy Land by the now despised Crusaders. The state apparatus for investigating civilians now is far more extensive than anything dreamed up by the Spanish Inquisition, although both were created to serve the same purpose: to preserve a government’s public ideology and control of society, whether based on religion or on modern constitutional order.

Analogies can easily be multiplied, if one wants to push a thesis; but the point is that the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making “laws” beyond its competence. Few there are, however, who would venture to ask if there might be a better way for humanity to organize itself for the sake of the common good. Few, that is, beyond a prophetic voice like that of Dorothy Day, speaking acerbically about “Holy Mother the State,” or the ecclesiastical voice that calls the world, from generation to generation, to live at peace in the kingdom of God.

God sustains the world, in good times and in bad. Catholics, along with many others, believe that only one person has overcome and rescued history: Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of the Virgin Mary, savior of the world and head of his body, the church. Those who gather at his cross and by his empty tomb, no matter their nationality, are on the right side of history. Those who lie about him and persecute or harass his followers in any age might imagine they are bringing something new to history, but they inevitably end up ringing the changes on the old human story of sin and oppression. There is nothing “progressive” about sin, even when it is promoted as “enlightened.”

The world divorced from the God who created and redeemed it inevitably comes to a bad end. It’s on the wrong side of the only history that finally matters. The Synod on the New Evangelization is taking place in Rome this month because entire societies, especially in the West, have placed themselves on the wrong side of history. This October, let’s pray the rosary so that the Holy Spirit will guide and strengthen the bishops and others at the synod as they deliberate about the challenges to preaching and living the Gospel at this moment in human history. (emphases my own)

Cardinal's Column Archive

“What kind of Catholics do they think we are?."

“What kind of Catholics do they think we are?."

That question was thundered at the recent National Prayer Breakfast in Washington D. C. by Knights of Columbus Carl Anderson.  The question was rhetorical.

President Obama has said that he was quite a poker player in his Springfield days.  I don't know about that Obama Bio Nugget, but I have lost piles dollars playing poker myself.  I 'invested' more than enough years ago in a personal Solyndra of waste.  Like me, who wears his heart on his sleeve, face, and shirt-front, has a tell - a tell is a signal to other players. Many times a tell goes unnoticed for many hands, but eventually jumps up.

President Obama's tell with regard to faith and liberty screamed out last May when his NLRB Chicago team declared that St. Xavier University was not a religious institution. As Vice President Biden once said over hot-mic, " It is a BFD!"

In November, Cardinal George and then Cardinal Designate Dolan of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops sat down with the Springfield Kid and his three-card monte HHS Contraception Mandate shill Sec. Sebelius. The Tell was picked up, but not really obvious until Shill Sebelius, a Vichy Catholic herself, punched down the HHS Mandate. It is a supreme hypocrisy and threat to religious freedom.

Catholics and They are at war.  No kidding.

The rhetorical pronoun "They" refers to the current White House, Democratic National Committee, Planned Parenthood, ACLU, Southern Law and Poverty Center, Academia, Hollywood, and the Media.

Catholicism by state -There sure are many Catholics.

Rank	State	%[30]	Largest denomination
1	Rhode Island	63	Catholic
2	Pennsylvania	53
3	Massachusetts	44
4	New Jersey	39
5	California	37
6	New York	36
7	New Hampshire	35
8	Connecticut	34
9	Texas	32
10	Arizona	31
11	Illinois	30
	Louisiana
	North Dakota		Lutheran
14	Wisconsin	29	Catholic
15	Nebraska	28
16	Florida	26
	New Mexico
	Vermont
19	Maine	25
	Minnesota
	South Dakota		Lutheran
22	Colorado	24	Catholic
	Hawaii
	Montana
	Nevada
	Ohio
27	Iowa	23
	Maryland
	Michigan
30	Washington	22
31	Indiana	20
	Kansas
	Missouri
34	Wyoming	18
35	Idaho	15	LDS
	Oregon		Catholic
	Kentucky		Baptist
38	Virginia	14
39	Georgia	13
	Oklahoma
41	Delaware	10	Methodist
	North Carolina		Baptist
43	Alaska	9
	Arkansas
	South Carolina
	Tennessee
	Utah		LDS
48	West Virginia	8	Baptist
49	Mississippi	7
50	Alabama	6

We pretty much know what "they" think Catholics to be: Lock-step voting demographic, close-knit tribal white blue collar ethnics, homophobic breeders, slow-witted, unsophisticates easily cowed by their betters, and    sheep of patriarchal undemocratic autocrats.

Supreme Knight Carl Anderson summed up the American spiritus mundi 2012 brilliantly -

The spirit of our age is profoundly secular.
And secularism accepts religion – if it accepts it at all – only on its own terms.
Under this view, religion is subordinated to the political interests of the secular state.
And it is precisely this subordination of religion to the state that the First Amendment seeks to prevent.
Let us be clear: we value religious liberty not only because it protects our personal autonomy.
We value religious liberty because of the goodwhich religion brings into the life of the individual believer and into the life of our nation. Carl Anderson National Prayer Breakfast 4/19/2012 ( emphasis my own)

"They" have the stage, the microphone,the camera, the White House, the Justice Department and a sea of ink.

We have the Nicean Creed, seven sacraments, at least eight years of Catholic schooling, which trumps 12 years of a public school education, a rich history of commitment to liberty for all of our neighbors, and for the first time in decades a group of courageous, generous, thoughtful and patriotic American Catholic Bishops standing for first principles - the sanctity of Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

What kind of Catholics do they think we are?

Here in Chicago, the great work of Cardinal Mundelein, who was the first prominent American to condemn Hitler, who Americanized Catholic Education, who reformed the Chancery Office, built the largest American Catholic seminary at St. Mary of the Lake and hundreds of schools is all but ignored.

The role of Bishop Bernard Sheil who fought for real American Labor with John L. Lewis, educated parolees without state funding, operated the largest sports and vocational network for youth -The Catholic Youth Organisation ( CYO) which gave opportunities away from the streets for all races creeds and colors.  Sheil who?

Instead, you would think that Saul Alinsky actually mattered in the lives of people.

What kind of Catholics do they think we are?  The types of Vichy Catholics* they create, it seems to me, are acceptable, fund-able and suitable for high and low public office. If a Catholic gets money from Planned Parenthood, or Personal PAC, more importantly accepts that money to push abortions that is what they think Catholics should be.

We shall see in November.

* A term that I heard first from the late Chicago genius and Renaissance Man Tom Roeser - it equates the public Catholic  who demands every, if not most, social agendas that conflict with Catholic teaching and doctrine with the pro-facist French who helped the Nazis round up Jews and enemies of freedom.  Simply, any self-stated Catholic who admires and defends abortion, homosexual marriage, and pretty much every DNC secularist plank in the platform. AKA Catholics for Obama 2012.