THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

Leftist priests who are not even Christian, let alone Catholic: "Then there are those progressive priests who "renovated" churches by demolishing well-loved marble monuments and removing icons and statues in scenes reminiscent of Cromwell's purges during the Reformation. There is a famous photograph of the then dean of one Catholic cathedral actually at the controls of a bulldozer doing a Lazlo Toth on the High Altar. What about those who have refused communion to worshippers choosing to kneel to receive Holy Communion or, worse, bishops calling in the police to evict them as happened in Quebec?"

Deceitful attacks on an orthodox Catholic archbishop: "George Pell was once again making headlines last week. A priest in his Sydney diocese, John Crothers, published a highly critical essay in the e-magazine Online Catholics.... What neither Anne nor Crothers is entitled to is righteous indignation when they can't have their own way or delusions of grandeur about their place in the church's scheme of things. The Catholic Church is not and never can be a democracy. It has always been run according to its own rules, confidently patriarchal and hierarchical. The clergy and laity have rights and privileges, of course, but the church alone defines them and can suspend them. Even bishops are constrained by higher authority.... Perhaps Pell's distinctiveness, and his great offence, lies in representing what's left of mainstream Catholicism as unmistakably as John Howard represents the political mainstream"

A more impressive Frenchman than today's lot: "At the heart of all of Lacordaire's endeavors was a concerted effort to correct the flawed assumptions concerning the Catholic Church held by revolutionaries. Radical individualism had so possessed the masses that they deemed threatening any body of authority, including the church. "So long as this spirit exists," Lacordaire argued the year of his death, "liberalism will be vanquished by an oppressive democracy or by unbridled autocracy, and this is why the union of liberty and Christianity is the sole possible salvation of the future. Christianity alone can give liberty its real nature, and liberty alone can give Christianity the means of influence necessary to it." Thus, the state must also cease its control of education, the press, and labor in order to allow Christianity to effectively flourish in those arenas".

New Agers are trying to take over one of Christianity's oldest pilgrimages -- the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain.

There is a thorough demolition of "The Da Vinci Code" here for anyone who is inclined to suspect that there is any truth in it

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ELSEWHERE

Final proof that Leftists live in a mental world of their own comes in this comment from the Boston Globe: "Part of the problem was the candidate. Kerry rarely opened up about Vietnam". He's never shut up about it since he got back!

Hmmmm... George Will claims that the great popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger at the recent Republican convention signifies a return to "Goldwater Conservatism" -- non-religious conservatism. I think he exaggerates greatly. The religious Right has always been only one current in conservatism and Reagan himself had thoroughly libertarian views -- though his undoubted personal faith and love of his "fellow Americans" (as he always called them) tended to blur that. He was, after all, a divorced man. And even among Bible-believing Christians there is great diversity of views. One can perfectly well be a devout Christian conservative without being "born again" and without wanting to use the law to force your values down the neck of others. The most fundamentalist Christians in fact want no part of "the world" and may even refuse to vote at all (as with Jehovah's Witnesses). And they have perfectly good scriptural authority for that (John 18:36; Mark 12:17). But Schwarzenegger certainly does provide a clear signal that you do not have to be religious to be an effective conservative -- a point I make at some length elsewhere.

The inevitability of centrism: "Gingrich... told the gathered [Republicans] that it would be "impossible to create a right only majority in America" and that a party that didn't invite someone as popular as Governor Schwarzenegger to speak "wasn't fit to win." With a nod to some of the journalists in the room, Newt declared, "There is a narrow-minded, bigoted party in America. It's called the Democratic Party." (See also here).

Europe gets a turn: "A coalition of Rastafarian groups in Jamaica said yesterday that it wanted to go to the UN to persuade Europe to pay billions of dollars to the followers of the faith in reparation for slavery. The Rastafarian Nation in Jamaica said European countries once involved in the slave trade, especially Britain, should pay $129bn (�72.5bn) to resettle 500,000 Jamaican Rastafarians in Africa".

Australia's leading Leftist talks sense: "Mark Latham yesterday clashed with Australia's leading welfare body over his tax package, accusing it of believing that providing people with a life of welfare was doing them a long-term favour. Mr Latham said he had a different view. "The best life is not a life of welfare - it's a life of work," he said".

Leftists in the media and elsewhere commonly pillory GWB for his Christian faith. Kengor, however, shows that Clinton in fact mentioned God more often and spoke in churches more often. So why no condemnation of Clinton? I guess everybody realizes that GWB means what he says while Clinton is a fake. (Via Peg Kaplan)

Tom Barrett: "John Kerry is a patrician snob. He looks down his nose at the very people he is supposed to serve. George Bush is a regular guy. If you sat down with him at a barbeque, as some of my friends have done, you wouldn't know he was the most powerful man in the world. And he LOVES the American people, every one of us."

Carnival of the Vanities is up again with its usual survey of blogospheric wisdom.

EDUCATION WATCH has an excerpt from a rather fun article which argues that it is good for creationism to be taught in schools even though it may not be right.

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH and EDUCATION WATCH. Mirror sites here, here, here and here


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The vast hatred of President Bush coming from the Left seems to focus almost entirely on his Iraq policy and a claim that it is "stupid" or dishonest. Yet the world's most successful and influential Leftist intellectual -- the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom -- is a vigorous supporter of that policy. It shows that everything said to justify the Leftist hatred of Bush is mere camouflage. What they really hate is someone non-Leftist wielding great power. The hatred is purely emotional and envious -- with only the slightest pretense to reasoning tacked on. As usual, principles have nothing to do with it.

The conflict between conservatives and Leftists is not usually a conflict between realists and idealists. Mostly it is a conflict between realists and people who will say anything to win applause

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