The Ark and The Dove

We Must Allow Coaches to Marry; Eliminate Athletic Infallibility

BreitbartTV linked to a story about a Penn State coach who has been charged with sexually assaulting underaged boys. His Athletic Director has also been charged with perjury for failing to notify the police while investigating the matter. Worse yet, the pedophile was running a program for at-risk kids. He found a way to work one-on-one with potential victims.

This really is a tragedy for those who were abused, and I don't want to exploit their plight in this situation...but I also think this story can serve a larger, religio-political argument.

So...evidently...a secular, state institution has been found guilty of the same exact kind of crimes that Church leaders have been accused of. When do we start calling for the complete dismantling of Penn State Athletics? When do we start blaming the strict, austere demands of an outdated, medieval, patriarchal coaching for the leading this man to his perverse appetites? When do we demand the Pennsylvania governor to resign for his horrific oversight?

And another thing about #Occupy...

I've said it before, and I'll say it again...1% of 300,000,000 is 3,000,000.

Does this mean there are 3,000,000 people living in the 1% in this country?

That doesn't sound so bad.

Heck, if the odds of becoming a millionaire by playing the lottery were 1:100, I'd play that thing every day!

About the #Occupy Movement...

I can't stop watching these Occupy videos. It's like some kind of circus sideshow. But after awhile, I started thinking...could all of these people have missed religious vocations?

I don't like the idea of missed vocations. I prefer to think that if God's calling you, He's going to get you at some point. Maybe the idea that a person would perpetually reject a bona fide call just seems too sad to me. We have free will, sure...but I'd like to think people would eventually choose the right vocation.

Looking at the Occupy protestors, though, is sobering.

The group seems quite heterogenous...so the following generalizations will have exceptions...but the narrative seems to suggest that these are people who think:

1) people shouldn't pursue private property
2) people should sacrifice their lives to help others
3) people should submit their individual wills to a superior collective, a common good
4) there is a higher moral law
5) that pursuing this higher moral law is worth abandoning all of your personal belongings and living with the poor
6) that people with wealth should donate money to the people without wealth so that the latter can live unburdened lives in pursuit of this higher morality

So...how is this not compatible with, say, a mendicant order?

If these people could just get off the drugs and the sex, they'd probably make great missionaries.

The real kicker is this -- nobody wants to just give money to a stoner-hippie-wannabe or a whiny college graduate. We don't want freeloaders. But a lot of people will gladly provide for the needs of religious because people value what the religious do even if it is just to sit in a cloister and pray (and most religious I know do more than that).

I'm not saying that every freeloader should sign up for Holy Orders just so they can get fed. We've had enough problems with people entering religious life with ulterior motives...but I wonder if convictions these people feel to live free of the bondage of personal possessions and to serve the needy might actually be the residue leftover from an even higher...and more dignified calling.

One Miracle Down, and about Three More to Go...

Once again, the rolling Prayer Machine seems to have averted tragedy...so I just wanted to post a little shout out to God and all the folks who have been praying for us.

Of course, if things hadn't worked out in the most immediately comfortable way, that wouldn't have meant the Prayer Machine had failed. It's just a relief to know that things worked out the way they did. There are plenty of people for whom things take the most tragic turn, but that doesn't mean Providence has left them.

Now, if I could only land a permanent job...we'd get a little breathing space.

Better for it...

Just read an article at MSN of all places on a study measuring the effect of Down Syndrome on happiness.

It turns out that the vast majority of families including a member with Down Syndrome report being happier because of that member. 79% in fact. We can't even get that percentage of people to agree on how to save our economy.

And i have to give the article credit for pointing out that

Thousands of women a year opt to terminate pregnancies when their unborn child has Down syndrome. Some estimates put that number as high as 90 percent

According to the article, only about 6000 persons with Down Syndrome are allowed to be born each year in our country.

The rest, parents refuse...and yet, as the study indicates, these people might actually be rejecting the very person who would bring them the most happiness in life.

Abortion, that great freedom and right which allows people to live their lives according to their own plans (assuming of course that something else that they hadn't anticipated doesn't intervene)...might actually yield a less happy life than the life they didn't plan on.

Who would have guessed it? Who could possibly be prescient enough to know what's best for us in the future?

I wonder...

Michael Moore Model Catholic!

Link to a Newsbuster's piece on Moore's highly advanced, sophisticated and thoroughly self-contradictory brand of Catholicism here.

Here's a question for the "social justice" Catholic: how often did Jesus actually seek out the poor for the purpose of giving them food and redistributing wealth? His first public miracle wasn't feeding poor people...it was making wine for a party. The loaves and fishes weren't donated to a soup kitchen -- they were multiplied because people came to hear Jesus speak and he felt bad that they hadn't packed lunch.

This probably sounds like I'm saying Jesus was some kind of suburban snob who didn't care about the poor. Obviously, that's not true.

My point (and I feel like I've typed this before...why does the Internet still ignore my wisdom?!?) is that Jesus' was a spiritual ministry. Feeding the hungry was second to leading souls away from sin and damnation.

