• “We do not hesitate to say that the acceptance of contraception will produce profound changes in our civilization, these changes are already taking place in countries that have officially endorsed contraception for one or two generations.”
• “Voluntary numerous families will progressively disappear, and the large family will tend to appear as a monstrosity.”
• “Populations and families which have deliberately become less creative will experience spiritual ageing and premature sclerosis.”
• “The idea and the ideal of family happiness will be downgraded in terms of a so-called right to happiness and of what people think are the ‘techniques’ of achieving it.”
• Morality among the young will deteriorate. The unmarried will be more licentious. The sexuality of women will lose its connection with marriage.”
• “There will be a grave change in the bond of love, due to the reversal of sexual function. It will remain fixed at an ‘adolescent’ stage. Society as a whole will slip into this ‘transitory’ stage.”
• “The maternal instinct will become sterile, due to the repression of the desire for children which is innate in women. There will be a silent hostility toward life and its first manifestations: pregnancy, childbirth and even sometimes towards dolls and babies.”
• “A new concept of sex, now essentially defined as ‘the capacity for erotic play for the sake of the couple,’ all reference to procreation now being only accidental.”
• “A growing tolerance of homosexual behavior, as erotic play that succeeds in expressing personal intimacy between friends or lovers.”
• “Finally, contraception will raise hopes which it cannot fulfill, and will give rise to frustrations and deep dissatisfactions, which will contribute to:
- The crisis of divorce and instability of modern marriages.
- The deterioration of mental health, and lack of sexual desire in women.
- The abdication of parents confronted by their task as educators.
- The ennui secreted by a civilization that is entirely centered on a comfortable way of life and sexual satisfaction.”
• “We may be accused of drawing a rather somber picture. No one will reproach us for not being frank. It only remains to justify these predictions.”

Women dressed in miniskirts and low-cut shirts have rallied at the doors of Mexico City's Cathedral during Sunday Mass, carrying signs that read: "Clothed and naked, I am the same."

Guadalupe Loaeza, a renowned Mexican social commentator, said she worries the priest's statements will be taken seriously and make it acceptable to blame the victim.

"It gives rapists permission to say, 'Well, she had on a miniskirt,'" Loaeza said. "What the church says has credibility — that's why this type of statement is so dangerous."

Most impressive to me is the area containing a list of the popes (since the time of St. Augustine of Canterbury) and the English Catholic patriarchs throughout history. It really tied together my time as an Episcopalian to my reversion back to the Catholic faith. I get English Catholicism so much more than I do American Catholicism. There seems to be a tremendous focus on beauty and on GOOD music. The choirs at Westminster Cathedral were a delight to hear. (source)

So the other day at William's lunch break we drove downtown in the van with the kids so I could pay a traffic ticket. The ticket said I could mail it or pay in person at the Governmental Office Building (read: Ministry of Information) on St Louis Street. I was going to mail it, but I called and they said I had missed the two weeks advance date to mail it in.

I have never been in this building, but I have seen politicians coming out of it before surrounded by news people. We locate the building which, like all old Baton Rouge buildings, is done in Art Deco. and I go in and go up to the 2nd floor which is all my traffic ticket says to do. The building seems quiet and empty. I also notice that on the back of the ticket there's a little square that says "Rm 1097". Couldn't figure out what that was for.

I go up the musty old elevator and step out onto the 2nd floor. To one side is a glass wall behind which there are endless magazine boxes lined up on shelves. It is the registrar of voters. To the other side there is another glass wall which says Sherriff's something or other. That's gotta be the one, so I go in. It's lit with florescent lights and there seem to be papers absolutely everywhere. Stacks and stacks. And people on phones and doing stuff with the paper. This was all behind a very long counter. There must've been 40 or 50 people in this room working. I don't remember seeing a single computer, but I want to say there at least some tr-80s.

I began to notice signs on the counter amongst all the papers. Some referred to traffic tickets. I stared at all this for a while and then figured out that traffic tickets were to be paid at the end of the counter. I looked aaaaallll the way down, and sure enough there was a slightly higher counter with an enormous sign in red letters stating 'ALL TRAFFIC TICKETS TO BE PAID HERE". Below the sign there sat a black woman with an elaborate hairstyle talking on the phone.

When I approached and set my bag down at the edge of the counter behind a foot and a half of stacked paper, she hung up the phone and sighed deeply with eyes half open. As I was getting out my ticket and the wallet I said "I need to pay a traffic ticket." She said half asleep that I needed to go up to room 1012 and get the paperwork and fill it out and then come back down and pay the ticket. So I repack my purse and head up the elevator.

On the 10th floor, there is a closed cafe behind a glass wall, lots of tables and chairs, and not much else. I was confused. Then I noticed that there were well hidden doors amongst all the brown paneling. The numbers were all out of order. There was 1001 next to 1027, and a hallway which said it had a traffic court in it somewhere. Finally I noticed a sign on door 1001 which said several other rooms were in it, like 1097 and 1012. Ah ha. I went in and found myself in a smaller browner hallway.

