The particular challenges men of faith are facing today

A Bishop Speaks to the Men of His Flock

by Jim Graves

Bishop Thomas Olmsted discusses his recently released exhortation to Catholic men and the particular challenges he sees facing men of faith today.

Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of Phoenix addresses members of the media and chancery staff in December 2010. (CNS photo/ J.D. Long-Garcia, Catholic Sun)
Last fall Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix released Into the Breach: An Apostolic Exhortation to Catholic Men, inviting Catholic men to return to an active practice of their faith and re-assume their roles as fathers in society. 

Citing statistics from the Center for Applied Research into the Apostolate, Bishop Olmsted laments a steep decline in the practice of the Catholic faith—since 2000, 14 million Catholics have left the faith, parish religious education of children has dropped by 24 percent, Catholic school attendance has dropped by 19 percent, infant baptism has dropped by 28 percent, adult baptism has dropped by 31 percent, and sacramental Catholic marriages have dropped by 41%.

“This is a serious breach,” says Bishop Olmsted, “a gaping hole in Christ’s battle lines. … As our fathers, brothers, uncles, sons and friends fall away from the Church, they fall deeper and deeper into sin, breaking their bonds with God and leaving them vulnerable to the fires of Hell.”

Bishop Olmsted implores men to “step up and lovingly, patiently take up your God-given role as protector, provider, and spiritual leader of your home. A father’s role as spiritual head of the family must never be understood or undertaken as domination over others, but only as a loving leadership and a gentle guidance for those in your care.”

In addition to the publication of the exhortation, the Diocese of Phoenix will also be hosting its 2016 Catholic Men’s Conference on February 6. It will feature such well known men’s conference speakers as Chris Stefanick and Deacon Harold Burke-Sivers, who were asked to read Into the Breach and offer their thoughts about its contents. Mike Phelan, director of the diocese’s Marriage and Respect Life Office, explained, “Using Into the Breach, our plan this year is to talk about strategies to get into the breach.”

As the diocese was making preparations for its men’s conference, CWR spoke to Bishop Thomas Olmsted about his apostolic exhortation.

CWR: When did you start thinking about writing Into the Breach?

Bishop Thomas Olmsted: I had actually been thinking of writing something for quite some time. It arose out of conversations I’d been having with others about Pope St. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body and his writings on feminine genius; we thought, “Why not talk about the masculine genius?” [laughing]

Pope John Paul gave us some great insight in his 1995 Letter to Women, including the problems with modern feminism. We thought there was a need for a discussion of masculinity as well. This is especially true in recent years, as men presented in the media are not building up the true sense of what it means to be a man.

So, a little more than a year ago, when a woman I respect was making a presentation on the feminine genius, she made a challenge: “Why has no bishop written on masculinity?” That led me to do some thinking, and talking with Catholic men for whom I have great respect about the creation of such a document.

CWR: What was the process of researching and writing Into the Breach?

Bishop Olmsted: In 2015, I invited 20 speakers to come to a mini-synod on the identity and mission of men. These included Dr. Paul Vitz (a psychologist), Jason Evert (chastity speaker), Mike Phelan (director of the Diocese of Phoenix’s Marriage and Respect Life Office), Father Paul Sullivan (vocations director for the Diocese of Phoenix) and Deacon John Scott (a retired army major general). They spent a day making presentations of five to ten minutes each, and we’d discuss the material that was presented. It was an intense day, and I received some good input for Into the Breach.

I had some writing assistance from Mike Phelan and Father Sullivan, both of whom work regularly with me.

.............................


Read more: www.catholicworldreport.com

Le député-maire d'Orange fait une nouvelle proposition de loi contre toutes les violences faites aux femmes.

