His Hermeneuticalness, Fr. Finigan, directed my attention to a new blog called Ecumenical Diablog, which is worth your attention. Here is a sample.
Monday, 5 July 2010
Catholics Don’t Take the Pill or The TabletThere is a custom in the Catholic Church of a Month’s Mind Mass, which liturgically is the Mass on the 30th day after death or burial. As ‘The Tablet’ finally died as a Catholic magazine with its 5th June 2010 pro-abortion issue, today is it’s Month’s Mind. Others will write, and have written, long polite articles explaining The Tablet’s long and painful spiritual death. So I will focus on a couple of points; personal insulting of women and what is to be done now.
My Wife and I lost a child two years ago through an ectopic pregnancy, for The Tablet to try and use this to promote abortion (by claiming this is an example of the Church permitting “abortion”) is at best evil. This is an insult to countless couples who have had to live through this tragic situation. The only thing that could be worse than this is to think of the Priests & Bishops, under whose pastoral care we are, showing us and our deceased children nothing but contempt by reading this rag.
It is a sin to read this rag or to allow it to be sold in your Church. “But I don’t read all of it, I just like the articles by…..” To support evil financially is not okay even if you don’t read all of it. “I’m just the Curate, not the Parish Priest there is nothing I can do about it.” So ask the PP to stop selling it and if he won’t, ask your Bishop for a transfer! That may ruin your career Father, but Hell is full of the prudent who tolerate evil. “If I stop selling it that will upset some of my parishioners.” Oh dear! Human respect leads to Hell.
“What about the right to debate and free speech?” I doubt that The Tablet will print an article by Bishop Richard Williamson SSPX on World War II or Nick Griffin (BNP) on Race-Relations. No reasonable person believes in unlimited ‘free speech’.
I will stop now, the bottom line is; if you have a subscription to The Tablet cancel it today, if you read it stop today, if you sell it stop today, if you write for it stop today.
:(
I am going to screw my courage to the sticking-place and ask my dad to cancel his subscription.
May Mary’s Son bless this gentleman and his wife abundantly.
Tolerance that is so broadminded so as to be flat-headed (Bp. Sheen) has no place among the hierarchy.
Thank God for Pope Benedict, who keeps laying his pallium at the tomb of Pope Celestine V, but nevertheless keeps facing the wolves. Let’s pray for him as he prepares to go to England.
I fully expect one of the most anti-Catholic of the Tablet’s writers, whom I know personally, to disparage the Holy Father.
I can’t imagine anyone supporting the “Bitter Pill” with subscriptions if they have any sense. Ditto with the National Catholic Reporter here in the US, despite the more reasonable reporting of John Allen. Someone out there in Catholic media needs to make John Allen an offer he can’t refuse and get him out of there. It then needs to be put out of it’s misery. However, I think these two sources are already well on their way to putting themselves out of their misery.
And here in America if you go to a parish and look at the magazine rack and it is full of the Distorter (national ‘catholic’ reporter) and America and Commonweal you know you are walking into a den of dissent and most likely will not hear the Gospel preached. Also there are suspect items sometimes in the St. Anthony Messenger and the Liquorian…discernment is needed.
The last issue of American, the Jesuit magazine, was in favor of homosexual priests. We know where that has led.
And, as St. John Bosco said, if something is derogatory to the Pope do not read it and that includes the ‘bitter pill’ and some of these others.
Many times, priests just stock what the chanceries recommend (and we all know that chanceries are not bastions of conservatism). I don’t think all priests are on board with the agenda of publications like the Tablet – they just have other things to worry about besides going through magazine subscriptions.
If enough parishioners request good magazines, then it can get changed. If people complain that they want the Tablet, then give them the address where to contact the Tablet and order directly.
In fact, if the Tablet has to spend more in postage sending individual subscribers single copies…………
In a parish I used to attend, someone clandestinely stocked copies of America in the narthex. Whenever I saw them I’d simply take them home and throw them away.
So what was the point of the “Ecumenical Diablog” posting the Confederate flag and labeling it “4th July”? More than a little odd coming from a Brit.
@RichR – chanceries don’t need to be bastions of conservatism, just orthodoxy.
@Dave N – I agree – the confederate flag mixes messages here and undermines his message. This should be about the Bitter Pill, not Dixie.
Probably still sore about backing the wrong side in the Civil War–and losing those colonies in the 18th cen!
I took the Confederate flag on the 4th of July entry as an attempt at humo[u]r. Something like “they celebrate their secession from us but not secession from them”.
