The 4W CLASS

NOT DEAD YET, a disability group, is busy fighting the usual suspects on assisted suicide since they know from history that they are the next ones in line to get the needle.

so when the hearing was held in Massachusetts link, it was snowing making it very difficult for the disabled to get there. Postpone it? Why? the elites could get in fine.

Suicide proponents, meanwhile, were met by designated greeters and plastered with green stickers proclaiming “My Life/My Choice/My Death.” Belying their natty appearance, proponents were surprisingly rowdy when Second Thoughts was testifying. In appearance and style, H 1998 supporters came directly from the Compassion & Choices catalog: a spry group of the older white upper-middle class that we call the 4-W’s, the “white well-off worried well.”

and yes, Angell, who perverted her place at the NEJM to push the issue 20 years ago, was there, giving fake testimony. The NDY destroyed her strawman arguments.

Palliative care has demonstrated that physical pain is a medical issue that can be addressed, I said, whereas proponents want the state to approve their suicides when they are experiencing disabling conditions many of us know well. They call it “death with dignity.” I pointed out that this particular notion of “dignity” is specific to a narrow social class of almost exclusively white people. According to a poll recently taken by Pew, whites support legalized assisted suicide by 53%-44%, but 65% of both blacks and Latinos oppose it. I concluded:
“We have a public health problem, but it isn’t certain people’s lack of dignity, it’s the turn to suicide as a social solution by a powerful social class. Legalizing assisted suicide would only entrench this suicidal tendency as the preferred social norm.”

The problem with atheists

This article echos what I observe (although I usually observe it in the new age successful types, a la "the secret" of Oprahland).

And it is in the UKGuardian, of all places.

The people who challenged my atheism most were drug addicts and prostitutes

I've been reminded that life is not as rational as Richard Dawkins sees it. Perhaps atheism is an intellectual luxury for the wealthy...

he describes how he was "scientific" and felt superior...until he met and started talking to addicts and the poor, who unlike the elites felt a need for God....

read the whole thing. But he concludes:

We are all sinners. On the streets the addicts, with their daily battles and proximity to death, have come to understand this viscerally. Many successful people don't. Their sense of entitlement and emotional distance has numbed their understanding of our fallibility.
Sonya with her cross and rosary. Photograph: Chris Arnade Soon I saw my atheism for what it is: an intellectual belief most accessible to those who have done well.
I look back at my 16-year-old self and see Preacher Man and his listeners differently. I look at the fragile women praying and see a mother working a minimum wage custodial job, trying to raise three children alone. Her children's father off drunk somewhere. I look at the teenager fingering a small cross and see a young woman, abused by a father addicted to whatever, trying to find some moments of peace. I see Preacher Man himself, living in a beat up shack without electricity, desperate to stay clean, desperate to make sense of a world that has given him little.
They found hope where they could.

Merry Christmas

we wish you a merry christmas

Spirituality as a "warm fuzzy" feeling? Bah humbug.



"Evolving to a higher power"? Bah Humbug



Christmas nativities as pristine babies in warm "manger" scenes"? Bah Humbug.



The
 reality is that when the God of the universe decided to save humanity
from their pride, he chose to be born among the "least of these"...



No, our area in the Philippines was not destroyed by Yolanda, but we were badly hit by an ordinary typhoon two weeks earlier, which destroyed much of the almost ripe rice, so the next few months will be hunger months for many people in this area.







Silent Night Holy Night

All is calm all is bright

Round yon virgin Mother and child

Holy infant so pleasant and mild

Sleep in Heavenly peace



Sleep in heavenly peace.







 link

LINK







LINK

Facing east to pray?

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Not really a podcast, but Fountain Of Elias discusses why Christian churches are traditionally supposed to face the east.

Fr. Mark explains the reason why the Mass was traditionally said facing east, ad orientem.
From the earliest times, Christians at prayer have turned towards the East. Christ is the Dayspring, the rising sun who dawns upon us from high “to give light to those in darkness and in the shadow of death” (Luke 1:9). The eastward orientation of churches and altars is a way of expressing the great cry of every Eucharist: “Let our hearts be lifted high. We hold them towards the Lord.”

