Category Archives: Catholic Church

Catholic Church, Conservatism, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

Compulsory evil and the new totalitarianism

The Cardinal Van Thuan Observatory posted the following warning. The warning applies not just to Catholics but to all who see the same transgressions of the natural law.

COMPULSORY EVIL. NEW TOTALITARIANISM AND DISTRACTED CATHOLICS

The entry into force of a law in France that will penalize anyone who seeks via Internet to dissuade women from abortion is a new sign that the threshold of totalitarianism has been crossed. This threshold is crossed when national legislation not only permits evil, but also makes it compulsory and considers doing good to be a crime; when national legislation not only admits deviations from natural law, but imposes them, forcing compliance with an unnatural right; when non negotiable become principles contrary to the non negotiable ones.

It is evident to everyone that this threshold has now been crossed in many cases; for example, when the US Supreme Court made it compulsory for the 50 states to make same-sex marriage admissible by law; when the French parliament approved the Taubira law on “matrimony for all” without permitting mayors or other public officials to invoke conscientious objection. We also witnessed this in Italy with the approval of the Cirinnà law on civil unions. As of that moment, any family policy would have been to the advantage of civil unions as well. Therefore, no public administration would have been able to consider itself exempt from doing evil: it was compulsory for one and all. Another example was the recent case of the San Camillo Hospital in Rome where invited to apply for positions on the medical staff were only physicians willing to perform abortions. Continue reading Compulsory evil and the new totalitarianism →

Catholic Church, Conservatism, History, Philosophy, Politics

Thomistic Natural Law and its influence on Edmund Burke

The Edmund Burke Society’s second seminar on the Natural Law took place at the RACV Club Melbourne on Tuesday 7 March. The focus was on St Thomas Aquinas’s writings on law in his Summa Theologica. The seminar was again most enjoyable lasting three hours incorporating the reading of talking points and wide-ranging discussion, between the serving and partaking of food and drink in the RACV’s Bistro.

Of course, we could only cover the surface of Thomas’s explanation and arguments as they appear in Summa Theologica, but that was enough to keep us going. The subject of the classical realist metaphysics that lay behind the treatise on law would remain for another time.

See here for the readings and talking points: Presentation Natural Law seminar2

The talking points and discussions brought us to an appreciation of Thomas’s masterly synthesis of the work of the preceding philosophers of Natural Law. There was also the crucial demonstration that unaided reason could arrive at moral and political conclusions and determinations, though those conclusions and determinations were confirmed in divine law, that is, in the Scriptures. Continue reading Thomistic Natural Law and its influence on Edmund Burke →

Catholic Church, Politics, Religion

The Catholic Inquisition – aka Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse

Gerard Henderson offers compelling criticism of those running the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse whose primary task appears to be the destruction of Cardinal George Pell. Media Watch Dog No. 347, 3 February 2017.

  

ROYAL COMMISSION CENSORS PROFESSOR MICHAEL HAINS’ SUBMISSION RE PAUL BONGIORNO, STEPHEN CRITTENDEN AND THE ROYAL COMMISSION’S TERMS OF REFERENCE

 On 5 May 2016, the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse released a document titled Issues Paper 11: Catholic Church Final Hearing.  The document commenced as follows:

The Royal Commission will hold a final hearing regarding the institutional response of the Catholic Church to child sexual abuse in February 2017. This hearing is expected to include consideration of the following:

  1. Data regarding the extent of child sexual abuse within Catholic institutions.
  2. Factors that may have contributed to the occurrence of child sexual abuse in Catholic institutions, particularly by clergy and religious.
  3. Factors that may have affected the institutional response of the Catholic Church to child sexual abuse.
  4. The response of Catholic Church authorities to the findings and observations made in relevant Royal Commission case study reports.
  5. Current and future approaches of Catholic Church authorities to:
  • responding to child and adult victims and survivors of child sexual    abuse, including secondary victims
  • responding to individuals subject to allegations of child sexual abuse.
  • the protection of children and the prevention of child sexual abuse.

The Royal Commission, under the title “Submissions”, then advised that submissions on Issues Paper 11 are invited – from, among others, “academics or other professionals” – concerning a range of matters. Continue reading The Catholic Inquisition – aka Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse →

Catholic Church, Conservatism, Philosophy, Religion

Christmas culture – Is it just a fairytale?

Christmas was one of the happiest times of the year for our family during the 1950s. A multitude of 1950s kids will tell you the same. It was not just cutting down a Christmas (pine) tree in the nearby bush, dragging it home, decorating it, hanging streamers all around the lounge room and putting out a plate of Christmas cake and a bottle of beer for Santa (next morning there were just crumbs where the Christmas cake had been). It was not just the expectation of presents, the waking up at the crack of dawn, dragging half-asleep parents to the filled pillow slips hanging over the backs of a line of six chairs, and the family gathering around Christmas dinner. Looking back, it was as much the story of the first Christmas and celebrating that great Church feast at Christmas Mass early on Christmas morning. Continue reading Christmas culture – Is it just a fairytale? →

Catholic Church, Conservatism, Religion

Catholic conservative to be New Zealand’s next prime minister

The Guardian Australia reports that Bill English a ‘Catholic conservative’ is to take over the reins of government in New Zealand from popular and successful John Key. One wonders how the leftist world in New Zealand is going to deal with this dangerous development.

In Australia the news that a conservative Catholic had any chance at all of assuming the office of prime minister would raise the temperature of Australia’s inbred anti-Catholic sectarianism several degrees. Tony Abbott is the convincing empirical evidence such a reaction.

