The One Percenters

(or)  The Recent Bold Deeds of The Most Busy and Industrious Band of True Believers and Followers of the Religion Of Peace

Not too long ago someone sought to prove a point, that being that most followers of Islam are nice folks who just want to get along, that not every Muslim was an Islamist … a PC word used now in lieu of the word Terrorist, which is fast becoming a word not to be used in polite society…..  After all one cannot call a billion people terrorists.  I mean some of them are crazy, some of them dribbling idiots, some kings, some murderous dictators, some rabid preachers and even more rabid politicians, some oil billionaires, and someone needs to stay home and cook.

They mentioned the results of a years long poll, worldwide in scope, by the Gallup folks and sponsored by a bunch of pro-Muslim organizations here in the Untied States…if fast fading memory serves.  The poll concluded that only 1% of Muslims were interested in converting the world by any means, fair or foul, into a seamless garment of burka clad women and bearded men with four wives apiece and 70 virgins waiting them in paradise.

This conclusion was reached, one may speculate, from analysis of data gathered from the usual statistically accurate survey of 1,00o some odd folks…perhaps in every country where there are one thousand Muslims, but who knows.

Only 1#?

It is  only too easy to adopt the term One Percenters from the Occupy Everything crowd of anarchists and use it to denote this extremely busy band of murderers, bombers, arsonists, rapists, enslavers, “occupiers”, whiners, thugs and criminals who do not worship any god I can recognize…and the governments and vast numbers of angry maniacs who support them anywhere one or two of them are gathered, it seems, in their prophet’s name, peace be upon him.

You doubt??

Read on then, here.

This thing comes out every month.  One would think, from the way our Main Stream media is addicted to feeding its slobbering audience with stories of gore and guts, that they would jump at the chance to cover things like these assorted acts of horror, mayhem, intimidation and crime all committed by a mere, but extremely busy, one percent of the worshipers of something or other.  But, no.  The fact is they hate Christianity more.  And they hate anyone who is a believing Christian.  Did you ever wonder why?

The battle is not between Islam and the rest of the world.

The battle is the same one it has always been; the one between Good and Evil.

The Passion of Phill Kline

Yeah, I know, and I hope you do to, this guy Kline in Kansas is just another mad dog runaway prosecutor. ‘Cause of him George Tiller was martyred by some killer while he was at church “wushipin’ Gawd Awmitey”, a crime that will live in infamy.  And, yeah I know, that Kathy Sebelius the former poster cute guvnur of that place and now the 21st Secretary of the whole Department of Health of these Untied States and in charge of the Death Panels, to help us get rid of folks who don’t need no help no more; which is only right, and her bein’ a good Cathlick to boot.  And I’m all for the one and agin’ t’other with all my strength, “Puh-raise and Amen.”

I read some of them stories about this bloodthirsty no good prosecutor goin’ after that poor dead angel Dr. George,who Kathy loved like a brother, so close you couldn’t tell ‘em apart, almost.  Him askin’ all sorts of questions and demandin’, DE, damn, MANDIN’ records and stuff which was promised we would never have to see see the light of day, an’ he ain’t got no damn right to in the first place since they is all medical records and private.

This Kline, a German, a kraut ain’t he, like that there pope in Rome, thinks since he was the law, he’s above the law.  But now they’re going to get him, and get him good.  And me and my wife and kids can sleep peaceful.  I can’t wait.  Ain’t no safer place for a kid than in their own home, like Gawd made it for.

Listen to Kline whine.  Makes me laugh.

UPDATE/NOTE:  I’m still learning my way around the blogosphere even 2 years into the exercise.  It occurs to me that I should have credited Life-Site News as a source for this story.  My apologies to the good folks over there. folks who are a heckuva lot better at getting to the truth of things than anyone I can think of at, oh say, The New York Times.

Pogo’s Equation Proved Once Again, With Reference to Scripture

A fellow named Mark Shea has a blog called Catholic and Enjoying It.  The title sums up something I’ve known for a long time about being a Catholic.  It’s a lot of fun!  It’s a lot of work, too, sometimes, and sometimes it could get you killed.  But most of all it’s a lot of fun.