Feeding the hungry is a way to lead one's soul away from sin...so, in that sense, alms-giving and spirituality overlap. But guys like Moore seem to subscribe to an idea that a hippie-Jesus just would be cool with whatever your lifestyle is so long as you volunteer in a soup kitchen.

Dear, BoingBoing -- Stick to the Geek Stuff

The latest BoingBoing post to fuel my ire:
http://boingboing.net/2011/08/30/irish-catholics-object-to-child-abuse-disclosure-law.html

In this post, blogger Rob Beschizza links to an article on an Irish legal attempt to compel priests to break the Seal of Confession in cases of child abuse.

Obviously, the Church objects to such a law. Beschizza conjectures: "I wonder if it's really about the ongoing use of the sacrament to hide internal discussions of undisclosed abuses from the possibility of legal scrutiny."

Right. Because that's rampant in the confessional. Bishops are sneaking into each other's confessionals to hold secret conclaves under the Seal of Confession. That doesn't even sound canonically feasible, let alone reasonable. It also sounds like a completely paranoid view of Confession.

Priests who broke the law; priests who actively engaged in cover-ups; priests who knew what was going on outside of Confession but who did nothing to stop it -- those priests should be punished. A secular law against the Seal of Confession will not stop any of that, though.

Plus, there is the utterly mystifying logic of such a law. What good could it possibly do?

Let's say that a priest hears the confession of a child abuser. The priest has a solemn responsibility not to expose what has been confessed. It's part of his vows. Thus, it stands to reason, that only a priest who would break his vows would be willing to reveal such a sin.

A good priest, a priest who keeps vows, would not reveal the sin under any circumstance. He would rather be punished by the secular authorities than disobey God.

So what's the result of such a law? A bunch of bad priests will turn over the criminals, while a bunch of good priests will go to jail.

Next, if word gets out that Confessions are no longer protected by the Seal, then no one in their right mind would confess their sins (at least not until after they were caught). So the law would essentially render itself impractical. Priests would have nothing to report because there would be no confessions to report.

What's the point of this law, again?

Worse yet, if such a law were passed, you'd have a bunch of hidden-camera journalists posing as child molestors in Confessionals, and then reporting the priests who didn't report them. Priests would end up being punished for not reporting crimes that didn't happen.

It would be absurd.

So, if by chance, Rob Beshizza stumbles upon this blog, let me make something clear.

The purpose of the Sacrament of Confession is to offer God's spiritual forgiveness for sins. The Church doesn't even teach that this forgiveness eliminates the need for temporal punishment. But -- and this is the really important part -- as Christians, we believe that God wants to forgive all of our sins, and that He will in fact forgive any sin--no matter how vile, putrid, or harmful--so long as it is confessed with a contrite heart.

You might not believe in souls and sins and God and forgiveness. You might not think God is capable of forgiving child abusers. It's a hard idea even for believers to accept, but there it is.

Pass a law like this, and all it means is that we'll have priests being dragged into prison for testifying to God's mercy.

But was always Christ's message, wasn't it? He died to let the sinners know God was willing to forgive them, even if the world wouldn't. Christ didn't die just to save the people who committed not-so-bad sins. Christ also died for the people who really don't seem worth dying for at all.

I guess a priest going to prison for the sake of a pedophile he doesn't even know would be the modern equivalent...

But, if I had the chance to vote on it, I'd rather it not come to that.

I Stand Corrected!

When I went to bed last night, Weather.com was stating that the worst of Irene was currently hitting the region. Irene's worst didn't seem so bad.

Driving to Church this morning, however, was a veritable obstacle course of downed trees, repair crews, and disabled traffic lights. So, Irene did some damage out here after all.

Hurricane!

Irene is apparently here.

I'm not exactly sure though.

We've had thunderstorms worse than what we're getting now, although I imagine coastal areas are getting more action.

Anyway, the real reason I was posting on this was to get political. We had been talking about how the possibly over-reaction that the federal government has taken on this hurricane seems to be a response to Katrina. "See," Obama seems to say, "I have this covered way better than Bush did."

But then I started thinking, the horror of Katrina wasn't just the hurricane. It was the region itself which was highly susceptible to flooding because it is at the mouth of the Mississippi...where people apparently like to live below sea level anyway.

Really, the more appropriate comparison should be the federal reaction to the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Back then, critics were complaining that Obama wasn't aggressive enough in response to a natural disaster.

Has Obama's aggressive and visible response to Irene really been an attempt to erase the almost forgotten image of him doddering over the BP spill?

If damage is minimal, will he give credit to the mercy of Mother Nature...or will he take credit for having better prepared us?

Earthquake!

Felt it here!

It wasn't too strong, but it was enough to make the house bounce a little. Nothing fell over or anything of that magnitude. At first, I thought it was a truck rolling by...then I realized that I live in the country and my street is a deadend.

I felt a bit foolish when I opened the front door and the grounds crew was just mowing lawns as if nothing happened. I guess if you were already moving around and had a lawnmower going, you wouldn't have even noticed anything unusual.

Of course, I didn't know it was an earthquake until I called my parents' house since I don't have television out here. Maybe Mozilla needs to start an emergency / breaking news app to pop up in windows.