Can you dig it?

Here's how it's done

Speaking of not lying, Archbishop Fulton Sheen did not lie in this story, but neither did he give in to the temptation of "non-violence". Excerpt:

She said "I will only come back if you promise you will not ask me to go to confession."

"OK, I promise I will not ask you to go to confession."

"Say it again, you will not ask me to go to confession".

"OK, I promise again, I will not ask you to go to confession".

She came back that afternoon and he met her at the church door. He told her that there were paintings by Rembrandt and Van Dyke in that chapel and would she like to see them? She said yes.

"And as we walked up the side aisle to see the paintings, I pushed her into a confession box. (I did not ask her if she wanted to go to confession.) I was present three months later when she took her veil as a member of the perpetual adoration sisters where she is to this day."

Yeah, he knocked the devil out of her. Reminds me of Christ's assertion the the Kingdom of Heaven being taken by force by "men of violence." OK, it wasn't too rough I'm sure; it wasn't violence for violence sake. He was a man who wasn't afraid to push and who understood that a little goes a long way.

Abp. Sheen: "I pushed her into a confession box."

Also reminds me of St. Jude's remark about "snatching" people from the fire.

Church Teaching on Families and State

I mentioned several weeks ago that I'd signed up to get these emails everyday to help me study the catechism. I've been doing pretty good at it, just missed a few days. The service uses the popular YOUCAT version which is based on the official catechism. I thought I'd post the two for today, questions 369 and 370.

Why are families irreplaceable?
Every child is descended from one father and one mother and longs for the warmth and safety of a family so that he may grow up secure and happy. The family is the basic cell of human society. The values and principles that are lived out in the small circle of the family are what make solidarity in the life of larger society possible in the first place.

---

Why should the State protect and promote families?
The welfare and future of a State depend on the ability of the smallest unit within it, the family, to live and develop. No State has the right to intrude on the basic cell of society, the family, by its regulations or to question its right to exist. No State has the right to define the family differently, for the family's commission comes from the Creator. No State has the right to deprive the family of its fundamental functions, especially in the area of education. On the contrary, every State has the duty to support families with its assistance and to ensure that its material needs are met.

These point segue with something else I've been studying in Vatican II's DECREE ON THE APOSTOLATE OF THE LAITY, written by Blessed Paul VI. Excerpt:

17. There is a very urgent need for this individual apostolate in those regions where the freedom of the Church is seriously infringed. In these trying circumstances, the laity do what they can to take the place of priests, risking their freedom and sometimes their life to teach Christian doctrine to those around them, training them in a religious way of life and a Catholic way of thinking, leading them to receive the sacraments frequently and developing in them piety, especially Eucharistic devotion. While the sacred synod heartily thanks God for continuing also in our times to raise up lay persons of heroic fortitude in the midst of persecutions, it embrace them with fatherly affection and gratitude.

 Yes. Truly a prophet.

What your Rod Dreher Benedict Option community will be like

A kennel of distempered Chihuahuas barking at a cat.

Patriarch Rod, who in middle age is still whining about being "tortured" as a high schooler,

When I think about the bullying I endured in high school, the most indelible image on my mind is being pinned to the floor and tortured in a hotel room on a school trip, and the two adult women chaperones in the room literally stepping over me, lying there screaming for them to help me, as they left the hotel room. 

finds yet another pariah to group-deride in order to keep the cult bond strong. After all, what does the Prophet of the Benedict Option focus on for those excellent, tingling, culturally disengaging blog hits if not strippers?

The post itself is entirely uninteresting. What is useful are Rod's consistent testimonials to his self-valorizing Christianity:

[NFR: That’s not the point. The point is that she is lying down with dogs, and complaining about flea bites. — RD]

 [NFR: “Sex work,” as you call it, is inherently dehumanizing. The exploitation this writer complains about comes with the territory. What does she think “sex work” is? What sort of person does she think it serves? The kind of people who treat women like dirt. — RD]

Crunchy Mike brings it home:

It’s ironic (putting it kindly) that the greatest (only) source of my exposure to the trashiest aspects of our culture is this blog, home of the BenOp. It’s just so hard to square. Step away from the underbelly of the interwebs, Rod. Practice what you preach. You’re strategically withdrawing from the wrong things, and wallowing in what you claim is demoralizing and desensitizing us all.

