Some thoughts on Evangelii Gaudium

Evangelii Gaudium has been releasedWell, this should cause all who put money and material wealth ahead of people to explode regardless of the side of the political spectrum they are on.

But those aren't the only people who are attacked by this, the first publication of Pope Francis.  Equally attacked are moral relativists, who take advantage of the specific problems of poverty to lead people away from the truth, while reducing the faith to the private and personal.

The United States isn't even mentioned in the first 63 sections, a real blow to those who seem to thing the United States is the center of the universe.

The unborn aren't mentioned until section 213!

And that's just my first read through.  I'm going to download this PDF to my phone.

Do You want to know the mind of Pope Francis the I?

Pope Francis has been a hard man to pin down theologically; his tendency to speak in less-than-concrete pastoral terms, combined with a willingness to admit to his own mistakes and sins make it extremely hard to get a reading of this man. But one English Novel linked to the new Pope stands out. Before he was pope, before he was Archbishop, he once taught literature in secondary school, and one English science fiction novel was on his list even back then: The Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson. He's quoted from it recently, as of course had the two Popes before him. I guarantee it is worth a read, once you get past the idea of lighter-than-air jet aircraft (called volors in the language of the novel) and the fact that like George Orwell's 1984, Benson's dystopia took place in our past (supposedly back in 2000), yet the rest is remarkably prescient on where the trends of materialism and psychology were headed. I don't see an actual Lord of the World international celebrity emerging- yet- but what is happening to the Church in Europe and the Americas is very close indeed to what happened in the novel, even if the timeline is off (perhaps the gentle motion of the volors gave traveling men more opportunity for reflection?).

Still, a very interesting read- and since it is on Gutenberg, free for download to the e-book reader of your choice.

What happens when forgiveness for sin, is interpreted as judgement for sin?

An interesting post today asking a generic question, led me to another question.

And the sad thing is, in today's America, far too often forgiveness and inclusion is interpreted as judgement an exclusion. When the concept of sin is removed from the world, even forgiveness becomes offensive.

Dead isn't dead

In the so-crazy-this-can't-be-made-up file, 10 people who came back from the dead, people are resurrecting all over the world. If I was a fundamentalist, I'd call it a sign of the end times. As it is though, I think I'd rather call it insufficiently advanced medical science and bigotry against the unwanted.

Archbishop Chaput reveals the web of lies of modern America

It's all related. Greed, especially impersonal greed, the type we normally associate with conservative businesspeople, creates material poverty. Material poverty, creates moral poverty, especially of the sexual variety that is so embedded in the New Left. Moral poverty creates drug use. And drug use, destroys the world.

If we want to change that, a new evangelization is necessary. And homosexuality is not the biggest threat to the family- the lack of decent work is.

The biggest obstacle to a new evangelization, to a new world, is our own willingness to cling to partisan politics at the expense of the Faith.

If I ever hear a bigot call a baby "a blob of cells" again

I'll be posting this link which explains why the Pain-Capable Act proposals aren't set early enough.

And now we begin to see the Latin American Heart

Pope Francis is beginning to use the Council of Eight- and he starts by sending Cardinal Óscar Rodríguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa to lecture the United States on "The State of the Church". Where I don't find his speech as disheartening as some conservatives do (and they should, as the focus shifts away from sexual sin to economic sin, something that conservatives and East Coast elite Liberals are even worse at than the sad state of marriage in the United States) I do see in it a note of exactly what I don't like about Latin American culture- specifically, the attitude that sin and the work of the devil aren't important, that material poverty is the overriding mission of the Church. It should be the other way around; if we win more hearts to Christ, and fewer to mammon, generosity and charity will win out over material poverty. The problem is we're not doing that, if anything, the economic man has been beaten, robbed, and left for dead- and the Catholic Church is very, very late to that party, the best we poor Samaritans can do is bind his wounds the best we can and get him to the inn for healing. We can't do that if the focus remains on the war of the free market- the continual harm done to human relationships in the name of business.

People are more important than money

Human progress is people. Everything that makes life better, from democracy to the economy to the internet to penicillin was either discovered and built by people. More people means more progress. The inventor of the cure for cancer might be someone's fourth child that they decided not to have.

That is the truth being denied by the so-called "progressive left" in this country. But also by the generic Christian Libertarian Right who puts debt reduction ahead of the right to life. Both are making the primary error in making money and short term pleasure (homosexuals and contracepting heterosexuals, that's aimed at you) ahead of people. And the result is a President who ends up having to apologize for putting a scheme to force new customers to crony capitalists into place that actually forced people to sign up with his crony capitalists.

It is all connected- the culture of waste.

The 11 nations of North America

The best article I've read yet on the complexity of the urban/rural divide and how three century removed from the old country settlers affect attitudes about violence and force in the United States today. The subject is gun control, but you can pick just about any hot button issue and break it down among the 11 North American (Canadian, American, Mexican, the political lines don't follow the cultural lines anymore) cultural nations in this article.