Jacques Bompard propose une loi contre la violence faite aux femmes

Le député-maire d'Orange explique :

« La France représente toujours un modèle social observé dans le monde. Les actions que nous engagerons en faveur du respect de la figure féminine auront un écho important, dans un monde en proie à la marchandisation de l’être humain. Les violences qui sont faites ne se limitent pas au plan physique, mais regroupent également, le galvaudage éthique de leur image et l’incitation quasi systématique à recourir au divorce et l’avortement, sans se soucier de l’impact psychologique de telles pratiques. Nous ne pouvons plus longtemps refuser cette réalité ; l’efficacité de notre réponse en dépendra. Ce sera un signal fort envoyé aux Français, qui changera des mesurettes habituellement mises en œuvre. Il faut faire passer la femme du statut de victime qu’il faut protéger, à celui de tuteur sur lequel nous devons nous appuyer. »

La proposition de loi est ici. Et voici l'intéressant article 16 :

• "Après la première phrase de l’article L. 2212-1 du code de la santé publique sont insérés la phrase et les sept alinéas suivants :

• « Le médecin face à cette demande [d'avortement] est dans l’obligation d’informer la mère de l’acte qu’elle demande. Il doit :

• « – avertir la femme des conséquences psychologiques qu’elle encourt face à l’avortement, notamment le risque accru de dépression nerveuse et l’exposition au syndrome post-avortement, ainsi que des risques encourus pour sa santé physique ;

• « – établir au cours de l’entretien la gravité de l’acte posé : la suppression d’une vie humaine ;

• « – compte tenu des conséquences sur la mère, proposer des solutions alternatives à l’avortement. Ces propositions sont les suivantes :

• « – possibilité pour la mère d’accoucher sous X ou de confier son enfant à des services de l’État ;

• « – ou celle de garder l’enfant en rassurant la mère sur les conditions matérielles auxquelles elle devra faire face par la présentation d’aides, droits et avantages qu’elle peut recevoir de la part de l’État.

• « – seront aussi proposés les contacts d’au moins une association défense de la vie à même de secourir la détresse de la mère face à cette situation en lui proposant accueil et écoute, lui permettant ainsi de garder son enfant.

• « Le médecin ne satisfaisant pas à cette neutralité pourra faire l’objet de poursuites judiciaires pour non-assistance à personne en danger, dès lors qu’il n’aura pas tenu compte de la gravité des séquelles d’un avortement sur une personne fragile en négligeant de l’en avertir. »

Source lesalonbeige.blogs.com

Communiqué de Monseigneur Marc Aillet, du jeudi 28 janvier 2016 : "Avortement : le débat est-il permis?"

Communiqué de Mgr Aillet: "Avortement : le débat est-il permis?"

« Ouvrons nos yeux pour voir les misères du monde, les blessures de tant de frères et sœurs privés de dignité, et sentons-nous appelés à entendre leur cri qui appelle à l'aide. Que nos mains serrent leurs mains et les attirent vers nous afin qu'ils sentent la chaleur de notre présence, de l'amitié et de la fraternité. Que leur cri devienne le nôtre et qu'ensemble, nous puissions briser la barrière d'indifférence qui règne souvent en souveraine pour cacher l’hypocrisie et l'égoïsme. » (Pape François, extrait de la Bulle d’indiction de l’Année Sainte de la Miséricorde)


Alors que le gouvernement amorce de nouvelles mesures pour faciliter l’accès à l’avortement, nous appelons de nos vœux que ce débat, trop longtemps ostracisé, caricaturé, voire interdit, soit ouvert à nouveau. Parce qu’il engage l’avenir de notre pays dans une logique que le pape François appelle la « culture du déchet », ce combat assumé et mené par la classe politique doit être interrogé honnêtement, sans devenir un tabou social dont même les dérives ne peuvent être soumises à la critique.

Il est en effet surprenant de constater la vigueur avec laquelle le gouvernement engage de nombreux moyens pour faire taire –non seulement le délai de réflexion légal pour les femmes- mais la réflexion autour de l’avortement elle-même, à grand renfort de campagnes médiatiques et aux frais du contribuable.