The secret is locked up in what I’ve come to call Pogo’s Equation, the solution to which is given us every year on Easter morning.  I guess that’s what’s behind Pope Benedict’s new deal about evangelization and re-taking the ground lost in Europe and other places.  As the song asks, “How can you keep from singing?”

Mark Shea also writes the occasional article for the National Catholic Register, and probably a dozen other things.  I like reading what he writes because even when he’s  stalking the bad guys he’s doing it with good spirit and a jolly smile.  Well, on his blog this morning he merely gives one a copy of a You Tube video by a Fr. Robert Barron who is, I think, a professor at Mundelein Seminary.  The video is worth watching.  I get the feeling that Father Barron does what he does with the same kind of spirit as does Mark Shea.  It’s about that “Singing” thing.  Father Barron is talking about why he’s doing what he’s doing and how he does it.  We could learn something about doing the same thing; explaining the equation, sort of.

At the National Catholic Register Shea has an article called It’s a Good Thing We Won World War II.  The article is worth the few minutes it’ll take you to read it, especially the quote from the journal (magazine?) Psychology Today, for letting us know what is happening while we sleep (to allude to a book about another time and place), and why we need to go around making our point; with a song in our hearts.

The comments, too, are very interesting.  Some folks don’t seem to get the point, or listen to the music.  They’re still working on the left side of that equation

Do yourself a favor, read and then understand why we ought to be praying, fervently, for help; because we are certainly incapable of getting ourselves out of this mess we have placed ourselves in without it.  Of course, if you are a HC (Happy Catholic) you’ve already been praying, and singing and smiling.  You know the answer.

I now expect the usual comments from the usual sources that what is wrong is either the fault of the vicious people in the Vatican, the Tea Partiers or the Democrats, or the Market, or the unions, or a thousand other things, including bad genes and un-planned parenthood.  To which I reply, “Go read Pogo if you really want to know.”

Better yet, read, if you must, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; and everything that goes before it and comes after it in that Book.

The Grandchildren

The only ever time I was in France was a few years ago while on my way to Poland with my wife.  We changed planes at De Gaulle airport and sped away within an hour or so.  Poland, I thought after a few days there, had taken the title away from France for me.  Which title, you ask?  The title France owned outright once; the Eldest Daughter of the Church.

She had dropped out of the contest long ago, relinquishing her champion’s belt, her crown and title to any passer by;  it seemed for simple lack of interest in the matter.  Follow France in the media and you’ll read about Muslim slum kids rioting, naked movie stars, near naked models, haute couture that is a parody of itself, gray salt, cheese and churches becoming night clubs.

You don’t think of religion and churches when you think about France and the French; unless you think of them scoffing at any thought of the former and avoiding the latter in favor of riots, movie stars, clothes, salt and cheese in no particular order. Oops, I forgot wine.

Oh, you’ll probably also read about “Kiss Ins”.  This is an event staged in public by homosexual activists, now called “homosexualists”.  (Well, why not?  We have Islamism and Islamists.)  Often the “Kiss In” will be staged in front of a Catholic Church.  Groups of homosexualists, male and female, will assemble and kiss each other; confining that activity of course to members of the same sex kissing each other, because, well, that’s what homosexuals do; their raison d’etre, if you will.

Now, the French, you might say, are always kissing each other; men and men, women and women.  What is the problem with that?  Well, I suppose none if you happen to like doing it.  Folks do all kinds of things because they like doing it.  Even if, “It’s illegal, it’s immoral or it makes you fat.” as the song has it.  They like doing it, and so they’re gonna do it.  What’s more, they don’t like being told they can’t, shouldn’t or ought not do it.

Personally, I find it yucky.  But as someone might say, “There’s no accounting for taste.”  I like sardines and anchovies, but my wife doesn’t.  I could never bring myself to kiss a guy…or gal, for that matter…who had just finished smoking a gauloises; something the Frenchies like to do as much as eating stinky cheeses.

Another thing I wouldn’t do is demand that my wife or everyone else in the whole wide world endorse my taste for anchovies and other “tin fishies”, as my wife calls them; or else.  Or else, what?  Well, or else I’ll show up in their home, office or, say, church and cram loads of anchovies down my throat in front of them until they turn green and say, “Please.  We’re sorry.”

