Ruth Bader Ginsburg: Victim of intellectual pride

 

From AKA Catholic :

On September 18, 2020, Ruth Bader Ginsburg died.

Thus, were the doors opened wide for members of the conciliar church, both lay and clerical, to demonstrate just how deeply imbued they’ve become with religious syncretism and, likewise, their inability to think and feel with the Holy Catholic Church.

Bishop John Stowe of Lexington, KY, for example, took to Twitter, writing:

I join the nation in mourning the passing of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on this Rosh Hashanah. Let us carry on her passionate commitment to the words of Deuteronomy: “Justice, justice you shall pursue.”

According to multiple reports, the Hebrew text of those “words of Deuteronomy” are framed and hanging on three of the four walls of her chambers. They served as an ever-present reminder to Ginsburg, as the story goes, of the guiding principles inherent to her Jewish faith.

“The demand for justice,” she once explained, “runs through the entirety of Jewish history and Jewish tradition.”

And yet, she is best known as a champion for homo-deviance who left millions of slaughtered human beings in her wake. In other words, her legacy is, in sum, a mockery of Almighty God and Divine Revelation.

Even so, one Fr. Patrick Behm, an associate pastor at St. John Paul II parish in Carroll, IA, also took to Twitter following reports of Ginsburg’s death, saying:

Eternal rest grant unto her, oh Lord. I’ll remember her and ask for the eternal repose of her soul at Mass tomorrow.

Such a public response, by a priest no less, reveals a stunning lack of Catholic sense. One need only be reminded of the remainder of the traditional prayer cited by Fr. Brehm, the text of which can be found in the traditional Latin Requiem Mass, in order to gain the perspective of Holy Mother Church in the matter:

V. Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord

R. And let perpetual light shine upon her.

V. May she rest in peace.

R. Amen.

V. May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace.

R. Amen.

Did you get that? The faithful departed… When the Church and her members offer such public prayers for the deceased, they are offered with the understanding – or at the very least, the reasonable hope – that the decedent departed this world among the faithful.

In other words, there is a presumption of righteousness. To publicly offer such prayers when this is plainly unrealistic, as in the case of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is to invite scandal, for obvious reasons. This is why Requiem Masses are not offered for notorious, unrepentant public Catholic sinners, much less is it offered for high profile evildoers who also rejected Christ and refused to enter His Church.

Evidently, I’m not the only person disturbed by such things. Writing for the Jewish Forward, David Ian Kline reports, Jewish Twitter claps back at Christian-inflected condolences for RBG.

Kline cited numerous tweets chastising non-Jews, all with a similar message. For example:

Hi! RBG was a Jewish woman, tweeting “RIP” is actually disrespectful, as is comes from a highly Christianized view of death/afterlife. The Jewish tradition is “may her memory be a blessing”, & some folks have been saying “be a revolution”, which I believe she would have liked.

That brings me to the Catholic response to Ginsburg’s death that is getting the most media attention; it comes from Christopher Scalia, the son of the late Antonin Scalia and brother of Fr. Paul Scalia, a priest of the Diocese of Arlington, VA.

I’m very sad to hear about the passing of my parents’ good friend, and my father’s wonderful colleague, Justice Ginsburg. May her memory be a blessing.   

“May her memory be a blessing” is a traditional Jewish expression, a Hebrew anagram for which is often found written after the names of their departed.

In another Jewish Forward article, writer Molly Conway explains:

When we say “may her memory be for a blessing,” the blessing we speak of is not “may we remember her fondly” or “may her memory be a blessing to us.” The blessing implied is this: May you be like Ruth. Jewish thought teaches us that when a person dies, it is up to those who bear her memory to keep her goodness alive.

Yes, so much goodness (like dead babies and same sex “marriages”) to keep alive!

It’s not surprising given the conciliar church’s insatiable appetite for so-called “inter-religious dialogue,” that there are well-meaning Catholic commentators, like Scalia, who believe that invoking this phrase is a harmless, culturally sensitive, way of responding.

They are dead wrong.

You see, not unlike the Catholic prayer, “Eternal rest grant unto her…” there is a presumption of righteousness implied when one exclaims, “May her memory be a blessing.”

 As Molly Conway writes:

We do this [make Ginsburg’s memory a blessing] by remembering her, we do this by speaking her name, we do this by carrying on her legacy. We do this by continuing to pursue justice, righteousness, sustainability.

For this reason, it is scandalous for even a Jew to say, “May the memory of Ruth Bader Ginsburg be a blessing.”