Nous regrettons que dans ce débat les premiers acteurs de l’acte d’avortement, les femmes, soient souvent trop peu écoutées, au profit d’un « combat pour les droits des femmes » fréquemment instrumentalisé. Il est tout autant regrettable de constater que la violence des propos dont on accuse régulièrement les défenseurs de la vie n’est que la pâle expression de la violence –occultée mais bien réelle et physique- vécue par les enfants à naître et leur mère à l’occasion d’un acte d’avortement. Violence létale pour les premiers, et conséquences souvent dramatiques pour les secondes dont les issues psychologiques voire physiques ne sont malheureusement pas assez prises en considération.

« Le droit à disposer de son corps », dont la ministre de la santé madame Marisol Touraine a fait état à l’occasion de ses vœux du 25 janvier dernier, ne suffit plus pour justifier cette politique mortifère. Il est acquis pour la science et le bon sens que l’enfant dans le ventre de sa mère est l’hôte de ce corps dont il ne partage pas le code génétique, dès ses premiers instants de vie. A ce titre, ce même droit à disposer de son corps doit pouvoir lui être accordé avec d’autant plus de rigueur qu’il est le plus faible et le plus petit d’entre nous. A l’heure où le monde et notre pays sont marqués par des drames terribles, quelle société peut prétendre faire l’impasse sur la défense des plus faibles et des plus fragiles d’entre les siens ?

Nous disons notre refus d’opposer dans ce débat le droit des femmes et le droit des enfants. A la suite du pape François qui disait à l’occasion de ses vœux au Corps diplomatique en 2014 : « la seule pensée que des enfants ne pourront jamais voir la lumière, victimes de l’avortement, nous fait horreur », nous appelons au droit à la vie pour tous, de la conception à la mort naturelle. Et au droit à l’avis.

+ Marc Aillet
Évêque de Bayonne, Lescar et Oloron

« Et je ressens quelque chose que je voudrais partager avec vous. Le plus grand destructeur de la paix, aujourd'hui, est le crime commis contre l'innocent enfant à naître. Si une mère peut tuer son propre enfant, dans son propre sein, qu'est-ce qui nous empêche, à vous et à moi, de nous entretuer les uns les autres ? […] Car l'enfant est le plus beau présent de Dieu à une famille, à un pays et au monde entier. Dieu vous bénisse !» (Mère Teresa, Discours à Oslo lors de la remise de son Prix Nobel)

Lire la suite: diocese64.org

Woman says she's a CAT trapped in a human body

'I was born in the wrong species': 

Woman who says she's a CAT trapped in a human body hisses at dogs, hates water and claims she can even see better at night

By SIOFRA BRENNAN

• Nano, 20, from Norway realised at age of 16 she was born a cat
• Claims to have superior sense of smell and ability to see in dark
• Speaks to best friend Svien in 'cat language' of meows
• Psychologist says she can grow out of it, but Nano wants to be cat for life 

A woman who believes she was born a cat has opened up about her life as a feline, describing how she has a superior sense sense of hearing and sight which allows her to hunt mice in the dark.

https://youtu.be/YWeBunPiIzo

Nano, 20, from Oslo, Norway, makes the revelation in an interview published on the NRK P3 Verdens Rikeste Land YouTube channel, and it's been viewed 122,000 times.

And she claims to possess many feline characteristics including a hatred of water and the ability to communicate simply by meowing.

...........


Read more: www.dailymail.co.uk

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Finland has reiterated that the Catholic Church has not changed its teachings

Lutherans receiving Communion in St Peter’s was a ‘mistake’, says spokesman

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Finland has reiterated that the Church has not changed its teachings

A spokesman for the Catholic Church in Finland has reiterated that the Catholic Church has not changed its teachings on who may receive Holy Communion, after a group of Finnish Lutherans received the Eucharist in St Peter’s Basilica.