This is a custom, not a rule...

Silly me. I always thought it was feng shui...

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Movies vs the politically correct

The new superhero: Themistocles??

yesterday, at the movies, we saw the preview of the up and coming film 300, the rise of an empire. and there was Themistocles...

the good news, of course, is that Themistocles saved the Greeks, but the bad news is that he was later hounded out of Greece by politics and moved to the Greek area of the Persian empire and lived happily ever after.

Ruby was mad because they showed a woman being evil (Artemesia), helping the evil Persians, but I had to tell her to blame Herodotus, since he wrote the story.

And, of course, the irony is that if Xerxes had followed her advice, Greece would have lost the war...

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The PC are trying to eliminate "evil white men" 'and "western culture" from education, but between 300 (Herodotus), the Hobbit (Beowulf), Thor (the Icelandic sagas), and Percy Jackson (Greek and Roman mythology), they are finding out about it anyway.

The latest Percy Jackson (House of Hades) includes Diocletian's palace...I visited Split, which before the civil war was a wonderful medieval town, but we didn't get to that part of the city.

Now, if they could only do the same with Christian stories. too many "christian" movies are boring and full of goody two shoes.

I did like "Molokai" however...starring Faramir and Lawrence of Arabia...(ha).

and the film "The Mission" was a great story about forgiveness.

But aside from that one, it's hard to think of a decent film about a saint.

But I disliked "Of Gods and Men"... (about some monks who stayed in Algeria after they had been warned to leave, and the bad guys killed them).

Hello: they had no reason to stay there.

I speak from experience.

Some of my friends were killed when I worked in Africa, and a civil war erupted.

But those of us in dangerous areas left when we realized we might be killed, and those who were killed were killed by rogue units, in areas thought to still be safe. Sister Rita was even killed walking near the dam one afternoon on mission property, in an area where there  had been no reports of local insurgents.

The problem was that the regular insurgents took care of the missionaries, but some people got hold of guns and killed, raped, and robbed because they could. Anarchy was more dangerous than the war per se.

Story: After I left, the local insurgents had a meeting and told the sisters they could stay. So when we would announce we were planning to go to the villages or when Sister Mary was planning to go for supplies, they would leave a note with the hours when the road would be "safe" (i.e. landmines removed).

Sister Mary also was given a list of medicines/medical supplies that they needed, and where to drop off the supplies.

However, this didn't work all the time: when our sisters decided to visit Father Bombolini (not his real name: a nickname from this film) they noted disturbed earth and tire tracks that went around the earth, so they took the detour. He wasn't home,  so they leisurely came back (on a different road) to find that the mission was in an uproar. Father had been given a note saying "Don't take the main road....it is a BAD ROAD"...

related item:

The Philippines are making a film about St. Pedro Calungsod...which again makes him a pious pete type. Sigh.

Ironic, isn't it, that the Philippine saints are OFW? Yes, we have local people up for saints but a lot of them are associated with the families who run the place, and I think the Vatican is slowing down the process because they suspect political pressure.

Depression

Depression is often biochemical, but can be related to life stresses or one's history.

GrowingTeenager links to a video that describes the presence of that "black dog" depression

Ditto

Editorial on WaPo blog says it all about Francis.