To leave no room for confusion on this point, I spoke with the Founder of Jews for Morality, Rabbi Yehuda Levin, an Orthodox Jew who speaks with far more clarity and conviction about the grievous sins of abortion and homosexual deviance than every member of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops combined.

[Note: Some readers may recognize Rabbi Levin’s name given his longtime friendship with Nellie Gray and the many fiery addresses he has delivered at the March for Life over the years.]

Rabbi Levin not only confirmed how inappropriate it is to declare in this case, “May her memory be a blessing,” he elaborated so as to be perfectly clear:

What kind of a blessing? There are no blessings involved here. This woman has been a catastrophe. We should breathe a sigh of relief that she’s no longer contributing to the commonweal of society.

“We don’t know what happens in the next world,” Rabbi Levin said with his inimitable wit, but Ginsburg is “not receiving laudatory hosanas when she goes upstairs.”

Not one to mince his words when it comes bedrock moral principles, he went on to say, “There was nothing righteous about Ruth Bader Ginsburg.”

He added that the same must be said for every lawmaker and judge that stands against what he called “a common morality that is older than the bible itself.” Specifically, he mentioned those who “believe in baby killing and same gender marriage perversion.”

So, how might a Catholic respond to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg given that she dedicated so much of her life to promoting and vigorously defending intrinsic evils?

I suppose one could offer something to the effect:

May the merciful Lord render perfect justice unto her, and may those who mourn her passing find comfort by drawing nearer to Him.

The important thing is that our public response gives witness to the goodness of Almighty God, while avoiding any statements that might serve to downplay the decedent’s well-known offenses against Him.

It would also seem appropriate to express hope, and even to pray in hope, that the decedent may have repented and turned back to God prior to death, even if in a way known only to Him.

Yes, one may ask, but isn’t it too late?

The answer is no, it is not.

In his magnificent encyclical Miserentissimus Redemptor – On Reparation to the Sacred Heart – Pope Pius XI explained how the graces implored via prayerful acts of penance are applied by God in a way that is not timebound.

Specifically, the Holy Father was addressing those who may wonder how our acts of reparation can “bring solace to Our Lord now, when Christ is already reigning in the beatitude of Heaven.”

The Holy Father tells us that Our Lord died even for our sins “which were as yet in the future, but were foreseen.” In a similar way, he continued, “it cannot be doubted that then, too, already He derived somewhat of solace from our reparation, which was likewise foreseen.”

The point is that our prayers for one another are, to God, timeless.

With all of this said, if one were absolutely determined to respond to the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a way that is in keeping with Jewish tradition, there is yet another, far more fitting way, of doing so:

“May her name be blotted out.”

In other words, may we not be like Ruth; may we labor to cleanse her regrettable legacy from every corner of society as we pursue authentic justice and righteousness, all for the greater glory of God, blessed be He.

______________________________________________

Acts 17: 19-33

A meditation on Saint Paul by Father James E. Sullivan, m.s.:

"Some of the philosophers seemed anxious to hear more of Paul's strange teaching so they invited him to address the Areopagus, the famous council of learned men which decided on all questions religion, culture and education. Paul was happy to consent, although he felt a little uneasy in that setting which was purely pagan. In his speech to the semi-circle of scholars, Paul tried very hard to be 'a Greek to the Greeks.'

He spoke with kindness: 'Men of Athens, I see that...you are extremely religious.' He incited their curiosity about 'the Unknown God' whom he would proclaim to them. He spoke in philosophical terms. All the beautiful things of nature must have been made by Someone. That Someone is the Lord of heaven and earth - not an image in gold or silver; not aloof from us or disinterested in us, whom He made in His own likeness; not in need of anything from us - as the false, childish gods they had been worshipping. - Up to this point they listened attentively. But when Paul implied that their religious ideas were childish, they began to seethe. Who was this funny little Jew to be teaching them, the intellectual lights of the world!

Paul continued. It wasn't exactly their fault and God had certainly forgiven these mistaken ideas. But now they were able to understand the true God because He had sent a messenger to men. And He had given this messenger unmistakable credentials by raising Him from the dead. Paul was about to mention the name of Jesus and tell of His life, but 'some began to sneer' openly. Paul stopped. He couldn't mention that Sacred Name to scoffers. The president of the Council tried to be polite: 'We will hear thee again on this matter.' Paul nodded. Disheartened and sad, he left the Council.

Lord, there is no armor harder to pierce than this shield of intellectual pride. St. Paul would preach in cities that were moral cesspools - like Corinth and Antioch in Syria. He would address men with little education as in Galatia and Beroea - And all these he could reach, influence for good, win for Christ. But not the Athenians! Not the men who thought they knew it all! Their pride was an armor plate which deflected Paul's sincerest points and most brilliant proofs as though they were little toy arrows.