So, over in France a bunch of “homosexualists” decided to get together in front of Notre Dame Cathedral, and stage this “Kiss In”, where they would get sloppy in public.  They don’t like the Catholic Church because the Catholic Church disapproves of their behavior and calls what they do disordered and sinful.  These are words which can upset people who like doing what they are doing.  I don’t suppose anyone likes to hear they are doing something they shouldn’t ought to do.  As my grand daughter once said to me, “You’re not the boss of me.”

The “Kiss In” was supposed to be a kind of nose-thumbing exercise at the Catholic Church in France, a kind of public shaming of their intolerance toward people who like doing what they do; people who in fact can’t help doing it, so they say.  To “homosexualists” it is as if the Catholic Church had pronounced blue eyes and red hair disordered and sinful.  Their demonstration then would be nothing different from a group of “Blue-eyed-ists” gathering to stare at Catholics.

But then, some Catholics objected to this, and decided to counter demonstrate, to let them “Kissers” know they were not welcome to do what they were planning to do in front of Notre Dame Cathedral . And, they were forced to move away.  If you follow the link to the video of the incident you may be struck by the same thing which astonished me, frankly.  Can you guess what that was?

They were all young!  There wasn’t a gray head in the crowd, not one.  Here’s another thing you’ll see in the clip, and hear.  You’ll see and hear the kids chanting in Latin, “Habemus Papam!”  That means “We have a Pope!”  One website which is, err, on the other side of this issue reported that the “kissers” were attacked and beaten with motorcycle helmets by “Christian fundamentalists.  See for yourself.

Over here there’s a word entering the language for what happened in front of the cathedral in Paris.  The word is “pushback.”

The French have phrase, “L’Amour, Toujours L’Amour.”  It means “Love, Always Love.”  It’s supposed to capture the French spirit of romance, and stuff like that; as opposed to the English spirit of, umm, bully beef?  Anyway, sometimes love gets a bum rap because you have to do a hard thing to the folks you love and tell them what they like doing is not good for you, them or anyone.  I was doing something like that with my granddaughter when she told me that I was “not the boss” of her.

Listen to the grandkids here, though.  Don’t you just love ‘em?

It Was A Cold And Rainy Night

Not too many days ago some friends of mine were chatting on line about the changes they saw taking place in Harlem; a kind of revitalization seems to be going on there.  The place is becoming “gentrified”.  That means it’s now becoming attractive to live in Harlem for white people.  That’s if you have enough money.  Some may not remember that about a hundred years ago white people did live in Harlem.  It didn’t take as much then, even if you allow for a dollar being a dollar back then.

My mother and her brothers and sister grew up there, and went to school and went to church there.  They lived in a lovely apartment building at 120 Mt. Morris Park South, and attended Mass each Sunday at All Saints Church, a Gothic structure which is on the list of National Landmarks.  So is, I believe, Mt. Morris Park.  Only don’t go looking for Mt. Morris Park on a map.  John Lindsay, who used to be the Mayor of New York, and wanted to keep on being the mayor, thought it would help him to stay mayor if he re-named the park.  So he called it Marcus Garvey Park.  Nothing changed on the ground, though.  Everyone in Harlem calls it Mt. Morris Park.

In City Hall it’s Marcus Garvey, and probably no one knows where it is.

What happened in Harlem?  A lot of things happened, I guess, the same kind of things that happened to the neighborhood where my mother’s mother grew up in the late 19th Century, Five Corners of movie fame; a combination of cheap labor flooding in, greedy landlords and grubby politicians looking for a little easy money and a way to stay in office.

I once arrested a heroin dealer who lived in one of the rooms in the apartment that my mother’s family once called home.  It had been subdivided because the City of New York said a landlord could do that if he wished to “expand” his property in order to rent more places for more money to more people.  Landlords in New York City swing a big bat.

Well, all of the talk about what a wonderful place Harlem has (once more) become to settle in and raise a family got me thinking of some of my own experiences not so long ago in another Harlem at another time, the Harlem of poor people, rich landlords and corrupt politicians.