A man rushed past me from the door I had just entered with a wheeled cart full of envelopes and files. He stopped and began fiddling with the files. Next to me there was a hallway directing me to 1012. In the wall of this hallway there was a window-like opening. It said traffic tickets above it. This was it! So I walked up to the window. There was a low desk immediately on the other side there were paper taped up all over the place. The whole room, which didn't appear to be very large, but continued on to the right beyond the view of the window, was lined with tall metal filing cabinets. There were also files all over the floor and sitting atop the cabinets.

Another black woman with an elaborate hairstyle sat at the low desk and looked up at me. I said "I need to pay a traffic ticket." She said, "I need the ticket, please." I handed her the ticket and she wandered off to the right amongst all the filing cabinets. I waited a while, and she reappeared having made a copy of the ticket. She kept the copy of the ticket and the ticket and wrote some stuff on the copy. She handed me two sets of carbon copied legal size forms. They were already filled out. She said I was to bring these downstairs and pay my ticket and then bring the yellow copies back up and put them in the box at the counter in the window.

So back down I went with my papers. I stepped into the elevator, and there was a man with crazy looking gray hair wearing a rumpled suit facing into the corner of the elevator and mumbling occasionally into his cell phone. He got out at the 6th floor. I peered out onto the 6th floor. It had a long maze of ropes for waiting in line and signs saying "Information" and "wait here". I have no idea what the 6th floor was for.

I paid my ticket and started back up to the 10th floor. At the 6th floor, the rumpled man got back in again, this time facing out from his corner. He had a file and was shuffling around in it. At the 10th floor, I got out and quickly rushed in and dropped my yellow copies into the box, even though someone else was now standing at the window. I was a little afraid I'd be told to wait in line to do this, so having done it, I rushed back out and down. I got to keep the pink copies. I used them to write a grocery list on. And for entertainment in the car on the way back to William's office. The cost of the ticket was broken down into about 14 different categories of $2-$5 each. Each category was labeled with a code of letters and numbers referring to some fund or legal code.

So Brazil really exists. It's art deco and it's called the Governmental Office Building. I found myself praying for these people and wondering if God cared about government.

Matt 19:13-14 Then children were brought to him that he might lay his hands on them and pray. The disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said, "Let the children come to me, and do not prevent them; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."

44. The civil authority may interfere in matters relating to religion, morality and spiritual government: hence, it can pass judgment on the instructions issued for the guidance of consciences, conformably with their mission, by the pastors of the Church. Further, it has the right to make enactments regarding the administration of the divine sacraments, and the dispositions necessary for receiving them. -- Allocutions "In consistoriali," Nov. 1, 1850, and "Maxima quidem," June 9, 1862.

“He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh,” the Psalmist promises, specifically in a passage about enjoying vindication over one’s adversaries. If that is so, then the racket on this fortieth anniversary must be prodigious. Four decades later, not only have the document’s signature predictions been ratified in empirical force, but they have been ratified as few predictions ever are: in ways its authors could not possibly have foreseen, including by information that did not exist when the document was written, by scholars and others with no interest whatever in its teaching, and indeed even inadvertently, and in more ways than one, by many proud public adversaries of the Church.

The encyclical warned of four resulting trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.

When “Humanae Vitae” came out in July 1968 I thought I better read a copy of it. So I went up to my Newman Club chaplain at the University of Minnesota and I asked him where I could find a copy of “Humanae Vitae.” And his comment to me was, “What do you want to read that kind of trash for?”

This irritated me. It was not his role to make an editorial comment to me. He was a priest, a Catholic priest. He ought to at least be sharing what the Church was saying, and not be so afraid of it.

Then the pilgrims came. The winter weather turned heavenly — one blue day after another. And the crowds of youths weren't quite the kind party-mad "Sinny" is used to. They were happy, patient, peaceable. They sang hymns and waved flags. When protesters threw condoms at them, they shouted, "Jesus loves you, too." When gay activists dressed as monks, nuns and devils shouted "Pope Go Homo, Gay Is Great," pilgrims made peace signs. After a mass on Bondi Beach, some high-spirited worshipers plunged into the surf. "They don't feel the cold, obviously," said local resident Lilian Selby. "I'm freezing."

Of the priests I've known, not one deserves this casual vilification as pedophiles, or their protectors. And when I check how their church touches even my life, I see one of its hospitals, in which my children were born. I see its churchmen tackling forces that rip up homes and make our streets unsafe. I see its intellectuals preaching values I recognise as essential for the defence of our weak. And I see a faith that exhorts its -- yes, fallible -- believers to goodness, integrity and public service.

Such a faith deserves respect. Instead, there's that hooting mob, brandishing cobwebbed skeletons to smash one of the few institutions still trying to civilise the barbarians.