In a statement issued last week, Marko Tervaportti, director of the Catholic Information Centre in Helsinki, said that only members of the Catholic Church “in a state of grace” may receive the Eucharist, with some “special exceptions”.

The Finnish news agency Kotimaa reported that the priests celebrating the Mass were aware that the group, led by their bishop, Samuel Salmi of Oulu, were aware that they were Lutherans.

In his statement, Tervaportti rejected speculation about a “new ecumenical attitude” at the Vatican, saying that the Church’s doctrine and practice “has not changed in recent years and decades.”

.............

Read more: www.catholicherald.co.uk

Wartime refugees had a high regard for Britain’s values. But we hardly know what those values are any more

Why the times seem darker now than in 1939

by Francis Phillips


Wartime refugees had a high regard for Britain’s values. But we hardly know what those values are any more

This week we marked Holocaust Memorial Day. I read an article in the Telegraph about the Jewish orphans who were brought over to settle in Britain after the war and listened to a programme on Radio 4 about Albert Goering, brother of Hermann. The programme explored the case for describing him as a “good German” and decided that he had indeed helped Jewish families when he was in a position to do so. It concluded with the truism (though still worth reiterating): “Evil isn’t something we inherit; it’s something we choose.” We are not merely the products of our genes; we have free will.

Those people who grew up before the war and who lived through it are now slowly dying out. At the funeral of an elderly parishioner earlier this week, the war and how it affected European Jews was brought to mind again as I recalled the memory of this old lady, who had died aged 93 and who had escaped to England from Germany with her family in 1939.

Her father, a judge, had been a secular Jew and her mother a Catholic. Being only half-Jewish and a Catholic herself had not protected her from the anti-Semitism of the times. She told me that although she was top of her class one year, the headmaster informed her: “I cannot give you the prize. You will understand why.” She never forgot this injustice.

Although initially interned on the Isle of Man, her father was later allowed to take up British citizenship with his family. Keen to show patriotism, my late friend had joined the WRAF and qualified as an aircraft mechanic. She always recalled this period of her life with great pride and affection; indeed, after the war when she returned to Germany to reclaim the family home, she had worn her WRAF uniform and the sight of it had quelled any opposition.

Then she had gone up to Oxford to study languages. It was where she met her husband, where they raised their children and where they spent the rest of their lives as academics at the university.

Everything about her life spoke to me of an age that is past: her loyalty to her German history as well as her patriotic love for her adopted country; her reserve, her independence and the quiet inner strength that her faith gave her.

It struck me that, despite the horrors of the war, she had come to adulthood and to England during a less complex time in our history: patriotism was not a suspect stance to hold; the concept of multiculturalism, once unthinkingly vaunted, now agonised over, had not been heard of; there was no migration crisis (the post-war refugee crisis was a European phenomenon) and global terror had not been invented.

.............

Read more: www.catholicherald.co.uk

"Fools, Frauds and Firebrands" is not a single-minded demolition of intellectual sophistry. It contains numerous, rich bounties of historical and philosophical detail.

New Left Ideas and Their Consequences

by Sean Haylock 

The world is not good enough. It could be better. We all agree about that. There are disagreements over how bad it is, and what causes this inadequacy. A popular explanation is that all of the world’s problems are caused by oppression, the process by which the powerful exercise their supremacy over the weak. It is a seductive myth, often employed to license resentment toward the majority of decent people who don’t view the world in such Manichean terms. If you aren’t a revolutionary, then you are an accomplice of the hateful establishment.

This is the kind of thinking that gave us the gulag, and it is the favored mode of thought in humanities departments the world over. Academics who rank Lenin and Mao among their greatest influences are subjects of veneration. Men who have repeatedly apologized for mass murder are regarded as geniuses. Propaganda is received as insightful scholarship. In the worst cases, homicidal rants are treated as righteousness itself. How has this happened? By what subtle arts have the acolytes of Marx taken hostage the minds of three generations of university students?