The proud man is basically insecure, Lord. The only way he can have any peace is to imagine that he is self-sufficient, that he knows all that is important to know. The moment someone comes along with fine ideas different from his own, the proud man is threatened! His dream-world of all-sufficiency is about to be torn down. So up go his defenses! He laughs and sneers at the other's ideas. 'That man's a fool,' he cries out. 'He doesn't know what he's talking about. Might as well end the conversation here and now!' His defenses become impenetrable.

What peace humility would bring to the intellectually proud! We are none of us self-sufficient. All of us have things to learn - Once we are honest enough to admit this, new ideas are never a threat! We learn and we grow!

Dear Master, humility is truth. And truth is the key to freedom and peace. Let me listen then without anxiety to each person's ideas. Whatever is good or beautiful or true in what they have to say enriches me - and also them for sharing it with me! Lord, how can that be a threat! Let me love truth - and open my arms wide to it, wherever I find it!"

- My Meditations on St. Paul, pp. 243-246.

There is a famous hymn written by Martin Luther which begins, "A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.." For all too many people today (including sadly, many Catholics) the conscience has become a "mighty fortress" built so as to shelter one from the exacting demands of truth. In the words of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, "In the Psalms we meet from time to time the prayer that God should free man from his hidden sins. The Psalmist sees as his greatest danger the fact that he no longer recognizes them as sins and thus falls into them in apparently good conscience. Not being able to have a guilty conscience is a sickness...And thus one cannot aprove the maxim that everyone may always do what his conscience allows him to do: In that case the person without a conscience would be permitted to do anything. In truth it is his fault that his conscience is so broken that he no longer sees what he as a man should see. In other words, included in the concept of conscience is an obligation, namely, the obligation to care for it, to form it and educate it. Conscience has a right to respect and obedience in the measure in which the person himself respects it and gives it the care which its dignity deserves. The right of conscience is the obligation of the formation of conscience. Just as we try to develop our use of language and we try to rule our use of rules, so must we also seek the true measure of conscience so that finally the inner word of conscience can arrive at its validity.

For us this means that the Church's magisterium bears the responsibility for correct formation. It makes an appeal, one can say, to the inner vibrations its word causes in the process of the maturing of conscience. It is thus an oversimplification to put a statement of the magisterium in opposition to conscience. In such a case I must ask myself much more. What is it in me that contradicts this word of the magisterium? Is it perhaps only my comfort? My obstinacy? Or is it an estrangement through some way of life that allows me something which the magisterium forbids and that appears to me to be better motivated or more suitable simply because society considers it reasonable? It is only in the context of this kind of struggle that the conscience can be trained, and the magisterium has the right to expect that the conscience will be open to it in a manner befitting the seriousness of the matter. If I believe that the Church has its origins in the Lord, then the teaching office in the Church has a right to expect that it, as it authentically develops, will be accepted as a priority factor in the formation of conscience." (Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Keynote Address of the Fourth Bishops' Workshop of the National Catholic Bioethics Center, on "Moral Theology Today: Certitudes and Doubts," February 1984).

In the same address, Cardinal Ratzinger explains that, "Conscience is understood by many as a sort of deification of subjectivity, a rock of bronze on which even the magisterium is shattered....Conscience appears finally as subjectivity raised to the ultimate standard."

A broken conscience, an ill-formed conscience, becomes a mighty fortress which shuts the truth out. Have we built an interior castle, as did St. Teresa of Avila, which remains open to the demands of truth and the promptings of the Holy Spirit? Or has our conscience become a mighty fortress built to prevent our encounter with truth?

Suggested reading: Catechism of the Catholic Church Nos. 1783-1785.

The leftist "mainstream media": Silencing the truth about the health hazards of homosexual sex

 

Mass Resistance reports:

The book-burning culture of the Left is continuing its march.

As everyone knows, Amazon has achieved a virtual monopoly on the book industry. It has vast powers to decide what books people can read – and what they can’t read.

After 3½  years of publishing our groundbreaking 600-page book, The Health Hazards of Homosexuality: What the Medical and Psychological Research Reveals, Amazon has suddenly notified us that it has banned it from being printed or sold on its site. Amazon is also refusing to allow us to print any more copies for our own use and has even blocked us from accessing our account records. The book was printed (and also posted as an eBook) through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing subsidiary.