I remember this one:

Why do these things always happen on cold days?  At night?  In the
rain?  I’m not setting a scene, just telling the facts.  I was still in
my first, probationary, year at the FBN.  I was going along with three
other agents to serve a search warrant at an address in Harlem, off
Madison Avenue, on the south side of the street, at about 118th Street.
We were looking for heroin, which was, and may still be, as plentiful as
marihuana in some places in Cos Cob where many the new colonizers of Harlem probably grew up.

The building was one of those one probably sees now filling up with
“nice” people, the right kind, the ones who work at the mid-six figure
salaries three or four miles south, and write e-mails back and forth to
each other asking for advice on schools in the area, where it’s safe to
walk and where’s the best place to get authentic Ghanian cuisine.

They’d be horrified to know that heroin was once kept in about every
nook and cranny the place had, and used all over it…perhaps in their
bedrooms.

Anyway, as the rain fell we descended the stairs to the basement and kicked in the door.  It was the building’s superintendent who was supposed to be the dealer du jour, and we had decided that the judge had issued us a no knock warrant on the way over from Rao’s or some other place the real powers ate in Harlem before white folks came back …we had had a late meal.  Inside a dim bulb gleamed in a filthy ceiling shedding its light on something straight out of a Dickens nightmare.  There was no furniture, only rags and heaps of rags, odd platforms of refuse, which could once have been furniture, and the two inhabitants, dark and furtive creatures vaguely human, or what  might have been.   They spoke.  They moved.  Their “quarters” were separated from the old furnace by a sort of half wall, and it dawned on me that they lived in what had been the coal bin.

“There’s not enough money in the world,” I thought, “to make me want to
look at, through or under anything for anything else in this place.”  It
was the same thought going through everyone else’s mind, I figured,
because the fellow whose “case” this was simply ordered one of the
wretches to give us the heroin he knew was in there.  She got up from
something or other and motioned him to follow her.  I joined him, more
out of curiosity than anything else.  I was still curious then.

We walked out of the coal crib to the rear of the place behind the
furnace.  It was getting quite dark, but this creature knew her way.  Did
I mention they were both female?  They were a lesbian pair, or so the informant had told the fellow with the “case”.  I mention that because, well because it was odd then.  Perhaps that’s all they could do, in that place at that time.  One makes “arrangements”.   Anyway, she
stopped and reached up to pull the string on another light, which
illuminated a scene I don’t think I’d seen before and know I’ve not
seen since for its squalidity.  There in a hole in the wall she removed
some package or other and handed it over to my partner. It contained
about an ounce or two of heroin, already bagged.  She was a retailer of
the product, of course.  Probably had never been in Rao’s.  Probably had
never been off 118th Street, or out of her hole for years.

We were in her bathroom.  I could tell because the floor was covered
with piles of dung and small pools of urine I think.  At least they were
wet spots.

Both women were arrested and removed to the Federal Detention Center on West Street, not far from those places today where lesbians and other
homosexuals gather in public and private .  Times change.  The FDC is something else, too.

I went home.  We lived on Cannon Place near the Jerome Reservoir.  I
removed all my clothing outside my apartment and left it there, keeping
my wallet, gun, badge and credentials with me.  Sheila was, not
surprisingly, surprised to see me enter the house in that state, but
understood when I told her why, and agreed that most bugs would not have had time to establish themselves on what I brought through the door.  She urged me, however, to shower and bathe, quickly.  The clothes were
bagged and thrown away.

I think of that night when I read about “renewal”, and hope that the
ones responsible for the conditions I experienced in 1966, and those two
women lived in, will get to enjoy the same in some hot place for eternity.

Mercy Me!

The first week of June  is always a week of martyrs in the life of Holy Church, just like the first few days after Christmas.   Let’s see, we had Justin, then Marcellinus and Peter, then Charles Lwanga and all of the others in Uganda and finally Boniface (Good Worker?  Good Work?).  This lineup of people who were killed for trying to spread what has come to be called the Good News, and the thousands of others like them down through the centuries had me thinking about why such things happen.  Does anyone have a clue?  Try and figure out why that is.  Go ahead and take a few minutes.  I have time.  As you wander off I’ll continue my musings below on folks long dead and folks who wanted them that way; on folks still living and what they have to say about whether or not we need more or less of us, and why.