Roger Scruton has offered the most lucid, compelling, and comprehensive analysis of the ascendancy of Marxist and crypto-Marxist thought in the humanities departments of Western universities. In Paris in 1968, Scruton witnessed first-hand what havoc the revolutionary mindset could wreak. Witnessing this had cemented his conservative convictions. In 1985, Scruton published Thinkers of the New Left, a collection of articles from The Salisbury Review, a conservative monthly which he then edited. The book has now been reissued with additional material under the provocative title Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. In his introduction, Scruton describes the reception ofThinkers of the New Left:

The book was … greeted with derision and outrage, reviewers falling over each other for the chance to spit on the corpse. Its publication was the beginning of the end for my university career, the reviewers raising serious doubts about my intellectual competence as well as my moral character… One of [the publisher’s] best-selling educational writers threatened to take his products elsewhere if the book stayed in print and, sure enough, the remaining copies of Thinkers of the New Left were soon withdrawn from the bookshops and transferred to my garden shed.

Today’s reviewers intent on panning Fools, Frauds and Firebrands haven’t resorted to vitriol and slander. They seem content to sneer and caricature. In The New York Times,Damon Linker, completely ignoring the battery of arguments Scruton levels at his targets, in fact showing no evidence of having done more than glance at the book’s contents page, comes out with this gem of condescending snark: “If you’re a Sean Hannity fan who likes to put on airs at a Tea Party rally, Scruton’s book will tell you everything you need to know about the thinkers it so confidently dismisses.” Which is Linker’s way of confidently dismissing Scruton’s sophisticated critiques of those thinkers. I suppose this shows that, in responding to Scruton, the organs of the left, such as they are, have graduated from derision and outrage to just plain derision. Progress of a kind.

Let’s imagine what kind of thought the Sean Hannity fan at the Tea Party rally might find himself capable of formulating after having read Scruton’s book, provided he is a reasonably astute reader. He might say, for instance (to pick the example that I assume would be of most interest to the legally-minded Tea Partier),

Dworkin’s procedural view of justice, though it shares very basic characteristics with conservative conceptions of the law, is ultimately nothing more than special pleading for judicial activism. His notion that the law is grounded in a particular “political morality,” and that the constitution rests on a particular moral theory, casts the law as almost entirely a realm of rights and claims, and the law thereby becomes an instrument for the advocacy of arbitrarily conceived social goals such as “equality,” rather than an organically emerging institution for resolving specific conflicts of interest. For Dworkin, the law, as the expression of a particular morality, is a means to certain pre-conceived political ends, not a tradition of codified pragmatic compromises with no greater goal than maintaining public order.

Probably any self-respecting Tea Partier would have had a firm grasp of the concepts involved in this critique of Ronald Dworkin long before opening Fools, Frauds and Firebrands. But is it enough to utter the words “Hannity” and “Tea Party” to refute the argument at play here?

There’s also an abundance of evidence against the claim that Scruton altogether fails to conduct a diligent enquiry. In the course of critiquing J.K. Galbraith’s economic theory, for instance, he takes the time to say, albeit in a footnote, that “onecorollary of Galbraith’s theory—that firms sometimes (and perhaps increasingly often) tend to pursue satisficing rather than maximising solutions, is fairly widely supported.” I’m not quite sure what this means, but it doesn’t sound to me like your typical Fox News analysis. Neither does Scruton’s approving observation that Adorno’s critique of mass culture is of a piece with critiques offered by Ruskin and Arnold and Eliot and Leavis, and partakes of the Old Testament condemnation of idolatry. Or that the subtler flaws in the concept of the “long revolution” advanced by the socialist literary critic Raymond Williams can be seen detailed in the much earlier writings of Alexis de Tocqueville. It seems it’s far easier, for Linker at least, to summon the spectre of vulgar populism than to confront challenging claims from a rigorous thinker.

