“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.

Explaining ObamaCare and the HHS Abortion Mandate

When life needs a guide-book, there is no better source for context or compelling narrative to ease one through the twisted maze than poetry. The Song of Solomon, The Pslams, Essay on Man, Paradise Lost, Absolam and Achitophel, Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot have helped me at times. When that failed, I generally turned to prayer (real poetry) and if that failed, I did some yard work or scrubbed out the shower stall. Poetry generally works.

It is tough to get one's head around the Obama Administration - regime more accurately - and its insistence upon group think and the Constitution.

However, only the poet Adam Rex seems to have his delicate fingers on the pulse political and fully explains the nature and intent of the Obama Regime and Big Government itself.

When Frankenstein
prepared to dine
on ham-and-cheese on wheat,
he found, instead,
he had no bread
(or mustard, cheese, or meat).
What could he do?
He thought it through
until his brain was sore,
And thought he ought
to see what he could
borrow from next door...

Rex 2006

Eureka! Dominus in caelo, e quis!

Read this poem and then apply the principles of criticism - Deconstruction(Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man), Marxist -Gender -Inclination, or Queer Theory , Structuralist Linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, as you choose.

Dusty old me, I cling to the New Criticism of the hillybilly theorists -Johnny Crowe Ransom and believe that words matter and a 12-gauge splatters!

Cardinal George's Letter on Obama Choice Mandate-Cosmic Impiety and Single Living

"Give me a place to stand, and I shall move the Earth with a lever" Archimedes

Cardinal George's powerful letter deconstructs the Obama Shell Game regarding Mandated Choice and serves notice on a culture that celebrates the end of marriage as the fulcrum that supports and hinges civilization.

Contraception means 'against fertilization.' No babies. An unfertilized civilization runs against the clock and ultimately . . .well who is left to do the counting? Nancy Pelosi? Dave Axelrod? Forced contraception is Planned Parenthood's President Obama's triumph of what Bertrand Russell called the cosmic impiety of secular thought.

Piety is recognition of obligations. Cardinal George's fine letter read to Catholics in Chicago today challenges us to those obligations.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced on January 20 that
almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services” in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.

In so ruling, the Administration has seemingly ignored the First Amendment to the
Constitution of the United States, denying to Catholics our Nation’s first and most fundamental freedom, that of religious liberty. As a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics must be prepared either to violate our consciences, or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so). The Administration’s sole concession was to give our institutions one year to comply.
We cannot—we will not—comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made
second class citizens because of their religious beliefs. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. Our parents and grandparents did not come to these shores to help build America’s cities and towns, its infrastructure and institutions, its enterprise and culture, only to have their posterity stripped of their God given rights. All that has been built up over so many years in our Catholic institutions should not be taken away by the stroke of an administrator’s pen. This order reduces the Church to a private club, destroying her public mission in society. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same.

Francis Cardinal George has challenged not only Catholic, but Americans to stand together against the prevailing sentiment that marriage is the fulcrum of culture.

Cardinal George and Joel Kotkin, America's best societal analyst and demographer, write about the mindset that is America's Cosmic Impiety. In Russell’s chapter in his A History of Western Philosophy on the American pragmatist philosophy John Dewey, he has a long aside on what he calls “cosmic impiety” with a certain dread as to unspoken but potentially ruinous consequences:

“The attitude of man towards the non-human environment has differed profoundly at different times. The Greeks, with their dread of hubris and their belief in a Necessity or Fate superior even to Zeus, carefully avoided what would have seemed to them insolence towards the universe. The Middle Ages carried submission much further: humility towards God was a Christian’s first duty. Initiative was cramped by this attitude, and great originality was scarcely possible. The Renaissance restored human pride, but carried it to the point where it led to anarchy and disaster. Its work was largely undone by the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. But modern technique, while not altogether favorable to the lordly individual of the Renaissance, has revived the sense of the collective power of human communities. Man, formerly too humble, begins to think of himself as almost a God. The Italian pragmatist Papini urges us to substitute the ‘Imitation of God’ for the ‘Imitation of Christ’.” (Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, p. 737)

Russell further goes on to say on the same page:

“In all this I feel a grave danger, the danger of what might be called cosmic impiety. The concept of ‘truth’ as something dependent upon facts largely outside human control has been one of the way in which philosophy hitherto has inculcated the necessary element of humility. When this check upon pride is removed, a further step is taken on the road towards a certain kind of madness… I am persuaded that this intoxication is the greatest danger of our time…”

Nothing says Dewey like Planned Parenthood. In order to make the euthanasia and infanticide wholesome articles of modern evolved secular doctrinal bad medicine go down, the sugar of self-love and single living is poured down from every cultural outlet. Joel Kotkin hones in on this toxic sweetener by identifying where single living takes root:

The importance of singlehood and childlessness is amplified by location. The greatest bastions of non-families are found in the centers of the country’s media, cultural and intellectual life. Single households already constitute a majority in Manhattan and Washington, and they are heading in that direction in Denver, Seattle and San Francisco.

The growing self-confidence of these post-familial constituencies is evident in recent articles and books hailing not only the legitimacy but even the preference of this lifestyle option. Kate Bollick’s much celebrated and well-argued portrayal in the Atlantic of attractive matchless, and childless, 40-something females celebrates the coming of age of this new perspective on family life.

Bollick , citing the degraded condition of today’s males, openly embraces “the end of traditional marriage as an ideal.” One of her heroines, California psychologist Bella DePaulo, dismisses the traditional family unit as a kind of mental malady she labels “matrimania.” Oh well, there goes the primary basis for four thousand years of civilization.

Why would this be important, one might ask? Kotkin explains it's all about political power, Clyde!

The Atlantic piece serves as a kind manifesto for this key emerging Democratic constituency. But it’s not just single women now swarming into the Democratic Party. NYU Professor Eric Klineberg’s recent ode to singleness in the New York Times follows a similar narrative, but has room for left-leaning male singletons as well. This trend is even more pronounced in demographically disintegrating Europe, a fact that only increases its appeal to the sophisticated denizens of the single zone.

Are there any risks to Democrats — and advantages to Republicans — in this new post-familial tilt? Author and New America fellow Phil Longman argues that in the long run the “greater fertility of conservative segments of society ” could allow the palpably brain-dead GOP to inherit the country. Childless singletons may be riding high now, he writes, but as non-breeders their influence ends with their own lifespans.

To win the future, according to Democratic activists and millennial chroniclers Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, Democrats must all appeal to the next generation of families. Many of today’s childless millennials are still under 30 and plan to have kids. Reflecting their own experience with divorce as children, 50% consider being a good parent their highest priority in life. A strong plurality also see themselves ending up in the suburbs.

That means Democrats could pay a big price for disdaining homemakers, the often unaesthetic chores of child-raising and particularly suburbia, because that’s precisely the place where many of today’s urban millennials will likely end up in the next decade.

To address the future millennials, Democrats don’t need to adopt the often Medievalist views of their Republican rivals. But they will have to craft a message that appeals to a demographic that looks, at least somewhat, like the current First Family.

Marriage and the family is the fulcrum for the lever of civilization. Without marriage there is an empty planet, let alone a civilization.

Cardinal George and Joel Kotkin are taking up the warning against Dewey/Hegalian 'cosmic impiety' from 1946. We are challenged.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/joelkotkin/2012/02/10/sex-singles-and-the-presidency/2/

http://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2011/10/07/cosmic-hubris-or-cosmic-humility/