You’re back?  Good.

After just a bit of poking around on the Internet, I found out things that I hadn’t paid attention to way long ago in grade school, or if I had I’d forgotten them.  St. Justin was born into an aristocratic Roman family and became a convert.  He died when he wouldn’t burn any incense to their gods.  Sts. Marcellinus and Peter went the same way, too, though I cannot find out if they were converts or born into the faith.  Marcellinus was a priest.  Peter was an Exorcist, a part of minor orders back in the day.  I’ll bet he was busy.  We need guys like him today, too; one on each block it almost seems.  We probably need one in each legislature, and one in the White House; or three or four.

Anyway, all three of them, Justin, Marcellinus and Peter, ran afoul of one emperor or the other and ended up dead.  Their ideas about what was important didn’t quite match up with Diocletian, or whoever.  Formed in the pattern that Christ had established, what would you expect?  One of the “beatitudes”, you remember said as much.  Some blessing.  We tend to forget that one, the last, while getting all gooey and smoochy over the “peacemaker” and “pure of heart” ones.  It ain’t all Joni Mitchell, you know.  Perhaps that’s why the seven corporal and spiritual works of mercy are “works” and not “hobbies”, or “pastimes”.

Ask Boniface or Charles Lwanga and his friends about that.  Boniface lost his head, after a good beating, because the guys who ran things in Frisia didn’t like him giving those strange ideas about love, and everyone being a child of God and whatnot, to the churls they were very fond of keeping in line with a clubbing or two whenever the need arose.  Charles and his friends were actually pretty well situated, themselves.  They were right in with the king, who liked young boys.  And, therein lies the story, as they say.  Charles and some of the others had the bad luck to have been converted by Irish missionaries, and they…, well let’s say they wouldn’t have agreed with something like this month being LBGT Pride Month…but the king, God save us all, would, and sought to prove it on all those young boys.

For their refusal to go along, and for suggesting to the king that he might like to stop they were rounded up, frog marched thirty or so miles away, wrapped in reed mats, placed on a large pyre and….problem solved.  So much for mercy.

A few weeks ago I was privileged to be a guest at the commencement ceremonies at Thomas More College of the Liberal Arts just down the road from me in Merrimack, NH.  Francis Cardinal Arinze gave the commencement address to the graduates.  He spoke on the very same day, I think, that another guy gave an address at Notre Dame (where they may have need of an exorcist).  The Cardinal got no honorary degree, but that didn’t matter.  And, I will not say much about what he said.  You may find his address at the Thomas More College site.

I had been reading about this man for some time and would have missed my funeral to be there.  I was not disappointed.  The Cardinal’s words and his life are constant reminders of the truth of faith, the vibrancy of hope, the beauty of charity and the great rewards the “works” of mercy return on the investment in them.  And so, the Cardinal spoke truth to the graduates and guests and to the world.  His truth is, to me, summed up in that very difficult beatitude,  the first and greatest commandment and those irritating “works”.  It isn’t thought so these days in a lot of places, some of them, BTW, places which used to teach the very thing.  It seems to rankle a certain type, you know?

A little while ago in this place I reacted, quite justifiably I thought, to the news that some very rich folks had met secretly to devise a plan to save the world by providing the means for folks to avoid what our President calls “the punishment of pregnancy” and its results (God have mercy on him and all who agree with his own “works”), and to persuade them to make frequent use of these aids to…umm…species suicide, all mercifully done, mind you.  I didn’t like it…or them…or their idea for contracepting whole populations into oblivion and said so.

These rich fools called themselves the Good Club.  I found nothing good in the idea of the club, or the ideas of the people who are its members.

I was shortly criticized for calling these people jerks and belittling their plan for saving the world as devoid of either goodness or sense.  My critic thought differently.  You may read his remarks in the comments section of “It’s a Ding Dong World #5290″.  We went back and forth, and at one point he even told me that he believed so strongly in keeping the world population at a decent level that he’d had himself gelded after the birth of his second child.  He decided to commit a kind of generational suicide.  What a sad and grim and hopeless thing to do.   And, I used to think tattoos and piercings were self-mutilation.