Where Scruton comes armed with cogent arguments his critics are often armed only with accusations and insults (in the Guardian, Steven Poole sees tat and plays tit, if I can put it that way, accusing Scruton of adopting “the same paranoid and abusive style [he] decries”). An example of such an argument might be Scruton’s pithy response (pithy considering the oceans of ink spilled in its service) to anti-capitalist bluster:

[A]re we not tired, by now, of this tautologous condemnation of the free economy, which defines that which can be purchased as a thing and then says that the man who sells his labour, in becoming a thing, ceases to be a person? At any rate, we should recognise that, of all the mendacious defences offered for slavery, this is by far the most pernicious. For what is unpurchased labour, if not the labour of a slave? We should recognise the enormous onus of proof that lies with the person who condemns the market in labour, in favour of some intellectual alternative. Just who controls in this new situation, and how? Just what elicits labour from the person who would otherwise withhold it, and how is he reconciled to the absence of a private reward?

One could look at this passage and see only rhetoric (“mendacious,” “pernicious,” “enormous onus”) or one could recognize the gauntlet it throws down at the feet of any socialist, and the awful weight of history that justifies its rhetoric. The intellectuals Scruton studies don’t set out to answer those questions he poses. They set out, above all, to justify their violent resentment of the world’s imperfections.

Sometimes Scruton’s ability to discuss these figures with composure seems a remarkable feat. Jean-Paul Sartre, because his influence was so great, demands a lucid appraisal, but his history of despicable utterances makes such an appraisal difficult. It is worth pointing out that Sartre spoke in defense of the murder of eleven Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, that his response to the revelation of concentration camps in the Soviet Union (when he finally, grudgingly acknowledged the atrocity) was to urge that communism be judged “by its intentions and not by its actions,” and that his anti-bourgeois rhetoric likely inspired the massacre committed by his student Pol Pot. Scruton does more than inventory these appalling associations. He lays bare the connection between Sartre’s philosophy and Sartre’s accommodating attitudes to these crimes against humanity. It’s a connection that Scruton charts in each of the intellectuals he studies, the connection between theories and their real-world consequences. It is no accident that every country that has embraced communism (or had communism forced upon it) has become a hellish slave state. The Marxist’s actions are a direct result of his intentions.

The militant project of the Marxist intellectual reaches a fever pitch in György Lukács, for whom “the label ‘bourgeois’ concentrates into itself every human evil, and the label ‘proletarian’ all human good.” Scruton offers numerous samples of Lukács’ “dichotomizing invective,” and he emerges as perhaps the most frightening of the self-made grotesques on display. He also appears the most shamelessly dogmatic, insisting that anyone who actually consults the opinions of working-class people has committed the communist error of “opportunism,” thereby ensuring that the guardians of truth can only ever be enlightened intellectuals like György Lukács, people who measure out their courageous defiance of the capitalist order in page after page, and volume after volume, of prose designed to be indecipherable to all but a well-trained elite (and perhaps even to them).

It has become a commonplace in some circles that postmodern writing is nothing but nonsensical logorrhoea, deliberately opaque and utterly pretentious. Scruton certainly presents some astonishing examples of just this phenomenon, especially from Jürgen Habermas and Gilles Deleuze, both titans of postmodern academia (Deleuze is responsible for the sentence: “The eternal return eliminates that which renders it impossible by rendering impossible the transport of difference”). But Scruton also pays due compliment to works by his targets which display genuine literary accomplishment. Sartre’s account of his childhood, Les mots, is “a masterpiece of autobiography.” Michel Foucault is praised for “the synthesizing poetry of his style” and his last work, the three volume History of Sexuality, hailed for its discovery, as far as Foucault’s scholarly practice is concerned, of careful analysis and diligent citation. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, currently much in vogue, “writes perceptively of art, literature, cinema, and music, and … always has something interesting and challenging to say.” Such compliments aren’t concessions to the ideologies that drive these philosophers. I wonder how many ardent Marxists would be prepared to acknowledge the poetry in Scruton’s prose.

...............

Read more: www.crisismagazine.com