I forgive the ignorant Limeys for using a Confederate Navy Jack instead of a proper Battle Flag (which is square with a white border).
So…sort of like flying Cromwell’s Banner on the Queen’s Birthday? ;)
Let us not forget that just because the North won and thus, they are the “good guys” in the history books, but we (especially Catholics) should probably think twice before before applauding the North’s victory.
No doubt, chattel slavery was/is a terrible evil, and its abolition was certainly a great accomplishment. But that may well have happened without a Yankee victory, as it did in other parts of the world (one being the North, where slavery was still legal in some states during the war, the Emancipation Proclamation only freed slaves in conquered southern states).
That said, the emancipation of the slaves was not the goal of the war, but a means to victory for the North. The war’s primary motivation was the confrontation of lifestyles between the increasingly industrialized North and the agricultural South, and as a result of this confrontation, the question about whether the states could withdraw from the voluntary union that they had entered if the federal government began to encroach on their sovereignty. I would contend that for these two reasons the South’s loss is regrettable, indeed — though who is to say what the last 150 years would have looked like if they had successfully succeeded?
After all, Bl. Pius IX recognized the CSA and Davis as its president — the Pope even personally weaved a crown for Davis and sent it to him with a personal letter while Davis was in prison after the war. There is a great blog post on this issue at The Catholic Knight.
An except:
There are many possible reasons why this pontiff would be sympathetic to the CSA and her president, but the most likely one was that Pope Pius IX recognized in the traditional Christian culture of the South, a mindset opposed to the advance of liberal Modernism. You see it was Pius IX who composed the famous “Syllabus of Errors,” which condemned the Modernist philosophies of liberalism, humanism, secularism and marxism. It is speculated that Pius IX saw in the Confederacy a political movement steeped in European Christian tradition, and therefore a potential ally against liberal modernism on the North American continent. Alas, the Confederacy was ultimately defeated, and President Davis was captured. As the ‘Deconstruction’ of the South commenced, and Davis awaited his trial, it is understandable why the pope would be sympathetic.
Pope Pius IX was a revered figure in the post war South. General Robert E. Lee kept a portrait of him in his house, and referred to him as the South’s only true friend during her time of need. Both Davis and Lee were Episcopalians, a denomination which had many things in common with Catholicism before the 20th century influence of Modernism of course. Davis was frequently visited by Southern Catholic nuns during his imprisonment, who delivered messages for him and prayed for his release. He eventually was released, having never stood trial, on the grounds that he committed no real crime. It is believed the majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court at that time acknowledged the right of secession.
Amen!
The same can be said of the New York Times and National Catholic Reporter.
If subscriptions were to be cancelled, the heresy and pseudo-journalism would lose an outlet.
The one or two good journalists who write for them (although anyone who does write for them must in some way agree) should easily find another paper.
And yet, how many rectories and Catholic households still support these rags with subscriptions???
I know John Allen is often lauded here.
But, he is a useful stooge for NCR.
He makes you read their garabage, doesn’t he?
ikseret: It may be that Mr. Allen is using the NCR. Too bad there isn’t a better Catholic publication out there willing to pony up for what Mr. Allen needs as a salary.
I’m reading “The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman”, and occasional mentions of the Tablet pop up, with comments strikingly similar to ours (of course, I’m also not an Ultramontane!). Let’s see, so far for this volume, subtitled The Vatican Council, I found:
“The Tablet is far from accurate in many of its details.”
— Bishop W. B. Ullathorne, 20 January 1870 (XXV, 18, n. 1).
“I go about very little [in Rome], but wherever I do go, I find the Tablet is considered intolerable.”
— Henry James Coleridge, S.J., 23 March 1870 (XXV, 60, n. 3).
+++
Ven. John Henry Newman, pray for us!
Re “[t]oo bad there isn’t a better Catholic publication out there”: maybe the solution isn’t a better (i.e. different) publication so much as a better NCR. I can’t help wonder what—and how deep a set of pockets—it would take for Catholics to acquire the NCR.
I know John Allen is often lauded here.
But, he is a useful stooge for NCR.
He makes you read their garabage, doesn’t he?
Comment by ikseret
No. I can look at his columns on the Internet and never read any other NCR article.
I get the impression that Allen is personally quite committed to the progressive cause, but his reporting tends to be more even-handed and, since he seems to have contacts, more useful. I have never gotten the feeling from one of his articles that he is a great supporter of Benedict’s attempt to return the Church to liturgical and doctrinal sanity.
Yes, the Tablet has the secular right to publish as it pleases. But…we in the Church have the right and the duty to set the record straight. Miserere Nobis!