Along the way, another citizen joined me in my opinions of the Good Club, it’s membership and their ideas.  We agreed that what was being proposed by the “GC” and supported by my critic was stupid, and you may read his remarks in the comments section, too.  But, I have to confess, I do not entirely agree with this man’s analysis of the current state of things and what is Western Man’s (to use a loaded term) responsibility toward it, for it and about it.  It plays too much into the way good clubbers and self-mutilators think.

Cardinal Arinze is one of the guys who the Good Clubbers would have you and me believe are responsible for the current mess they say we are in.  First of all, he’s a black African, and there are just too many of them.  They are all poor, and backward and prone to disease.  Second of all, he’s a Catholic, and a Cardinal to boot, and we all know what that means.  Lots of folks think it means that the reason why we have the first condition is because of folks like Arinze who are in the second position.  It’s a variation of the old Roman, Frisian, Ugandan problem with people who think like that crazy Jewish kid from Nazareth.  It follows that high on the Good Clubbers list of things to do while solving the problem of there being too many people is to counteract the effect of religion(s) which don’t see things their way about all of those folks there are too many of.  Are you thinking about emperors, kings and pyres?  I am.

Reflecting on the way they think about people, and the presence of Cardinal Arinze among us, I couldn’t help laughing at what they are about proposing, and what the poor self mutilator had gone and done to contribute to the cause…or not contribute to be more precise.  Arinze’s just one of the smartest fellows on the planet, who was born into a situation that causes noses to wrinkle in the salons frequented by the good clubbers, and other folks to go running to the urologist for surgery to help out.  And,  if the GC’s have their way millions of future Arinze’s will never see light.

They have everything they need, the GC’s, thank you, and want to make sure it stays that way.  The Arinzes, Justins, Bonifaces and Lwangas of this world make two points against such stupid selfishness.  The first is that such plans as the Good Club people are concocting are on a par with the plans of empire since Babel, or Pharaoh, or Rome, or the Third Reich for that matter.  They will fail because the planners forget who they are and Who is, really, the One who plans.  The second is the message delivered from Calvary about being ready to lay down one’s life…not cajole or force others to give up theirs or prevent new life from coming into the world.  It’s a scandal, really; a scandal of faith, hope and charity…of mercy.

The Good Club and its members remind me of the title and the final scene in an old James Cagney film.  I think it was “Public Enemy #1″.  As the film ends, Cagney, a vicious killer, stands atop a gas tank and screams, “Look, Ma, I’m on top of the world!”  As he ends his little exclamation of triumph, the tank explodes, and the Public Enemy #1 and his world are engulfed in flames in a moment that can only be called apocalyptic in its violence and purpose.  In the end all that remains is fear, despair, defiance and death.

That scene has stayed with me since I first saw the film a million years ago in the RKO Marble Hill in Kingsbridge, in the Bronx, the neighborhood where i grew up.  It was a neighborhood filled with the kind of people that the well bred cultural ancestors of the Good Club members thought better off dead, and did their level best to make them that way.

I saw another film recently and a scene from that one has stayed with me.  Another man speaks to his mother in this one too.  Christ meets Mary as he works out His plan for Mercy on us all.  He speaks words from the Apocalypse, a fine touch I thought when I saw the film, “See, I make all things new!”  I laughed through my tears at the joke he was playing on the President of the Good Club down in his office at the bottom of the world.

Mercy me!

What Has The Emperor Got On Now?

The Catholic Thing is a website that I visit from time to time. Interesting folks say interesting things there; things that almost never make it to the surface in the wide and deep waters of the Main Stream Media.  Nonetheless, it is worth the effort to hazard the uncharted and dangerous  swamps of  places like The Catholic Thing for what one may stumble upon, all the more valuable for it’s brilliance amid the slime of reactionary, religious pedantry so characteristic of such places.

Some of you may know that there are Catholics who are truly faithful and also intelligent.  By truly faithful I mean that they accept and live by the doctrines and dogmas of what truly faithful Catholics often refer to as Holy Mother Church, she who gave birth to us, loves us and nourishes us; well those of us who are left, I guess.  Unless, of course we want to run for any elected office or run a college.