[NFR: Are you not aware that this piece did not come from Gawker or some like site, but from The New York Times? It is leading the op-ed slot on the paper’s website. That is what makes it interesting to me — what it says about how our cultural elites regard stripping, sex, and human dignity. Your problem, ultimately, is not with me, but with the NYT, which is *not* the “underbelly of the interwebs,” but the flagship journal of the American cultural elite. If the Times thinks workplace justice for strippers is a vital concern, it tells us something about the culture. You think it’s trashy of me to notice this? Good grief. — RD]

Let me break it to you gently, Crunchy Mike, this isn't a bug in Rod Dreher's Benedict Option, it's its defining feature: the "Christian" version of the Mean Girls Table, where those who do measure up in their own eyes can sit apart and mock those who don't - strippers, the "wrong kind" of other Christians, the riff-raff of a world they've never managed to mature into.

And, as we've discussed before, of course they'll expect someone else to protect them.

It may not come as a surprise to some of you that I have known some strippers, even drunk with some strippers. Guess what? Except for what they do, they're just like you (particularly if you're a woman), same on the outside, same on the inside.

Yeah, there are crackheads and other desperate losers among them, but most of the ones I've known do it to support their kids, so they won't have to do the same kind of work. From what I've read so far of the sniveling, backbiting little Dreherhua - from his own lips - he's got miles and miles to go before he'd ever come close to being worthy of washing the feet of the women I've known.

Why would anyone be remotely surprised his closest family and community despises him in the same way?

So here's your Benedict Option, fools. Vaya con Rodos. And good riddance to all of you who vaya with him.

I have finally arrived

I love some of the stuff that lands in my inbox. It makes me feel so special, like this latest invitation:

Registry of Distinguished Women - Confirm your Free Membership
NAPW [info@happypene.com]
Sent:    Thursday, August 13, 2015 11:08 AM
To:       pauli@mugglematters.com

Pauli Congratulations, You've qualified To Join the National Association of Professional Women!

Very Few are selected each year to be included into NAPW.

Please Confirm your Invitation.
http://west21.happypene.com/O0bEW67Iq7iaVnmabrnVKwmr8MIZxcoQ0ir5Pch5HYu62qPPheC58vsKsMkl6wBkqYrZEVS4zDInmidVLbbSLWBaqZz65crB/3OgcE3zjtTOqIUvdxregcTggPPoosPSKF9pSCXC3wAlsP0fMKYrKe/g==

Hilarious.

It's Pauli, not Paula. "Learn your genders, man!"

Holding up a mirror to Planned Parenthood

I'm very busy today, but I feel like this post is necessary to read and assimilate for everyone concerned with the fighting the moral war we've been fighting since Eve bit the apple. It's especially important for all Christians and other Pro-life people upon the release of the latest video from the Center for Medical Progress to agree that the undercover work they do is good and just and justified. Here's the meat of it:

Here are just a few of the implications of verbal pacifism. On that theory, the following activities would be intrinsically evil, just like using child suicide bombers against the Nazis — and it would be better to die, and let millions of others be tortured, raped or killed, rather than engage in them. In fact, doing any one of them would be a sin sufficient to damn one’s soul to hell:

• Deceiving the Pharaoh who wished to kill all the newborn male Hebrews — as the midwives did in Exodus 1:15-21. (The Bible tells us that “God dealt well with the midwives.”)
• Deceiving priest-hunters by using assumed names, as Jesuit missionaries did when they ministered in Reformation England, and St. Miguel Pro did in Mexico in the 1920s.
• Deceiving the Nazis to rescue Jews from the gas chambers, as Oskar Schindler did.
• Distributing false baptismal certificates so that Jews could pass as Gentiles and escape extermination, as John XXIII did during World War II.
• Using false documents and false statements in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, like the conspirators working with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who were aided by Pope Pius XII (who passed their messages via Vatican couriers).
• Deceiving the brutal dictators who hoped to hunt down and torture leftist priests, as Pope Francis did while serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires.
• Posing as a child in online forums in order to catch child porn distributors and pedophiles, as police routinely do — having found it the only effective means of capturing such predators.
• Pretending to be an Islamist, in order to infiltrate terrorist organizations like al-Qaida and ISIS, as CIA operatives do.
• Misleading criminal suspects about the evidence you have, as police do to obtain truthful confessions without coercion.
• Infiltrating an abortion business like Planned Parenthood to see if they are breaking laws about statutory rape and organ trafficking, as Live Action and the Center for Medical Progress did.

Any moral philosophy that claims that all these activities are intrinsically evil has got some explaining to do. By insisting on premises that yield such repugnant conclusions, and claiming that the only alternative is a crass and unprincipled pragmatism, verbal pacifists are cutting off their nose to spite their face.

