Desmond T. Doss Sr., Requiescat in pace.

Now this, kiddies, is an American:

Desmond T. Doss, Sr., the only conscientious objector to win the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War II, has died. He was 87 years old.

Mr. Doss never liked being called a conscientious objector. He preferred the term conscientious cooperator. Raised a Seventh-day Adventist, Mr. Doss did not believe in using a gun or killing because of the sixth commandment which states, "Thou shalt not kill" (Exodus 20:13). Doss was a patriot however, and believed in serving his country.

During World War II, instead of accepting a deferment, Mr. Doss voluntarily joined the Army as a conscientious objector. Assigned to the 307th Infantry Division as a company medic he was harassed and ridiculed for his beliefs, yet he served with distinction and ultimately received the Congressional Medal of Honor on Oct. 12, 1945 for his fearless acts of bravery. . . .

On one occasion in Okinawa, he refused to take cover from enemy fire as he rescued approximately 75 wounded soldiers, carrying them one-by-one and lowering them over the edge of the 400-foot Maeda Escarpment. He did not stop until he had brought everyone to safety nearly 12 hours later.
(Thanks to Best of the Web Today for the heads up.)

This is what America is all about, kiddies, and we are in the process of destroying it. I think Mr. Doss' religion is hooey and his pacificism misguided. (So did many of his fellow soldiers.)

But that is irrelevant. Mr. Doss served our country above and beyond the call of duty. He knew his religious freedom depended upon victory over enemies who would not hesitate to slaughter people like him wholesale.

So he did everything he could.

Have mercy on his immortal soul, Lord.

Please read the complete obituary for Mr. Doss.

Democracy Isn't 'Western'

Amartya Sen, writing at OpinionJournal, reminds us to learn from history.

The belief in the allegedly "Western" nature of democracy is often linked to the early practice of voting and elections in Greece, especially in Athens. Democracy involves more than balloting, but even in the history of voting there would be a classificatory arbitrariness in defining civilizations in largely racial terms. In this way of looking at civilizational categories, no great difficulty is seen in considering the descendants of, say, Goths and Visigoths as proper inheritors of the Greek tradition ("they are all Europeans," we are told). But there is reluctance in taking note of the Greek intellectual links with other civilizations to the east or south of Greece, despite the greater interest that the Greeks themselves showed in talking to Iranians, or Indians, or Egyptians (rather than in chatting up the Ostrogoths).

Since traditions of public reasoning can be found in nearly all countries, modern democracy can build on the dialogic part of the common human inheritance. In his autobiography, Nelson Mandela describes how influenced he was, as a boy, by seeing the democratic nature of the proceedings of the meetings that were held in his home town: "Everyone who wanted to speak did so. It was democracy in its purest form. There may have been a hierarchy of importance among the speakers, but everyone was heard, chief and subject, warrior and medicine man, shopkeeper and farmer, landowner and laborer." Mr. Mandela could combine his modern ideas about democracy with emphasizing the supportive part of the native tradition, in a way that Gandhi had done in India, and that is the way cultures adapt and develop to respond to modernity. Mr. Mandela's quest for democracy and freedom did not emerge from any Western "imposition."

Similarly, the history of Muslims includes a variety of traditions, not all of which are just religious or "Islamic" in any obvious sense. The work of Arab and Iranian mathematicians, from the eighth century onward reflects a largely nonreligious tradition. Depending on politics, which varied between one Muslim ruler and another, there is also quite a history of tolerance and of public discussion, on which the pursuit of a modern democracy can draw. For example, the emperor Saladin, who fought valiantly for Islam in the Crusades in the 12th century, could offer, without any contradiction, an honored place in his Egyptian royal court to Maimonides, as that distinguished Jewish philosopher fled an intolerant Europe. When, at the turn of the 16th century, the heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Campo dei Fiori in Rome, the Great Mughal emperor Akbar (who was born a Muslim and died a Muslim) had just finished, in Agra, his large project of legally codifying minority rights, including religious freedom for all, along with championing regular discussions between followers of Islam, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism and other beliefs (including atheism).

Cultural dynamics does not have to build something from absolutely nothing, nor need the future be rigidly tied to majoritarian beliefs today or the power of the contemporary orthodoxy. To see Iranian dissidents who want a fully democratic Iran not as Iranian advocates but as "ambassadors of Western values" would be to add insult to injury, aside from neglecting parts of Iranian history (including the practice of democracy in Susa or Shushan in southwest Iran 2,000 years ago). The diversity of the human past and the freedoms of the contemporary world give us much more choice than cultural determinists acknowledge. This is particularly important to emphasize since the illusion of cultural destiny can extract a heavy price in the continued impoverishment of human lives and liberties.
Mr. Sen, the 1998 Nobel laureate in economics, is the author of "Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny," published next week by Norton.

The protestant crackup continues apace...

Best of the Web Today takes a swipe at some leftists who wear sheep's clothing.

Ingrates to Their Very Souls
Some good news from Iraq: "U.S. and British forces freed one Briton and two Canadians early Thursday in a military operation, ending a four-month hostage drama in which an American among the group was shot to death and dumped on a Baghdad street earlier this month," the Associated Press reports. The ex-hostages belong to the Christian Peacemaker Teams, a group that--well, let's let the CPT explain for itself in a statement issued today:

[The ex-hostages] were in Iraq to learn of the struggles facing the people in that country. They went, motivated by a passion for justice and peace to live out a nonviolent alternative in a nation wracked by armed conflict. They knew that their only protection was in the power of the love of God and of their
Iraqi and international co-workers. We believe that the illegal occupation of Iraq by Multinational Forces is the root cause of the insecurity which led to this kidnapping and so much pain and suffering in Iraq. The occupation must end.

Today, in the face of this joyful news, our faith compels us to love our enemies even when they have committed acts which caused great hardship to our friends and sorrow to their families. . . .

We pray that Christians throughout the world will, in the same spirit, call for justice and for respect for the human rights of the thousands of Iraqis who are being detained illegally by the U.S. and British forces occupying Iraq. During these past months, we have tasted of the pain that has been the daily bread of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Why have our loved ones been taken? Where are they being held? Under what conditions? How are they? Will they be released? When?

It's not clear whom the CPT statement means by "our enemies." But the only enemy they seem to recognize is the U.S. and its allies, whose "occupation" of Iraq is the "root cause" of the ex-hostages' captivity, and whose detention of "thousands of Iraqis" they liken to their own kidnapping and (in one case) murder by terrorists.

But if the CPT is going to "love our enemies," the least it could do is thank them. The statement does not acknowledge that the hostages were rescued by U.S. and British servicemen, or indeed that they were rescued at all; it refers mysteriously to their having been "released," as if the kidnappers themselves had decided to let them go.

This seems to run deeper than a case of simple ingratitude. There is a whole strange worldview at work here--a theology, if you will. We don't claim to understand it fully, but it seems to equate America as the root of all evil and America's adversaries as Edenic creatures--innocents who know not good or evil and thus bear no culpability for their bad actions.

If we have this right, it follows that the CPT Christians see themselves, by virtue of their faith, as being forgiven for being American, or for being from another nation that America has corrupted. This is why they cannot be grateful to, or forgiving of, America: For them that would amount to thanking or forgiving sin itself.

...Of course, even "protestant" might be too strong a word for these clowns.

In vitro, no one can hear you scream...

Drudge: Adult cells in mice shown to mimic embryonic stem cells...

German scientists said on Friday they had isolated sperm-producing stem cells that have similar properties to embryonic stem cells from adult mice.

If the same type of cells in humans show similar qualities the researchers from the Georg-August-University of Goettingen believe they could be used in stem cell research which would remove the ethical dilemma associated with stem cells derived from human embryos.

Does this mean an end to the horror of harvesting humans? I doubt it.

The question is "Where can I get one?"

Drudge: Teen-repellent shop siren silenced by human rights fears...

If only the guy with the nice lawn and a shotgun had had one of these babies...

A high-tech alarm audible only to youngsters which has dramatically cut loutish behaviour outside a British shop must be switched off over fears it infringes human rights, police said.

The Mosquito emits an irritating high-pitched pulse that most people aged under 20 can hear but almost nobody over 30 can.

The Spar grocery shop on Caerlon Road in Newport, south Wales said anti-social behaviour had plunged by 84 percent outside the premises since it was installed earlier this year.

However, human rights concerns have swatted The Mosquito -- and stung the shop's furious managers in the process.

"It's absolutely disgusting," a spokesman for the shop said.

"These louts can infringe on our rights to run a profitable shop for the community yet we can't dare infringe on their right to loiter and make life a misery for our shoppers," the BBC quoted him as saying.

A police spokesman said: "Gwent Police agreed to monitor a trial at a retail premises on Caerleon Road and there was an initial indication that it was successful at deterring anti-social behaviour and was positively received by the local community.

"However, it was decided by the Newport Community Safety Partnership (NCSP) that before endorsing the device, issues concerning health and safety and human rights need to be resolved."

A concerned NCSP spokesman told the BBC: "If the noise upset a baby in a pram or caused a dog in a neighbouring house to bark incessantly then these are issues we would have to address."

Fyodor's Headlinks.

There are Christians...

MINISTER WIFE CONFESSES TO MURDER

...and then there are Christians...

Afghan Christian 'likely to be released soon'...

How many have been ignored by the West?

The Japanese are indeed different.

1) Mainichi Daily News: Japan's cuisine reaches sublime heights and squid-flavored chocolate lows

Without doubt, Japan has one of the richest culinary cultures on the planet. Having said that, though, Japan doesn't always get it right when it comes to foods, as Josei Jishin (4/4) discovers this week.

Take Genghis Khan-flavored caramel candies. What the hell is Genghis Khan flavor? It's a lamb and vegetable-filled crock-pot dish originally from the northern island prefecture of Hokkaido. And it's that same lamb and veggie mix being used to flavor caramel candies, produced by a company called, without irony I'm sure, Sapporo Gourmet Foods.

"We sell about 170,000 to 180,000 boxes a month. At first, we only sold them at tourist spots like airports within Hokkaido," a spokesman for the self-professed purveyors of gourmet fare tells Josei Jishin. "We got so many inquiries about them, though, we decided to put them on sale nationwide at Hokkaido specialty stores that can be found throughout Japan."

If candies named after a brutal, barbaric conqueror don't tempt your taste buds, perhaps salted butter-flavored or seaweed-flavored candies may be better. Or, Sapporo Beer-flavored candies -- also produced in Hokkaido -- may do the trick.

"They taste a little bit like amazake (sweet sake, rice-flavored wine). The smell, though, is more like the dregs of a beer bottle left out overnight. What's more, these candies are going out of production and sales will be limited to whatever's left," Kenma Yonebayashi, an expert on Japan's freak foods, tells Josei Jishin. "If you can't get some of the candies, perhaps beer flavored chocolate could be a suitable alternative. They've managed to maintain the awful taste of the beer candies in a move that appears to have been intentional."

Perhaps squid-flavored chocolate will, especially as it comes with in both white and bitter flavors.

"It's true that it gives off a squid smell when you open the package. I've bought both the white and bitter flavors," funky food fan Yonebayashi says. "I somehow managed to get my way through the white squid-flavored chocolate, but when it came to the bitter stuff I had to give up halfway through."

Takuma Shokuhin, the company that unleashed the calamari cocoa-blend on the market also proudly boasts of having produced red pepper and curry flavored chocolates.

Slower of the uptake, sort of, is turtle-flavored Jell-O.

"My dad said eating this was like taking medicine," Yonebayashi says. "It's true that the more you eat of this, the worse the aftertaste gets."
Maybe washing your mouth out with Miki, a liquid rice drink, could be the answer.

"It's made of white rice, sugar, gluten rice, wheat and lactic acid. You basically make it yourself, but it's pretty awful. It tastes sort of like an acidic broth, but it looks like the barium milk they make you drink before a stomach X-ray," Yonebayashi tells Josei Jishin, adding that Hustle Drink may be a better way to quench your thirst. "It's only sold on fight nights for the martial arts sport Pride. Hustle Drink is awesome. Open the lid and immediately this vile reek like rotten apples starts wafting through the air. Drinking it burns your mouth." (By Ryann Connell)


2) Mainichi Daily News: Japan's 'second virgins' are camels in a dry spell

Japan is faced with a crisis as growing numbers of mostly 30-something guys go through what Spa! (3/21) calls a "second virginity," where they have not had sex for at least half a year.

But instead of champing at the bit, the magazine notes that most of these "second virgins" are perfectly content to remain inactive.

The Theology of the Body: 70. Doctrine of the Resurrection according to St. Paul

In his General Audience of 27 January 1982, the Holy Father continued his catechesis on Theology of the Body by further examining St. Paul's teaching, in 1 Corinthians 15, on the general resurrection. The resurrection of the body completes man's redemption from the effects of sin.


Doctrine of the Resurrection according to St. Paul

The following is the text of the Holy Father's address during the general audience on 27 January.


1. During the preceding audiences we reflected on Christ's words about the other world, which will emerge together with the resurrection of bodies. Those words had an extraordinarily intense resonance in the teaching of St. Paul. Between the answer given to the Sadducees, transmitted by the synoptic Gospels (cf. Mt 22:30; Mk 12:25; Lk 20:35-36), and Paul's apostolate there took place first of all the fact of the resurrection of Christ himself and a series of meetings with the risen Christ. Among these must be included, as the last link, the event that occurred in the neighborhood of Damascus. Saul or Paul of Tarsus who, on his conversion, became the Apostle of the Gentiles, also had his own post-paschal experience, similar to that of the other apostles. At the basis of his faith in the resurrection, which he expresses above all in the First Letter to the Corinthians (ch. 15), there is certainly that meeting with the risen Christ, which became the beginning and foundation of his apostolate.

God is not dead

2. It is difficult to sum up here and comment adequately on the stupendous and ample argumentation of the fifteenth chapter of the First Letter to the Corinthians in all its details. It is significant that, while Christ replied to the Sadducees, who "say that there is no resurrection" (Lk 20:27), with the words reported by the synoptic Gospels, Paul, on his part, replied or rather engaged in polemics (in conformity with his temperament) with those who contested it.(1) In his (pre-paschal) answer, Christ did not refer to his own resurrection, but appealed to the fundamental reality of the Old Testament covenant, to the reality of the living God. The conviction of the possibility of the resurrection is based on this: the living God "is not God of the dead, but of the living" (Mk 12:27). Paul's post-paschal argumentation on the future resurrection referred above all to the reality and the truth of the resurrection of Christ. In fact, he defends this truth even as the foundation of the faith in its integrity: "If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.... But, in fact, Christ has been raised from the dead" (1 Cor 15:14, 20).

God of the living

3. Here we are on the same line as revelation. The resurrection of Christ is the last and the fullest word of the self-revelation of the living God as "not God of the dead, but of the living" (Mk 12:27). It is the last and fullest confirmation of the truth about God which is expressed right from the beginning through this revelation. Furthermore, the resurrection is the reply of the God of life to the historical inevitability of death, to which man was subjected from the moment of breaking the first covenant and which, together with sin, entered his history. This answer about the victory won over death is illustrated by the First Letter to the Corinthians (ch. 15) with extraordinary perspicacity. It presents the resurrection of Christ as the beginning of that eschatological fulfillment, in which, through him and in him, everything will return to the Father, everything will be subjected to him, that is, handed back definitively, "that God may be everything to everyone" (1 Cor 15:28). And then—in this definitive victory over sin, over what opposed the creature to the Creator—death also will be vanquished: "The last enemy to be destroyed is death" (1 Cor 15:26).

Imperishable soul

4. The words that can be considered the synthesis of Pauline anthropology concerning the resurrection take their place in this context. It will be opportune to dwell longer here on these words. We read in the First Letter to the Corinthians 15:42-46 about the resurrection of the dead: "What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor; it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness; it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. Thus it is written, 'The first man Adam became a living being'; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual which is first but the physical, and then the spiritual."

Historical experience

5. Between this Pauline anthropology of the resurrection and the one that emerges from the text of the synoptic Gospels (Mt 22:30; Mk 12:25; Lk 20:35-36), there exists an essential consistency, only the text of First Letter to the Corinthians is more developed. Paul studies in depth what Christ had proclaimed. At the same time, he penetrates the various aspects of that truth which had been expressed concisely and substantially in the words written in the synoptic Gospels. It is also significant for the Pauline text that man's eschatological perspective, based on faith in the resurrection of the dead, is united with reference to the beginning as well as with deep awareness of man's historical situation. The man whom Paul addressed in the First Letter to the Corinthians and who (like the Sadducees) is contrary to the possibility of the resurrection, has also his (historical) experience of the body. From this experience it emerges quite clearly that the body is perishable, weak, physical, in dishonor.

Mystery of creation

6. Paul confronts such a man, to whom his words are addressed—either in the community of Corinth or also, I would say, in all times—with the risen Christ, the last Adam. Doing so, Paul invites him, in a way, to follow in the footsteps of his own post-paschal experience. At the same time he recalls to him the first Adam. That is, he induces him to turn to the beginning, to that first truth about man and the world which is at the basis of the revelation of the mystery of the living God. In this way, Paul reproduces in his synthesis all that Christ had announced when he had referred, at three different moments, to the beginning in the conversation with the Pharisees (cf. Mt 19:3-8; Mk 10:2-9); to the human heart, as the place of struggle with lusts within man, during the Sermon on the Mount (Cf. Mt 5:27); and to the resurrection as the reality of the "other world," in the conversation with the Sadducees (cf. Mt 22:30; Mk 12:25; Lk 20:35-36).

Enlivening of matter

7. It belongs to the style of Paul's synthesis that it plunges its roots into the revealed mystery of creation and redemption as a whole, from which it is developed and in the light of which alone it can be explained. According to the biblical narrative, the creation of man is an enlivening of matter by means of the spirit, thanks to which "the first man Adam became a living being" (1 Cor 15:45). The Pauline text repeats here the words of Genesis (2:7), that is, of the second narrative of the creation of man (the so-called Yahwist narrative). From the same source it is known that this original "animation of the body" underwent corruption because of sin.

At this point of the First Letter to the Corinthians the author does not speak directly of original sin. Yet the series of definitions which he attributes to the body of historical man, writing that it is "perishable...weak...physical...in dishonor..." indicates sufficiently what the consequence of sin is, according to revelation. Paul himself will call it elsewhere "bondage to decay" (Rom 8:21). The whole of creation is subjected indirectly to this "bondage to decay" owing to the sin of man, who was placed by the Creator in the midst of the visible world in order to subdue it (cf. Gn 1:28). So man's sin has a dimension that is not only interior, but also cosmic. According to this dimension, the body—which Paul (in conformity with his experience) characterizes as "perishable...weak...physical...in dishonor..."—expresses in itself the state of creation after sin. This creation "has been groaning in travail together until now" (Rom 8:22).

However, just as labor pains are united with the desire for birth, with the hope of a new child, so, too, the whole of creation "waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God..." and cherishes the hope to "be set free from its bondage to decay, and obtain the glorious liberty of the children of God" (Rom 8:19-21).

Try to understand

8. Through this cosmic context of the affirmation contained in the Letter to the Romans—in a way, through the "body of all creatures"—let us try to understand completely the Pauline interpretation of the resurrection. According to Paul, this image of the body of historical man, so deeply realistic and adapted to the universal experience of men, conceals within itself not only the "bondage of decay," but also hope, like the hope that accompanies labor pains. That happens because the Apostle grasps in this image also the presence of the mystery of redemption. Awareness of that mystery comes precisely from all man's experiences which can be defined as the "bondage of decay." It comes because redemption operates in man's soul by means of the gifts of the Spirit: "We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies" (Rom 8:23). Redemption is the way to the resurrection. The resurrection constitutes the definitive accomplishment of the redemption of the body.

We will come back to the analysis of the Pauline text in the First Letter to the Corinthians in our further reflections.

NOTE

1. Among the Corinthians there were probably movements of thought marked by Platonic dualism and neo-Pythagoreanism of a religious shade, Stoicism and Epicureanism. All Greek philosophies, moreover, denied the resurrection of the body. Paul had already experienced in Athens the reaction of the Greeks to the doctrine of the resurrection, during his address at the Areopagus (cf. Acts 17:32).

The Theology of the Body: 69. New Threshold of Complete Truth About Man.

In his General Audience of 13 January 1982, the Holy Father continued his exposition of the words of Christ on the general resurrection, as applied to Theology of the Body. In some way difficult to imagine, the meaning of the human body will be revealed as the means of mutual self-giving in the communion of Saints.



New Threshold of Complete Truth About Man

During the general audience in the Paul VI Hall on 13 January, the Holy Father continued his catechesis on marriage in the following address.



1. "When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven" (Mk 12:25; cf. Mt 22:30). "They are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection" (Lk 20:36).

The words in which Christ refers to the future resurrection—words confirmed in an extraordinary way by his own resurrection—complete what we are accustomed to call in these reflections the revelation of the body. This revelation penetrates the heart of the reality that we experience, and this reality is above all man, his body, the body of historical man. At the same time, this revelation permits us to go beyond the sphere of this experience in two directions—first, in the direction of that beginning which Christ referred to in his conversation with the Pharisees concerning the indissolubility of marriage (cf. Mt 19:3-8); then, in the direction of the future world, to which the Master addressed the hearts of his listeners in the presence of the Sadducees, who "say that there is no resurrection" (Mt 22:23).

2. Neither the truth about that beginning of which Christ speaks, nor the eschatological truth can be reached by man with empirical and rationalistic methods alone. However, is it not possible to affirm that man bears, in a way, these two dimensions in the depth of the experience of his own being, or rather that he is somehow on his way to them as to dimensions that fully justify the meaning of his being a body, that is, of his being a carnal man? As regards the eschatological dimension, is it not true that death itself and the destruction of the body can confer on man an eloquent significance about the experience in which the personal meaning of existence is realized? When Christ speaks of the future resurrection, his words do not fall in a void. The experience of mankind, and especially the experience of the body, enable the listener to unite with those words the image of his new existence in the "future world," for which earthly experience supplies the substratum and the base. An adequate theological reconstruction is possible.

3. To the construction of this image—which, as regards content, corresponds to the article of our profession of faith: "I believe in the resurrection of the dead"—there greatly contributes the awareness that there exists a connection between earthly experience and the whole dimension of the biblical beginning of man in the world. If at the beginning God "created them male and female" (cf. Gn 1:27); if in this duality concerning the body he envisaged also such a unity that "they become one flesh" (Gn 2:24); if he linked this unity with the blessing of fertility, that is, of procreation (cf. Gn 1:29); if speaking before the Sadducees about the future resurrection, Christ explained that "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage"—then it is clear that it is a question here of a development of the truth about man himself. Christ indicated his identity, although this identity is realized in eschatological experience in a different way from the experience of the beginning itself and of all history. Yet man will always be the same, such as he came from the hands of his Creator and Father. Christ said: "They neither marry nor are given in marriage," but he did not state that this man of the future world will no longer be male and female as he was from the beginning. It is clear therefore that, as regards the body, the meaning of being male or female in the future world must be sought outside marriage and procreation, but there is no reason to seek it outside that which (independently of the blessing of procreation) derives from the mystery of creation and which subsequently forms also the deepest structure of man's history on earth, since this history has been deeply penetrated by the mystery of redemption.

Unity of the two

4. In his original situation man, therefore, is alone and at the same time he becomes male and female: unity of the two. In his solitude he is revealed to himself as a person, in order to reveal, at the same time, the communion of persons in the unity of the two. In both states the human being is constituted as an image and likeness of God. From the beginning man is also a body among bodies. In the unity of the couple he becomes male and female, discovering the nuptial meaning of his body as a personal subject. Subsequently, the meaning of being a body and, in particular, being male and female in the body, is connected with marriage and procreation (that is, with fatherhood and motherhood). However, the original and fundamental significance of being a body, as well as being, by reason of the body, male and female—that is precisely that nuptial significance—is united with the fact that man is created as a person and called to a life in communione personarum. Marriage and procreation in itself do not determine definitively the original and fundamental meaning of being a body or of being, as a body, male and female. Marriage and procreation merely give a concrete reality to that meaning in the dimensions of history.

The resurrection indicates the end of the historical dimension. The words, "When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage" (Mk 12:25), express univocally not only the meaning which the human body will not have in the future world. But they enable us also to deduce that the nuptial meaning of the body in the resurrection to the future life will correspond perfectly both to the fact that man, as a male-female, is a person created in the "image and likeness of God," and to the fact that this image is realized in the communion of persons. That nuptial meaning of being a body will be realized, therefore, as a meaning that is perfectly personal and communitarian at the same time.

5. Speaking of the body glorified through the resurrection to the future life, we have in mind man, male-female, in all the truth of his humanity: man who, together with the eschatological experience of the living God (the face to face vision), will experience precisely this meaning of his own body. This will be a completely new experience. At the same time it will not be alienated in any way from what man took part in from the beginning nor from what, in the historical dimension of his existence, constituted in him the source of the tension between spirit and body, concerning mainly the procreative meaning of the body and sex. The man of the future world will find again in this new experience of his own body precisely the completion of what he bore within himself perennially and historically, in a certain sense, as a heritage and even more as a duty and objective, as the content of the ethical norm.

Mutual communication

6. The glorification of the body, as the eschatological fruit of its divinizing spiritualization, will reveal the definitive value of what was to be from the beginning a distinctive sign of the created person in the visible world, as well as a means of mutual communication between persons and a genuine expression of truth and love, for which the communio personarum is constituted. That perennial meaning of the human body, to which the existence of every man, weighed down by the heritage of concupiscence, has necessarily brought a series of limitations, struggles and sufferings, will then be revealed again, and will be revealed in such simplicity and splendor when every participant in the other world will find again in his glorified body the source of the freedom of the gift. The perfect freedom of the children of God (cf. Rom 8:14) will nourish also with that gift each of the communions which will make up the great community of the communion of saints.

Difficult to envisage

7. It is all too clear—on the basis of man's experiences and knowledge in his temporal life, that is, in this world—that it is difficult to construct a fully adequate image of the future world. However, at the same time there is no doubt that, with the help of Christ's words, at least a certain approximation to this image is possible and attainable. We use this theological approximation, professing our faith in the resurrection of the dead and in eternal life, as well as faith in the communion of saints, which belongs to the reality of the future world.

A new threshold

8. Concluding this part of our reflections, it is opportune to state once more that Christ's words reported by the synoptic Gospels (cf. Mt 22:30; Mk 12:25; Lk 20:34-35) have a decisive meaning not only as regards the words of Genesis (which Christ referred to on another occasion), but also in what concerns the entire Bible. These words enable us, in a certain sense, to read again—that is, in depth—the whole revealed meaning of the body, the meaning of being a man, that is, a person incarnated, of being male or female as regards the body. These words permit us to understand the meaning, in the eschatological dimension of the other world, of that unity in humanity, which was constituted in the beginning, and which the words of Genesis 2:24, ("A man cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh")—uttered in the act of man's creation as male and female—seemed to direct, if not completely, at least especially toward this world. Since the words of the Book of Genesis are almost the threshold of the whole theology of the body—the threshold which Christ took as his foundation in his teaching on marriage and its indissolubility—then it must be admitted that the words reported by the Synoptics are, as it were, a new threshold of this complete truth about man, which we find in God's revealed Word. It is indispensable to dwell upon this threshold, if we wish our theology of the body—and also our Christian spirituality of the body—to be able to use it as a complete image.