Government in New Zealand these last few years seem to be doing better than in Australia where the Marxist left have almost total control over our institutions. Perhaps the New Zealand people will similarly do better in honouring the liberal doctrine of freedom of religion.

It is reported that Bill English is a quiet person who busies himself with his political responsibilities. Quiet though he may be, he is, however, not afraid to give expression to his religious belief:

“It is very good for someone in public life to spend a minimum of an hour a week participating in … in my case, going to mass and hearing language like forgiveness, mercy, sinfulness, worship – none of which you hear about in day-to-day political life.”

“And also hearing stories of humanity going back four or five thousand years. It creates a more rounded perspective on the events of the day.”

Here he is not only frankly expressing how he regards his religious belief. It is also pointing to the fundamental place of Christianity in Western Civilization.

Gerard Wilson

Catholic Church, Left, Politics, Religion

Catholics’ crucial last minute support for Donald Trump

According to a Washington Times report, most Catholics did not decide their vote for Donald Trump until the last moment when ‘in one of the most profound demographic shifts’ witnessed in US elections many swung their support behind Trump. Exit polls showed that the crucial Catholic demographic went to Trump 52% against Hillary Clinton 45% while until then most surveys had shown Catholics solidly behind Clinton. What happened? Jay Richard, executive editor of the conservative Christian website The Stream, is quoted as saying that the ‘turning point’ came in the third debate when Trump’s pro-life stance contrasted dramatically with Clinton’s pro-choice stance.

There was not a Catholic that watched who could not remember the ghoulishness of Hillary Clinton when it came to partial-birth abortion and Trump’s impassioned commonsense defence of unborn human life. It was huge. Continue reading Catholics’ crucial last minute support for Donald Trump →

Catholic Church, History, Left, Philosophy, Politics, radicalism

Unmasking Saul Alinsky: ‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’

It is a tragic fact that most people in the West’s liberal democracies have never heard of the name Saul Alinsky, let alone know who he is. Tragic because Saul Alinsky probably takes the title for the most evil and the most effective operative in the leftist campaign to collapse traditional Western society whose foundation is Christianity. And there is strong competition among some monsters for that title.  By savagely applying Marxism in the concrete circumstances he took radical leftist theory to its logical end. And that’s not to the socialist heaven-on-earth that is the false promise of Marxism.

Alinsky’s best known book Rules for Radicals is a handbook for the application of his methods. Those methods boil down to one injuncture: do whatever ever it takes to attain the power necessary for the irresistible implementation of your political program. In Australia, the application of the Alinsky method is seen most flagrantly in the actions of GetUp!, the Greens Party, some unions (most notably in the CFMEU), radical Marxist organizations like the Socialist Alternative, and in sections of the Labor Party. Continue reading Unmasking Saul Alinsky: ‘A wolf in sheep’s clothing’ →

Catholic Church, Conservatism, History, Philosophy, Politics

Burke’s Catholic conservatism

An unbiased reader of Burke’s writings, one familiar with the history of Catholic theology and philosophy, could not help thinking that Edmund Burke was as close to being Catholic as one could be without officially belonging to the Church. Garrett Ward Sheldon in his essay in Modern Age Summer 2014 marshals such compelling evidence and argument that there seems hardly any doubt left about where Burke had his religious allegiance. Professor Sheldon’s essay is one of the most important in recent years about one of the crucial influences that operated on Edmund Burke, an influence that has not until now received the full attention it demands.

BURKE’S CATHOLIC CONSERVATISM
by Garrett Ward Sheldon

Garrett Ward Sheldon is the John Morton Beaty Professor of Political Science at the University of Virginia’s College at Wise, and author of ten books on political theory and political theology.

In perhaps his most famous observation, Edmund Burke said that the social con­tract is not something made in a moment in time but rather is between the past, the present, and the future. Continue reading Burke’s Catholic conservatism →

Catholic Church, Islam, Left, Philosophy, Politics, Religion

‘The end of ideology?’

‘Words have no meaning if Islamic terror is simply garden-variety violence’

Robert P. Barnidge Jr. is a professor of international relations at Webster University and at the University of Haifa. He is author of “Self-Determination, Statehood, and the Law of Negotiations: The Case of Palestine” (Hart 2016). In an article for the Washington Times he disconcertingly argues that Pope Francis’s explanation of Islamic violence has a Marxist (materialist) basis. Professor Barnidge presents a powerful case with a careful analysis of the Pope’s recent comments, comments that must come across to the ordinary person as perversely biased towards Islam and Muslims. The opening paragraphs that follow are a lucid account of the key elements of Marx’s dialectical materialism leading into the professor’s compelling analysis.

Historical materialism, a theory popularized by Karl Marx and further developed and refined by others, holds that humanity progresses through stages to a class-free society. For Marxists, the course of history is best appreciated through a scientific lens, with class struggle inevitably leading to a communist future. Marx famously captured the predestined nature of history in the 1859 preface to his tome “A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy”: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness.” Continue reading ‘The end of ideology?’ →

Catholic Church, Politics, radicalism, Religion

The Greens’ campaign to render the churches impotent

The Australian Greens is a Marxist political party of extreme regressive tendencies foremost of which is the implacable urge to destroy bourgeois society with its execrable cultural and industrial structure. For the mind not clouded by the poisonous haze of Marxist propaganda nothing could clearer.

The most odious feature of bourgeois culture for the feverish Greens acolyte is the Christian church of which the Catholic Church exudes the worst bourgeois odour. But if the Marxist and neo-Marxist have learned anything, it is that shooting Christians or locking them up in the gulag to starve is counter-productive. A more effective policy is to render them impotent by cunning bureaucratic strategies. Continue reading The Greens’ campaign to render the churches impotent →