Why this book is important

The mainstreaming and normalization of homosexuality has created a public health crisis affecting us all. This book documents in detail the enormous public health problems – both medical and psychological – associated with homosexual behavior.

The book took several years to compile. It brought together information from the federal Centers for Disease Control, major medical professional groups, and other mainstream medical sources, as well as LGBT medical and advocacy groups – all documented in 1,800 endnotes with up-to-date links. In today’s society, this is critical information everyone should know, especially given what’s being pushed on young children in schools across the country. Read more about it here, including reviews and excerpts from the book.

Although the scourge of political correctness has taken over much of the medical establishment, the book has gotten rave reviews from the conservative medical community. Some of those include:

Michelle A. Cretella, MD, Executive Director of the American College of Pediatricians, called the book a "tour de force" and added: “This book is the single most comprehensive collection of scientific data from authoritative scientific sources on this topic. Our youth have the distinction of being among the most lied-to generation. For this reason alone, this book should be required reading for all health professionals, educators, legislators, graduate students, and parents."

Paul A. Church, MD, urologist, former Assistant Clinical Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School: “It is an excellent go-to reference for those seeking accurate, truthful information on the health risks of certain sexual behaviors. I recommend this book highly."

A prominent cardiologist: “I think this book should be on the shelves of medical school bookstores as it is one of the most comprehensive tomes on the subject that I have seen.”

The book has sold throughout the United States, Canada, the UK, and around the world. We have been approached by people in Hong Kong who want to re-publish it in Chinese and in Egypt who want to re-publish it in Arabic.

Mainstream media linked the book to Pres. Trump!

Of course, the national LGBT movement and their allies in the media despise this book – though they have never been able to claim that the information is incorrect.

In 2017, when we sold the book at our table at the Family Research Council’s national Values Voter Summit in Washington, DC (where President Trump spoke), the liberal mainstream media went ballistic. NBC News linked the book to Trump. USA Today, Yahoo News, and the Huffington Post fumed about it. In the UK, The Independent and The Guardian newspapers covered our book’s appearance! But at the Values Voter event itself, the book was a big hit!"

The health consequences of homosexual behavior here.

"The chief function of propaganda is to convince the masses, who slowness of understanding needs to be given time in order that they may absorb information; and only constant repetition will finally succeed in imprinting an idea on their mind.........the slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula. The one will be rewarded by the surprising and almost incredible results that such a personal policy secures."

Adolf Hitler from "Mein Kampf"

As one website explains:

"Once they succeeded in ending democracy and turning Germany into a one-party dictatorship, the Nazis orchestrated a massive propaganda campaign to win the loyalty and cooperation of Germans. The Nazi Propaganda Ministry, directed by Dr. Joseph Goebbels, took control of all forms of communication in Germany: newspapers, magazines, books, public meetings, and rallies, art, music, movies, and radio. Viewpoints in any way threatening to Nazi beliefs or to the regime were censored or eliminated from all media.

During the spring of 1933, Nazi student organizations, professors, and librarians made up long lists of books they thought should not be read by Germans. Then, on the night of May 10, 1933, Nazis raided libraries and bookstores across Germany. They marched by torchlight in nighttime parades, sang chants, and threw books into huge bonfires. On that night more than 25,000 books were burned. Some were works of Jewish writers, including Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. Most of the books were by non-Jewish writers, including such famous Americans as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, and Sinclair Lewis, whose ideas the Nazis viewed as different from their own and therefore not to be read.

The Nazi censors also burned the books of Helen Keller, who had overcome her deafness and blindness to become a respected writer; told of the book burnings, she responded: "Tyranny cannot defeat the power of ideas." Hundreds of thousands of people in the United States protested the book burnings, a clear violation of freedom of speech, in public rallies in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis.

Schools also played an important role in spreading Nazi ideas. While some books were removed from classrooms by censors, other textbooks, newly written, were brought in to teach students blind obedience to the party, love for Hitler, and antisemitism. After-school meetings of the Hitler Youth and the League of German Girls trained children to be faithful to the Nazi party. In school and out, young people celebrated such occasions as Adolf Hitler's birthday and the anniversary of his taking power."

Today, censorship is beginning to be used against Christians to silence moral opposition to abortion and homosexuality.  Today's censors do not have to gather up thousands of books, march by torchlight in nighttme parades and throw books into huge bonfires.  They have merely to strike a few keys from the comfort of their offices.