The Theology of the Body: 68. Christ's Words on the Resurrection Complete the Revelation of the Body

In his General Audience of 16 December 1981, the Holy Father continued his focus on Christ's words about our condition after the general resurrection in his catechesis on theology of the body. Each person sharing in the beatific vision will have his own subjectivity perfected, and yet, in view of the Communion of the Trinity, experience a new depth of intersubjectivity which is the Communion of Saints. It will be virginal, and yet reveal the full nuptial meaning of the body, as a gift to God first, and through Him to others.



Christ's Words on the Resurrection Complete the Revelation of the Body

At the General Audience on Wednesday, 16 December, in the Paul VI Hall, the Holy Father continued his series on the theology of the body.



1. "In the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven" (Mt 22:30, similarly Mk 12:25). "They are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection" (Lk 20:36).

The eschatological communion (communio) of man with God, constituted thanks to the love of a perfect union, will be nourished by the vision, face to face, of contemplation of that more perfect communion—because it is purely divine—which is the trinitarian communion of the divine Persons in the unity of the same divinity.

Perfect subjectivity

2. Christ's words, reported by the synoptic Gospels, enable us to deduce that participants in the "other world"—in this union with the living God which springs from the beatific vision of his unity and trinitarian communion—will not only keep their authentic subjectivity, but will acquire it to a far more perfect extent than in earthly life. Furthermore, this will confirm the law of the integral order of the person, according to which the perfection of communion is not only conditioned by the perfection or spiritual maturity of the subject, but also in turn determines it. Those who participate in the future world, that is, in perfect communion with the living God, will enjoy a perfectly mature subjectivity. In this perfect subjectivity, while keeping masculinity and femininity in their risen, glorious body, "They neither marry nor are given in marriage." This is explained not only with the end of history, but also, and above all, with the eschatological authenticity of the response to that self-communication of the divine subject. This will constitute the beatifying experience of the gift of himself on God's part, which is absolutely superior to any experience proper to earthly life.

3. The reciprocal gift of oneself to God—a gift in which man will concentrate and express all the energies of his own personal and at the same time psychosomatic subjectivity—will be the response to God's gift of himself to man.(1) In this mutual gift of himself by man, a gift which will become completely and definitively beatifying, as a response worthy of a personal subject to God's gift of Himself, virginity, or rather the virginal state of the body, will be totally manifested as the eschatological fulfillment of the nuptial meaning of the body, as the specific sign and the authentic expression of all personal subjectivity. In this way, therefore, that eschatological situation in which "They neither marry nor are given in marriage" has its solid foundation in the future state of the personal subject. This will happen when, as a result of the vision of God face to face, there will be born in him a love of such depth and power of concentration on God himself, as to completely absorb his whole psychosomatic subjectivity.

Union of communion

4. This concentration of knowledge (vision) and love on God himself—a concentration that cannot be other than full participation in the interior life of God, that is, in the very trinitarian reality—will be at the same time the discovery, in God, of the whole "world" of relations, constitutive of his perennial order (cosmos). This concentration will be above all man's rediscovery of himself, not only in the depth of his own person, but also in that union which is proper to the world of persons in their psychosomatic constitution. This is certainly a union of communion. The concentration of knowledge and love on God himself in the trinitarian communion of Persons can find a beatifying response in those who become participants in the other world, only through realizing mutual communion adapted to created persons. For this reason we profess faith in the "communion of saints" (communio sanctorum), and we profess it in organic connection with faith in the resurrection of the dead. Christ's words which affirm that in the other world, "They neither marry nor are given in marriage" are at the basis of these contents of our faith. At the same time they require an adequate interpretation in its light. We must think of the reality of the other world in the categories of the rediscovery of a new, perfect subjectivity of everyone and at the same time of the rediscovery of a new, perfect intersubjectivity of all. In this way, this reality signifies the real and definitive fulfillment of human subjectivity, and on this basis, the definitive fulfillment of the nuptial meaning of the body. The complete concentration of created subjectivity, redeemed and glorified, on God himself will not take man away from this fulfillment, in fact—on the contrary—it will introduce him into it and consolidate him in it. One can say, finally, that in this way eschatological reality will become the source of the perfect realization of the trinitarian order in the created world of persons.

Revelation of the body

5. The words with which Christ referred to the future resurrection—words confirmed in a singular way by his own resurrection—complete what in the present reflections we are accustomed to call the revelation of the body. This revelation penetrates in a way into the heart of the reality which we are experiencing. This reality is above all man, his body, the body of historical man. At the same time, this revelation enables us to go beyond the sphere of this experience in two directions—in the first place, in the direction of that beginning which Christ referred to in his conversation with the Pharisees regarding the indissolubility of marriage (cf. Mt 19:3-9); in the second place, in the direction of the other world, to which the Master drew the attention of his listeners in the presence of the Sadducees, who "say that there is no resurrection" (Mt 22:23). These two extensions of the sphere of the experience of the body (if we may say so) are not completely beyond the reach of our (obviously theological) understanding of the body. What the human body is in the sphere of man's historical experience is not completely cut off from those two dimensions of his existence, which are revealed through Christ's words.

Spiritual and physical

6. It is clear that here it is a question not so much of the body in abstract, but of man who is at once spiritual and physical. Continuing in the two directions indicated by Christ's words, and linking up again with the experience of the body in the dimension of our earthly existence (therefore in the historical dimension), we can make a certain theological reconstruction. This is a reconstruction of what might have been the experience of the body on the basis of man's revealed beginning, and also of what it will be in the dimension of the other world. The possibility of this reconstruction, which extends our experience of man-body, indicates, at least indirectly, the consistency of man's theological image in these three dimensions, which together contribute to the constitution of the theology of the body.

NOTE

1. "In the biblical conception...it is a question of a 'dialogic' immortality (resuscitation!), that is, that immortality does not derive merely from the obvious truth that the indivisible cannot die, but from the saving act of him who loves, who has the power to do so; therefore man cannot completely disappear, because he is known and loved by God. If all love postulates eternity, love of God not only wishes it, but actuates it and is it....

Since the immortality presented by the Bible does not derive from the power of what is in itself indestructible, but from being accepted in the dialogue with the Creator, for this reason it must be called resuscitation... J. Ratzinger, Risurrezione della carne—aspetto teologico, Sacramentum Mundi, Vol. 7 (Brescia: Morcelliana, 1977), pp. 160-161).

Today is the fourth Friday of Lent, a Day of Abstinence.

Abstinence
The law of abstinence requires a Catholic 14 years of age until death to abstain from eating meat on Fridays in honor of the Passion of Jesus on Good Friday. Meat is considered to be the flesh and organs of mammals and fowl. Also forbidden are soups or gravies made from them. Salt and freshwater species of fish, amphibians, reptiles and shellfish are permitted, as are animal derived products such as margarine and gelatin which do not have any meat taste.

On the Fridays outside of Lent the U.S. bishops conference obtained the permission of the Holy See for Catholics in the US to substitute a penitential, or even a charitable, practice of their own choosing. They must do some penitential/charitable practice on these Fridays. For most people the easiest practice to consistently fulfill will be the traditional one, to abstain from meat on all Fridays of the year. During Lent abstinence from meat on Fridays is obligatory in the United States as elsewhere.

Those who are excused from fast or abstinence
Besides those outside the age limits, those of unsound mind, the sick, the frail, pregnant or nursing women according to need for meat or nourishment, manual laborers according to need, guests at a meal who cannot excuse themselves without giving great offense or causing enmity and other situations of moral or physical impossibility to observe the penitential discipline.

Aside from these minimum penitential requirements Catholics are encouraged to impose some personal penance on themselves at other times. It could be modeled after abstinence and fasting. A person could, for example, multiply the number of days they abstain. Some people give up meat entirely for religious motives (as opposed to those who give it up for health or other motives). Some religious orders, as a penance, never eat meat. Similarly, one could multiply the number of days that one fasted. The early Church had a practice of a Wednesday and Saturday fast. This fast could be the same as the Church's law (one main meal and two smaller ones) or stricter, even bread and water. Such freely chosen fasting could also consist in giving up something one enjoys - candy, soft drinks, smoking, that cocktail before supper, and so on. This is left to the individual.

One final consideration. Before all else we are obliged to perform the duties of our state in life. Any deprivation that would seriously hinder us in carrying out our work, as students, employees or parents would be contrary to the will of God.---- Colin B. Donovan, STL

Saint of the Day and daily Mass readings.

Today is the Feast of St. Aldemar the Wise, abbot and miracle worker. Pray for us, all you angels and saints.


Today's reading is Hosea 14:2-10.
Today's Responsorial Psalm is Psalms 81:6-8, 8-9, 10-11, 14, 17.
Today's Gospel reading is Mark 12: 28-34.


[Links to the readings will be from the NAB until I can find another chapter and verse searchable Douay-Rheims Bible on-line.]


Everyday links:

The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Rosary
Our Mother of Perpetual Help
Prayers from EWTN
National Coalition of Clergy and Laity (dedicated to action for a genuine Catholic Restoration)
The Catholic Calendar Page for Today


Just in case you are wondering what exactly Catholics believe, here is

The Apostles Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.


Memorare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession,was left unaided.Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins my Mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful; O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy clemency hear and answer me. Amen.


St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse, pray for us.


Prayer to St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire

Dear St. Anthony, you became a Franciscan with the hope of shedding your blood for Christ. In God's plan for you, your thirst for martyrdom was never to be satisfied. St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire, pray that I may become less afraid to stand up and be counted as a follower of the Lord Jesus. Intercede also for my other intentions. (Name them.)


Prayer To Saint Michael The Archangel

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the divine power, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Oh yeah, baby. There is nothing quite like the clean, pure scent of the One, True Religion...

The Theology of the Body: 67. The Resurrection Perfects the Person

In his General Audience of 9 December 1981, the Holy Father continued his catechesis on Theology of the Body, with particular regard for the general resurrection, in which the body will be spiritualized, and both body and spirit divinized, in the vision of God.



The Resurrection Perfects the Person

In the course of the General Audience on Wednesday, 9 December, the Holy Father delivered the following address to the faithful gathered in the Paul VI Hall.



1. "At the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven" (Mt 22:30; cf. Mk 12:25). "They are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection" (Lk 20:36).

Let us try to understand these words of Christ about the future resurrection in order to draw a conclusion with regard to the spiritualization of man, different from that of earthly life. We could speak here also of a perfect system of forces in mutual relations between what is spiritual in man and what is physical. As a result of original sin, historical man experiences a multiple imperfection in this system of forces, which is expressed in St. Paul's well-known words: "I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind" (Rom 7:23).

Eschatological man will be free from that opposition. In the resurrection the body will return to perfect unity and harmony with the spirit. Man will no longer experience the opposition between what is spiritual and what is physical in him. Spiritualization means not only that the spirit will dominate the body, but, I would say, that it will fully permeate the body, and that the forces of the spirit will permeate the energies of the body.

Perfect realization in life to come

2. In earthly life, the dominion of the spirit over the body—and the simultaneous subordination of the body to the spirit—can, as the result of persevering work on themselves, express a personality that is spiritually mature. However, the fact that the energies of the spirit succeed in dominating the forces of the body does not remove the possibility of their mutual opposition. The spiritualization to which the synoptic Gospels refer in the texts analyzed here (cf. Mt 22:30; Mk 12:25; Lk 20:34-35), already lies beyond this possibility. It is therefore a perfect spiritualization, in which the possibility that "another law is at war with the law of...the mind" (cf. Rom 7:23) is completely eliminated. This state which—as is evident—is differentiated essentially (and not only with regard to degree) from what we experience in earthly life, does not signify any disincarnation of the body nor, consequently, a dehumanization of man. On the contrary, it signifies his perfect realization. In fact, in the composite, psychosomatic being which man is, perfection cannot consist in a mutual opposition of spirit and body. But it consists in a deep harmony between them, in safeguarding the primacy of the spirit. In the "other world," this primacy will be realized and will be manifested in a perfect spontaneity, without any opposition on the part of the body. However, that must not be understood as a definitive victory of the spirit over the body. The resurrection will consist in the perfect participation of all that is physical in man in what is spiritual in him. At the same time it will consist in the perfect realization of what is personal in man.

A new spiritualization

3. The words of the synoptic Gospels testify that the state of man in the other world will not only be a state of perfect spiritualization, but also of fundamental divinization of his humanity. The "sons of the resurrection"—as we read in Luke 20:36—are not only equal to angels, but are also sons of God. The conclusion can be drawn that the degree of spiritualization characteristic of eschatological man will have its source in the degree of his divinization, incomparably superior to the one that can be attained in earthly life. It must be added that here it is a question not only of a different degree, but in a way, of another kind of divinization. Participation in divine nature, participation in the interior life of God himself, penetration and permeation of what is essentially human by what is essentially divine, will then reach its peak, so that the life of the human spirit will arrive at such fullness which previously had been absolutely inaccessible to it. This new spiritualization will therefore be the fruit of grace, that is, of the communication of God in his very divinity, not only to man's soul, but to his whole psychosomatic subjectivity. We speak here of subjectivity (and not only of "nature"), because that divinization is to be understood not only as an interior state of man (that is, of the subject) capable of seeing God face to face, but also as a new formation of the whole personal subjectivity of man in accordance with union with God in his Trinitarian mystery and of intimacy with him in the perfect communion of persons. This intimacy—with all its subjective intensity—will not absorb man's personal subjectivity, but rather will make it stand out to an incomparably greater and fuller extent.

United with the vision of God

4. Divinization in the other world, as indicated by Christ's words, will bring the human spirit such a range of experience of truth and love such as man would never have been able to attain in earthly life. When Christ speaks of the resurrection, he proves at the same time that the human body will also take part, in its way, in this eschatological experience of truth and love, united with the vision of God face to face. When Christ says that those who take part in the future resurrection "neither marry nor are given in marriage" (Mk 12:25), his words—as has already been pointed out—affirm not only the end of earthly history, bound up with marriage and procreation, but also seem to reveal the new meaning of the body. Is it possible, in this case, at the level of biblical eschatology, to think of the discovery of the nuptial meaning of the body, above all as the virginal meaning of being male and female, as regards the body? To answer this question, which emerges from the words reported by the synoptic Gospels, we should penetrate more deeply into the essence of what will be the beatific vision of the divine Being, a vision of God face to face in the future life. It is also necessary to let oneself be guided by that range of experience of truth and love which goes beyond the limits of the cognitive and spiritual possibilities of man in temporality, and in which he will become a participant in the other world.

In the dimension of the "other world"

5. This eschatological experience of the living God will not only concentrate in itself all man's spiritual energies, but, at the same time, it will reveal to him, in a deep and experiential way, the self-communication of God to the whole of creation and, in particular, to man. This is the most personal self-giving by God, in his very divinity, to man: to that being who, from the beginning, bears within himself the image and likeness of God. In this way, in the other world the object of the vision will be that mystery hidden in the Father from eternity, a mystery which in time was revealed in Christ, in order to be accomplished incessantly through the Holy Spirit. That mystery will become, if we may use the expression, the content of the eschatological experience and the form of the entire human existence in the dimension of the other world. Eternal life must be understood in the eschatological sense, that is, as the full and perfect experience of that grace (charis) of God, in which man becomes a participant through faith during earthly life, and which, on the contrary, will not only have to reveal itself in all its penetrating depth to those who take part in the other world, but also will have to be experienced in its beatifying reality.

We suspend here our reflection centered on Christ's words about the future resurrection of the body. In this spiritualization and divinization in which man will participate in the resurrection, we discover—in an eschatological dimension—the same characteristics that qualified the nuptial meaning of the body. We discover them in the meeting with the mystery of the living God, which is revealed through the vision of him face to face.

Better Dead Than moslem Update.

Let me guess. You are wondering why the mohammed cartoons have reappeared in my Bloggerdom ghetto. First, it seems to be the only way to get the attention of the adherents of the Religion of Peace and Love. So be it.



Dear Powers That Be (ha!) in Afghanistan,
While I have your attention, I demand you let Mr. Abdul Rahman of Afghanistan, Christian, be allowed to continue as such. Our Boys are not fighting and dying so that ignorance as usual may continue. You are now free. With freedom comes responsibility. Primarily, the responsibility to allow all people to decide such matters for themselves. If you need convincing, just look at the horrific messes your religion creates when it assumes secular power. This ignorance as usual will not be permitted to continue.

Yours,
Just Another Crusader




Second, the links from the thumbnails of these cartoons I posted earlier no longer work. (Also here and here.)




U.S. Must Redouble Efforts for Rahman



Bush 'Deeply Troubled' Over Afghan's Trial






Jihad Watch: On Trial for Freedom





Michelle Malkin: Who Will Save Abdul Rahman?
Abdul Rahman is a man of faith. "I believe in the Holy Spirit. I believe in Christ. And I am a Christian," he declared this week.



In case you had not noticed, my mohammedan friends, it does not matter a whit to Your Humble Servant whether Citizen Rahman is Catholic or not. He could be a mormon for all I care. Or a hindu. Or an animist. The point is this: He decides. You do not.




Thanks to Human Events Online for the links above and the cartoons.

Joe Sobran delivers a major league beat-down to the democracy fetish.

The link above will take you to Joe's current on-line column. The archive is here. Not all of his past columns are available in the archive.

Am I dreaming, or what? The Republicans are on the ropes, and everyone is surprised that the Democrats can’t seem to take advantage of the situation.

But isn’t this in the nature of a two-party system when both parties have already failed to give satisfaction? When you’re tired of dysentery, does that mean you should prefer to go back to the nausea that preceded it?

Suppose the two big parties were the Prohibition Party and the Vegetarian Party, even though most people like both meat and drink. Are you with me so far? Okay, so the Prohibition Party rules for a while, but prohibiting the consumption of alcohol turns out to be a dubious idea in practice. The voters decide that prohibiting the consumption of meat couldn’t be any worse, so they put the Vegetarians in power.

Still with me? Now it’s illegal to eat meat, but the Vegetarians leave all the laws against alcohol in effect. This comes as an unhappy surprise to the people who thought that either party would at least offer relief from the other one.

Civics for Suckers, Lesson One: In a two-party system, you can get the evils of both parties at the same time. Maybe you voted Republican because you hated the way the Democrats always inch in the general direction of socialism. The joke’s on you! The Republicans start a war and simultaneously accelerate the drive toward socialism.

Reality Party, anyone?

Have you learned anything? If you are a typical American, probably not. So you buy a ticket to Brokeback Mountain and try to forget. At least in the movie the world makes some sort of crazy sense for a couple of hours. It’s a world where you know right from wrong and the scenery is gorgeous. The men can choose between women like Anne Hathaway or any of thousands of sheep, so, given the alternatives, they choose each other. Did I mention the great soundtrack music?

Back in the real world, as it is affectionately nicknamed, the war in Iraq is steadily losing favor. Even Bill Buckley, the retired founder of a pro-war magazine, says it’s time to admit defeat. This causes the magazine’s current editors, who favor nuking Mecca, to write that Buckley’s opinion is “premature.” After all, the war is not yet three years old, and you have to give these cakewalks at least a decade to work.

Jed Babbin gets it right here.

Politics is actually a lot of fun, if you observe it with a sense of humor and don’t get your hopes up. After all, politicians are basically just like the rest of us, and they behave just the way you or I might behave if we had the power to jail or shoot our creditors. In a democracy, the creditors are called “citizens” and the really gullible ones are called “voters.” Look in the mirror and ask yourself — honestly, now — which category you fall into. Keep the number of your local suicide hotline at hand.

It’s bad enough being a “citizen,” so I decided some time ago not to compound my troubles by being a “voter” too. This enabled me to see the world with an exhilarating clarity. Suddenly all the politicians bidding for my vote became comical little butts, like the figures in a Bruegel painting. At least I didn’t feel I was their butt anymore. Their slave, maybe, but no longer their butt.

Not that politicians really laugh at us. Humor isn’t their long suit. Does the wolf laugh at the sheep? In the movie I just mentioned, the sheep are protected by guys who shoot at the wolf. These guys are called “shepherds,” though in the so-called real world they are called “assassins” or even “terrorists.” And the wolf can shoot back, which brings us to Lesson Two: Don’t even think about shooting that wolf.

So when the wolf pounces on your lamb, just ignore the pitiful bleating and remind yourself that this is a democracy, where every sheep can freely express its preference for which kind of wolf it wants to be eaten by. Many sheep, perhaps understandably, prefer a wolf in sheep’s clothing, which is after all the basic idea of democracy. So far it has worked pretty well. The wolves all agree on that, and they want to spread democracy everywhere.

Irony, thy name is France.

French Anarchists Riot Again for Job Security...

OMG!!!! Phoebe Cates is almost 43!

Never! She will always be 18 to me!







Phoebe is exceptional in more than the obvious way. She and husband Kevin Kline have been married for seventeen years.

From The Horrible And Ironic Ways To Stay Dead Department:

BBC: Frozen parents cremated by son
A Frenchman who fought a long-running legal battle to keep his parents' bodies in a deep-freeze has cremated them after the freezer broke down.

Remy Martinot's parents were frozen soon after their deaths in the hope of bringing them back to life.

A court in January ordered them to be buried or cremated, and Mr Martinot had said he would appeal the decision.

However, they were cremated on 3 March after the crypt where they were kept at -65C heated up to -20C.

"I decided that it was no longer reasonable to carry on," Mr Martinot told the AFP news agency.

That is truer than he knows.

"I am no more sad today that at the time my parents died. I have finished mourning," he added.

That does not make any sense. If he truly believed freezing them would enable them tocome back to life one day, I should think he would be devastated at the thermostat's malfunction...unless he doesn't really love ol' pere et mere...or maybe he's just in it for the money...

"But I am bitter that I could not carry out my father's wishes. Maybe the future will show that my father was right and that he was a pioneer."

Daniel Boone was a pioneer. Your father was a looney.

Mr Martinot's father, Raymond, a cryogenics enthusiast, froze his wife after her death in 1984, hoping that one day science might enable her to be revived.

He showed off her crypt for a fee in the cellar of his chateau, in the Loire Valley town of Nueil-sur-Layon, to help pay for upkeep of the equipment.

When Raymond died in 2002, his body was frozen by his son.

In March that year, a court ruled that keeping the bodies refrigerated at the family chateau was against French law.

In January this year, France's highest administrative court, the Council of State, ordered Mr Martinot to either bury or cremate his parents.

He had planned to take his case before the European Court of Human Rights.

But there is good news for all the looneys chasing immortality:

Method designed to save cells from damage in cryogenics

Religion of Peace and Love Update.

Washington Times: Afghan Trial of Christian 'Troubles' Bush


Another from the "With friends like these..." files:

CAIR Urges Immediate Release of Afghan Christian(CNSNews.com) - A U.S. Islamic advocacy group criticized for not speaking out immediately about the trial of an Afghan Muslim who may get the death penalty for converting to Christianity is calling for the man's immediate release. Full Story


Top UK Court Tells Muslim Schoolgirl Her Human Rights Weren't Violated
(CNSNews.com) - Dismissing claims that her human rights had been violated, Britain's highest court has ruled against a British teenager who wanted to wear an all-encompassing Muslim dress to school. Full Story

Senator Social Moderate is damply incontinent.

Fox News/AP: Reid: Bush 'Dangerously Incompetent'

Someday, somebody will look up the definition of "science" and we'll all have a good laugh.

Scientist Alleging Bush Censorship Helped Gore, Kerry

(CNSNews.com) - The scientist touted by CBS News' "60 Minutes" as arguably the "world's leading researcher on global warming" and spotlighted as a victim of Bush administration censorship on the issue publicly endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president and received a $250,000 grant from the charitable foundation headed by Kerry's wife. Full Story

It Takes A Village To Staff A Gestapo Unit Update.

GOP Bills Would 'Criminalize' Jesus, Says Hitlery

A noted Christian, Gauleiter Hitlery Clintongruber (N-N.Y.), decries the evil FlyingBushMonkey regime's genocidal immigration proposals that threaten to toss Our Lord in the hoosegow.

(CNSNews.com) - Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.) said Wednesday that Republican-sponsored border security measures making it a federal crime to offer assistance to illegal immigrants would "criminalize" even Jesus. "It is hard to believe that a Republican leadership that is constantly talking about values and about faith would put forth such a mean-spirited piece of legislation," Clinton said during a news conference regarding a bill that was passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in December. A similar bill was introduced last week by Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.). "It is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the Scripture because this bill would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself," she said. "We need to sound the alarm about what is being done in the Congress." While noting that "we need comprehensive immigration reform," Clinton added: "Taking a harsh position is not going to solve the problem."

I hope and pray this psychotic power-mad cow keeps on talking all the way up to election day. The Democrasses are going to wish they gave the Gorehound another go.

Fyodor's Sour Sixteen.

I am down to eight teams in my Bracket of Integrity. I am so very, very sorry.

Allah and Man at Yale. (Sorry, WFB)

From OpinionJournal, John Fund continues his attack upon some poor Afghan frat boy who went to Yale just to meet blondes. And oppress them.

Something is very wrong at our elite universities. Last month Larry Summers resigned as president of Harvard; today Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi will speak by video to a conference at Columbia University that his regime is cosponsoring. (Columbia won't answer questions about how much funding it got from Libya or what implied strings were attached.) Then there's Yale, which for three weeks has refused to make any comment or defense beyond a vague 144-word statement about its decision to admit Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi--a former ambassador-at-large of the murderous Afghan Taliban--as a special student.

The three backers of the foundation that, along with Yale, is subsidizing Mr. Hashemi's tuition have told the Yale Daily News that they are withdrawing their support. But the university remains mute and paralyzed. "The intelligentsia haven't told Yalies what to think yet, because even they haven't made up their minds," says Yale professor David Gelernter. He clearly has: He calls the Taliban "an evil and macabre terrorist group. . . . The fact that Hashemi didn't do actual killing does not absolve him. Goebbels didn't shoot anyone either."

Except his own kids. How quickly we forget.

Universities are places where free inquiry, debate and information sharing are supposed to be guiding lights. In reality, the ivory towers too often now resemble dark castles, which raise their drawbridges at the first hint of criticism or scrutiny. Never has the moat separating elite universities from the rest of America been wider than in the case of Yale's Taliban Man.