“In a matter of months, Francis has elevated the healing mission of the church — the church as servant and comforter of hurting people in an often harsh world — above the doctrinal police work so important to his recent predecessors,” Time’s profile said. “John Paul II and Benedict XVI were professors of theology. Francis is a former janitor, nightclub bouncer, chemical technician and literature teacher.”
These are the forces that see Francis as a progressive reformer, a long-awaited Catholic antidote to the religious right. None of that theological or doctrinal stuff, thank you. Just give us the humble pontiff, not like the other guy with his high-church pomp and fancy red shoes. Francis — the pope who kissed a man disfigured by a gruesome disease! The one who lives in humble quarters! The pope who took it to trickle-down economics! By critiquing the excesses of religion and politics — a criticism that resonates in media circles — Francis has given the press permission to change its narrative about the church.
But woe to those who remake the pope in their own image. If you focus only on what you like about Francis’s papacy — whatever makes you feel comfortable and smug about your religious and political convictions — you’re doing it wrong. And you’re not seeing the real Francis.
Slate’s Matt Yglesias hailed Francis’s Nov. 24 attack on libertarian economic policies — part of a nearly 50,000-word document called “Evangelii Gaudium” that outlines the pope’s vision for sharing the Gospel. Yglesias emphasized that the pope is making a call not for charity but “specifically for economic regulation and democratic supervision of the capitalist system.” Yet Yglesias caveats his praise: “There’s a lot of stuff about Jesus in his thinking that I can’t really sign on to.”
Yes, that pesky Jesus stuff. But there’s just one problem: Without Jesus, there is no Pope Francis. If Francis’s embrace of the disabled, his focus on the poor and his mercy for the sinner sound vaguely familiar, that’s because you’ve heard them before. From that Jesus guy.
Moved by Pope Francis’s embrace of the disfigured man? See Jesus touch and heal the leper in the Gospel of Matthew. Love Francis’s call to feed the hungry? “Whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me,” reads one of Jesus’s better-known lines. Remember Francis’s vision of the church as a “field hospital” for needy souls? Jesus healed people, body and soul, throughout His ministry.

waiting for the presence

waiting for the presence



Father Robert Wild is one of the priests associated with Madonna house, and with Catherine Doherty.

Akita update

Check LINK for an update on the visionary in Akita.

essentially the Vatican intervened (the "Experts" appointed never really investigated, just found reasons to shut the place down).

Afterward, the Sister was taken out of the convent and the convent deteriorated, probably because no one would join it because it was under suspicion.

Figures.

A similar reaction occured here in Lipa, as ABS CBN noted. Can't have Asians messing up things by being hysterical and having visions seems to be the idea. This is not just a snide remark: it is something told to me by a boy whose uncle ridiculed one Asian vision to him and described how the bureaucracy in the curia didn't investigate but merely arranged to have it shut down.

of course, Sister Sasagawa predicted "fire from the sky", and that didn't happen, although some suspect it referred to the near nuclear war that happened when Poland started to make noises of freedom and the Russians tried to mobilize their troops to stop it (but couldn't). Or maybe it is in the future.

On the other hand, her predictions of "war" among bishops is ominous, and seems to be about right.

About the only apparition that has been approved recently is that in Africa, Rwanda: Maybe because their vision of bodies floating downstream came true ten years later...but even then, it was the apparition, not the visionaries, who were approved of (several of the visionaries died in the slaughter). This doesn't stop local devotion to the many "visions" that occur all over the place (or the many prophets in the Pentecostal churches who see visions or have words of knowledge) but shutting it down has a negative affect on believers, because it makes them outsiders and shames them. It's a power play by the "rational" to cleanse the church of the false, which are also common, by shutting down any miracle or appearance of the supernatural.

So our bishop in Pennsylvania, who covered up pedophilia and sent a "gay friendly" priest to a certain university which has since been sued for similar problems, forbad us to go to Medjugorje (something he could not do under canon law, but he thought we were too stupid to notice) and shut down the local charismatics. He also attempted to stop the many Marian novenas (too much opposition prevented him from doing so), had his newspaper ridicule the "bathtub madonnas" (my coalmining neighbor had one), and tried to modernize all the churches (luckily many of the old eastern european churches got protected as landmarks by the local government but many also got ruined).

coincidence?


Michael Brown notes that the Vatican now won't approve of Sister Sasagawa but does allow the shrine to be recognized, and says maybe this is a "third way" for Medjugorje to be allowed.