Let it be known that he [Benedict XVI] does not support the defection of conservative Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church

They want us to believe that Pope Benedict is "shunning defectors" in an attempt to shore up the position of the Archbishop of Canterbury. Not true.
...
The Pope is supporting moves by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith to construct a model whereby a group of rebel conservative Anglicans, the Traditional Anglican Communion, can be received en masse and occupy their own structures inside the Roman Catholic Church.
...
Let's put this bluntly. Far from wanting to preserve the Anglican Communion, Pope Benedict wishes all its members to become Catholics. He realises, however, that corporate reunion is now impossible, and so he and his key advisers in the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith are considering ways in which groups of Anglicans can be received into full communion with the Holy See.

HMS Birkenhead sank off the coast of South Africa on 26th February 1852. This incident is widely believed to be the origin of the phrase women and children first. The ship was carrying 480 British troops and about 26 women and children. When the ship foundered the soldiers' commander Colonel Seton told them to 'Stand fast!' and allow the women and children to make use of the few lifeboats. Most of the soldiers and sailors on board were drowned or eaten by sharks, but all the women and children survived.(source)

Very few of the survivors were women, children or - the elderly. "There is no law that says women and children first," said Roger Kohen, spokesman for the International Maritime Organization, based in London. "That is something from the age of chivalry."

Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her, cleansing her by the bath of water with the word, that he might present to himself the church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends.

The basic attitude of the Dem party leadership is "Christianity is crap and Christians are an enemy to defeat." The basic attitude of the GOP leadership is "Christianity is a useful form of crowd control, and must be exploited so that we can attain money, votes and power." Obama's principal contribution to Dem political thought is, "Hey! Slow down! We might be able to exploit Christians too!"

Please take care to write in a good, literate, adult style, in order to increase the contrast between the letters of support and the incoherent, juvenile flaming that will doubtless characterise the letters from the Catholics.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”

Myers, in an interview today, explained that the blog entry is more "satire and protest" than an actual threat to defile the Eucharist. (source)

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? ... I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare.

The Council of Cardinals that studies the Vatican's organizational and economic problems announced that the Holy See has reported a deficit of 9 million euros –more than 14 million U.S. dollars- for 2007.

That's fine that you don't agree with me. I've met many who do not and many who do. I've got friends of both mindsets.
The hardship between the two opinions is that many will take the

I simply don't agree with ...

and accuse those who [do/don't] spank of abuse.

Romans 14:21 it is good not to eat meat or drink wine or do anything that causes your brother to stumble

So is it fair to say that the modern notion of tolerance revels in acceptance of many forms of personal behavior but rejects most aims to simply state what behaviors are and are not acceptable under any philosophical or religious system? ... The second question I have is, given our free speech rights in this country, can we get where Canada is today?(source)

Now we see what happens when this newly redefined right to have strangers regard one’s relationship as particular and intimate crashes into the reality that most of the world’s religions regard such intimacy between two women or two men as wrong in one way or another – as “fundamentally disordered,” as the Catholics put it.

What happens is that judges sweep the religious views aside.

Not that courts are outlawing the mere belief that gay sex is a sin, at least not yet. But as Marc D. Stern of the American Jewish Congress writes in Tuesday's L.A. Times, allowing mere belief or not actually forcing clergy to perform gay “marriages” is an awfully narrow view of religious liberty.

The practical effect is that religions are increasingly stopped from behaving as if they believed that homosexual relationships were wrong. Believers can believe; they just can’t let that belief govern their actions if it in any way impairs what is a new right to have one’s homosexual relationship affirmed by the implicit social approval that comes with marriage. Under this new calculus, so much as merely declining to shoot pictures for pay amounts to an unacceptable “hatred.”

In short, political correctness is being used as a form of fundamentalism, and fundamentalisms, especially "warring" fundamentalisms as manifested in the battles between religious fundamentalists and neo-atheist fundamentalists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens, are a grave danger to democracy. They vastly widen the divides between us, creating an unbridgeable "us" and "them" when what we need is a "we".

...

The issue that sparked the "Ryerson controversy", legalising same-sex marriage, is an example of what "pure" moral relativism and intense tolerance, as modified by political correctness, mean in practice.

While I abhor discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (Full Circle: rightfully I might add) and agree that same-sex marriage could be a powerful message of the wrongs of that, I oppose same-sex marriage because of its impact on children’s rights. In choosing between adults and children, I believe we should give priority to children. I argue that children need and have a right to both a mother and a father, preferably their own biological parents, unless the "best interests" of a particular child require otherwise, as in many adoptions. Marriage limited to the union of a man and a woman establishes that right; same-sex marriage eliminates that right for all children (which is why I oppose the redefinition of marriage), but support civil unions (which do not have that impact).

The Ryerson protestors sought to "deal" with me by labelling me. I was described as guilty of a hate crime; the new Ernst Zundel (who, like him, should be deported – they were grateful that I came from Australia and could be sent back there); a neo-Nazi; and a member of the Klu Klux Klan. My views had no place in the university, they claimed. This approach eliminated the need to deal with the substance of my arguments. It sent a very powerful warning to all those who might happen to share my views.