In justifying its grant of a place to Mr. Hashemi, Yale has cited his approval by the State Department. And Yale's sole official statement says it hopes "his courses help him understand the broader context for the conflicts that led to the creation of the Taliban and to its fall. . . . Universities are places that must strive to increase understanding." That justification is unsettling to two women who will join voices at Yale tonight. Natalie Healy lost her Navy SEAL son Dan in Afghanistan last year when a Taliban rocket hit his helicopter. Ms. Healy, who notes that her son had four children of his own, is appalled at Yale's new student. "Lots of people could benefit from a Yale education, so why reward this man who was part of the group that killed Dan?" she told me. "I want to tell [Yale President] Richard Levin that his not allowing ROTC on campus is one thing, but welcoming a former member of the Taliban is deeply insulting to families who have children fighting them right now."

Ten days ago Ms. Healy met Malalai Joya, a member of Afghanistan's parliament, when she spoke near her home in Exeter, N.H. Tonight, Ms. Joya will speak at Yale on behalf of the Afghan Women's Mission. She is appalled that many people have forgotten the crimes of the Taliban, and was surprised to hear that Mr. Hashemi, who, like her, is 27 years old, is attending Yale. "He should apologize to my people and expose what he and others did under the Taliban," she told me. "He knew very well what criminal acts they committed; he was not too young to know. It would be better if he faced a court of justice than be a student at Yale University."

Mr. Hashemi probably won't be attending Ms. Joya's lecture tonight. He has dodged reporters for three weeks, ever since his presence at Yale was revealed in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine. Some claim he has fully repented his Taliban past, but in his sole recent interview--with the Times of London--he acknowledged he'd done poorly in his class "Terrorism: Past, Present and Future," attributing that to his disgust with the textbooks: "They would say the Taliban were the same as al Qaeda." At the same time, Mr. Hashemi won't explain an essay he wrote late last year in which he called Israel "an American al Qaeda" aimed at the Arab world. When asked about the Taliban's public executions in Kabul's soccer stadium, he quipped: "There were also executions happening in Texas."

Shecky bin Goat Rape. Everybody's a comedian.

Given his record as a Taliban apologist, Mr. Hashemi has told friends he is stunned Yale didn't look more closely into his curriculum vitae. "I could have ended up in Guantanamo Bay," he told the New York Times. So how did he end up in the Ivy League? Questions start at the State Department's door. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee's border security panel, has asked the State Department and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to explain exactly how Mr. Hashemi got an F-1 student visa. Yale's decision tree is clearer. Richard Shaw, Yale's dean of undergraduate admissions until he took the same post at Stanford last year, told the New York Times that Yale had another foreigner of Mr. Hashemi's caliber apply but "we lost him to Harvard" and "I didn't want that to happen again." Mr. Shaw won't return phone calls now, but emails he's exchanged with others offer insights into his thinking.

The day after the New York Times profile appeared, Haym Benaroya, a professor at Rutgers, wrote to Mr. Shaw expressing disbelief that Mr. Hashemi, who has a fourth-grade education and a high school equivalency certificate, could be at Yale. Mr. Shaw replied that he indeed had "non-traditional roots [and] very little formal education but personal accomplishments that had significant impact." Mr. Benaroya was stupefied; did Mr. Shaw mean accomplishments that had a "positive impact, not terroristic and totalitarian impact"? Mr. Shaw responded: "Correct, and potential to make a positive difference in seeking ways towards peace and democracy. An education is a way toward understanding the complex nuances of world politics."

That last paragraph is why you must monitor your children's education at all times.

Back in the early 1990s, when he was dean of Yale College, Yale history professor Don Kagan warned about what he called the university's "mutual massage" between value-neutral professors and soft-minded students. He is even more critical now: "The range of debate on campus is more narrow than ever today, and the Taliban incident is a wake-up call that moral relativism is totally unexamined here. The ability of students to even think clearly about patriotism and values is being undermined by faculty members who believe that at heart every problem has a U.S. origin." Mr. Kagan isn't optimistic that Yale will respond to outside pressure. "They have a $15 billion endowment, and I know Yale's governing board is handpicked to lick the boots of the president," he told me. "The only way Yale officials can be embarrassed is if a major donor publicly declares he is no longer giving to them. Otherwise, they simply don't care what the outside world thinks."

But there may be one other source of worry for Yale. Mr. Hashemi told the New York Times that he will apply next month for sophomore status in Yale's full-degree program starting next fall. An admissions official told me Yale's plan all along was to do just that if his grades were acceptable. But next week, Yale will mail out 19,300 rejection letters to those who applied to be in its class of 2010. "I can't imagine it'll be easy for Yale to convince those it rejects that the Taliban student isn't taking a place they could have had," a former Yale administrator told me.

Former Yale president Benno Schmidt says admitting Mr. Hashemi is an exercise in "amorality and cynicism." He told me that "diversity simply cannot be allowed to trump all moral considerations." It's not as if Yale can't muster moral indignation. Yale is divesting from Sudan, responding to pressure from student activists and labor unions. But when it comes to a former Taliban official, there is a desire to move on.

That's funny. Diversity is not a moral consideration. It is a political one.

A case in point is Amy Aaland, executive director of Yale's Slifka Center for Jewish Life, where Mr. Hashemi takes his meals (Kosher complies with Islamic dietary laws). (That is what is known as irony. - F. G.) When I asked her if any of the revelations about his past disturb her, she noted that he was "very, very young" when he had been a Taliban official, and that "it's not like the Taliban attacked this country." I asked about the Taliban's decree in May 2001 that all non-Muslims--chiefly Hindus--had to wear yellow badges. The order, reminiscent of the Nazis, was met with global censure. A reporter then in Kabul recalls Mr. Hashemi had no trouble defending the decree as a protection for minorities against punishment by the religious police "until I pointed out it also required non-Muslims to move out of housing they shared with Muslims within three days; he didn't have a coherent response to that." Ms. Aaland absorbed all that I told her, and replied: "I don't expect learning to happen overnight." She still thought that "just living here, [Mr. Hashemi] can learn values and ideals from our society."

She doesn't even have enough of a clue to be considered a self-hating Jew.

There is a line beyond which tolerance and political correctness become willful blindness. Eli Muller, a reporter for the Yale Daily News, was stunned back in 2000 when the lies of another Taliban spokesman who visited Yale "went nearly unchallenged." He concluded that the "moral overconfidence of Yale students makes them subject to manipulation by people who are genuinely evil." (EXACTLY! - F.G.) Today, you can say that about more than just some naïve students. You can add the administrators who abdicated their moral responsibility and admitted Mr. Hashemi.

James Taranto reminds us that anti-Israel is indeed anti-semite for some people. (Part 3)

From Best of the Web Today on Wednesday, March 22, 2006. (Link above.)

Anti-Jew Déjà Vu
Blogger Ed Lasky notes a fascinating piece that appeared in the Jan. 10, 2003, issue of the Chicago Maroon, a student newspaper at the University of Chicago:

An open letter demanding vigilance in ensuring that Israel does not forcibly expel Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza has drawn the endorsement of nearly a thousand American academics, including eight at the University of Chicago.

The letter, adopted from one circulated by Israeli academics, cites Israeli politicians who publicly support removing Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza and relocating them into neighboring Arab countries. The "fog of war [with Iraq] could be exploited by the Israeli government to commit further
crimes against the Palestinian people, up to full-fledged ethnic cleansing," the letter reads. . . .

"The precedent is there [to forcibly expel Palestinians], and it
behooves us to make sure it does not happen again," said John Mearsheimer, co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University and one of the letter's signatories.

Mearsheimer, of course, is a co-author, with Stephen Walt, of the infamous Harvard paper arguing that there is no moral or strategic basis for America's support of Israel and concluding that such support is explained by "the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby." As we noted Monday, their paper has drawn praise from David Duke.

The claim that Israel would expel Palestinians from the disputed territories had a familiar ring to it, and after some digging through our archives, we figured out why. On March 14, 2003, less than a week before coalition troops crossed the Iraqi frontier, we quoted a reader e-mail responding to our mystification at the idea--then being propounded by figures as diverse as Edward Said, Pat Buchanan, David Duke and Rep. Jim Moran (D., Va.)--"that the impending liberation of Iraq is the result of a conspiracy by a Zionist 'cabal,' as Buchanan calls it, that is 'colluding with Israel' to 'ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America's interests.' "

I would like to suggest Pat Buchanan is better described as "rabidly pro-American" rather than "anti-semitic". I think Pat's record proves he deserves the benefit of the doubt here. I have heard him attack every "ally" we have at one time or another.

Our reader wrote:

What is obvious is that they [the Israelis] will use the resulting chaos as a pretext to get rid of the Palestinians, driving them out of the country into Jordan or Egypt. Who will say or do anything to stop them when the region is totally destabilized and a mess?

We are not cruel enough to reveal the identity of this silly missive's author, but we will say that the person is at the University of Chicago and is not Mearsheimer. Apparently this idea was very much in the air among Windy City savants in early 2003. Three years later, Israel not only has not expelled the Palestinian Arabs; it has withdrawn from Gaza. The prediction not only was not "obvious" but was flat wrong. We said so at the time:

Let us spell out the assumptions underlying this theory:

That the disastrous outcome of war in Iraq--"chaos," with the region "totally destabilized and a mess"--is foreordained.

That Israel and its co-conspirators, some of whom hold subcabinet-level positions in the Bush administration, know this, but the rest of the administration and the majority of Congress have no clue and thus have been duped by the Zionist plotters into thinking the war has a significant chance of success.

That although the whole region will be engulfed in "chaos," "totally destabilized and a mess," Israel will have no problem managing the forcible relocation of more than three million people, many of them heavily armed with guns and explosives, all the while defending its borders against the hostile states and terrorist groups that surround it.

There is actually one more assumption implicit in the 2003 prediction of imminent "ethnic cleansing" in the disputed territories: that Israel would not observe any moral constraint against such an action. In other words, those who predicted mass expulsion of Palestinians assumed both (a) that Israel is wicked and (b) that carrying out the imagined plan would be practicable. We'd argue that both (a) and (b) are false, but clearly they cannot both be true. It may be that a conviction that Israel is evil blinded advocates of this theory to its practical shortcomings.

In a 2005 essay for Josh Marshall's TPMCafe.com titled "A Democratic Foreign Policy?," G. John Ikenberry sang the praises of both the authors of the Harvard study, among others:

It is worth noting that some of the most lucid and compelling voices in Democratic foreign policy circles are in fact scholars who ground their ideas in realist theory. These realist-oriented security studies scholars--who include the top figures in the field such as John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Barry Posen,
Robert Art, and many others--all have distinct and sophisticated realist-oriented theoretical views of world politics. But they also have spoken out against Bush foreign policy and opposed the Iraq war in unusually systematic
and intelligent ways.

Can we at least agree that entertaining lurid fantasies about Israeli depravity does not qualify as "realism" in any meaningful sense of the word?

James Taranto reminds us that anti-Israel is indeed anti-semite for some people. (Part 2)

From Best of the Web Today on Tuesday March 21, 2006. (Link above.)

A Friend Indeed
"US President George W. Bush said he hoped to resolve the nuclear dispute with Iran with diplomacy, but warned Tehran he would 'use military might' if necessary to defend Israel," reports Agence France-Presse:

"The threat from Iran is, of course, their stated objective to destroy our strong ally Israel. That's a threat, a serious threat. It's a threat to world peace," the US president said after a speech defending the war in Iraq.

"I made it clear, and I'll make it clear again, that we will use
military might to protect our ally Israel," said Bush, who was apparentlyreferring to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's call for the destruction of Israel.

This seems like as good an excuse as any to take a second whack at Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, whose shoddy anti-Israel screed, published under the aegis of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, has won praise from David Duke. Yesterday we eviscerated their moral case against Israel but passed over their dismissal of Israel's strategic value. On that question, reader James Brothers makes an excellent point:

Many years ago I sponsored a Jordanian officer at the U.S. Army Field Artillery Center at Fort Sill, Okla. Ibrahim was quite critical of both Israel and U.S. Middle Eastern policy. He could not understand why the U.S. was so unequivocally pro-Israel.

That is until I asked him the following question: If the Soviet Union attacked the U.S., which side would Jordan be on? He replied that it would depend, but that generally Jordan was pro- Western. Then I asked him which side Israel would be on. You could almost see the light bulb go off. His reply was simply, "Oh."

The Middle East is an important part of the world for the U.S. and the West. But as pro-Western as some of the countries may be, only Israel is a dependable friend of the U.S. And that in the final analysis is the reason why we support Israel. When the chips are down and the excrement hits the rotary air-moving device, we know the Israelis will be right there with us trying to clean up the mess. We really have no idea what any of the other countries in the Middle East will do.

A truculent Frenchman whose name we'll withhold offered this comment (quoting verbatim):

Let me strongly advice to you to return to school and learn to read, because the title of the study is "The Israel Lobby" and not "The Jewish Lobby". But you now it perfectly. Your goal is to pillory as anti-Semite any people criticizing Israels policies. And it works...for the moment.

This led us to muse that the close U.S. relationship with Israel has a psychological basis as well as a moral and strategic one. Both the U.S. and Israel, after all, are immigrant nations, founded and originally settled by people who, for various reasons, got the hell out of Europe. One can see why Europeans who stayed behind, and whose societies are considerably less dynamic than either ours or Israel's, would resent those who rejected the European way.

Further, World War II left Europe owing an incalculable moral debt to both America and the Jews: America because it saved Europe from its own savagery, Jews because they were the primary victims of that savagery. European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are often hard to tell apart, and it may be because they both reflect a self-loathing aspect of the European psyche--a neurotic need to compensate for an overwhelming sense of historical guilt.

James Taranto reminds us that anti-Israel is indeed anti-semite for some people. (Part 1)

From Best Of the Web Today on Monday, March 20, 2006. (Link above.)

Duke 1, Harvard 0
With Yale struggling to control the damage owing to its admission of an unrepentant onetime Talib as a student (John Fund has the latest), Harvard now finds itself in a similarly embarrassing situation. It's the sort of Ivy League rivalry that causes "prominent alumni" of third-tier Western universities to break into a slightly guilty smile. The New York Sun reports on the latest trouble in Cambridge:

A paper recently co-authored by the academic dean of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government about the allegedly far-reaching influence of an "Israel lobby" is winning praise from white supremacist David Duke.

The Palestine Liberation Organization mission to Washington is distributing the paper, which also is being hailed by a senior member of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.

But the paper, "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," by the Kennedy School's Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago, is meeting with a more critical reception from many of those it names as part of the lobby. The 83-page "working paper" claims a network of journalists, think
tanks, lobbyists, and largely Jewish officials have seized the foreign policy debate and manipulated America to invade Iraq. Included in this network, the authors say, are the editors of the New York Times, the scholars at the Brookings Institution, students at Columbia, "pro-Israel" senior officials in the executive branch, and "neoconservative gentiles" including columnist George Will.

Duke, a former Louisiana state legislator and one-time Ku Klux Klan leader, called the paper "a great step forward," but he said he was "surprised" that the Kennedy School would publish the report.

Now of course, just because Duke endorses Walt and Mearsheimer doesn't mean they endorse him. Indeed, we suspect they're as mortified by this praise as Yale is by the criticism it has received over Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi. Yet without ascribing to them any invidious motives, it seems fair to say that their views dovetail disturbingly with those of unquestioned anti-Semites.

Walt and Mearsheimer argue that "neither strategic nor moral arguments can account for America's support for Israel," and therefore the only possible explanation is "the unmatched power of the Israel Lobby." The premise is plainly false; the "Israel Lobby" in fact makes many strategic and moral arguments in its own favor. Walt and Mearsheimer merely disagree with them, and they spend the opening paragraphs of the paper explaining why.

We'll pass over their strategic arguments. We find them wrongheaded, but we will stipulate that one can in good faith take the position that the costs to the U.S. of supporting Israel outweigh the benefits.

Their rejection of the moral arguments, however, is highly problematic. They write:

[Israel's] backers . . . argue that it deserves unqualified support
because it is weak and surrounded by enemies; it is a democracy; the Jewish people have suffered from past crimes and therefore deserve special treatment; and Israel's conduct has been morally superior to that of its adversaries. On close inspection, none of these arguments is persuasive.

Let's take these points one by one:

Israel is weak and surrounded by enemies. To the contrary, they say, Israel is by far the strongest regional power. Further, "Egypt and Jordan have signed peace treaties with it, and Saudi Arabia has offered to do so." This gives the Saudis far too much credit. True, as we noted in 2002, then Crown Prince Abdullah (now king) told the New York Times' Thomas Friedman that he was amenable to establishing full diplomatic relations, conditioned on Israeli withdrawal from the disputed territories (occupied by Egypt and Jordan before 1967 and Israel since). But Riyadh quickly made clear that it was unwilling even to talk to Jerusalem until after such a withdrawal. As we wrote then, "The Saudi position, in other words, amounts to: Give us land now, and maybe we'll give you peace later." It is true that Israel is the regional superpower, and that Cairo and Amman have signed peace treaties with the Jewish state, but it seems undeniable--and Walt and Mearsheimer do not deny it--that none of this would be true absent U.S. support for Israel. Thus their reasoning is circular: Israel doesn't deserve U.S. support because it has received U.S. support.

Israel is a democracy. This they concede, but they also claim
that "some aspects of Israeli democracy are at odds with core American values." In particular, they claim that Arab citizens of Israel "are treated as second-class citizens" and note that "a recent Israeli government commission found that Israel behaves in a 'neglectful and discriminatory' manner towards
them." Yet even acknowledging that Israeli democracy is flawed, its political system is still vastly superior to those of its adversaries. Israeli Arabs enjoy more political and civil liberties than citizens of just about any Arab country; and the only Arab lands that come anywhere close to being democracies are
Lebanon, Iraq and the disputed Palestinian territories--the last two only because of American intervention. That the Israeli government criticizes its own treatment of Arabs is a testament to its democracy; can anyone imagine, say, the Saudi regime offering similar criticisms of its treatment of Shiites, non-Muslims or women? American democracy, too, is not without its flaws. During World War II, for instance, black Americans were still disfranchised, and innocent Japanese-Americans were rounded up and put in camps. It does not follow that America was no better than Nazi Germany.

Jews deserve a homeland because of their past oppression. Walt and Mearsheimer go so far as to allow that Israel's creation "was undoubtedly an appropriate response to the long record of crimes against Jews." But, they say, "it also brought about fresh crimes against a largely innocent third party: the
Palestinians." They lay the plight of the Palestinians entirely at Israel's door, failing to acknowledge the Arab states' vast culpability. The Arabs rejected the 1947 U.N. partition of Palestine, which would have created a Palestinian Arab state including territories beyond the present-day West Bank
and Gaza strip. The Arabs immediately declared war on the nascent Jewish state--a war in which Israel gained more territory--and they waged war again in 1967 and 1973. All Arab states except Jordan refuse to allow Palestinians to become citizens, preferring to let them linger as stateless refugees. Nor do the authors acknowledge that since the creation of Israel many Jews who settled there were fleeing persecution in Arab lands and (since 1979) Iran. Whereas Israel has 1.3 million Arab citizens, no Arab country except Morocco has more than a handful of Jewish ones.

Israel is morally superior to its adversaries. Here they cite
various alleged abuses by Israel during its war of independence and claim that "Israel's subsequent conduct has often been brutal, belying any claim to moral superiority." Even if we concede all the criticisms of Israel, they do not belie "any claim to moral superiority," only to moral perfection. Evaluating which side is morally superior would require a comparative analysis; the only thing Walt and Mearsheimer say about Arab misconduct is that "the Palestinian resort to terrorism is wrong but it isn't surprising. The Palestinians believe they have no other way to force Israeli concessions." No such excuses are offered for Israel's purported misdeeds.

Walt and Mearsheimer's method of analysis presumes Israel's guilt. Every past or present Israeli transgression is evidence of its wickedness, whereas Arab ones, if they are acknowledged at all, are "understandable." This approach paints a highly misleading picture. It is anti-Semitic in effect if not in intent.

Which brings us back to David Duke. His endorsement no doubt is anathema to Walt and Mearsheimer, but it is telling that he finds their ideas congenial.

Their brand of anti-Israel prejudice is much more common and respectable in Europe than in America (indeed, their paper was published in the London Review of Books), a fact that they would no doubt attribute to the mighty "Israel Lobby." But here is another difference between Europe and America: In many European countries, David Duke would not be allowed to speak because of postwar prohibitions on Nazi propaganda. Passing these laws surely was an act of prudence, and it may be that they are still necessary for the protection of European democracy.

By contrast, America's ability to tolerate the likes of Duke demonstrates the health of our body politic. It may be that Duke's presence even enhances that health. Think of him as a sort of vaccine that helps immunize us against more insidious forms of bigotry.

Today's guest Italian-American: Sal Paolantonio.

LEFT: Arch-lamebrain behind The Sopranos, David Chase. (nee DeCesare)

ESPN's Sal Paolantonio wants all you whiter folks to know this crap is a slanderous embarrassment to us.


A couple of years ago, a producer from a radio station here in Philadelphia called my house at a ridiculously early hour of the morning to tell me that a talk show host wanted to interview me about my appearance on "The Sopranos."

I thought it was my brother playing a practical joke on me. But this was no joke. Yes, I had been on the show -- I was on TV in Tony's living room during one episode, reporting on the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXXV, while Tony was having an argument with his son.

I didn't have to stand in one of those long lines in North Jersey. I didn't have to endure a tedious casting call. And here I was, given a bit part on one of the most popular shows in the history of television.

And I was outraged.

Over the next two days, my phone never stopped ringing. Radio stations, friends, relatives all called, looking for a reaction, a story, anything that could connect them to "The Sopranos."

Once I told them that I had nothing to do with my appearance on "The Sopranos," that it happened against my will, and that I thought the show was the worst kind of harmful stereotyping of Italian-Americans imaginable, the interviews quickly turned sour, then became a shrill and often pointless debate.

"The Sopranos" has been on the air now for seven years. Two Sundays ago, all over the New York metropolitan area, bars and restaurants emptied early -- people were trying to beat the traffic to get home in time to watch the opening episode of the new season. On his Monday morning radio program, Don Imus said, "It's like the Super Bowl."

The reaction I always get is: "How could you not watch 'The Sopranos'? You have a vowel on the end of your name. You live in New Jersey. These are your people."

No, they're not. And this is precisely the problem that the show has caused for many, many Italian-Americans. For seven years now on television, which night in and night out provides the unavoidably relentless reflection of our behavior and values, "The Sopranos" has given the country a horribly skewed version of what Italian-Americans look and act like in modern America.

Let me give you one tiny, but potent, example. In several of the clips of the show I have seen, Tony's son routinely curses out his father -- and his mother, in front of his father. I have spent countless hours in dozens upon dozens of Italian-American households, including my own. I find it hard to believe that behavior would be tolerated in any Italian family, be it working class, super-rich, or anywhere in between. Ever.

Amen to that, Brother.

I know the argument. It's just a TV show. As former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani recently told the New York Times: "You could spend your whole life wanting to be insulted."

I'm not insulted by "The Sopranos." I just want people to know that this show is not universally embraced, as some in the mainstream media would suggest.

And, lost in the all the media slobbering over "The Sopranos," the show is losing some of its audience. The season opener was down nearly a quarter from last season's finale -- from 12.1 million viewers to 9.5 million.

Yippee!

Often, critics praise the show for being well made. Well, Leni Riefenstahl's movies for Hitler were well made. So was "The Birth of a Nation." "The Sopranos" is just another form of propaganda -- which can be defined as anything that confirms what we already think we know. It does not challenge us. And in that way, it is not art. It is comfort food for the brain, feeding a century-old stereotype of a great people.

A-men!

Art is the act of taking the impossible and transforming it into something we all care about. "The Sopranos" is just garbage. It appeals to the worst in all of us -- whether you are Italian-American or not. And we should not care about that.

David Chase, the creator of the show, has provided us with cartoon characters who steal, cheat, murder and treat each other like crap. The show is about sex, profanity, gambling and violence -- and you don't have to get up from your couch. Oh man, start printing the money. (See the No. 1 thing the Internet is used for: porn.)

Here's the kicker: Chase should know better. His original name is DeCesare. That means that somewhere down the line, his surname was Anglicized -- perhaps because he was being victimized by the kind of stereotyping that he now exploits.

And the mainstream media should know better, too. For weeks prior to this season's opening episode, the giddiness over the arrival of the final season was nauseating. The praise for the show almost universally ignores the harm it has done.

Just imagine this for a moment: HBO, or any other television network, decides to put a series on the air that depicts Latino-Americans -- the nation's fastest-growing minority group -- as uneducated drug dealers whose lives revolve around gang warfare, a seven-year run of bad behavior that reinforces America's fears about the influx of illegal immigrants into the country.

A show like that would be, and should be, excoriated. And it probably would never make it out of the pilot stage, no less have a run of seven years of great reviews.

How about, for example, a TV series about athletes who engage in all kinds of illicit behavior, including adultery and illegal drugs? Wait a second. There was a show like that: "Playmakers." Critics loved it. It had a solid following on ESPN.

When the show was on the air, I remember having a long discussion with Tampa Bay Bucs linebacker Derrick Brooks, who found "Playmakers" to be an offensive and outrageous depiction of who he is. Brooks is a philanthropist. Every year, he takes disadvantaged children on a trip abroad. He is overwhelmingly generous with his time and money.

Brooks was one of a number of players who complained to NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue, who put pressure on then-Disney chairman Michael Eisner to pull the show. Few doubt that that pressure helped end the show's short run.

Of course, no one is going to watch a show about NFL players taking kids on a safari.

And unlike many groups who claim to speak for Italian-Americans, I've never thought that "The Sopranos" should be pulled off the air. And unlike many Italian-American critics of the show, I'm not going to rattle off a bunch of numbers trying to convince you that the mob is a minuscule percentage of the Italian-American community. To justify our objection to the show, it doesn't matter how many of us are doctors and lawyers and judges and teachers and sportscasters.

But just remember this when you tune in on Sunday nights: "The Sopranos" is not who we are.

Why Repansycans are just like Democrasses. Only slower.

Here's the bottom line on any minimum wage, anywhere and anytime: All labor cost increases (just like all corporate tax increases) are passed onto consumers in the form of higher prices. What consumers are least able to afford higher prices on the goods they purchase? Why, that would be the poor minimum wage earners these power-mad goofballs pretend to help. That is all you need to know about the minimum wage because that is all there is to know about it. It is a fraud. It is not a "living wage". (For the confused Catholic kiddies out there. And their confused bishops.)

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Minimum-wage bill likely to pass in Pa.

Sit back and watch Totalitarian Pennsylvania's Repansycans play politics (read: vote buying) with the lives of the poor.

The GOP-controlled legislature appears likely to approve legislation to raise the minimum wage this year, but the increase might be about half the amount Gov. Rendell advocated.

Rendell's spokeswoman, Kate Philips, said it was too hypothetical for her to say whether Rendell would sign legislation raising the minimum wage halfway between the current $5.15 and the $7.15 the governor and other Democrats are pushing for.