By intelligent I mean that they are not media stereotypes of faithful Catholics; either grim rich Republicans from Connecticut, Orange County or Northern Virginia, or rosary swinging, kerchief covered shapeless old hags from an ethnic ghetto in Philadelphia, New York or some failing rust-belt wreck in the red midlands, or their chain smoking, beer swilling, Rush Limbaugh listening spouse, who live to kill Jews, keep immigrants where they belong, which ain’t here, hate women enough to force them to stay pregnant when it doesn’t please them and insist on thinking marriage and family are more than words whose meaning may change like the weather.

One of those who are truly faithful is a Jesuit, Father James Schall…a minor miracle in my way of thinking.  Father Schall teaches at Georgetown University, which used to be a Catholic University in Washington DC.  That he is still on a the faculty is a lesson in miracles and the fact that for the truly faithful few who follow Christ this world is a vale of tears.  Pray for Father Schall, please.

A few days ago the source of all hope and the agent of change in the direction of all that is good and progressive, and the most aggressive supporter of murder ever in the history of the country…our President Barack Obama, peace be upon him…came to Georgetown to give a speech at some well known speech giving location.  So that it might not seem as if he was endorsing any religion, especially in a place from which religion has been banished, the White House asked them to, and the formerly Catholic administration of Georgetown eagerly agreed to, cover up any signs of what some might consider its once Catholic identity; including a large gold IHS on a pediment above the stage where His Hopefulness was going to speechify.

(Now given the state of things most folks these days would see IHS and think it might be the logo for something like International Hockey Sticks, and I believe Georgetown does have a hockey team, but that ain’t the case.)

Not a word was going to be mentioned, and who would have thought anything of it.  After all, we have emptied most of the language of any meaning so far; marriage, death, pregnant, life, belief and hope are shape shifting like fog in a high wind.  Who should give a tinker’s damn if IHS stays, goes or becomes the logo for an athletic equipment chain.  It’s not even a word.  It’s only initials, letters.  Maybe it’s merely some dyslexic’s attempt to write HIS…oops, that’s vaguely familiar, and perhaps religiously significant.  I mean, if killing people is now promoted as helpful medicine, then what matter covering up something which some fools may have once thought was a reference to the very author of life, and bringer of hope?

We all know who that really is.  Don’t we?

Well some folks noticed and asked a couple of questions.  One of them was, “Why?”  The other one was, “Who?”  The answers came quickly enough.  Who?  Us, meaning the folks who run GU and the White House, now known as Hope Center.  Why?  Well, umm, “Because!” is about all I can figure out, followed by, “If you don’t like it, lump it.”

This stuff doesn’t make for good headlines, so you probably don’t know about it.  I mean it ain’t a fire, a pirate attack, a drunk rock star lumping up his girl friend or some starlet’s latest tattoo.  So, it doesn’t run.  Who cares?

But it does make for some witty observations, some pin pricks in the balloon of pretension swelled by all the hot aired puffery surrounding the Messiah of Manipulation.

And, that brings me around to The Catholic Thing.  Father Schall…did I ask you to pray for him?…is joined by Mary Eberstadt in a couple of short comments on the “cover up” at Georgetown.  You are entitled to ask who Mary Eberstadt is.  She’s another intelligent Catholic; a genuine brainy lady, who has a darn good sense of humor.

It’s one of the things I like about good Catholics.  Again, contrary to popular opinion, they can be very funny.  Read the articles found at the link below and try not to laugh (while you may be holding back tears of sadness for, or grinding your teeth in frustration and anger at, the fools who run both the country and what was once a nice “Catholic institution of higher learning”, but is now a something or other in the “hopeful tradition”).

Laughter is good medicine, and it doesn’t kill anyone.  Come to think of it, it is not yet a crime to laugh at such stupidity, nor would it be a violation of your conscience, unless you belong to ACORN, Planned Parenthood, NOW or NARAL, to do so.  Fear not, though, if you do belong , things will change.

And pray for Mary Eberstadt, too.  She does the work of God in the world, with a bright smile.

Here’s the site: http://www.thecatholicthing.org/content/view/1476/