Inflated in their rebellion against the God-Man, the Sons of Satan, those committed toward the atheistic program of attacking the Church from without and undermining it from within in preparation for the Man-God, will continue to intensify their persecution of craftiness and subversion until it reaches its culmination in an explosion of hate-filled rage which will bear much blood and death. Father Livio Fanzaga, writing about the Antichrist, says that, "Catholicism alone will resist him. How then do we destroy this superstition which alone obstructs the world's self-revelation? How do we destroy this superstition which divides mankind and which prevents man from being truly brotherly and free? The true Antichrist is revealed in the replies to these questions. Here is perceived his profound being as the man of iniquity. He will not tolerate the idea of men who adore any god other than himself. His intolerance obliges him to make an exception to his pacifism and his philosophy of non-violence. He is the greatest pacifist in the history of the human race, but because peace and justice really reign on earth he will make an exception to kill and destroy the great superstition of Catholicism, once and for all time..." (Wrath of God: The Days of the Antichrist, p. 124).

On September 15, 1992, Our Lady told Father Gobbi of the Marian Movement of Priests that, "..It is the hour of my great sorrow for the Church, my dearly beloved Daughter.  How grievously the Church is suffering in these times, as she carries her great cross and climbs the bloodstained Calvary of her passion and her bloody immolation!  Never before, as today, has the Church been made so utterly like my Son Jesus.  She is like Him in solitude and abandonment; she is like Him in denial and betrayal; she is like Him in contempt and condemnation; she is like Him in her crucifixion and in her agony.  This is the hour of my great sorrow for the Church, because the hour of her redemptive passion has come.  It is the gour of my great sorrow for humanity, so ill and so reduced to slavery by the spirits of evil.  The diabolical powers are ruling the earth and producing everywhere the wicked fruits of their dark reign.  And thus this humanity has again become pagan, after almost two thousand years of its redemption and of the first announcement of the Gospel of salvation.  Faithlessness and impiety again cover it; sins wound it; evil poisons it; pride rules it; impurity seduces it; egoism and hatred enchain it; Satan reduces it more and more to slavery and reigns over you with his diabolical power...This is the hour of my great sorrow for all of you, my poor children, because the time of your great suffering has come.  Take refuge in me.  Hasten to the sure refuge of my Immaculate Heart, because we must live together through the hour of the greatest trial, which has now come for you, for the Church and for all humanity."

The Covid Vaccine named after Lucifer?

Beware the new vaccine named after Lucifer.  See here.  The New Order is rising.


"It forced all the people, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to be given a stamped image on their right hands or their foreheads, so that no one could buy or sell except one who had the stamped image of the beast's name or the number that stood for its name." (Revelation 13: 16, 17).

There is another dimension to this being marked on the hand or the forehead. Our Lady told Father Gobbi of the Marian Movement of Priests:

"These are the times when the followers of him who opposes himself to Christ are being signed with his mark on the forehead and the hand.

The mark on the forehead and on the hand is an expression of a total dependency on the part of those who are designated by this sign. The sign indicates him who is an enemy of Christ, that is to say, the sign of the Antichrist. And his mark, which is stamped, signifies the complete belonging of the person thus marked to the army of him who is opposed to Christ and who fights against His divine and royal dominion.

The mark is imprinted on the forehead and on the hand. The forehead indicates the intellect, because the mind is the seat of the human reason. The hand expresses human activity, because it is with his hands that man acts and works. Nevertheless it is the person who is marked with the mark of the Antichrist in his intellect and in his will.

He who allows himself to be signed with the mark on his forehead is led to accept the doctrine of the denial of God, of the rejection of His law, and of atheism which, in these times, is more and more diffused and advertised. And thus he is driven to follow the ideologies in mode today and to make use of himself as a propagator of all the errors.

He who allows himself to be signed with the mark on his hand is obliged to act in an autonomous manner and independently of God, ordering his own activities to the quest of a purely material and terrestrial good. Thus he withdraws his action from the design of the Father, who wants to illumine it and sustain it by His divine Providence; from the love of the Son who makes human toil a precious means for one's own redemption and sanctification; from the power of the Spirit who acts everywhere to interiorly renew every creature.

He who is signed with the mark on his hand works for himself alone, to accumulate material goods, to make money his god and he becomes a victim of materialism. He who is signed with the mark on his hand works solely for the gratification of his own senses, for the quest of well-being and pleasure, for the granting of full satisfaction to all his passions, especially that of impurity, and he becomes a victim of hedonism.

He who is signed with the mark on his hand makes of his own self the center of all his actions, looks upon others as objects to be used and to be exploited for his own advantage and he becomes a victim of unbridled egoism and of lovelessness." (September 8, 1989, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary).

The chip on the tip of the needle.  See here.