Slow Eddie's brain is hypothetical. Lynn Swann could not possibly be any worse.

"We don't believe it's enough," she said. "The governor wants to go farther."

Increasing the minimum wage has emerged as one of Rendell's biggest election-year priorities. It is opposed by business owners who say an increase in labor costs would squeeze their already thin margins.

Note the business community's complicity. They should stand up like men and tell the world the truth: They will pass on all government mandated labor costs in immediate price increases. Do you think the people would blame them or the kleptocrats in Harrisburg?

Unions and advocates for the poor support a raise, saying the minimum wage can barely support a family or help people get ahead, and that an increase would help boost wages for workers at many other pay scales.

Lies and fraud from professional liars and con men.

The House plans to vote on minimum-wage legislation in early April. That bill would raise the minimum immediately to $5.70 and to $6.25 on Jan. 1, 2007. Workers under 18 would be exempt, a concession to business advocates who contend the minimum wage is paid largely to teenagers and others who do not support a household on that pay alone.

Before voting, Democrats will try to amend the bill to boost the increase to $7.15 immediately and provide an annual increase at the rate of inflation.

Saint of the Day and daily Mass readings.

Today is the Feast of St. Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo, bishop, defender of the native Indians of Peru, lawyer, professor, and chief judge of the court of Inquisition under King Phillip II of Spain. He founded schools, churches, hospitals, and the first seminary in the New World. Pray for us, all you angels and saints.


Today's reading for the Feast of St. Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo is 2 Timothy 1:13-14, 2:1-3.
Today's Responsorial Psalm is Psalms 96:1-2, 2-3, 7-8, 10.
Today's Gospel reading is Matthew 9:35-38.


[Links to the readings will be from the NAB until I can find another chapter and verse searchable Douay-Rheims Bible on-line.]


Everyday links:

The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Rosary
Our Mother of Perpetual Help
Prayers from EWTN
National Coalition of Clergy and Laity (dedicated to action for a genuine Catholic Restoration)
The Catholic Calendar Page for Today


Just in case you are wondering what exactly Catholics believe, here is

The Apostles Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.


Memorare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession,was left unaided.Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins my Mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful; O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy clemency hear and answer me. Amen.


St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse, pray for us.



Prayer to St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire

Dear St. Anthony, you became a Franciscan with the hope of shedding your blood for Christ. In God's plan for you, your thirst for martyrdom was never to be satisfied. St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire, pray that I may become less afraid to stand up and be counted as a follower of the Lord Jesus. Intercede also for my other intentions. (Name them.)

Prayer To Saint Michael The Archangel

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the divine power, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

The sick, twisted money grab and false religion known as Scientology is manipulating the stricken Isaac Hayes.

Isaac Hayes' Quitting Controversy
(Also here and here.)

From Roger Friedman of FoxNews:

Isaac Hayes did not quit "South Park." My sources say that someone quit it for him.

I can tell you that Hayes is in no position to have quit anything. Contrary to news reports, the great writer, singer and musician suffered a stroke on Jan. 17. At the time it was said that he was hospitalized and suffering from exhaustion.

It’s also absolutely ridiculous to think that Hayes, who loved playing Chef on "South Park," would suddenly turn against the show because they were poking fun at Scientology.

Last November, when the “Trapped in a Closet” episode of the comedy aired, I saw Hayes and spent time with him in Memphis for the annual Blues Ball.

If he hated the show so much, I doubt he would have performed his trademark hit song from the show, “Chocolate Salty Balls.” He tossed the song into the middle of one of his less salacious hits and got the whole audience in the Memphis Pyramid to sing along.

I can tell you, Hayes was very pleased with himself, was in a great mood and, as always, loved his fans' coming up to him and asking him about Chef.

As recently as early January, before his stroke, Hayes defended the "South Park" creators in an interview with “The AV Club,” the serious side of the satirical newspaper, The Onion.


AV Club: They did just do an episode that made fun of your religion, Scientology. Did that bother you?

Hayes: Well, I talked to Matt [Stone] and Trey [Parker] about that. They didn't let me know until it was done. I said, 'Guys, you have it all wrong. We're not like that. I know that's your thing, but get your information correct, because somebody might believe that [expletive], you know?' But I understand what they're doing. I told them to take a couple of Scientology courses and understand what we do. [Laughs.]


The truth is, Hayes has a sly sense of humor and loves everything about "South Park." It’s provided him a much-needed income stream since losing the royalties to the many hits he’s written, such as “Shaft” and “Soul Man,” in the mid-1970s.

Even though he’s one of America’s most prolific hit writers, Hayes has been denied access to profits from his own material for almost 30 years.
But it’s hard to know anything since Hayes, like Katie Holmes, is constantly monitored by a Scientologist representative most of the time. Luckily, at the Blues Ball he was on his own, partying just with family and friends. He was very excited about having gotten married and about the impending birth of a new child.

Friends in Memphis tell me that Hayes did not issue any statements on his own about South Park. They are mystified.

“Isaac’s been concentrating on his recuperation for the last two and a half, three months,” a close friend told me.

Hayes did not suffer paralysis, but the mild stroke may have affected his speech and his memory. He’s been having home therapy since it happened.
That certainly begs the question of who issued the statement that Hayes was quitting "South Park" now because it mocked Scientology four months ago. If it wasn’t Hayes, then who would have done such a thing?

Meantime, Tom Cruise may have gotten Comedy Central to pull its repeat of "South Park"'s Scientology spoof last week, but the result is that episode is all over the Web. You can see it for free at youtube.com.

Not only that, the Comedy Central Web site has four clips from the 21-minute show. And it also says that “Trapped in the Closet” will air this Wednesday at 10 p.m.

So whether or not Cruise actually did use influence at Viacom/Paramount to get the show pulled from last week’s schedule, here it is, bigger and better than ever. Of course, no one would have cared one way or another if “Trapped” simply had aired on schedule.

Of course, no one could blame Cruise, John Travolta or even R&B singer R. Kelly for being upset about the episode. They are poked fun at mercilessly.
In the episode, Stan, one of the "South Park" characters, is solicited into Scientology. He gives them $240 and takes an EMeter test. This convinces the higher-ups that Stan is the reincarnation of the group’s founder, L. Ron Hubbard.

That would be bad enough, wouldn’t it? But Cruise visits Stan in his bedroom and winds up hiding in his closet when Stan tells him he’s not the greatest actor. Thus is born the line “Tom Cruise won’t come out of the closet.”

It’s repeated dozens of times. Travolta soon joins Cruise in Stan’s closet. He won’t come out, either. And when they do, there is the ecstatic announcement that they’ve “come out of the closet.”

You get the picture. But nothing in “Trapped in the Closet” is any worse than anything "South Park" creators Stone and Parker have done before. Just rent “Team America” and see what I mean. (Thanks to WND for the heads up.)

This is going to end badly.

Sun-Sentinel.com: Palm Beach County commissioners to require developers to limit home prices

Palm Beach County's proposed affordable housing fix started Tuesday, with county commissioners agreeing to force developers to limit some new home prices.

After months of negotiations with the housing industry failed to produce a deal, county commissioners agreed to require that as much as nearly 20 percent of new neighborhoods be reserved for low and middle-income buyers.

In return for providing "affordable" homes, which could range in price from $164,000 to $304,000, developers could build up to 30 percent more homes than usually allowed to help recover lost profits.

Fees on new businesses and luxury homes as well as taxpayer-backed bonds to help pay for affordable housing efforts could follow, commissioners said.

"The builders are going to hate it. The realtors are going to hate it. Too bad," Commissioner Warren Newell said. "We have to do what's right for the community."

Commissioners on Tuesday backed off threats of a building moratorium. Instead, the commission endorsed an interim policy to start limiting some home prices in new neighborhood proposals while work begins to change county development guidelines and finalize the affordable housing standards by this fall.

Developers and builders contend the new rules mean they are the ones who will get priced out of Palm Beach County, which they say would slow construction of new neighborhoods and further inflate the costs of existing homes. (Thanks to WorldNetDaily for the heads up.)

Diversity über alles.

WND:'Diversity Day' canceled over ex-'gay' speakers
Homosexual couple didn't want Christian viewpoint represented

Amid controversy over a homosexual speaker, a high school in Wisconsin has canceled its "Diversity Day" event scheduled for tomorrow.

Speakers at Viroqua High School in Viroqua, Wisc., for the biannual event were to include Hmong, Jewish, Muslim, American Indian, African American, Latino, Buddhist, physically handicapped and poor people, the La Crosse Tribune reported.

The paper said, however, the event was called off late last week after the Florida-based public-interest legal group Liberty Counsel raised a potential challenge, insisting the program include the viewpoint of a former homosexual.

The last event, in 2004, initially was canceled by the school board after 400 people signed a petition protesting the inclusion of speakers on homosexual and transgender issues. The event was reinstated in the spring, however, when elections changed the board's membership.

This time, a fax from Liberty Counsel stated local pastor Don Greven of Bad Axe Lutheran Church and the grandfather of a senior at the high school raised concerns about no Christian, or formerly homosexual, viewpoint being included among the speakers, the Tribune reported.
Liberty Counsel argued a federal court in Michigan had ruled a similar exclusion unconstitutional.

"By excluding the Christian and ex-gay viewpoints, the (Viroqua) District violates the Establishment Clause and the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection," the group said.

Greven, 61, told the paper diversity means, "in our understanding, that the various views are presented, and that was lacking."

Gregg Attleson, a teacher on the Diversity Day planning committee, told the LaCrosse paper the intent is to introduce students to minorities and people with alternative lifestyles.

What about orthodox Catholicism? I can't think of anything more radical and "alternative" these days.

"Our students are not going to be living their lives out in Viroqua," said Attleson. "They'll be out and about in the world – in jobs, in the military, in the university – and they're going to come into contact with people of different backgrounds. And we feel it would be real helpful for them in a nice safe place, like a high school, to have contact and be able to dispel some of the stereotypes."

Attleson said the homosexual couple scheduled to speak refused to be on the program alongside an "ex-gay" viewpoint, saying they would be uncomfortable.

Welcome to the real world, Nancy. And Nancy. My guess is they are constantly incomfortable.

The committee then decided it would be best to cancel the whole program.
The agenda was to feature two keynote speakers, a movie and small-group discussions with three of the 10 speakers.

Attleson said students were free to choose which small groups to attend and could opt out of the program if parents contacted the school in advance.

"Non-positive groups were not what we were going for," said committee member Ellen Byers in response to the decision to cancel.

The homosexual couple's appearance was not about "proselytizing" or alienating people, (Of course not... - F. G.) she said. The planners wanted to help resolve misunderstandings about the issue because the school has homosexuals among its student body.

...maybe they were just looking for some high school kids to "date".

"It's ironic, because we're trying to be tolerant and at the same time we might be accused of being intolerant, said Byers, an English teacher.

Oooooohhhh...Byers, you are this close!

The Theology of the Body: 66. The Resurrection and Theological Anthropology

In his General Audience of 2 December 1981, the Holy Father continued his catechesis on Theology of the Body, by addressing the teaching of Christ on the relationship between male and female after the general resurrection.


The Resurrection and Theological Anthropology

In the course of the General Audience of 2 December the Holy Father took up again the general theme of the resurrection of the body in the context of his catechesis on theological anthropology.


1. "When they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage" (Mk 12:25). These words have a key meaning for the theology of the body. Christ uttered them after having affirmed, in the conversation with the Sadducees, that the resurrection is in conformity with the power of the living God. All three synoptic Gospels report the same statement, except that Luke's version is different in some details from that of Matthew and Mark. Essential for them all is the fact that, in the future resurrection, human beings, after having reacquired their bodies in the fullness of the perfection characteristic of the image and likeness of God—after having reacquired them in their masculinity and femininity—"neither marry nor are given in marriage." Luke expresses the same idea in chapter 20:34-35, in the following words: "The children of this age marry and are given in marriage, but those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage."

Definitive fulfilment of mankind

2. As can be seen from these words, marriage, that union in which, according to Genesis, "A man cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh" (2:24)—the union characteristic of man right from the beginning—belongs exclusively to this age. Marriage and procreation do not constitute, on the other hand, the eschatological future of man. In the resurrection they lose, so to speak, their raison d'être. "That age," of which Luke spoke (20:35), means the definitive fulfillment of mankind. It is the quantitative closing of that circle of beings, who were created in the image and likeness of God, in order that, multiplying through the conjugal "unity in the body" of men and women, they might subdue the earth. "That age" is not the world of the earth, but the world of God, who, as we know from the First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians, will fill it entirely, becoming "everything to everyone" (1 Cor 15:28).

3. At the same time "that age," which according to revelation is "the kingdom of God," is also the definitive and eternal "homeland" of man (cf. Phil 3:20). It is the "Father's house" (Jn 14:2). As man's new homeland, that age emerges definitively from the present world, which is temporal—subjected to death, that is, to the destruction of the body (cf. Gen 3:19, "to dust you shall return")—through the resurrection. According to Christ's words reported by the synoptic Gospels, the resurrection means not only the recovery of corporeity and the re-establishment of human life in its integrity by means of the union of the body with the soul, but also a completely new state of human life itself.

We find the confirmation of this new state of the body in the resurrection of Christ (cf. Rom 6:5-11). The words reported by the synoptic Gospels (Mt 22:30; Mk 12:25; Lk 20:34-35) will ring out then (that is, after Christ's resurrection) to those who had heard them. I would say almost with a new probative force, and at the same time they will acquire the character of a convincing promise. For the present, however, we will dwell on these words in their pre-paschal phase, referring only to the situation in which they were spoken. There is no doubt that already in the answer given to the Sadducees, Christ revealed the new condition of the human body in the resurrection. He did so precisely by proposing a reference and a comparison with the condition in which man had participated since the "beginning."

Renewed in resurrection

4. The words, "They neither marry nor are given in marriage" seem to affirm at the same time that human bodies, recovered and at the same time renewed in the resurrection, will keep their masculine or feminine peculiarity. The sense of being a male or a female in the body will be constituted and understood in that age in a different way from what it had been from the beginning, and then in the whole dimension of earthly existence. The words of Genesis: "A man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh" (2:24), constituted right from the beginning that condition and relationship of masculinity and femininity, extended also to the body, which must rightly be defined as conjugal and at the same time as procreative and generative. It is connected with the blessing of fertility, pronounced by God (Elohim) when he created man "male and female" (Gn 1:27). The words Christ spoke about the resurrection enable us to deduce that the dimension of masculinity and femininity—that is, being male and female in the body—will again be constituted together with the resurrection of the body in "that age."

Like the angels

5. Is it possible to say something more detailed on this subject? Beyond all doubt, Christ's words reported by the synoptic Gospels (especially in the version of Luke 20:27-40) authorize us to do so. We read there that "Those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead...cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God" (Matthew and Mark report only that "They are like angels in heaven"). This statement makes it possible above all to deduce a spiritualization of man according to a different dimension from that of earthly life (and even different from that of the beginning itself). It is obvious that it is not a question here of transforming man's nature into that of the angels, that is, a purely spiritual one. The context indicates clearly that in that age man will keep his own human psychosomatic nature. If it were otherwise, it would be meaningless to speak of the resurrection.

The resurrection means the restoring to the real life of human corporeity, which was subjected to death in its temporal phase. In the expression of Luke (20:36) just quoted (and in that of Mt 22:30 and Mk 12:25), it is certainly a question of human, that is, psychosomatic nature. The comparison with heavenly beings, used in the context, is no novelty in the Bible. Among others, it is said in a psalm, exalting man as the work of the Creator, "You have made him little less than the angels" (Ps 8:5). It must be supposed that in the resurrection this similarity will become greater. It will not be through a disincarnation of man, but by means of another kind (we could also say another degree) of spiritualization of his somatic nature—that is, by means of another "system of forces" within man. The resurrection means a new submission of the body to the spirit.

Plato and St. Thomas

5. Before beginning to develop this subject, it should be recalled that the truth about the resurrection had a key meaning for the formation of all theological anthropology, which could be considered simply as an anthropology of the resurrection. As a result of reflection on the resurrection, Thomas Aquinas neglected in his metaphysical (and at the same time theological) anthropology Plato's philosophical conception on the relationship between the soul and the body and drew closer to the conception of Aristotle.(1) The resurrection bears witness, at least indirectly, that the body, in the composite being of man as a whole, is not only connected temporarily with the soul (as its earthly "prison," as Plato believed).(2) But together with the soul it constitutes the unity and integrity of the human being. Aristotle taught precisely that,(3) unlike Plato. If St. Thomas accepted Aristotle's conception in his anthropology, he did so considering the truth about the resurrection. The truth about the resurrection clearly affirmed, in fact, that the eschatological perfection and happiness of man cannot be understood as a state of the soul alone, separated (according to Plato: liberated) from the body. But it must be understood as the state of man definitively and perfectly "integrated" through such a union of the soul and the body, which qualifies and definitively ensures this perfect integrity.

Let us interrupt at this point our reflection on the words spoken by Christ about the resurrection. The great wealth of content enclosed in these words induces us to take them up again in further considerations.

Notes

1. Cf., e.g.: Habet autem anima alium modum essendi cum unitur corpori, et cum furerit a corpore separata, manente tamen eadem animae natura; non ita quod uniri corpori sit ei accidentale, sed per rationem suae naturae corpori unitur... ["Now the soul has one mode of being when in the body, and another when apart from it, its nature remaining always the same; but this does not mean that its union with the body is an accidental thing, for, on the contrary, such union belongs to its very nature..."] (St. Thomas, Sum. Theol. 1a, q. 89, a. 1 [New York: Benziger, 1947]).

Anima, quandiu est corpori coniuncta, non potest aliquid intelligere non convertendo se ad phantasmata, ut per experimentum patet. Si autem hoc non est ex natura animae, sed per accidens hoc convenit ei ex eo quod corpori alligatur, sicut Platonici posuereunt, de facili quaestio solvi posset. Nam remoto impedimento corporis, rediret anima ad suam naturam, ut intelligeret intelligibilia simpliciter, non convertendo se ad phantasmata, sicut est de aliis substantiis separatis. Sed secundum hoc non esset anima corpori unita propter melius animae, si peius intelligeret corpori unita quam separata; sed hoc esset solum propter melius corporis, quod est irrationabile, cum materia sit propter formam, et non e converso. [The soul united to the body can understand only by turning to the phantasms, as experience shows. Did this not proceed from the soul's very nature, but accidentally through its being bound up with the body, as the Platonists said, the difficulty would vanish; for in that case when the body was once removed, the soul would at once return to its own nature, and would understand intelligible things simply, without turning to the phantasms, as is exemplified in the case of other separate substances. In that case, however, the union of soul and body would not be for the soul's good, for evidently it would understand worse in the body than out of it; but for the good of the body, which would be unreasonable, since matter exists on account of the form, and not the form for the sake of matter] (Ibidem).

Secundum se convenit animae corpori uniri, sicut secundum se convenit corpori levi esse sursum....ita anima humana manet in suo esse cum fuerit a corpore separata, habens aptitudinem et inclinationem naturalem ad corporis unionem. [To be united to the body belongs to the soul by reason of itself, as it belongs to a light body by reason of itself to be raised up.... So the human soul retains its proper existence when separated from the body, having an aptitude and a natural inclination to be united to the body] (Ibidem Ia, q. 76, a. 1, ad 6).

86. To men soma estin hemin sema (Platone, Gorgias 493 A; cf. also Phaedo 66B; Cratylus 400C).

87. Aristotle, De anima, II, 412a, 19-22; cf. also Metaph. 1029, b 11; 1030, b 14.

The rebellious enemies of Holy Mother Church refuse to let Pope John Paul the Great rest in peace.

Colleen Carol Campbell discusses the late pontiff's last days and the culture of death's attempts to co-opt them.

Let Me Go, the new book co-written by Pope John Paul II’s personal physician, reveals few details about the pope’s death that were not already divulged in the official Vatican report last fall. But news writers have done their best to incite interest, by highlighting Dr. Renato Buzzonetti’s testimony that John Paul tried to delay the tracheotomy he underwent in his last hospital visit, refused to return to the hospital when death was imminent, and received care from physicians who rejected “any new aggressive therapeutic measure” on the day he died. Headlines trumpet these nuggets suggestively: “Pope John Paul Shunned Medical Treatment,” shouts one; “John Paul a Tough Patient,” proclaims another.

Given the headlines and the tone of the reports, casual readers might assume that the decisions made by the pope and his physicians fell short of the Catholic Church’s standard for sustaining life. It is a high standard, after all. The Church has always taught that both passive and active euthanasia are grave evils and the late pope regularly criticized the “culture of death” in which physicians give up too soon on the lives of the frail and elderly. In 2004, as Catholic hospitals were increasingly sanctioning the removal of food and water from patients in a persistent vegetative state and Michael Schiavo was winning his battle to starve his wife, Pope John Paul II declared that food and water are always part of the basic care due to all patients, even those in a persistent vegetative state. He allowed only two exceptions to this principle: Food and water may be taken away when the patient’s body is no longer able to absorb them or when they no longer alleviate the patient’s suffering. An example of the latter case is a patient who is on the brink of death from another underlying cause and food and water are of no benefit, use, or comfort to him anymore.

The Church’s teachings on end-of-life issues, and the late pope’s articulation and clarification of those teachings, had long infuriated euthanasia advocates. They also riled many Catholic ethicists and health-care professionals, who criticized the pope’s position on end-of-life issues as severe, unrealistic, and inconsistent with the Church’s longstanding distinction between ordinary and extraordinary means of sustaining life. If John Paul’s own deathbed decisions contradicted Church teachings as he had proclaimed them, that would be news.

The key to interpreting the circumstances of John Paul’s death can be found in the very distinction that his critics accused him of ignoring. The Catholic Church has long held that ordinary or proportionate care — which is beneficial, useful, and not unreasonably burdensome to the patient — is morally obligatory. Extraordinary or disproportionate care — which may include exotic, experimental, or excessively burdensome treatments that are unlikely to benefit a patient or that include unreasonable costs relative to benefits — is not morally obligatory, though a patient may choose to accept it. The categories of ordinary and extraordinary care allow us to navigate between two dangerous extremes: the vitalism that would have us preserve life at all costs by any means necessary without regard for the burdens imposed on the patient, and the fatalism that would tempt us to give up on gravely ill patients before their time and violate their rights to life and basic care.

When it comes to discerning the difference between ordinary and extraordinary care, Catholic teaching maintains a strong bias for life. Decisions on end-of-life issues must be consistent with the core Catholic principle that requires us to do what we can within reason to preserve life and never do anything directly intended to end life.

The details published in Let Me Go suggest that in his final days, John Paul upheld this principle and avoided both the fatalism of his critics and the vitalism of which they accused him. He patiently endured years of suffering from Parkinson’s disease and accepted feeding and breathing tubes in his final weeks to sustain his life. On March 31, when faced with what his doctors recognized as imminent death, the pope decided to stay home, surrounded by his loved ones, and spend his waning hours praying and preparing to meet God. John Paul uttered his final words on April 2: “Let me go to the house of the Father.” Then he lapsed into a brief coma. After running an electrocardiogram for more than 20 minutes that night, Buzzonetti declared him dead.

The new details of the pope’s death reaffirm what we already knew. John Paul loved this life and accepted its joys and sorrows in equal measure. He did not seek an easy exit from suffering. Nor did he ignore the reality of his own death. He faced it with courage, trusting in the promise of eternal life that he had proclaimed to the whole world, the promise upon which he had staked his entire life.

— Colleen Carroll Campbell, an NRO contributor, is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a former speechwriter to President George W. Bush, and author of The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy.

Better dead than moslem.

Pressure Builds Over Plight of Afghan Christian

(CNSNews.com) - The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, accustomed to warm receptions in Western capitals, is coming under growing outside pressure over the trial of a Christian facing a possible death sentence for converting from Islam. Full Story

Islamic Advocacy Group Silent on Afghan Apostasy Trial

(CNSNews.com) - What does the Council on American-Islamic Relations have to say about the trial of an Afghan Muslim who may get the death penalty for converting to Christianity? Nothing so far, noted a conservative, pro-family group. Full Story

From the Editors of National Review:

An Affront to Civilization
We should have no illusions that Afghanistan — in many ways the backwater of the Islamic world — will soon embrace Western-style religious pluralism. But the trial of Abdul Rahman, who faces a potential death sentence for converting to Christianity some 15 years ago, is an affront to civilization. If there is always a balancing act between accommodating the religious beliefs of a traditional society like Afghanistan and coaxing it toward reform, the Rahman case is not a close call — killing or jailing someone for his religious beliefs is always wrong, and is especially galling in a country so dependent on American military forces and aid.

The Afghan constitution is a work of studied ambiguity when it comes to religious liberty. Article 2 says Islam is Afghanistan's religion, but it also stipulates that other religions are free to perform their ceremonies “within the limits of the law” (whatever that means). Article 7 says the state shall abide by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — which includes the right of conversion — but Article 130 says, where there is no guidance for the constitution or other laws, Islamic laws apply. This is the kind of “living constitution” Ruth Bader Ginsburg can only dream about in the U.S. The Afghan document was deliberately written vaguely to bridge the divide between the country's modernizers and its Islamists. The latter surely want to use the Rahman case to embarrass our ally President Karzai and to advance their interpretation of the constitution.

Yesterday, the State Department's Nicholas Burns adopted the right tone and substantive position when asked about the case by reporters. He said that, as far as the U.S. is concerned, the Afghan constitution guarantees religious liberty, and therefore Rahman shouldn't be punished for his conversion. But he also emphasized our respect for Afghan sovereignty. It is important that, while we push for justice in the case, we don’t play into the hands of Karzai's enemies, who are eager to capitalize on the fears of a very traditional society. We should make it clear privately, but very firmly to Karzai — who would have to sign Rahman's death warrant — that we expect him to find some Afghan way to short-circuit the case before it ever gets to that point.

Conservatives in this country have been admirably willing to accept the compromises and frustrations that come with President Bush's attempts to reform recalcitrant parts of the world. The judicial murder of a Christian convert by a government that exists only on the basis of American power and good will, however, would be intolerable.

William F. Buckley rouses himself in order to expose a particularly stupid bit of nonsense from LA's cardinal.

If I may be so bold, Cardinal Mahony, to suggest your time would be better spent keeping as many of these immigrants Catholic as is possible. I believe that is in your job description. If you haven't noticed, the schismatics are making inroads south of the border.

The situation has come to a boil. Immigration policy is the top concern of candidates running for office in the border states. In December, the House of Representatives passed a tough bill designed to tighten the border. It calls for criminal penalties for those Americans who collude with the illegal enterprise. A response came from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. This body assails aspects of the House bill as excessively punitive and lobbies for a tenderer bill from the Senate, but it is not yet clear just what sort of provisions the Conference would endorse.