I was so glad to see clarity provided on the morality of some types of trickery that I sent an email to the author. Here's an abbreviated form of the email:

Excellent work, John! I honestly don't know what Mark Shea's deal is. What is really going on here is that people are holding up a MIRROR to the face of Planned Parenthood, they're looking in, seeing the ugliness and saying "YEP. THAT'S ME. THAT'S US. WE *OWN* IT, WE'RE PROUD OF IT." Picasso said something like "art is a lie which helps us see the truth". Well, what CMP does is ARTWORK.

Here's a few other points I've thought of in the past to counter Shea's absurdity and obsession:

• Acts 5:7-9: St. Peter dissimulates and sets up Sapphira for the Holy Spirit to whack her. So... St. Peter tempted her to sin?
• I Kings 3:24-28: King Solomon tricks a hooker into revealing that she is not the mother, and that she's OK with murdering an innocent child.

These events are held up in sacred scripture as truly right and just. And of course there are many other examples from scripture and elsewhere in history.

The second example is particularly apropos to CMP — they are basically being Solomon in the modern day.

Keep up the good work.

Still in search of Rod Dreher's Benedict Option

In response to a claim that "[Rod Dreher's] Benedict Option work is massively important for American Christianity"*, Vox Popoli commenter YIH has unearthed an early training film:

But who says Benedict Option ducking and covering can't also be fun?

Rod Dreher & Marvin Olasky practice practicing Rod Dreher's Benedict Option

Not to mention, if you happen to be chosen as one of the Benedict Option Elect by actually being invited into the prophet's compound, you also get the rare privilege of wielding Rod's Mighty Mallet:

Marvin Olasky whacks the wood

Marvin Olasky, to his great honor, joins an impressive roster of previously co-opted mallet minions, Rod's recently declared Pagan soul mate Franklin Evans

Franklin Evans

and Rod's former pal around Dallas, longtime gay NPR commentator Rawlins Gilliland.

Rawlins Gilliland

That's right, moms and dads, a mint julep-sipping middle-aged Alfred E. Neuman still sporting Dr. Seuss hair hosting what can only be described as a rainbow coalition of bar tending house guests will personally guide you through his Benedict Option as you try to help your families and children navigate our increasingly strange and strangely sexualized culture.

That can only be better than the pathetic, failing job you're doing now, right?

Right.

Say, why not start right now, practicing Rod Dreher's Benedict Option at home yourselves?

First, have a little family fun Criscoing everyone's hair into fanciful tempests of twirls.

A culture-tossed family chooses Rod Dreher's Benedict Option

Then, crush some ice, with your own special mallet or, if you're common, in a blender or by running over it with a brick and your car. Make everyone a mint julep. For those children who can't hold their liquor, substitute root beer for the bourbon.

Finally, sit everyone in a circle on the couch around your Apple laptop (no Apple laptop?...I-I'm so sorry...) and get the whole family to read one of Rod's best culture-disengaging posts aloud, maybe one of the ever-popular ones about trannies, or, hey, how about something fresh and new, like a bold, ground-breaking put-down of Donald Trump?**

With brave new Christian cultural-thickening moves like these, I can assure you, it's only a matter of time before our enemies begin falling before us like matchsticks.

*How something Dreher himself has characterized as "inchoate" can be massive is unclear. Maybe it's like dark matter.

**See how Rod did that? Pretty cool, huh: took a free comment and recycled it as one part of a build-a-Mr. Potato Head post, then a free article by a colleage, then stuck it al together with some straw argumentation. You could have written your own Benedict Option book this way, but I think by now Rod's got the jump on you. But maybe a book on something else? Remember, you don't have to know a bit about your subject until the contract is inked.

"I was stunned."

I was so happy to read this exciting (yawn) science news about some planet that is supposedly like earth because it reminds me of one of my favorite Jack Handey bits.

I was stunned. But then I was struck by a thought that was even more devastating. What if it wasn't an exact copy of us but instead we were an exact copy of it?  The possibilities were fantastic! What were we like, I wondered. Were we warlike? Did we look like humans?

So it was with great disappointment that I realized I had been aiming the telescope at a picture of Earth on the wall. I had been right after all: it was a duplicate of Earth. And yet it wasn't a planet. I sat back in my chair stunned.

Oh, man... too funny. Read it; you'll use this one, I promise: "What in the name of a supreme being exactly like God was going on here?"