Tag Archives: Catholic Church

Catholic Church, Left, Political, Religion

A moral panic in the 1980s

This is the first of two outstanding articles by Julia Yost in First Things. She reviews We Believe the Children: A Moral Panic in the 1980s by Richard Beck
public affairs, 352 pages, $26.99. The article has direct relevance to the ‘Pell Affair’.

Children of Desire
by Julia Yost

My sister and I were preschoolers in the 1980s. Once upon an afternoon, our mother instructed us: If ever she were unable to pick us up and had to send another grownup in her stead, she would impart to that grownup a “secret word.” If ever a grownup approached us, neighbor or stranger, claiming that our mother wanted us to go with him in his car, we were to require of him this “secret word.” If he did not know it, we should run to the nearest policeman. We rehearsed. Our mother: “Hi, little girls. [Lies, lies, lies.] Why don’t you get in my car?” Our line was: “What’s the secret word?”

It was snickerdoodle, if you want to know. It never did turn out to be useful. Our mother was reacting to news reports that America was creeping and crawling with child predators. These were people undetectable by the casual observer but secretly organized in rings or cults dedicated to the violation of children, whether recreationally or as stipulated by satanic rites. Often they operated preschools or daycare centers as fronts for culling. Read on…

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, 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, 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 →