Meanwhile the nation has heard from Roger Mahony, who is the cardinal of Los Angeles. Cardinal Mahony has taken the extraordinary step of enjoining his flock simply to defy any congressional act that incorporates the features of the House bill — on the grounds that to comply would be to collaborate with injustice.

Now the good cardinal, whose motives we must as a matter of Christian forbearance accept as humanitarian, has got to be sharply rebuked by the Conference of Bishops. Begin with the basic question: The writing of the law is a democratic exercise. To call for disobedience to the law is acceptable behavior when such law transgresses upon the city of God. The laws that called for the annihilation of the Jewish race violated the city of God. Proposed laws that would punish citizens who deliberately help to defeat or to circumvent immigration laws aren't inherently defiant of the prerogatives of a democratic community. Cardinal Mahony's contumacy has to be rejected for what it is, never mind what the Senate ends up doing in the matter of formulating fresh rules to enforce policies which have not been enforced.

President Bush endorsed the House bill and asks the Senate to act on it. He hardly understands himself to be rejecting the canon of Christian behavior towards our fellow men by making the point that free and independent societies have the right to prescribe immigration codes, and need especially to reject such distortions of Christian dogma and practice as invite the wrong kind of attention to appropriate divisions between church and state. (Thanks to NRO for the heads up.)

Jonah Goldberg has more on spotting conservative toddlers using modern phrenology.

Did you ever wonder if your kid had a play date with the next Hitler? Or the next Condi Rice?

Remember the cocky, arrogant kid in nursery school, the one who always thought that he had all the answers and that he could do whatever he wanted, and was always ignoring what the teacher had to say? Chances are this bully grew up to be a conservative.

Right now, I have no doubt that some liberal readers are nodding their heads and saying, "Yes! That makes total sense. Conservatives are such bullies!"

Well, according to the latest "scientific" study this is nonsense. In fact, it's the other way around.

Here's the lead from a story in the Toronto Star about a new study in The Journal of Research Into Personality: "Remember the whiny, insecure kid in nursery school, the one who always thought everyone was out to get him, and was always running to the teacher with complaints? Chances are he grew up to be a conservative."

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley — of course — found that of the roughly 100 kids they tracked for 20 years, starting in nursery school, the whiny kids were more likely to become conservatives.

UC Berkeley professor Jack Block's theory, according to the Star, is that insecure kids look for "reassurance provided by tradition and authority, and find it in conservative politics. The more confident kids are eager to explore alternatives to the way things are, and find liberal politics more congenial."

I wonder if Silent Bob has a theory as well...You know, Jack Black and Jack Block? Silent Bob...get it? Oh, never mind.

Ah yes, in Berkeley, Calif., nothing is more rebellious to the status quo than being a liberal. Why, they must be pariahs at the local organic food co-op. I mean, it's just plain heroic to embrace liberal politics in a town where residents cast 90 percent of their votes for John Kerry and only 6.6 percent of their votes for Bush.

Heehee.

But don't nominate these mavericks for a Profiles in Courage award just yet. If you read down to the 15th paragraph in the story, you'll discover that there was "a .27 correlation between being self-reliant in nursery school and being a liberal as an adult." In other words, self-reliance explains seven percent of the variance between kids who bravely became liberal and tykes who supinely embraced conservative politics.

Oopsie. Someone's been screwing with science again.

One obvious problem with this sort of analysis is that the single best predictor of partisan affiliation is the political orientation of your parents. In Berkeley, the most liberal majority-white city in America, most kids are going to be liberal because their parents are liberal. If one or two of the whinier kids turn out to be conservative, it might have more to do with the fact that their parents are whiny conservatives. Heck, if I lived in Berkeley, I might be whiny too.

To call these sorts of studies entirely useless is probably unfair. No doubt Block has more or less accurately charted the path of his subjects. And even he concedes that the study tells us little about the rest of the country. But it's also pretty clear that Block wants to find psychologically satisfying explanations for what makes people conservatives. (Emphasis mine.) It's not hard to imagine that if the whiny, sniveling brats turned out to be liberals, he would explain this as proof that liberals are born more emotionally sensitive and with a greater acuity for spotting injustice.

One reason this isn't hard to imagine is that this is a very, very old game. Ever since Theodor Adorno came out with his scandalously flawed Authoritarian Personality in 1950, liberal and leftist social scientists have been trying to diagnose conservatism as a psychological defect or sickness. (That's not science. That's trying to bully others into agreeing with your fantasies. - F. G.) Adorno and his colleagues argued that conservatism was little more than a "pre-fascist" "personality type." According to this school, sympathy for communism was an indication of openness and healthy idealism. (Heehee! - F.G.) Opposition to communism was a symptom of your more deep-seated pathologies and fascist tendencies. According to Adorno, subjects who saw Nazism and Stalinism as similar phenomena were demonstrating their "idiocy" and "irrationality." Psychological counseling, many argued, could cure these maladies. But for some it was too late. In 1964, an ad in the New York Times reported that 1,189 psychiatrists determined that Barry Goldwater was not "psychologically fit" to be president.

Ahhh, the good old days...before all this partisanship.

In 2003, another Berkeley study, led by John T. Jost, reviewed four decades of research of conservatism and found that conservatives tended to be fear-driven dogmatists, terrified by ambiguity. The study linked Ronald Reagan, Rush Limbaugh, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. The findings were hardly surprising since they basically recapped the branch of "scholarship" launched by Adorno.

Yet another Berkeley professor, George Lakoff, has convinced leading Democrats that psychology is the best way to tackle politics. People see things through "frames," according to Lakoff, and if Democrats could simply recast those frames in their favor, conservatives would see the light. Howard Dean calls Lakoff "one of the most influential political thinkers of the progressive movement."

There's a credible endorsement.

Perhaps the more revealing psychological insight can be found in the fact that so many liberals think disagreeing with them is a form of psychosis.
(Thanks to National Review Online for the heads up.)

Whatever happened to...

...Roxanne Pulitzer?

Who cares? Beats me.

I don't really care. Sometimes one is simply curious.

Roxanne Pulitzer was a Cinderella tale gone horribly wrong who came out on the losing end of a sensational divorce trial in 1983 with Herbert "Peter" Pulitzer, a wealthy real estate mogul and grandson of the famed publisher.

In the media-circus trial she was accused of being an "incorrigible coke slut" and an unfit mother who "humped almost everything she could get her hands on". The most outrageous accusation was that she had "slept with a trumpet" leading to the moniker "the strumpet with the trumpet".

She parlayed her notoriety into an appearance in Playboy in June 1985.

After that, Roxanne wrote a few books. And there was that made-for-tv-movie written from her point of view.

Here's an update from kathleenbush.com:

For many years, Roxanne lived in high society, but that was not where she came from—quite the contrary. She grew up in a small town outside Buffalo , New York . Her father abandoned her when she was four, leaving behind a wife and four children. "It was tough growing up, but I have a great family who grounded me and instilled morals and values in me," she said. Roxanne started working at 10-years-old; she ironed clothes, picked apples and grapes and said she did just about "everything." She also put herself through college in Florida , where she majored in anatomy and physiology. To pay for school, Roxanne sold life insurance. Her mentor's client was Peter Pulitzer, who she became acquainted with in '74 and later married in '76. "I married someone who had quite a bit of wealth," she said. "I didn't get any settlement or alimony when we divorced, so I went back to where I had been, a working girl living in an apartment, teaching aerobics for four or five years. In June of '85, I posed for Playboy Magazine in order to pay lawyer fees for the landmark Pulitzer versus Pulitzer case, which made it to the Supreme Court. Life has been a roller-coaster ride, but I never forget what I did, where I came from, and how I got there. So there is nothing that makes me afraid of losing the materialistic things—as I am sure I can get them back on my own." In '88, Villard, a division of Random House, contacted Roxanne to write a book titled Prize Pulitzer . Making it onto the New York Times bestseller's list, this book was later turned into a made for- TV movie. After that, Random House contracted Roxanne to write several more books.

It wasn't until '99, that Tim Boberg and Roxanne Pulitzer encountered each other. They met in Palm Beach , Florida , where Roxanne had spent most of her adult life. A mutual friend threw a party for Boberg. The two were instantly attracted to each other; most likely because their lives seemed to have paralleled each other's—both criss-crossed the economic vortex. Like Pulitzer, Boberg was born into a poor family in Chicago , near a wealthy suburb. Boberb saw himself as the kid from the wrong-side-of-the-tracks because he grew up in a modest, one-bathroom home, while many of his friends had Rolls Royces and Bentleys parked in their driveways. "It never really bothered me or my parents," said Boberg. "It gave me an idea of what the good life could be and what you could achieve if you worked hard. That is what I did; I worked hard and I was very lucky. It also taught me that those people [the rich] are really no smarter or better than anyone; the only difference are the possessions they have."

Similarly, Boberg worked his way through college. He attended a small liberal arts school, where he jokingly claims he majored in beer with a double minor in business and economics. After spending 35 years in Chicago , Boberg moved to Brazil for two years. During the two years, he adapted to the weather and found Chicago winters unbearable upon his return. He didn't last more than six weeks in the city before heading to Hilton Head for 10 years and then off to Miami for another 10 years, where he founded a highly successful productivity consulting firm. This is the time frame he met and fell in love with Roxanne.

When the two knew they wanted to share a life together, they started exploring options in ski resort towns. Aspen had too much attitude. Jackson Hole was too cold. It ultimately came down to Telluride; they found the climate as pleasant as the people. In January '01, they ventured into a new life—a mountain life, followed shortly thereafter by retirement. "We've both retired since moving here. We are into a different stage of our lives," said Pulitzer. "I have never put this much time and effort into decorating and building a home. I was really worried about Tim being home seven days a week. I thought he was going to hate retirement, but I totally pegged him wrong."

Pulitzer and Boberg embrace this lifestyle change. She has taken up gardening; while his passion for art has evolved into architecture. She spends her days caring for 92-plus plants and looks forward to raising orchids this summer. He, on the other hand, supervises a 13,600-square-foot addition to their home, equipped with a bowling alley—a birthday gift to Pulitzer. Most days you'll find them dressed in casual jeans, t-shirts and slippers looking like young love birds. He calls her Rox. He is her baby. They find mountain living refreshing, particularly on the days they are on the slopes skiing or taking a hikes into Telluride's splendid countryside. The laid-back atmosphere of Telluride is an easy transition from their high-society days. They admit they are finally black-tied out. They relish the peace and serenity of the mountains.

The Michael and Cathryn Borden Memorial Book of the Day.*

From a review of Peter Brock's
Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia
by Professor Edward Herman in Z Magazine (12/29/2005):

The huge irony that Brock reveals so clearly is that the media co-belligerents, pushing relentlessly for more aggressive action, supposedly in the interests of stopping ethnic cleansing and killing, played into the hands of parties with a political agenda that assured and produced far more ethnic cleansing and killing than might have taken place without their bellicosity and war propaganda service. The same irony is clear in Johnstone’s and Mandel’s volumes that deal with the ends and means of the indigenous and external participants. The focus on “justice” as opposed to peace, and the demonizing of the Serbs and making them the unique group needing punishment, was the vehicle used by Bosnian Muslim leader Alija Izetbegovic and his close associates, and Clinton/Albright and Kohl-Genscher and their associates, to prevent a peaceful settlement--most importantly in backing out of the 1992 Lisbon Agreement--and to work incessantly to get NATO to intervene militarily on behalf, first, of Izetbegovic and the Bosnian Muslims and then the Kosovo Liberation Army and Kosovo Albanians. Brock shows that the media served these pro-violence and anti-peace ends relentlessly and effectively.

He argues convincingly that this was a model case of “pack journalism,” and also of what has been called “advocacy journalism” or “the journalism of attachment.” The journalists were quickly convinced that good was fighting evil, or that it was obligatory and less risky to take this as a given, and so they joined the pack and became advocates attached to the supposed good side and their victims. This was aided in the Balkans by the fact that most of the journalists didn’t know the language or history of the area, and that, because of the threat of bodily harm in trying to do real journalism, they tended to congregate in protected areas—many of them, as one cynical observer noted, only reported what they saw “150 meters on either side of the Holiday Inn” (General Lewis MacKenzie).

This made them dependent for “news” on one another and on the official sources happy to service their needs. As they stayed in the part of Sarajevo controlled by the Bosnian Muslims, they, along with U.S. officials, were the main sources of news, and as Brock notes they were hardly aware of the existence of a large Serb population in Sarajevo, some 50,000 of whose members left or were driven out of the city. The pack were even unaware of the exodus of the Jewish population of Sarajevo (pp. 131-3), quietly threatened by the dominant Muslims and recalling well (like the Serbs) the murderous behavior of the Muslims and Croats in the era of Nazi rule during World War II.

The pack journalists in Sarajevo (and elsewhere in the Balkans) were thus highly manageable, knowing the broader truth in advance, dispensing with notions of substantive objectivity and balance, and on the hunt for stories that would both confirm the institutionalized bias--and therefore please their editors at home--and advance the cause that they advocated and for which they campaigned. Journalists like David Rieff, Roy Gutman and Ed Vulliamy openly acknowledged that they were campaigners for more aggressive NATO intervention (i.e., war), and they were by no means alone.

* Who? Look here.

The NYT is consistent, all right. You gotta give 'em that...

...or, maybe I should call it Goober II's Dirty War Legacy and His Media Whores Who Made It Possible.

Former NY Times Reporter: '93 Pulitzer Should be Revoked

(CNSNews.com) - Castigating the press for "journalistic crimes" committed during its reporting on the Balkans wars of the 1990s, retired New York Times reporter David Binder claims the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting awarded to both the Times and New York's Newsday "should, in all fairness and honesty, be revoked."

Binder was speaking at a press conference for the release of a new book criticizing the war reporting. Binder wrote the foreword to the book by Peter Brock, titled "Media Cleansing: Dirty Reporting, Journalism and Tragedy in Yugoslavia."

That looks like today's Michael and Cathryn Borden Memorial Book of the Day.

"What we're looking at here is a series catalogued by Peter Brock of journalistic crimes," said Binder. Before mentioning the reporting of the Times' John F. Burns and Newsday's Roy Gutman, Binder evoked the memory of what he called Walter Duranty's "phony reporting" for the New York Times in the 1930s as an example of an undeserved Pulitzer. Duranty was criticized for having been too deferential to Joseph Stalin and his plan to industrialize the Soviet Union.

Walter who? Look here.

"What Peter [Brock] has unraveled and disclosed in this book involves at least a couple of Pulitzer prizes that should in all fairness and honesty be revoked." Binder confirmed to Cybercast News Service that he was referring to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, awarded to Burns of the New York Times and Gutman of Newsday for their reporting in the Balkans. Brock devotes considerable space in his book to criticizing the reporting of Burns and Gutman.

Binder noted that the Times has gone through "agony" in recent years over the "terrible professional behavior of its staff members" and with "what has gone on under its masthead."

"[E]xposure is the best remedy," said Binder.

It hasn't forced them to clean up their act yet. Neither has declining readership.

"I think Peter Brock's book helps a great deal to confront these egregious crimes of journalism. I think it should be shoved under the noses of editors all across the press, at least the editors who are dealing with foreign news ..." said Binder.

The Pulitzer Board at first voted to award the prize solely to Gutman, according to Binder. "The New York Times got so agitated that John Burns was passed over that they started lobbying the board. The Pulitzer is an extremely political award in many if not all cases. There are all kinds of backstage manipulations that go on."

Could that be the problem, kiddies? Could it really?

Sorry, but I can't take the Pulitzer Prize seriously. For example: Whatever happened to Roxanne Pulitzer?

The centerpiece of Burns' Pulitzer entry was a seven-hour interview with a captured Bosnian Serb -- Borislav Herak -- who in graphic statements to Burns, confessed to dozens of murders, including eight involving rape. Burns' Nov. 27, 1992, article was described by the New York Times as offering "insight into the way thousands of others have died in Bosnia."

However, more than three years after the publication of Burns' story, the Times on Jan. 31, 1996, described Herak as "slightly retarded" and reported that Herak had retracted his confession and claimed it had been beaten out of him by guards.

"I was tortured, forced to confess," said Herak. By that time his testimony already had been used to convict Sretko Damjanovic for the killing of two Muslim brothers who were later found alive. Both Herak and Damjanovic, who also said he had been "tortured" into providing a false confession, were sentenced to death by firing squad.

Author Peter Brock described Burns' interview with Herak as "a manipulated confession and interrogation in which Burns was the key participant." Brock faults Burns for failing to tell readers that the interview took place with a Sarajevo video production crew present and that "interrogations were conducted by [government] investigators and by Sarajevo film director Ademir Kenovic."

He also argues that "vital pieces" of Herak's story were missing. "[T]here was no evidence, corpses or victims, or eyewitnesses to implicate Herak, except for hearsay from Bosnian government 'investigators,'" Brock writes.

Brock also faults Newsday's Roy Gutman for being unduly influenced by government propagandists including one source who operated under four different aliases. Gutman was criticized for not exercising enough scrutiny before repeating allegations of atrocities and statistics of the dead and tortured.

Gutman won his Pulitzer partly for "electrifying stories about 'concentration camps'," notes Brock, who criticizes the reporter for the prominence of "hearsay" and "double hearsay" in his stories, as well as gratuitous use of the language of the Nazi Holocaust.

Gutman's first five stories about the alleged Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia were actually filed from Zagreb, in Croatia, Brock complains. It was Gutman's sixth story on the subject that finally carried an Omarska dateline, Brock wrote, and that was after the prison had been shut down.

Both Binder and Brock accuse the press of falling into "pack journalism" and playing the role of "co-belligerent." The reliance on Croat and Bosnian Muslim propaganda resulted in distorted reporting that exaggerated the Serb role in the three-sided conflict and ignored ethnic cleansing of Serbs, according to Binder and Brock.

Brock went so far as to say the $3,000 Pulitzer Prize money awarded to Burns and Gutman was "blood money."

"What we're talking about in terms of what I call crimes of journalism was only ten years ago," said Binder. "It wasn't so long ago that these, I think revolting things, were happening -- revolting bias, revolting suppression of other sides of the story."

During his recent appearance at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Binder said it would take "at least a decade" before historians "clear out that wretched underbrush of lies and concoctions" from "despicable" politicians "like Richard Holbrooke," an international negotiator during the administration of former President Bill Clinton and "certainly the journalists" criticized in Brock's book. The rise of blogs and media watchdog groups offers a "corrective" for the public now, Binder contended.

In his call for the revocation of the Pulitzer Prize Peter Brock said that "in all fairness, if [the Pulitzer board] is not going to revoke the prize, they ought to give Janet Cooke's Pulitzer back." Cooke was a Washington Post reporter who won a Pulitzer for a fabricated 1980 story about an eight-year old heroin addict.

Janet Cooke, an oldie but baddie. It is hard to believe it has been twenty-five years...

Bonus Fyodor's Headlinks.

Bayinsider: Teacher Debra Lafave Won't Face Student Sex Charges
State prosecutors are dropping the charges against former Tampa teacher Debra Lafave, who was accused of having sex with a 14-year-old middle school student.

Forgot Debbie's 15 minutes? Part 19: SEX IS DEATH. (Hot for teacher) is here. (More on Debbie here.)


Daily Mail: Underage sex 'link' to media

Children exposed to sex in TV programmes, films, magazines and music are more likely to engage in sexual activity than those who are not, according to research out today.

There is a direct relationship between the amount of sexual content a child sees and their level of sexual activity or their intentions to have sex in the future, the study found.

Such media also has at least an equal influence on sexual behaviour as religion or a child's relationship with their parents and peers, the study said.

It concluded that the media is an "important source" of information about sex for teenagers who might not get advice elsewhere.

More than 1,000 American children aged between 12 and 15 were asked to identify from a huge list the kinds of media they were exposed to regularly.
They also answered questions about their health and levels of sexual activity, including whether they went on dates, kissed, had oral sex or full sex.

Researchers then examined the sexual content of 264 items on the list, which included teen magazines, teen movies and TV programmes.

In Pyongyang, no one can hear you scream...

Drudge: SHOCK: N.Korean defector says disabled newborns are killed...
North Korea has no people with physical disabilities because they are killed almost as soon as they are born, a physician who defected from the communist state said on Wednesday.

Shock? Who is still shocked by the depravity of those in rebellion against God and His good order?

Remember Fyodor's Rule #4: Always believe the worst about commies. (It helps prepare you to face the horror.)

Religion of Peace and Love AND My Genius Italian Cousins Combined Update.

Do you think they notice it's us infidels who actually seem to care about them?


Italian Co. Designs Jeans -- for Muslims...

They're high around the waist, wide around the leg and have lots of pockets for holding watches, bracelets, glasses and other knickknacks.

A new line of jeans designed by a small company in northern Italy caters to Muslims seeking to stay comfortable while they pray.

"As far as we know we're the first, at least in Italy," said Luca Corradi, who designed Al Quds jeans.

The bagginess is to ensure the wearer avoids stiffness while bending down repeatedly during prayers. The pockets are for holding all the accessories Muslims have to take off while they worship. And the jeans have green seams — because green is the sacred color of Islam.

Al Quds representatives said a year of research and testing went into the product, with models being asked to try different versions of the jeans while they prayed.

Abdel Hamid Shaari, president of the Islamic Cultural Institute in Milan, said low-priced jeans specifically designed to keep Muslims comfortable could open up a big market in Islamic countries and countries with large Muslim populations.

"This could be a good idea, thinking of the comfort," said Shaari, who used to be a production manager for Italy's Carrera jeans. (Thanks to Drudge for the heads up.)

Fyodor's Headlinks.

Stories that have nothing in common...OR DO THEY?


STUDY CLAIMS: Confident, resilient, self-reliant kids grow up to be liberals; Whiny children: conservatives...

...which is really ironic, because nobody whines like an "adult" left-fascist.


And behold the totalitarian impulse:

MADELEINE ALBRIGHT: 'FUN IS MAKING DECISIONS THAT HAVE EFFECT ON AMERICANS'...

Thanks to Drudge for these links.

Super Bowl XL Champion Steelers Update.

From the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review:

Carter's brother gets 5 years for SB XL delay

The brother of Pittsburgh Steelers safety Tyrone Carter had his sentence for driving with a revoked license increased from six months to five years because he failed to report to jail on time.

Tank Carter was scheduled to report to a Broward County prison on Jan. 6, but decided against it when his brother told him the Steelers had a good chance of going to the Super Bowl. On Tuesday, Broward Circuit Judge Stanton S. Kaplan increased the sentence.

"Even knowing what I know now, I would do it again," Carter said. "It was the greatest game in my life."

Carter watched the Steelers beat the Seattle Seahawks from the 50-yard line in Detroit and partied with rapper Snoop Dogg after the game.

The brothers have been close since growing up in a rough section of Pompano Beach.

"I would have done the same thing," Tyrone Carter said of his brother's decision. Winning the Super Bowl meant "we finally made it together."


Report: Dwight shuns Steelers, signs with Jets

Although the New York Jets would not confirm it late Tuesday night, the team reportedly signed veteran New England Patriots wide receiver/kick returner Tim Dwight yesterday.

Dwight, who visited the Steelers yesterday afternoon, is an eight-year veteran out of Iowa. He was viewed by the Steelers as a partial replacement for Antwaan Randle El, who signed with the Washington Redskins 10 days ago.

Jets sign Kimo von Oelhoffen
The New York Jets agreed on a three-year, $9.2 million deal with defensive end Kimo von Oelhoffen on Tuesday night, his agent said. (2006-03-15)

Steelers retain Brett Keisel
Brett Keisel entered unrestricted free agency convinced he was the Steelers' top priority and desperately wanting to return to the team that gave him his shot in the NFL. (2006-03-15)

Steelers sign free safety Ryan Clark
The Pittsburgh Steelers not only anointed Brett Keisel their defensive end of the future Tuesday, they also locked in former Washington Redskins free safety Ryan Clark. (2006-03-15)

NFL roundup: Steelers new seats UPDATED
Good news if you're near the bottom of the Steelers season ticket waiting list: You're about to move up 700 places. (2006-03-16)

Steelers stay busy in free agency
The Steelers continued their whirlwind run through free agency Wednesday by making several maneuvers. (2006-03-16)

Taylor drawing interest
Steelers notebook: Restricted free agent cornerback Ike Taylor, who received a $1.55 million tender from the Steelers, has attracted interest from other teams. (2006-03-16)

Prisuta: So far, so good
Morgan's return would complete free-agent tweaking of Steelers. (2006-03-16)

Titans sign safety Chris Hope
The Tennessee Titans agreed to a six-year contract with free-agent safety Chris Hope on Wednesday. (2006-03-16)

Steelers sign Rodney Bailey
As expected, veteran defensive end Rodney Bailey, formerly of the Seattle Seahawks, signed a one-year deal with the Steelers on Thursday. (2006-03-17)

Steelers re-sign Deshea Townsend
The Pittsburgh Steelers on Friday re-signed cornerback Deshea Townsend, giving him a four-year contract. (2006-03-17)


Steelers re-sign Deshea Townsend
Deshea Townsend followed his heart -- and a pretty decent paycheck -- back to the Steelers. (2006-03-18)

Cowher to spend more time in N.C.
Pittsburgh Steelers coach Bill Cowher said Friday that while he definitely will return to coach the Steelers next year, he and his wife also plan to spend more time in Raleigh. (2006-03-18)

Steelers stone stolen from fan's grave
Jason Raab was such a Pittsburgh Steelers fan that when the 24-year-old Wellington man died nine years ago, his family had the Steelers logo engraved on his headstone. (2006-03-19)

Police investigate theft of Steelers golf cart
State police at Greensburg are investigating the theft of a Pittsburgh Steelers edition golf cart. (2006-03-20)

NFL roundup: Steelers sign Mays
Wide receiver Lee Mays, a sixth-round draft pick in 2002, re-signed with the Pittsburgh Steelers on Monday after finishing up the season with the Super Bowl champions. (2006-03-20)

Dan Rooney praises Tagliabue
Dan Rooney became the answer to a trivia question Monday. (2006-03-21)

Supremes spike Steelers suit
The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to hear the case of a Steelers fan who claimed taxpayers in National Football League cities have been fleeced by building expensive new stadiums to help rich team owners get richer. (2006-03-21)

...which brings me to another Fox product, "The Shield".

In case you have never seen The Shield during its four seasons on FX, you are not missing anything. It stinks out loud. But I cannot stop watching it.

It is worse than the traffic accident at which you feel compelled to slow down and gape. The Shield is more like a mass escape at your friendly neighborhood asylum after which all the patients take over the town.

I mean everyone on this show is psychotic. And not your cute and endearing harmless little psychoses, either. Everyone from the City Council to the cops to the hookers to the street vendors to the crooks to the victims...EVERYONE on this show is a violent, deranged pervert of one sort or another.

It doesn't say much about Your Humble Servant that he can't stop watching this cesspool.

24's Body Count Update.

From Right Wing Nuthouse:

BODY COUNT

The Grim Reaper took the night off.


UPDATE
Long time House reader Hector informs me that Grandma Hayes mentioned that 56 CTU employees bit the dust in the nerve gas attack. Since I only used the figure 55 (given by Bill) we will add one more to the show’s blood total.


JACK: 15

SHOW: 143

Minneapolis Region - Third and Fourth Rounds

At Minneapolis, MN on Friday 3/24



1 Villanova vs. 4 Boston College
Old Big East foes rematch. I gotta go with Villanova here.
FINAL: Villanova 60 BC 59 (OT) - Fyodor wins!


3 Florida vs. 7 Georgetown
I'm going with my heart here. Hoyas continue their run and take out the Gators.
FINAL: Florida 57 Georgetown 53 - Fyodor loses! (Billy Donovan must have found an assistant who can coach defense. Great season for the Hoyas.)



At Minneapolis, MN on Sunday 3/26


1 Villanova vs. 3 Florida
Wildcats need to shoot much better to beat the Gators. I think they will. 'Nova goes to the Final Four.
FINAL: Florida 75 Villanova 62 - Fyodor loses! (WRONG!WRONG! WRONG! No shootee, no winee!)

Washington, D.C. Region - Third and Fourth Rounds

At Washington, DC on Friday 3/24


1 Connecticut vs. 5 Washington
Connecticut hasn't played a complete game in the tourney yet. If they think they can coast past Washington, they will lose. Somehow, Coach Calhoun will make sure that does not happen.
FINAL: Connecticut 98 Washington 92 (OT) - Fyodor wins! (Connecticut wins another while not playing their best. Can it continue?)


7 Wichita State vs. 11 George Mason
At least one Cinderella will get to the Round of Eight. I'll take Mason here because they beat Wichita at Wichita in the regular season.
FINAL: George Mason 63 Wichita State 55 - Fyodor wins! (Cinderella lives to dance another day.)


At Washington, D.C. on Sunday 3/26


1 Connecticut vs. 11 George Mason
Your Humble Servant goes nuts here and picks the Patriots to go to the Final Four!
FINAL: George Mason 86 Connecticut 84 (OT) - Fyodor wins! (Wowee wow wow wow! A great game! This is why we watch, kiddies.)

Oakland Region - Third and Fourth Rounds

At Oakland, CA on Thursday 3/23


1 Memphis vs. 13 Bradley
Memphis looks better than they have all year. Bradley's big man has NBA potential. I'll have to take the deeper Tigers.
FINAL: Memphis 80 Bradley 64 - Fyodor wins! (Memphis hasn't had the toughest draw, but they do look good.)


2 UCLA vs. 3 Gonzaga
For the sake of bracket integrity, I'll take the Bulldogs, but the Bruins can now play defense and have an excellent chance to win.
FINAL: UCLA 73 Gonzaga 71 - Fyodor loses! (Congrats to the Bruins, but when each team plays only half a game, the one that plays the second half usually wins. That being said, Mr. Batista pulled three boneheaded plays in the last two minutes to cost his team the game.)




At Oakland, CA on Saturday 3/25


1 Memphis vs. 2 UCLA
I will go with Memphis here even though I think UCLA is hotter.
FINAL: UCLA 50 Memphis 45 - Fyodor loses! (Another ugly game. Bruins' D is for real.

Atlanta Region - Third and Fourth Rounds

At Atlanta, GA on Thursday 3/23



1 Duke vs. 4 LSU
I think this is a good place to go against Duke, but I'm going to wait another round. Devils win.
FINAL: LSU 62 Duke 54 - Fyodor loses! (Easily the ugliest game of the year. Congrats to LSU for holding Duke to 30% shooting. The Tigers better do the same to their next opponent or else start shooting better themselves.)


2 Texas vs. 6 WVU
My heart says Mountaineers (especially since Texas can't stop the "3") but my bracket says Longhorns. Texas will win.
FINAL: Texas 74 WVU 71 - Fyodor wins! (Congrats to Mr. Paulino - paisan! - on the game winning shot. WVU just had to play some defense down the stretch and grab a couple of rebounds and they would have won it. Anyway, nice comeback by the Mountaineers.)




At Atlanta, GA on Saturday 3/25

2 Texas vs. 4 LSU

My brackets being long since destroyed, I'll take Texas here. I don't think they'll lose their composure against the Tigers like Duke (!!!!) did.

FINAL: LSU 70 Texas 60 - Fyodor loses! (Once again, I under-estimated LSU's big men.)

Saint of the Day and daily Mass readings.

Today is the Feast of St. Nicholas Owen, a Jesuit lay brother and one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales. Pray for us, all you angels and saints.


Today's reading is Deuteronomy 4:1, 5-9.
Today's Responsorial Psalm is Psalms 147:12-13, 15-16, 19-20.
Today's Gospel reading is Matthew 5:17-19.


[Links to the readings will be from the NAB until I can find another chapter and verse searchable Douay-Rheims Bible on-line.]


Everyday links:

The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Rosary
Our Mother of Perpetual Help
Prayers from EWTN
National Coalition of Clergy and Laity (dedicated to action for a genuine Catholic Restoration)
The Catholic Calendar Page for Today


Just in case you are wondering what exactly Catholics believe, here is

The Apostles Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.


Memorare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession,was left unaided.Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins my Mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful; O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy clemency hear and answer me. Amen.


St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse, pray for us.


Prayer to St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire

Dear St. Anthony, you became a Franciscan with the hope of shedding your blood for Christ. In God's plan for you, your thirst for martyrdom was never to be satisfied. St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire, pray that I may become less afraid to stand up and be counted as a follower of the Lord Jesus. Intercede also for my other intentions. (Name them.)


Prayer To Saint Michael The Archangel

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the divine power, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

Sharon Stone...

...well, not so much. ABOVE: Now. BELOW: Then.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus...

...is still getting it done. ABOVE: Now. BELOW: Then.

Reconstruction work on the Tower of Babel continues apace.

Refs must speak English to work World Cup

They should have gone with a jury of their cowardly peers.

ABOVE: In case you wanted to see what Faheem looked like...

...and in case you were wondering what happened to the bad guys...


Guilty Verdicts In Faheem Thomas-Childs Case

From CBS 3 in Philadelphia:

Two men were found guilty Thursday of fatally shooting a 10-year-old boy outside his elementary school, a case that bedeviled authorities for months because witnesses were reluctant to come forward.

Kennell Spady, 21, and Kareem Johnson, 22, were charged with first-degree murder for their roles in a wild gunfight that caught Faheem Thomas-Childs in the crossfire, killing him as he walked to school on Feb. 11, 2004.

The non-jury trial over the past several weeks had been a nightmare for prosecutors, with at least eight witnesses recanting their statements to police. One woman allegedly was coached by her father as she took the stand to say, “I don’t remember.”

The case was seen as a textbook example of the code of silence that permeates many violent neighborhoods, with residents fearful of being seen as “snitches” and suffering retaliation.

Dozens of people saw more than 90 bullets fly outside Thomas-Childs’ elementary school in North Philadelphia, but few came forward despite authorities offering a $100,000 reward and witness protection.

Those that did changed their stories once they got to court.

The Theology of the Body: 65. The Living God Continually Renews the Very Reality of Life

In his General Audience of 18 November 1981, the Holy Father continued his catechesis on theology of the body, by returning to the words of Christ to the Sadducees on the general resurrection. They deny the resurrection because they doubt the power of God.



The Living God Continually Renews the Very Reality of Life

At the General Audience on Wednesday, 18 November, in the Paul VI Hall, the Holy Father continued his catechetical series on the theology of the body, delivering the following address.



1. "You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God" (Mt 22:29), Christ said to the Sadducees, who—rejecting faith in the future resurrection of the body—had proposed to him the following case: "Now there were seven brothers among us. The first married and died, and having no children left his wife to his brother" (according to the Mosaic law of the "levirate"). "So too the second and third, down to the seventh. After them all, the woman died. In the resurrection, therefore, to which of the seven will she be wife?" (Mt 22:25-28)

Christ answers the Sadducees by stating, at the beginning and at the end of his reply, that they were greatly mistaken, not knowing either the Scriptures or the power of God (cf. Mk 12:24; Mt 22:29). Since the conversation with the Sadducees is reported by all three synoptic Gospels, let us briefly compare the texts in question.

2. Matthew's version (22:24-30), although it does not refer to the burning bush, agrees almost completely with that of Mark (12:18-25). Both versions contain two essential elements: 1) the enunciation about the future resurrection of the body; 2) the enunciation about the state of the body of risen man.(1) These two elements are also found in Luke (20:27-36).(2) Especially in Matthew and Mark, the first element, concerning the future resurrection of the body, is combined with the words addressed to the Sadducees, according to which they "know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God." This statement deserves particular attention, because in it Christ defined the foundations of faith in the resurrection, to which he had referred in answering the question posed by the Sadducees with the concrete example of the Mosaic levirate law.

Admitting the reality of life after death

3. Unquestionably, the Sadducees treated the question of resurrection as a type of theory or hypothesis which can be disproved.(3) Jesus first shows them an error of method, that they do not know the Scriptures. Then he showed them an error of substance, that they do not accept what is revealed by the Scriptures—they do not know the power of God—they do not believe in him who revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush. It is a significant and very precise answer. Here Christ encounters men who consider themselves experts and competent interpreters of the Scriptures. To these men—that is, to the Sadducees—Jesus replies that mere literal knowledge of Scripture is not sufficient. The Scriptures are above all a means to know the power of the living God who reveals himself in them, just as he revealed himself to Moses in the bush. In this revelation he called himself "the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob"(4) of those, therefore, who had been Moses' ancestors in the faith that springs from the revelation of the living God. They had all been dead for a long time. However, Christ completed the reference to them with the statement that God "is not God of the dead, but of the living." This statement, in which Christ interprets the words addressed to Moses from the burning bush, can be understood only if one admits the reality of a life which death did not end. Moses' fathers in faith, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, are living persons for God (cf. Lk 20:38, "for all live for him"), although according to human criteria, they must be numbered among the dead. To reread the Scriptures correctly, and in particular the aforementioned words of God, means to know and accept with faith the power of the Giver of life, who is not bound by the law of death which rules man's earthly history.

Christ's answer

4. It seems that Christ's answer to the Sadducees about the possibility of resurrection,(5) according to the version of all three synoptics, is to be interpreted in this way. The moment would come in which Christ would give the answer on this matter with his own resurrection. However, for now he referred to the testimony of the Old Testament, showing how to discover there the truth about immortality and resurrection. It is necessary to do so not by dwelling only on the sound of the words, but by going back to the power of God which is revealed by those words. The reference to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in that theophany granted to Moses, of which we read in the Book of Exodus (3:2-6), constitutes a testimony that the living God gives to those who live "for him"—to those who, thanks to his power, have life, even if according to the dimensions of history, it would be necessary to include them among those who have been dead for a long time.

5. The full significance of this testimony, which Jesus referred to in his conversation with the Sadducees, could be grasped (still only in the light of the Old Testament) in the following way: He who is—he who lives and is Life—is the inexhaustible source of existence and of life, as is revealed at the "beginning," in Genesis (cf. Gn 1:3). Due to sin, physical death has become man's lot (cf. Gn 3:19),(83) and he has been forbidden (cf. Gn 3:22) access to the Tree of Life (the great symbol of the book of Genesis). Yet the living God, making his covenant with man (Abraham, the patriarchs, Moses, Israel), continually renews, in this covenant, the reality of life. He reveals its perspective again and in a certain sense opens access again to the Tree of Life. Along with the covenant, this life, whose source is God himself, is communicated to those men who, as a result of breaking the first covenant, had lost access to the Tree of Life, and, in the dimensions of their earthly history, had been subject to death.

Power and testimony of the living God

6. Christ is God's ultimate word on this subject. The covenant, which with him and for him is established between God and mankind, opens an infinite perspective of life. Access to the Tree of Life—according to the original plan of the God of the covenant—is revealed to every man in its definitive fullness. This will be the meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ. This will be the testimony of the paschal mystery. However, the conversation with the Sadducees took place in the pre-paschal phase of Christ's messianic mission. The course of the conversation according to Matthew (22:24-30), Mark (12:18-27), and Luke (20:27-36) manifests that Christ—who had spoken several times, especially in talks with his disciples, of the future resurrection of the Son of Man (cf., e.g., Mt 17:9, 23; 20:19 and parallels)—did not refer to this matter in the conversation with the Sadducees. The reasons are obvious and clear. The discussion was with the Sadducees, "who say that there is no resurrection" (as the evangelist stresses). That is, they questioned its very possibility. At the same time they considered themselves experts on the Old Testament Scriptures, and qualified interpreters of them. That is why Jesus referred to the Old Testament and showed, on its basis, that they did "not know the power of God."(7)

7. Regarding the possibility of resurrection, Christ referred precisely to that power which goes hand in hand with the testimony of the living God, who is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob—and the God of Moses. God, whom the Sadducees "deprived" of this power, was no longer the true God of their fathers, but the God of their hypotheses and interpretations. Christ, on the contrary, had come to bear witness to the God of life in the whole truth of his power which is unfolded upon human life.

NOTES

1. Although the expression "the resurrection of the body" is not known in the New Testament. (It will appear for the first time in St. Clement: 2 Clem 9:1; and in Justin: Dial 80:5.) which uses the expression "resurrection of the dead," intending thereby man in his integrity, it is possible, however, to find in many New Testament texts faith in the immortality of the soul and its existence also outside the body (cf., for example, Lk 23:43; Phil 1:23-24; 2 Cor 5:6-8).

2. Luke's text contains some new elements which are an object of discussion among exegetes.

3. As is known, in the Judaism of that period there was no clearly formulated doctrine concerning the resurrection; there existed only the various theories launched by the individual schools.

The Pharisees, who cultivated theological speculation, greatly developed the doctrine on the resurrection, seeing allusions to it in all the Old Testament books. They understood the future resurrection, however, in an earthly and primitive way, announcing, for example, an enormous increase of crops and of fertility in life after the resurrection.

The Sadducees, on the other hand, polemicized with such a conception, starting from the premise that the Pentateuch does not speak of eschatology. It must also be kept in mind that in the first century the canon of the Old Testament books had not yet been established.

The case presented by the Sadducees directly attacks the Pharisaic concept of the resurrection. In fact, the Sadducees were of the opinion that Christ was one of their followers.

Christ's answer equally corrects the conceptions of the Pharisees and those of the Sadducees.

4. This expression does not mean: "God who was honored by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," but: "God who took care of the patriarchs and liberated them."

This formula returns in Ex 3:6; 3:15, 16; 4:5, always in the context of the promised liberation of Israel. The name of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is a token and guarantee of this liberation.

The God of X is synonymous with help, support and shelter for Israel. A similar sense is found in Gn 49:24: "God of Jacob—the Shepherd and Rock of Israel, the God of your Fathers who will help you" (cf. Gn 49:24-25; cf. also Gn 24:27; 26:24; 28:13; 32:10; 46:3).

Cf. F. Dreyfus, O.P., "L'argument scripturaire de Jesus en faveur de la résurrection des morts (Mk 12:26-27)," Revue Biblique, Vol. 66 (1959), p. 218.

In Judaic exegesis in Jesus' time, the formula: "God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob," in which all three names of the patriarchs are mentioned, indicated God's relationship with the people of the covenant as a community.

Cf. E. Ellis, "Jesus, the Sadducees and Qumran," New Testament Studies, Vol. 10 (1963-64), p. 275.

5. In our modern way of understanding this Gospel text, the reasoning of Jesus concerns only immortality; if in fact the patriarchs still now live after their death, before the eschatological resurrection of the body, then the statement of Jesus concerns the immortality of the soul and does not speak of the resurrection of the body.

But the reasoning of Jesus was addressed to the Sadducees who did not know the dualism of body and soul, accepting only the biblical psycho-physical unity of man who is "the body and the breath of life." Therefore, according to them the soul dies with the body. The affirmation of Jesus, according to which the patriarchs are alive, could mean for the Sadducees only resurrection with the body.

6. We will not dwell here on the concept of death in the purely Old Testament sense, but consider theological anthropology as a whole.

7. This is the determinant argument that proves the authenticity of the discussion with the Sadducees.

If the passage were "a post-paschal addition of the Christian community" (as R. Bultmann thought, for example), faith in the resurrection of the body would be supported by the fact of the resurrection of Christ, which imposed itself as an irresistible force, as St. Paul, for example, has us understand (cf. 1 Cor 15:12).Cf. J. Jeremias, Neutestamentliche Theologie, I Teil (Gutersloh: Mohn, 1971); cf. besides I. H. Marshall, The Gospel of Luke (Exeter: The Paternoster Press, 1978), p. 738.

The reference to the Pentateuch—while in the Old Testament there were texts which dealt directly with resurrection (as, for example, Is 26:19 or Dt 12:2)—bears witness that the conversation really took place with the Sadducees, who considered the Pentateuch the only decisive authority.

The structure of the controversy shows that this was a rabbinic discussion, according to the classical models in use in the academies of that time.

Cf. J. Le Moyne, OSB, Les Sadducéens (Paris: Gabalda, 1972), pp. 124f.; E. Lohmeyer, Das Evangelium des Markus (Göttingen: 1959), p. 257; D. Daube, New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London: 1956), pp. 158-163; J. Radamakers, SJ, La bonne nouvelle de Jésus selon St. Marc (Bruxelles: Institut d'Etudes Théologiques, 1974), p. 313.

Religion of Peace and Love Update.

Americans Rally Around Afghan Christian
(CNSNews.com) - The plight of Abdul Rahman, the Afghan man who faces execution for converting to Christianity, has energized American Christians. In News This Hour


Apostasy Case Raises Questions About 'Islamic' Constitutions(CNSNews.com) - The plight of an Afghan Christian facing death for converting from Islam is refocusing attention on the new, post-transition constitutions of Afghanistan and Iraq, both of which give primacy to Islamic law but also include apparent contradictions. Full Story


With friends like these...

Hamas-Led Government 'Last Hope' for Gaza Christians
(CNSNews.com) - After the international community largely ignored their plight, the last hope for Gaza Christians to continue their work would be the establishment of a sympathetic Hamas-led government, a source here said. Hamas earlier offered to protect the Christians. Full Story



Giant Dragnet Thwarts Terror Attack in Israel
(CNSNews.com) - Israeli police thwarted a terrorist attack on Tuesday following a massive search operation in and around Jerusalem. In News This Hour



Pakistani Women Victims of Islamic Ordinances
(CNSNews.com) - Women in Pakistan face worsening discrimination, according to a new report that said "honor" killings are still a serious problem and that most of the thousands of women in jail are being held under controversial Islamic ordinances. Full Story


Boston Globe: Jordan's Islamists see a path to political power
Hamas's victory buoys movement


Washington Times: Jews wary of becoming fall guy for Iran's woes

Four for the price of one.

From Drudge:

Japan's rich buy organs from executed Chinese prisoners...

NBA star sues Prince over purple alterations to L.A. mansion...

Chavez Again Talks of a U.S. Invasion...

N. Korea Suggests It Can Strike America First...

DAMN YOU, OKRA WHINGEFREE!

Daytime TV tied to poorer mental scores in elderly

It Takes A Village To Staff A Gestapo Unit And Keep Your Genius Husband Out Of The Papers Update.

I'm boss, Hit tells Goober
Senator's word is now 'final,' says the ex-King

After being surprised by her husband's role in the Dubai ports deal, Sen. Hillary Clinton has insisted that Bill Clinton give her "final say" over what he says and does, well-placed sources said.

That's news?

The former President agreed to give his wife a veto to avoid his habit of making controversial headlines that could hurt her chances of returning to the White House, multiple sources told the Daily News.

"He knows it's Hillary's time now," said an adviser close to both Clintons who expects to play a key role in her likely 2008 presidential campaign.

Hillary Clinton's handlers are keeping a close rein on the former President's schedule to try to prevent another embarrassing screwup like their competing roles in the Dubai ports deal.

While she was blasting the Bush administration for allowing Dubai to run six of the country's ports, he was advising Dubai on how to sell the deal.
"Hillary has final say," said the adviser, and the ex-President's staff has been warned not to do or say anything without running it by the senator's handlers.

"That was true in the White House during the [2000] Senate campaign," recalled another longtime aide who stayed close to the ex-President after he left office. "If he said the sky was blue and she said the sky was purple, then the sky was purple."

Actually, he said the dress was blue and Hitlery's face went purple. Just for the hysterical record, kiddies.

Evil & Banal, Unlimited has a branch office in Fyodor's neighborhood, too.

ABOVE: The power of the terminally rebellious peepee meets the power of the press in the bucolic Garden Spot of the good ol' US of A.


My third-favorite bumpkin scribe of the totalitarian middle, Gil 'Get' Smart, (That's what I call him in my inimitable idiot's idiom, though I think his real middle name is 'Not Quite Half'.) vomits forth some down-home fascism in the hopes of being called up to the Major Leagues of ignorance.

Get a load of this, kiddies:

When abortion is the lesser evil

No, he's not talking about two abortions. He'd have to remove both shoes to count that high. Sssshhh. Members of the sloth family are notoriously sensitive about everything.

Today’s bit is meant for female readers. And it comes with a warning label: It is going to be harsh. Unfortunately, it’s also real — and something you might want to consider before we go any farther down our current road.

Hey girls, it's a "bit"! Raping, torturing, (Real torture. Not Abu Grab-u s&m playtime torture.) and killing you is fodder for the Lancaster Sunday News' own Shecky Beria. He'll be here all week.

I want you to imagine, for a moment, that you are Imette St. Guillen.

You might recognize the name. St. Guillen was a college student pursuing her master’s degree at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Friends described her as a “caring, bright, radiant” young woman.

I want you to imagine that you are Imette St. Guillen, and went out with friends one night, as she did Feb. 25.And I want you to imagine that on your way home, like St. Guillen, you were savagely raped.

I want you to imagine that, like St. Guillen, your hands and feet were bound with plastic ties, your hair chopped off.

You were tortured, sodomized, perhaps “violated with objects,” as police say the real St. Guillen’s wounds suggest.

Like St. Guillen, you were choked, a tube sock stuffed down your throat. And I want you to imagine that your face — your face — was wrapped in packing tape, effectively obliterating your identity.

It was the most vicious, violent, animalistic attack imaginable. The real St. Guillen died as a result.

Note the lack of punishment for the rapist and murderer. Typical "liberal" compassion for women. Gil Boy's rage is reserved for the child conceived during a rape and for anyone civilized enough to actually love that child. Silly Christians, that's a "rape-product", not a baby.

But I want you to imagine that you managed to live through it.

And then, a few weeks later, you discover you’re pregnant. What do you do?

Many, perhaps most women, might be unable to bear the additional trauma. And the law, as it now stands, would permit them to end the pregnancy.

But as you know, there is a well-funded, well-organized attempt to change the law. It seems likely that at some point in the not-too-distant future, the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade. If it happens, states will write their own laws. Some may retain abortion rights. Others may restrict abortion, yet permit it in cases of incest or rape. But many states may outlaw even this. One, in fact, has already done so.

South Dakota recently became the first state to ban abortion outright, unless it is necessary to save the life of the mother. The law is likely to be struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court — it is too extreme a move, too soon.

But make no mistake, this type of draconian law is exactly what the front-line shock troops in the abortion wars want. And their politicians are listening: Sen. Sam Brownback of Kansas, a darling of conservative evangelicals, strongly backed the South Dakota law, saying that “rape and incest are horrible crimes, but why punish the innocent child?”

Ah, Get, your blood soaked rags are showing. As is always the case, kiddies, Mr. 'Not Quite Half' Smart's real beef is with God. Killing children is Gil Boy's way of saying "You're not the boss of me, Lord."

La Smart has a particular thing against the politically active friendly protestant forces over in Amish country. In a word, he's a powerless, cowardly, outnumbered rebel who strikes at those who cannot strike back at him. After all, when's the last time you saw a six week old child cave in the skull of a rich, fat, white, left-fascist newspaper gauleiter like old Gil?

It's all political for "men" like Get Smart. See, rape victims might vote for Gil's favorite Democrass mass murderer. Abortion victims can never vote against Comrade Smart's interests.

Always, and in everything, kiddies, remember it is Love versus Power.

One wonders if Mr. Brownback would feel the same had his face been wrapped in packing tape as he was violated by foreign objects.

Actually, Get, Mr. Brownback seems to be, unlike you, a man of principle. I would sooner put my life in his hands than in yours, you petit fasciste thug. Other people's lives seem much too cheap to you, boy.

For it is telling that the men — and it’s almost always men — who scream the loudest for such restrictive laws never fully address the reality of rape or incest. They can never know what it must be like to have to carry the child of a monster who has destroyed your life, how it may force you, day after day, to relive the horror that got you pregnant in the first place.

It is always telling that it is men like you, Gil Boy, who scream the loudest about keeping baby-chopping legal so you can "dispose of" any little indiscretion your genitals might commit. "Bad peepee!"

In truth, they don’t really care. Oh, they will claim to, and there is certainly a raft of organizations dedicated to making the unbearable bearable. But when even a clump of tissue (Ahhhh, if only Gil's mom had had the option of chopping up and throwing away little Forest Clump back in the day...Hey, if he gets to fantasize about killing people, why don't I? At least I wouldn't go after the innocent ones... - F. G.) days or mere seconds old is the moral equivalent of a 6-year-old, abortion becomes a crime greater than any that might have been perpetrated upon you. However brutally you may have been assaulted, if you wind up pregnant, it doesn’t matter.

You don’t matter.

Note the superabundance of tiny paragraphs. Gil must have read Hemingway. Another champion of women's rights, ol' Ernie was.

And so as we hurtle (Oooooh, Gil! We're hurtling! - F. G.) toward the day when Roe v. Wade is overturned and people in this state, and others, labor to pass the most restrictive laws possible, it is worth wondering how you might feel had you been raped as St. Guillen was, and wound up pregnant.

Maybe you would have the child, regardless.

But if you didn’t want to, I suspect you might resent those who would paint you as the criminal.

Gil Smart is associate editor of the Sunday News. E-mail him at gsmart@lnpnews.com, or phone 717-291-8817.

Drop ol' Gil Boy a line. Don't expect a civil reply. But then, why would you? After reading his hateful and murderous fulmination against children, one would be surprised to find La Smart functioning in polite society without one of those Hannibal Lecter masks: "Babies taste goooooooood. Especially with a nice Chianti."

All things considered, (Ha! Get listens daily, I'll bet. His "thought" has that pre-cooked quality about it.) I gave Get the benefit of the doubt in my e-mail decrying his latest bit of printed crapulence:



Dear Get,
You really have to get some proofreaders. Your last column seemed to imply you advocate chopping up little kids because their dads are rapists. This would be akin to Lancaster countians sending you their tax bills because your fat, rich, white owners (Oops, bosses.) are assured of not losing a dime on their convention center boondoggle because our fat, rich, white owners (Oops, politicians.) are backing it with our hard earned money. (By the way, where's your outrage on that one, Mr. Friend of the Little Guy? Oh, right. You're their bitch. Somebody's got to pay for all those donuts and cheeseburgers, right?)

Anyway, everybody who can read and is bored enough to look at your foolishness knows you are just an ignorant little goof who's good for a couple of laughs each Sunday. You don't have the nerve to actually be a child-murdering pervert. You're more Vichy France than Stalinist Russia. (Of course, I don't doubt you could grow into a babykiller. They say Fidel is still a little squeamish at the sight of his victims' blood. You can always hire it done.)

So get out from under your desk and find someone to clean up your mess, boy. You wouldn't want anyone to think any less of you, after all. (Ha! It was impossible to type that last sentence with a straight face.)

Fyodor Garibaldi

Jed Babbin comes pretty darn close to nailing down this pesky war thingee.

War is war and we're not fighting this one like we mean to win it. Freedom and the rule of law must be left to the people of Afghanistan and Iraq. (Unless you want us to flatten both countries like we did to the Germans and the Japanese. Democracy is much easier to impose when everyone is beaten, cowed, demoralized, starving, and tired of resisting.)

From The American Spectator:

A useful battle among conservatives began last week when National Review's Rich Lowry fired a salvo at those he calls "the 'to hell with them' hawks." Lowry aims at the head of the conservatives who grow more skeptical of the president's strategy. Lowry accuses them of writing off the reform of Islam, of misunderstanding the lessons of Vietnam, and of failing to understand that our goal in this war is to win the hearts and minds of all Islam. Lowry has picked a good fight, and his challenge must be met because the neo-Wilsonians such as he are profoundly wrong about the nature of this war and how we must fight it to win in the long haul. This is not an argument over who is braver or a more stalwart supporter of the president. It's about who understands this war, what it will take for us to win, and when we will know if and when we have. Who can most accurately define victory and thus chart a path to it? It is not Lowry and the Bush-Wilsonians who believe victory in this war can only be achieved by democratizing the Middle East.

The nascent Iraqi democracy is neither the center of gravity in this war nor a factor determinative of victory or defeat. Iraq is but one key campaign in a larger war and if it becomes a democracy that is a collateral accomplishment, nothing more. To say that doesn't make the sayer an isolationist or someone who wants to abandon Iraq. We didn't invade Afghanistan and Iraq because they weren't democracies. If the lack of democracy were a casus belli we'd be at war with about two-thirds of the world. We counterattacked the Taliban because with malice aforethought they provided the base from which Osama bin Laden organized an attack that killed three thousand Americans and then refused to turn him over to us when we gave them the choice between doing so and war. In Iraq we sincerely believed that the Saddam Hussein regime posed a threat to Americans and attacked only after the UN failed, as it always does, to deal with such a threat. The only goal of this war, which Lowry and the others lost track of, is to end the threat of radical Islam and the terrorism that is its chosen weapon against us.

We mean to win this war by destroying the regimes that provide terrorists with weapons, funds, people, and sanctuary. We mean to defeat the radical Islamist ideology (for that is what it is, not a religion) as we defeated the Soviet communist ideology. I and those who agree with me aren't "'to hell with them' hawks": we are Endgame Conservatives.

We understand that Islamic terrorism cannot threaten us significantly without the support of nations. We are impatient with Mr. Bush's neo-Wilsonianism because it allows the enemy and its apologists to control the pace and direction of the war. We are unwilling to allow the prosecution of this war against the terrorist nations to be delayed for however long it takes for Iraqis to sort themselves out. It is impossible for them to do so while neighboring nations -- Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia -- actively interfere. Endgame conservatives don't want to be caught in the web of failed nostrums of Vietnam. We won't wait for Islam to be reformed or to win the hearts and minds of the mullahs in Tehran. We don't consider Islam unreformable; but we understand that it is unreformable by non-Muslims. And we understand that the only way to spur Muslims to accomplish that reformation is to break the hold radical Islam has over a growing number of nations.

Lowry says that the global war on terror is most like a counterinsurgency, and that it can only be won by persuading radical Islamists to either lay down their arms or not take them up at all. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the war we're in, and what our goals must be to defeat the enemy. Like Vietnam, this war is not only a counterinsurgency. First, it is a war against nations that has to be fought both diplomatically and on the battlefields, both conventionally and otherwise. Second, it is an ideological war that can't be won with soft words and euphemisms. And third -- in Iraq, the Philippines, and much of the Horn of Africa -- it is both a counterinsurgency and war for ascendancy among tribes and religious sects. (Emphasis mine.)

BINGO! The paragraph above and the one below pretty much say it all, kiddies.

We don't, like Lowry, completely mistake Vietnam. Lowry accuses us of missing the point that we only began to win in Vietnam when we "started to fashion a true counterinsurgency strategy focusing on hearts and minds, on holding territory and on training Vietnamese security forces." Endgame conservatives understand the principal lesson of Vietnam is something else entirely: if you fail to prosecute a war in the manner that will produce victory decisively, you will lose it inevitably. (Emphasis mine.) Iraq, by the President's and Lowry's formulation, is a self-imposed quagmire. They believe that unless and until we establish democracy there we cannot prosecute the war against the other national sponsors of terrorism. We are now at the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, almost five years since 9-11. If we had prosecuted this war as we did World War II, we would not be facing a pre-nuclear Iran, Syria's Bashar Assad would be only a bad memory and Saudi Arabia would have been forced to cease its support of terrorism. And Iraq would be a much more peaceful place, closer to the goal Messrs. Bush and Lowry seek.

The "hearts and minds" campaign in Vietnam was essentially irrelevant to winning or losing. What lost the war was President Johnson's gradualist approach to fighting it. LBJ was a stringless yo-yo. His stop-and-start, fight today, negotiate tomorrow and fight again the next day strategy, if you can call it that, was a disaster. When we pounded the North, we moved toward victory by depriving the insurgents (and the regular North Vietnamese forces) of the support on which they depended. When LBJ sputtered and stuttered, we lost what we had gained and gave the enemy time to recover and retake the offensive.

Lowry's formulation is, at its core, colonialist. He writes, "The project in Iraq is an attempt to shift the terms of the competition to who can better deliver peace, prosperity and representation." How shall we compete for hearts and minds of the Muslim world by offering Western democracy in a culture that, even at its most benevolent, cannot separate church from state? The only way would be to re-create the British Raj of colonial India. Would Lowry commit the hundreds of thousands of troops and tens of thousands of civilian bureaucrats to running a colonial government in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia for the next hundred years? I doubt it. And neither should anyone else interested in winning this war. We cannot and should not abandon Iraq. There, we should stay the course at least until the terrorist regimes that surround it are removed and their interference in Iraq ended.

Lowry's argument boils down to unquestioning support for the President's push to democratize the Middle East. He questions whether "the 'to hell with them' hawks" can support a responsible foreign policy and accuses them of wanting to put our civilization into a "permanent posture of strategic defense." No Endgame conservative wants to cut and run, or thinks Iraq is lost. Nor do we want to prevent America from ever engaging in another campaign. What we want to do is prosecute this war decisively to its conclusion, which Mr. Bush isn't doing.

Mr. Bush's democratization strategy, naive and Wilsonian, has put us in the posture of strategic defense. His original formulation -- that nations are either with us or against us -- has been whittled away to a confrontation-cum-engagement strategy that enables Iran to offer cooperation in Iraq while buying time to build nuclear weapons. The President is in the process of putting the UN in control of the Iran nuclear issue. This will result, in all probability, in allowing Iran enough time to achieve nuclear weapons. In Iraq, we are on the defensive because we haven't taken sufficient action to end the foreign interference that disrupts the nation-building effort. It's time to extricate ourselves from the Wilsonian policy quagmire. Let's press on with this war through the endgame and defeat the enemy decisively on both the military and ideological fronts. When that happens there will be time to encourage the rise of democracy in the Middle East, and many more of its peoples willing to undertake it.

TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004).

Fyodor Presents the Comedy Stylings of Eldrick "Tiger" Woods.

I heard this one on the radio from Steve Czaban, who got it from Golf Digest, who heard it from David Feherty, who got it from Tiger himself.


Tiger: "What do you call a black guy flying a plane?"

Feherty: "I don't know. What?"

Tiger: "You call him the pilot, you racist!"


Now that's funny.

Airlines Lost 30 Million Bags In '05

That's the headline, kiddies. The reality is this: That is 1% of all bags handled.

1%.

And remember, bag handling is not the number one priority of airlines.

Police: Man Killed Boy For Walking Across Yard

Obviously, this is a monstrous crime and Mr. Martin should be executed if convicted of the boy's murder. But once upon a time, a man who took care of his property and was proud of how it looked wasn't considered a crank and a lunatic.

Also, once upon a time, people respected others' property because they respected other people. That was a long time ago.

Police: Man Killed Boy For Walking Across Yard

An Ohio man who neighbors say was devoted to his meticulously kept lawn has been charged with murder in the shooting of a 15-year-old boy who apparently walked across his yard.

A 911 tape recorded 66-year-old Charles Martin as saying, "I just killed a kid." Martin also told a dispatcher, "I've been harassed by him and his parents for five years. Today just blew it up."

The child, Larry Mugrage, was Martin's neighbor.

According to police, Martin and Mugrage had a history of arguments about Martin's yard. The two argued again Sunday, police said, and when Mugrage returned, Martin was waiting outside and shot him twice.

He then called 911, officials said.

Martin: "I just killed a kid." 911 Operator: "You just killed a kid?" Martin: "Yes, ma'am."

Later, the operator asked Martin to explain what happened.

Martin: "Kids just been giving me a bunch of (expletive), making other kids harass me in my place, tearing things up."

911 Operator: "OK, so what'd you do?"

Martin: "I shot him with a (expletive) 4-10 shotgun twice."

911 Operator: "You shot him with a shotgun? Where is he?"

Martin: "He's laying in his yard."

Neighbors said Martin lived alone quietly, often sitting in front of his one-story home with its neat lawn, well-trimmed shrubbery and flagpole with U.S. and Navy flags flying.

Another neighbor described the victim as "a good kid."

Mugrage, a student at Glen Este High School, was pronounced dead at a local hospital. Authorities said Martin has no prior criminal record, but he does have a history of complaints about neighbors allegedly damaging his property. Other teens from the neighborhood said Martin was obsessive about his lawn.

May God have mercy on both their souls.

Martin is scheduled to be back in a Clermont County court Thursday.

Saint of the Day and daily Mass readings.

Today is the Feast of St. Nicholas von Flue, soldier, father of ten, hermit, peacemaker, and the Patron Saint of Switzerland. Pray for us, all you angels and saints.

Today's reading is Daniel 3:25, 34-43.
Today's Responsorial Psalm is Psalms 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9.
Today's Gospel reading is Matthew 18:21-35.


[Links to the readings will be from the NAB until I can find another chapter and verse searchable Douay-Rheims Bible on-line.]


Everyday links:

The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Rosary
Our Mother of Perpetual Help
Prayers from EWTN
National Coalition of Clergy and Laity (dedicated to action for a genuine Catholic Restoration)
The Catholic Calendar Page for Today


Just in case you are wondering what exactly Catholics believe, here is

The Apostles Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.


Memorare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession,was left unaided.Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins my Mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful; O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy clemency hear and answer me. Amen.


St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse, pray for us.


Prayer to St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire

Dear St. Anthony, you became a Franciscan with the hope of shedding your blood for Christ. In God's plan for you, your thirst for martyrdom was never to be satisfied. St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire, pray that I may become less afraid to stand up and be counted as a follower of the Lord Jesus. Intercede also for my other intentions. (Name them.)


PRAYER TO SAINT MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the divine power, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.

The latest from Orit, my favorite hot Israeli babe.

LEFT: Nothing says security like a "charming Jewess" (Remember Liz Taylor in Ivanhoe? Or was that "charming negress" - Abe Lincoln to Lt. Uhuru in Star Trek Episode 77?) with a gun.


Orit seems to almost have come full circle. She may once again call the good ol' US of A home.

Thursday night -- yet again. I don't want to go out.

A friend invited me to a happening party, and another friend invited me for a drink, but I still don't feel like dancing or drinking. I'm not in the mood for small talk and frivolity. Sometimes I wish I was. I know that in the past month I have sunken into a slight depression.

Now I'm wondering if Tel Aviv is not the only problem.

About two weeks ago I thought that maybe I had to leave the city and live on a settlement -- to become a "hilltop youth." Friends told me about an outpost deep in the Judean desert -- between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea -- that mixes religious and secular singles and couples. Maybe there I would find my place.

I was intrigued for a while and even spent Shabbat at this secluded hill consisting of a dozen caravans. I thought that maybe that's what I needed -- a simple life in the Judean desert to clear my head and to hear the Word about what I was supposed to do with my life. I had a good time -- I ate Shabbat meals together with some of the residents and we talked at length about the horrible state that Israel is in. I felt that I could unleash the frustrations I couldn't unleash with my friends in Tel Aviv.

Problem is, this desert outpost, while built legally, has no more vacancies. The Gush Etzion municipality no longer provides them with any caravans or support of any kind. I offered to try living there for a period -- if I really liked it I would raise money and buy my own caravan -- but the woman in charge of absorption said that they are giving priority to families. She wants more children around for her kids to play with.

Needless to say, it was a big turn-off -- here I came with all this idealism, good will, and enthusiasm, only to be rejected. I noticed that even settlements and outposts, which preach about the evils of selfishness in Israel, can sometimes be parochial and cliquey. At the end of the day most people are concerned with their own needs and desires, which, ultimately, is human nature.

Orit, baby! I can't believe you don't get it. For pioneers, children are like gold. And so are couples of child-bearing age.

Where does this leave me? I don't know, but I'm thinking more and more of moving back to the States. The Land of Israel is sacred, but the State of Israel is a blasphemy. I'd rather live freely under a gentile government than be oppressed by a Jewish government.

Fifty years of socialist government and being an American welfare client will do that to anyone.

Sometimes I think that we live in galut even in Israel. Our government is more oppressive to the Jews than the American or even some -- but certainly not all -- European governments. The rights and religion of Jews as individuals are protected in the States far more than they are here. And that's why being Jewish is cool and hip in the States, whereas in Israel Judaism is to be thwarted. So while I wouldn't be on Holy Land in the States, I won't always feel persecuted and undermined by the government and the people who vote for it.

Being Jewish is hip and cool here? Black folks, call your office.

Jews like to think that they own each other. Because we are all Jews we like to think we have the right to abuse, uproot, and control each other. In the United States the separation of religion and state and the relative protection of individual rights lend to a society where Jews can live according to their conscience and religion. In Israel the mish-mosh between religion and state and religion and society creates rifts and turmoil. Israel needs an intellectual revolution if it is to survive.

If I may be serious for a moment, kiddies.

Since the Nazis did not make any distinction between observant and non-observant Jews and killed every Jew they could, Jews have seemed reluctant to admit there are indeed different kinds of Jews. It may be time...

There is a lot I need to think about -- and I still have revolutionary ideas I want to get on paper -- but I don't know if I could do so in Israel -- confined, alone, struggling, and poor. The walls are closing in on me -- literally. And I feel as if I'm always besieged by stupidity, mediocrity, and barbarism -- in the media headlines, in the cafes, in the government offices - that turn the knife that is already in my back.

I've been here for almost seven years -- seven years of hard toil and labor. Yes, I had unforgettable and amazing experiences and I met extraordinary people, but maybe it's time for shmita -- a seventh year sabbatical. I'm worn out.

If two weeks ago I didn't want to speak to my secular friends, now I can't talk to my religious-Zionist friends. I know they'll try their hardest to convince me to stay. I know they'll call me a traitor. They'll tell me not to give-up. But their lectures will only make me feel more alone and invalidated.

So I'm planning to spend Passover -- the time of our liberation -- with my family in the US. It will be somewhat of a pilot trip. All I want is freedom, for me and the entire house of Israel.

Welcome back, Orit. You won't have to worry about the goat-raping murderers here. (As much.) But America has other kinds of predators who prey on good Jewish girls.

Meanwhile, back in the Holy Land...

Muslim and Jewish leaders open congress to discuss how to work toward peace
Muslim and Jewish leaders meeting in a rare face-to-face forum have appealed to their faithful not to view each other as enemies and keep religion from being hijacked by extremists.



Hodgepodge of Jews, Muslims and Christians cross the Sahara for peace
Ex-Israeli fighter pilot Gil Fogiel rarely talked about being a prisoner of war in Syria, until he sat across a campfire in the middle of the desert with people he long considered his enemies.



Apples from Israeli Golan Heights begin arriving in Syria
Truckloads of apples produced by Arab farmers in the Israeli Golan Heights began arriving in Syria as part of a government drive to help the farmers to market their main crop.
(Thanks to Israelinsider for the heads up.)

The Theology of the Body: 64. Marriage and Celibacy in the Light of the Resurrection of the Body

In his General Audience of 11 November 1981, the Holy Father began a new segment of his catechesis on theology of the body, basing his talk on the words of Christ to the Sadducees on the general resurrection. "These words are of fundamental importance for understanding marriage in the Christian sense and also the renunciation of conjugal life for the kingdom of heaven."



Marriage and Celibacy in the Light of the Resurrection of the Body

On Wednesday, 11 November, at the General Audience held in the Paul VI Hall, the Holy Father resumed his catechesis on the theology of the body, basing his talk on the discussion between Our Lord and the Sadducees. Following is the text of the Pope's message.



1. After a rather long pause, today we will resume the meditations which have been going on for some time, which we have called reflections on the theology of the body.

In continuing, it is opportune to go back to the words of the Gospel in which Christ referred to the resurrection. These words are of fundamental importance for understanding marriage in the Christian sense and also the renunciation of conjugal life for the kingdom of heaven.

The complex casuistry of the Old Testament in the field of marriage not only drove the Pharisees to go to Christ to pose to him the problem of the indissolubility of marriage (cf. Mt 19:3-9; Mk 10:2-12). Another time, it also drove the Sadducees to question him about the so-called levirate law.(1) This conversation is harmoniously reported by the synoptic Gospels (cf. Mt 22:24-30; Mk 12:18-27; Lk 20:27-40). Although all three accounts are almost identical, we note some differences, slight, but at the same time significant. Since the conversation is reported in three versions, those of Matthew, Mark and Luke, a deeper analysis is necessary, since it contains elements which have an essential significance for the theology of the body.

Alongside the other two important conversations, namely, the one in which Christ refers to the "beginning" (cf. Mt 19:3-9; Mk 10:2-12), and the other in which an appeal was made to man's inner self (to the heart), indicating desire and the lust of the flesh as a source of sin (cf. Mt 5:27-32), the conversation which we now propose to analyze constitutes, I would say, the third element of the triptych of the enunciations of Christ himself: a triptych of words that are essential and constitutive for the theology of the body. In this conversation Jesus referred to the resurrection, thus revealing a completely new dimension of the mystery of man.

Christ refutes belief of Sadducees

2. The revelation of this dimension of the body, stupendous in its content—and yet connected with the Gospel reread as a whole and in depth—emerges in the conversation with the Sadducees, "who say that there is no resurrection" (Mt 22:23).(2) They had come to Christ to set before him an argument which in their judgment confirmed the soundness of their position. This argument was to contradict "the hypothesis of the resurrection." The Sadducees' argument is the following: "Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man's brother dies and leaves a wife, but leaves no child, the man must take the wife, and raise up children for his brother" (Mk 12:19). The Sadducees were referring here to the so-called levirate law (cf. Dt 25:5-10). Drawing upon the prescription of this ancient law, they presented the following case: "There were seven brothers. The first took a wife, and when he died, he left no children. The second took her, and died, leaving no children, and the third likewise, and the seven left no children. Last of all the woman also died. In the resurrection whose wife will she be? For the seven had her as wife" (Mk 12:20-23).(3)

Wisdom and power of God himself

3. Christ's answer is one of the answer-keys of the Gospel, in which there is revealed—precisely starting from purely human arguments and in contrast with them—another dimension of the question, that is, the one that corresponds to the wisdom and power of God himself. Similarly, the case had arisen of the tax coin with Caesar's image and of the correct relationship between what is divine and what is human (Caesar's) in the sphere of authority (cf. Mt 22:15-22). This time Jesus replied as follows: "Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God? For when they rise from the dead, they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven" (Mk 12:24-25). This is the fundamental reply to the case, that is, to the problem it contains. Knowing the thoughts of the Sadducees, and realizing their real intentions, Christ subsequently took up again the problem of the possibility of resurrection, denied by the Sadducees themselves: "As for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God said to him, 'I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob'? He is not a God of the dead, but of the living" (Mk 12:26-27). As we can see, Christ quoted the same Moses to whom the Sadducees had referred, and ended with the affirmation: "You are quite wrong" (Mk 12:27).

Another affirmation

4. Christ repeats this conclusive affirmation even a second time. In fact, he said it the first time at the beginning of his explanation. Then he said: "You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God" (Mt 22:29). We read in Mark: "Is not this why you are wrong, that you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?" (12:24). In Luke's version (20:27-36), on the contrary, Christ's same answer is without polemical tones, without that, "You are quite wrong." On the other hand, he proclaimed the same thing since in his answer he introduced some elements which are not found either in Matthew or in Mark. Here is the text: "Jesus said to them, 'The sons of this age marry and are given in marriage. But those who are accounted worthy to attain to that age and to the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage, for they cannot die any more, because they are equal to angels and are sons of God, being sons of the resurrection'" (Lk 20:34-36). With regard to the possibility of resurrection, Luke—like the other two synoptics—refers to Moses, that is, to the passage in Exodus 3:2-6. This passage narrates that the great legislator of the old covenant had heard from the bush, which "was burning, yet not consumed," the following words: "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob" (Ex 3:6). In the same place, when Moses had asked God's name, he had heard the answer: "I am who am" (Ex 3:14).

In this way, therefore, speaking of the future resurrection of the body, Christ refers to the power of the living God. We will have to consider this subject in greater detail later.

NOTES

1. This law, contained in Dt 25:7-10, concerns brothers who lived under the same roof. If one of them died without leaving children, the dead man's brother had to marry his brother's widow. The child born of this marriage was recognized as the son of the deceased, so that his stock would not be extinguished and the inheritance would be kept in the family (cf. 3:9-4:12).

2. In the time of Christ, the Sadducees formed, within Judaism, a sect bound to the circle of the priestly aristocracy. In opposition to the oral tradition and theology elaborated by the Pharisees, they proposed the literal interpretation of the Pentateuch, which they considered the main source of the Jahwist religion. Since there was no mention of life after death in the most ancient books of the Bible, the Sadducees rejected the eschatology proclaimed by the Pharisees, affirming that "souls die together with the body" (cf. Joseph, Antiquitates Judaicae, XVII, 1.4, 16).

The conceptions of the Sadducees are not directly known to us, however, since all their writings were lost after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, when the sect itself disappeared. We get what little information there is about the Sadducees from the writings of their ideological opponents.

3. The Sadducees, turning to Jesus for a purely theoretical "case," at the same time attacked the primitive conception of the Pharisees on life after the resurrection of the body. They insinuated, in fact, that faith in the resurrection of the body leads to admitting polyandry, which is contrary to God's law.

Watch the NYT notice a conservative black Republican!

Ann Coulter takes us into the fetid world of the racially sensitive left-fascists who still give Jayson Blair good references:

I guess the only way we'll ever find out how many blacks have worked in the Bush administration is to wait for them to get in trouble someday so we can read the breathless, triumphant stories on the front page of the New York Times about a black Republican scofflaw. It's amazing that anyone has ever heard of Condoleezza Rice -- she's never even been arrested for jaywalking.

Claude Allen, whom I first heard of this week, was a top adviser to President Bush for more than 4 1/2 years. Soon after Bush was elected in 2000, he made Allen the No. 2 official at the Department of Health and Human Services. Allen later became Bush's domestic policy adviser, meeting with the president several times a week.

In 2003, Bush nominated Allen to a federal judgeship on the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals -- which nomination was then blocked by the party that wouldn't exist without black votes. Deploying their usual strategy against black Republicans, Democrats raised questions about Allen's "legal credentials": Democrat-ese for "He's black, so he's probably not very smart." Allen went to Duke Law School, where he was remembered fondly by law professor Walter Dellinger, later Clinton's solicitor general.

During the entire time this talented, intelligent, magnificently conservative black man held high positions in the Bush administration, he was mentioned in only 11 articles in The New York Times. (A small part of Times Executive Editor Bill Keller dies every time the paper is forced to mention any black top officials in the Bush administration. It might remind people that the most highly placed black in the Clinton administration was his secretary, Betty Currie.)

Heehee! (Poor woman. You do know Goober II made her clean up those messes, don't you?)

But since Allen was accused of stealing from department stores a few weeks ago, the Times has mentioned him in seven articles -- including a major front page article on Monday, coverage more appropriate to the first moon landing. This makes Allen the first black alleged thief whose photo has ever appeared in the New York Times.

Heehee!

Allen isn't even working for the Bush administration anymore. Yet the Times is wallowing in his agony. I've never seen people enjoy another person's private pain so much -- at least not since a prosecutor started investigating Rush Limbaugh for taking too many back pain pills.

Let me be the first to say: Congratulations, Mr. Allen! The New York Times really hates you. Welcome to my world. We're so happy to have you in our club.

I'm not shocked by the information that Claude Allen is not without original sin. But it has to be said: He was pretty close.

Allen emerged from a tough neighborhood in Washington, D.C., to go to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and then Duke Law School. He joined a "mostly white and liberal" fraternity, according to the Times, where he was adored -- despite the fact that he didn't drink, a major demerit at a fraternity -- for his ability to get along with anyone. One fraternity brother told the Times that Allen was "always thoughtful and respectful of different opinions" -- a trait that would come in handy for a black teetotaler living in a UNC frat house.

He became a born-again Christian at college and -- the obvious next step -- a Republican after college. These acts are known in the liberal rulebook as "strike two" and "strike three," respectively. He explained leaving the party of his birth to become a Republican with eloquence: "I realized after the fact that I agree more with the Republican Party platform, that it talked about independence, that it talked about individual responsibility, individual rights, it talked about the ability to guarantee opportunities, not outcomes," adding, "that was very much what my family stood for."

Amen to that, Brother. I wonder if Celine Dion has heard about this...

He is married with four children, all of whom he home-schools. (Is there such a thing as strike four?) So he was already the moral equivalent to a Ku Klux Klanner in liberal eyes. Wait, no, if he were a former Klanner, he'd be the Democratic senator from West Virginia. Let me rephrase that: He was already a meat-eating, God-fearing, patriotic American in liberal eyes.

Allen also worked for the sainted Jesse Helms, former senator from North Carolina. By now, the average liberal would need yoga and a Barbra Streisand album to calm down. After Helms' 1984 Democratic opponent, James B. Hunt Jr., ran a TV commercial saying Helms was backed by "right-wing nuts," Allen reacted by saying that if the Helms campaign was run by similar guttersnipes, they could say Hunt was backed by "queers."

Heehee!

This week at the New York Times, it was revenge of the queers. I'm sorry it took a tough period in Allen's life for the New York Times to feature him under a banner headline on its front page, but all in all, I'm glad to finally know about Claude Allen. I'm proud to have this great fellow sinner in our party.

Bless Mr. Allen and his family, Lord. And protect them from those stone throwers who are without sin.

NEWS FLASH!

Sarandon to Play Cindy Sheehan in Movie...

...Several Other Ghouls Miss Chance at Role of a Lifetime

Sharon Stone, who wasn't even the best looking chick in Meadville, PA back in the day, and was never as hot as she was made out to be, proves she...

...just may be the dimmest bulb on the nearly extingushed Hollyweird scoreboard.

Peace just a breath away, says Sharon Stone

Yeah, but... Sharon baby, what if the guy breathing down your lovely neck is a certified goat-raping terrorist wearing a C4 vest instead of an Armani suit?

A peaceful co-existence between the peoples of the Middle East is but a breath away, Hollywood star Sharon Stone said after a highly publicized visit to Israel.

"It feels to me that we have an opportunity ... to choose understanding in a new way," she told a press conference in Paris when asked about her trip.

I really shouldn't pick on the Hollyweird glitterati. They think that since so many people pay so much attention to them, they can really make a difference in this poor old world by just saying something. Or anything. It's vanity, that's all.

"And it really is just a breath. It's just an agreement that's just a breath. We are not far apart. We can choose to have this alternative kind of growth that is a collective nuance of understanding.

Now wait just a darn minute there, missy! Is it a breath or an agreement?

"We are just that breath away from a peaceful co-existence," she added after her visit to Israel as a guest of the Peres Center for Peace, a foundation run by Nobel laureate and former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres.

"Peaceful co-existence"? Is she channeling every commie dictator from Lenin to whatever arch-murderer is running Slave China today? Where's Shirley MacLaine when you need her? (BTW, Shirl, baby, I was Charlemagne and I'm darn sure I could have done better than you.)

Stone, 48, who visited several projects aimed at promoting peace, including a kindergarten for Israeli and Palestinian children in Jaffa, was also photographed praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, the holiest Jewish shrine.

Stone, who is also an ardent champion of women's rights, was in Paris ahead of the release of her latest film "Basic Instinct II".

Yeah, I'm sure this flick will be another triumph for oppressed women everywhere.

She told journalists that she was delighted that women were stepping up to take their place in the world, taking on new jobs to which they brought something unique, "their feminine instinct."

"This is a new and very exciting time for women, because women by their very nature are creative and not destructive. (Hoohoo! Hitlery ought to use ol' Sharon as a speechwriter! Gebärmütter über alles! - F.G.) And this is an extraordinary and important thing that we can bring into a world that awaits the opportunity for peace."

Big Mother Is Watching.

Man jailed 30 days for having disorderly house in Nebraska...

Party Crack Down at Kansas University...

State Shuts Down Online March Madness...

Thanks to Drudge for these links.

From The Holier Than Thou Department:

Three Tenors swag not as valuable as once thought...




Scandal shakes public radio...

The sedate, urbane world of public broadcasting was rattled Thursday as prosecutors charged three former employees of Michigan Public Media with illegally accepting golf club memberships, Persian rugs, airline tickets and massages in exchange for on-air considerations at the state's top public radio station.

Golf club memberships and Persian rugs are racist. Massages are sexist. And that last one sounds like good old fashioned payola. Haydn's publicists must have been working overtime...

Each of the men -- current WDET-FM general manager Michael Coleman, Jeremy Nordquist and Justin Ebright -- was charged by Washtenaw County prosecutors in Ann Arbor with embezzlement of under $20,000 while working at Michigan Public Media-controlled WUOM-FM (91.7). Each could face up to five years in prison if convicted.

An internal audit also found sloppy recordkeeping, excessive bonuses and expense-account fraud that totaled more than $50,000 from July 2001 to December 2005, said Timothy Slottow, University of Michigan's chief financial officer. U-M owns and runs Michigan Public Media.

WDET (101.9) and WUOM are the major public radio stations in Michigan, and public radio has long had a trustworthy image of being above the kind of influence-peddling that has occasionally tarnished commercial radio.

The charges shocked listeners of the National Public Radio affiliates.

"This is a sad revelation for Detroit, which has functioned as Michigan's cultural engine for so long," (Huh? If true, that explains quite a bit about the death of Detroit. - F.G.) said public radio listener Willie Northway of Ann Arbor. "The talk and news offered by Michigan Radio is an invaluable service to the community."

Great news from Drudge!

House Expected To Be In Session Only 97 Days This Year...

Happy Spring!

1:26 Eastern

(BTW, there is no sign of global or local warming in Totalitarian Pennsylvania today. Darn groundhog.)

Once upon a time in the West...

UN: Humans cause worst extinctions since dinosaurs...

...D. Keith Mano wrote a novel in the 1970's called The Bridge. In it, those who care more for "nature" than man have taken over and returned us to the Stone Age to save the planet from the scourge that is humanity.

Eventually, the ecocrats (my neo-logism, not Mr. Mano's) realize they cannot prevent the holy bacteria from being killed when evil humans inhale them, so they order the murder of the human race (including their own suicides).

We have been warned, kiddies.

These morons hate themselves and everyone else. And they are preparing to do something about it.

The state-sanctioned murder of Terri Schiavo plus one year.

Thanks to WI Catholic Musings for the reminder. Watching basketball all weekend is fun, kiddies, but it is still just a game. This is the real world:

A Year Since Court-Ordered Death of Innocent Terri

As a nurse since 1972, and a nursing assistant before that, I have been caring for many different people with head injuries and strokes, cognitively and developmentally disabled caused by many different things (some genetic, some from birth, some from accidents such as falls, vehicular crashes, etc).

I have also cared for many dying patients over the years.

There is a huge difference between the two.

Disabled people do not deserve to be murdered by starvation and dehydration. They deserve the best care that we can give them, meeting them at the level that they are at, and trying to assist them to any level higher that they can achieve, regardless of how long it takes.

Terri Schindler Schiavo was not dying when court orders were issued to remove her G-tube and worse, to not give her anything by mouth. One year ago today, that court order was carried out. Terri died after 13 days of dehydration, 13 days of starvation, in spite of the fact that her parents and siblings wanted her to live, and fought hard for her to be able to do so.

The world watched while she was being killed. The world also watched while the Holy Father was dying a 'natural' death.

There is a difference.

While her family wanted her alive, her unfaithful husband, who had already been 'intimate' (his testimony under oath in deposition and court testimony) with at least three women, including one, Jodi, with whom he had already had two children. While he tried to convince the world that this was what TERRI wanted, others who knew her strongly denied it.

Terri was not brain dead, nor was she a vegetable. A human being can become disabled, but they can NEVER become anything less than a HUMAN BEING. Terri was a disabled woman who had every right to life. She had a right to be fed and given liquids.

JPII spoke out against killing Terri, as did other Vatican officials. As did several Bishops in the USA. While JPII's statements are powerful, Bishop Vasa's was direct, short, and to the point. Bold sections are this writer's emphasis.

The Catholic Church teaches that hydration and nutrition are simply water and food. These must always be provided as long as the food or water itself or the method of delivery is not unduly burdensome to the PATIENT. There does not appear to be any indication from Terri that the provision or the method of provision of food and water is burdensome to her.

The one 'burden', which so many seem so determined to lift from her, is that one thing that allows Terri to continue to be a living breathing human person, life itself. Life itself cannot be the burden from which we in the Catholic Church seek to deliver the faithful. This is the Assisted Suicide attitude.

Life is a grace and a blessing and yes the living of that life does entail some burdens, sometimes great burdens, but the solution can be neither murder nor suicide - these are offenses against life itself and the Lord who gives it.

Terri is alive. She is kept alive by the same things that keep me alive - Food, water, air. Her disability deprives her of the ability to ingest these things, it does not deprive her of the ability to digest them. She may well die in the future from an inability to digest food but it would be murder to cause her death by denying her the food she still has the ability to digest and which continues to provide for her a definite benefit - life itself.

Related Tags: Terri Schindler Schiavo, Death by Court order, Disabled, G-tube, Tube feeding, Bishop Vasa

I hope all you kiddies out there are paying attention on the all-too-infrequent occasions I quote from this blog.

I know I am usually to be found joking about the Fairer Sex, (It's a nervous laughter kind of thing. I know women are better than men. Usually.) but this lady is the real thing. She's a grandmother, a nurse, and a Catholic gentlewoman to boot.

So pay attention, kiddies. You just might learn something.

I hope I didn't make her blush.

WI Catholic Musings on the husband of Mary.

From my favorite Catholic blogging babe in all of Wisconsin:

The Heart of a Father
An excellent article on St Joseph is here.

Just part of it:
His heart is always in the right place, and God was able to accomplish great things through this eminently just and faithful man.

St. Joseph's fatherly heart jumps off the page throughout the rich, biblical accounts of Christ's childhood. Let's take a brief look at just one such familiar episode: the Finding of Jesus in the Temple (Lk 2:41-52).

"Now His parents went to Jerusalem every year at the feast of the Passover. And when He was twelve years old, they went up according to custom" (verses 41-42).

These verses may seem unremarkable at first blush, though as St. Joseph is carting the Holy Family from place to place in the first century we can be certain these journeys were much more onerous than a leisurely afternoon drive in the air-conditioned minivan. But even in his fidelity to the Jewish practices of his time, St. Joseph gives us a most timely lesson on the value of men being observant Catholics. Too often we find at Sunday Mass mom and the kids, but where's dad? St. Joseph challenges us men to allow our love for the Lord and zeal for our faith to set the tone for the entire family.

Real men go to church.

And more......

It's also significant that Mary refers to Joseph as Jesus' father, which surely reflected the common understanding of the people. As an adoptive father myself, I appreciate the affirmation of a father that transcends biological lineage. As Pope John Paul II commented in his 1989 apostolic exhortation Guardian of the Redeemer:In this family, Joseph is the father: his fatherhood is not one that derives from begetting offspring; but neither is it an "apparent" or merely "substitute" fatherhood. Rather, it is one that fully shares in authentic human fatherhood and the mission of the father in the family.Joseph accepts this fatherhood through the obedience of faith, even though he also knows that this child was conceived "of the Holy Spirit" (Mt 1:20). He exercises this fatherhood in complete docility to God's will and with superabundant love for mother and Child. As the wondrous events unfold around him, it's clear that St. Joseph does not have a complete understanding of what is going to happen next. Yet he always remains faithful in the present moment, and the Lord never fails to reveal to him what he needs to know at any given point in time.

As I've tried to translate this into my own life experience, I've understood this to mean that I must at all times remain attentive to God and available for my family. When things go wrong, it's typically because either I'm not paying attention, or I am serving myself and not my beloved family. Mighty Love and Daily Solicitude

"And He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and His mother kept all these things in her heart" (verse 51).

Women with careers often need to be affirmed regarding the beautiful vocation of motherhood, which too often — in subtle and not-so-subtle ways — is devalued in our society. Yet men need to hear a similar message regarding fatherhood, spoken through the humbly eloquent life of St. Joseph.

We might do great things in the world's eyes, but our primary vocation as married men is to be husband and father in the domestic Church.

What happens when you search for "Catholic" at Yahoo! News...

...at noon on 3/20/06...


Poles' Anger Over Wartime Crimes
Catholic Times - Mar 16
Polish Church leaders have deplored a Russian prosecutor's ruling that a 1940 massacre of thousands of Polish officers cannot be considered a "communist crime."


Tough to be a Rosales after a Sin
INQ7.net - Mar 16
IT'S TOUGH being Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales. Often measured against the late Jaime Cardinal Sin, the low-key archbishop of the powerful Metropolitan See of Manila isn't exactly staring at calm seas, especially now that he's got the red hat.


UK Catholic hospital must tighten ethics: Cardinal
Reuters via Yahoo! News - 28 minutes ago
The leader of England's Roman Catholics called on Monday for tighter ethical controls in a fashionable Catholic hospital embroiled in a complex morality debate.


St. Anne serves Catholic faithful in 2 languages
The Arizona Republic - 1 hour, 54 minutes ago
The tremendous growth rate of Gilbert's Hispanic population is evident in the weekly St. Anne Catholic Church bulletin.


Four Fisher Catholic students are heading to district economics competition
CentralOhio.com - Mar 20
Most people would probably cringe if asked to explain the "inverted yield curve," but not Nathan Brunney, a junior at Fisher Catholic High School.


Catholic school will close in June
MLive.com - 1 hour, 14 minutes ago
After 51 years as a Catholic elementary school in Belleville, St. Anthony Academy will close in June. Debt and declining enrollment led to the decision.


Rell, who backed Catholic hospitals on 'morning after pill,' got bundle of campaign cash from St. Francis execs and docs
Journal Inquirer - 26 minutes ago
Gov. M. Jodi Rell, who this month sided with Catholic hospitals opposed to a bill that would force them to dispense the so-called "morning after pill," had previously collected $19,250 in campaign contributions from more than two dozen administrators, physicians, and others at St. Francis Hospital and Medical Center in Hartford.


College begins Catholic lecture series
Duluth News Tribune - Mar 20
The College of St. Scholastica is launching a new lecture series today to examine Catholic thinking on various topics.


Winning rate for Catholic teams average
Middletown Press - 51 minutes ago
But before we decide to put the Catholic schools on a reservation, maybe we ought to look at some numbers. Consider: All four boys basketball titles were won by public schools. Three of four girls titles were won by public schools. All four boys swimming titles were won by public schools.


Catholic Diocese Settles Suit for $5.1M
WLBT 3 - Mar 19
The Catholic Diocese of Jackson will pay more than $5.1 million to victims of priest abuse. The announcement was made Thursday by the Diocese and attorneys for 19 plaintiffs in the case. The settlement brings vindication..and church leaders say they hope some level of peace for victims.


Catholic Church losing its clout on Beacon Hill
South Coast Today - Mar 18
BOSTON — Massachusetts, one of the most Catholic states in the country, is witnessing an ever-widening rift between church and state on a raft of social issues, including gay marriage, abortion "buffer zones," stem cell research and emergency contraception.


Catholic school teachers pay dispute set to escalate
ABC via Yahoo! Australia & NZ News - Mar 18
A dispute by Canberra's Catholic school teachers over pay and conditions looks set to escalate into industrial action.

Bill Lester has a dream, too.

USA Today: Lester, 38th, learns much in Cup debut
(March 20) Wedged shoulder-to-shoulder between Mark Martin and Dale Earnhardt Jr. for a postrace interview, Bill Lester said he felt embarrassed because his 38th was undeserving of the attention. The Nextel Cup veterans on either side wouldn't have agreed.

Orlando Sentinel: Lester's debut on hold

Greensboro News-Record: Bill Lester secures spot in race

Lester Wants to Be Known As a Racer

Bill Lester doesn't want to be a footnote in history. Instead of being remembered as the first black driver to qualify for a race in
NASCAR's top stock car series in nearly 20 years, Lester would prefer to be thought of as "just a race car driver."

The 45-year-old regular in NASCAR's Craftsman Truck Series did make history, though, qualifying for Sunday's Golden Corral 500 in his first try at racing in the Nextel Cup series.

And the unassuming Lester, who left a six-figure job in corporate America 14 years ago to try his hand in racing, (Emphasis mine.) remained very composed after realizing the first step of his biggest dream.

"The biggest issue has been the age issue but, fortunately, I don't look or act my age," he said, smiling. "I'm pleased that those doubting Thomases are a little bit in the situation of re-evaluating the statements they made. There are always people who don't believe in you. But if I listened to those people, I wouldn't be where I am today."

Where he will be Sunday is starting 19th in the 43-car field for the race at Atlanta Motor Speedway. And he didn't back in.

Lester qualified at 190.502 mph, the fastest of the 15 drivers competing for eight open positions in the lineup. The other spots went to cars that were the top 35 in car owner points last year.

And now that he is in the race, Lester has some goals.

"I expect to race 500 miles," he said. "I expect to learn a lot and add knowledge to my database of information. I hope to gain the respect of my competitors. I'm hoping for a top-20 finish, but you can't predict the outcome. I'm just excited to race with the best drivers this country has to offer."

From The Stupid And Ironic Way To Die Department:

Rockclimbing Rule #1 from a non-rockclimber: Don't practice on buildings. They are partially made of rocks, but they are not rocks.

Rockclimbing Rule #2 from a non-rockclimber: Don't climb rocks (or practice rockclimbing on buildings) when wasted.

Harrisburg Patriot-News: Woman dies in fall from city building
Camp Hill resident was climbing with group of 'daredevils'

A Camp Hill woman fell to her death yesterday morning while trying to jump from the top of one 10-story building to another after a night of drinking alcohol with her friends, authorities said.

Zeynep Barnes, 25, of the 100 block of South 32nd Street, fell into an 18-inch-wide gap between the Walnut Street Parking Garage and the building known as 30 North Third Street Building that houses a Wachovia bank branch.

Barnes had been out drinking at several West Shore bars and bars along Second Street with a group of friends, who are rock climbers, in the hours before the accident, Mayor Stephen R. Reed said.

That would be Harrisburg, PA's ghoulish Mayor-for-Life Stephen "Hopalong" Reed, who loves to get himself in front of a camera and microphone whenever someone dies hideously in his fiefdom.

Barnes is the second woman to fall to her death from a downtown building after a night of drinking in the last three weeks.

To be fair to the first one, she was dropped out of a twenty-third floor window by her fiance as they celebrated their engagement. His defense? He was dangling her out of the window just for fun.

Reed said police continue to investigate Barnes' death but said he did not expect criminal charges to be filed.

"We're destroyed -- in shambles," said David Barnes, Zeynep's father. "She, we thought, was a rising star."

Here come the ironic parts, kiddies.

Barnes graduated from Skidmore College, majoring in business, where she also played soccer. She had an internship in China while at Skidmore and learned to speak Mandarin Chinese.

Ironic Part #1: She was an educated woman.

Barnes worked for Carlisle SynTec as a risk analyst and was working on her master's degree at Shippensburg, her father said.

Ironic Part #2: She was a "risk analyst".

"It's a tragic accident involving alcohol and what I would call daredevil behavior," Reed said.

The group, consisting of Barnes and four others, made a habit of going to the top of the 11-story parking garage and the bank building at night to look at the city and the surrounding area, Reed said.

You can look all you want. Just don't jump.

********************************************************** UPDATE (3/24/06)
To the anonymous person claiming to be this woman's sibling:

My post is cautionary in nature, trying to remind all that their lives are short and precious and encouraging all to refrain from needlessly and stupidly risking death. Short of banning everything sharp, heavy, fast, tall, tricky, and deep, our God-given common sense is our best protection.

And, as always, may God have mercy on her soul, your soul, and all souls.

*********************************************
UPDATE 4/27/06
To the anonymous person claiming to to be this pathetic woman's father:

My humblest appy-polly loggies to you and your entire family of geniuses. Has it turned out your intellectually superior offspring was working on a third shift maintenance or painting crew, bravely sprucing up Harrisburg's parking garages while mere mortals slept in the safety of their puny little bourgeois beds?

Or was she an undercover roof inspector, bravely exposing shoddy building materials and corrupt government contract-letting? (Mayor Steven "Hi-ho, Silver" Reid, call your office.)

Or maybe she was rescuing someone's kitty...

Whatever helps you sleep at night, pal.

Oh, and one more thing. If I don't pray for her poor soul, who will?

*********************************************
Update The Last
To every Everyone:

Although I am skeptical of concepts such as transference, one hardly ever knows for sure, does one? Therefore, I do not mind being a passive cog in the great mechanism that is mental health. (If, in fact, I have been dealing with the late rockclimber's loved ones. You can never be sure on the internet, kiddies. It could always be an FBI agent trying to entrap you into typing something someone else does not like. You also never know what could have been made illegal while you slept.)

If every tv sitcom I have ever watched is correct, (and who am I to doubt Hollyweird heavyweights who know therapy inside and out?) we have gotten through anger, denial, and (if the latest missive to arrive at my palatial dacha is to be believed) are about to wrap up the bargaining phase. Again, I am glad to do my part, cynical and sarcastic monster that I am.

Sadly, only the Natalee Holloway story lasts forever. It is time for Your Humble Servant to move on to stories on the current news cycle. Such are the hectic times in which we live.

But there may be something Miss Holloway's tragic (and, yes, stupid) demise and her mother's reaction to it can teach us. It seems Mrs. Twitty gets it.

I offer the following news item from the West Side Leader of beautiful Akron, Ohio without comment or opinion because sometimes, kiddies, people have to learn how to make lemonade on their own.

Natalee Holloway’s mother promotes travel safety

Beth Holloway Twitty has been living every parent’s worst nightmare since the disappearance of her daughter, Natalee Holloway, in Aruba last May.

But the speech therapist and mother of two from Alabama is trying to make something positive come from her tragedy. She is making visits around the country, including several here in the Akron area last Thursday, to educate teens and young adults about travel safety.

************************************************************
Update Beyond the Last

Remember Len Bias, kiddies? See how his mother triumphed over his horrific death here.

Vengeance belongs to God alone, but I understand Corporal Johnson completely.

A father re-enlists to avenge his son's death in Iraq. What was the Army thinking?

Joe Johnson wanted to serve with his son in Iraq
A bomb in a Baghdad slum stole his Justin. Would he get revenge?

AL-ASAD, Iraq - In the desert chill, on the lonely nighttime roads of Iraq, Joe Johnson looks out over his machine gun and thinks of Justin.

It was on Easter morning 2004 that a chaplain and a colonel appeared on Joe and Jan Johnson's Georgia doorstep with the news.

Justin, the boy Joe had fished and hunted with, the soldier son who'd gone off to Iraq a month earlier, was dead at 22, killed by a roadside bomb planted in a Baghdad slum.

May God have mercy on his brave soul.

Today it's Joe who mans the M-240 atop a Humvee, warily watching the sides of the road. He's an unlikely Army corporal at 48, a father who came here for revenge, a Christian missionary on a crusade against Islam, and a man who, after six months at war, is ready to go home.

"I shouldn't even have come," he now says.

Mr. Johnson should be sent home...

He wasn't there when the news arrived in Rome, Ga. The self-employed house-builder was in Fort Lewis, Wash., trying to qualify for a place in a Washington National Guard unit ticketed for Iraq.

With six years of long-ago Army and Navy service, Johnson had joined the National Guard in 2003, wanting to serve his country again, this time in combat, and to go to Iraq while his son was there. A year with husband and son at war would be easier on Jan than two years separately, he reasoned.
The death of Justin, a 1st Cavalry Division machine gunner, stunned his parents.

At that point, Johnson said, "I decided it was too soon to leave home." Jan was too distraught.

But last April 11, a year and a day after his son was killed, Johnson told his Iraq-bound Georgia National Guard unit, the 48th Infantry Brigade, he was ready to join them. They ended up at this dust-blown base in Iraq's far west, pulling escort duty for fuel convoys on the bomb-pocked desert highways from Jordan.

Why did he do it? The wiry, lean Georgian, an easy-talking man with a boyish, sunburned face, tried to answer the question that won't go away.

"It's a lot of things combined," he said. "One, a sense of duty. I was p----- off at the terrorists for 9-11 and other atrocities. Second, I'd only trained. I wanted combat." And then, he said, "there's some revenge involved. I'd be lying if I said there wasn't."

But there was more on the mind of this man who has done Church of God missionary work as far afield as Peru and the Arctic. "I don't really have love for Muslim people," Johnson said. "I'm sure there are good Muslims. I try not to be racist."

But somewhere along the way, his passion cooled, as the over-aged corporal, like tens of thousands of other American soldiers here, faced the reality of Iraq.

Was it last Christmas, when roadside bombs rocked his convoy one after another, and Johnson thought he was next? Or was it when speeding civilian cars passed the Americans' Humvees and Johnson failed to level his gun and open fire, which "I think anyone else," fearing car bombs, "would have done"?

Mr. Johnson should be sent home...

"I really don't want to kill innocent people," he now says. "I don't want to live with that the rest of my life."

...immediately.

It might have been the calls home to Jan, who was dealing not only with depression and other health problems, but with the prospect that their elder soldier son, Josh, 26, might be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan.

"I don't like that Joe's there," Jan Johnson said when called by satellite telephone from al-Asad. "But it's something he felt he had to do. People heal in different ways. This is how he heals after Justin's death."

War is too dangerous and too important for personal vendettas. I hope he hasn't (and doesn't) get any of his buddies killed.

Johnson's battalion leaves Iraq in early May, when his enlistment term expires.

Once home, he'll remove the silver-toned bracelet he's worn on his right wrist throughout his deployment, bearing Justin's name and date of death.
His mission is accomplished.

"I got it out of my system," he said.

Saint of the Day and daily Mass readings.

Today is the Solemnity of St. Joseph, the most chaste spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Pray for us, all you angels and saints.

Today's first reading for the Solemnity of St. Joseph is 2 Samuel 7:4-5,12-14, 16.
Today's second reading is Romans 4:13, 16-18,22.
Today's Responsorial Psalm is Psalm 89:2-3, 4-5, 27, 29.
Today's Gospel reading is Matthew 1:16, 18-21, 24.


[Links to the readings will be from the NAB until I can find another chapter and verse searchable Douay-Rheims Bible on-line.]



Everyday links:

The Blessed Virgin Mary
The Rosary
Our Mother of Perpetual Help
Prayers from EWTNNational Coalition of Clergy and Laity (dedicated to action for a genuine Catholic Restoration)
The Catholic Calendar Page for Today


Just in case you are wondering what exactly Catholics believe, here is

The Apostles Creed

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried.He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.


Memorare

Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that any one who fled to thy protection, implored thy help or sought thy intercession,was left unaided.Inspired with this confidence, I fly unto thee, O Virgin of virgins my Mother; to thee do I come, before thee I stand, sinful and sorrowful; O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in thy clemency hear and answer me. Amen.


St. Joseph, her most chaste spouse, pray for us.


Prayer to St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire

Dear St. Anthony, you became a Franciscan with the hope of shedding your blood for Christ. In God's plan for you, your thirst for martyrdom was never to be satisfied. St. Anthony, Martyr of Desire, pray that I may become less afraid to stand up and be counted as a follower of the Lord Jesus. Intercede also for my other intentions. (Name them.)


PRAYER TO SAINT MICHAEL THE ARCHANGEL

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle, be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil; may God rebuke him, we humbly pray, and do thou O Prince of the heavenly hosts, by the divine power, thrust into hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.