Have you ever noticed..

That God made major covenants with Noe, Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus made the New Covenant.

God The Father made covenants with men.

All men, whereas liberals claim that men and women are equal and essentially interchangeable.

Liberals (and by liberals I mean people of the Synod) want men and women to be equal and interchangeable to the point where women should be priests is the unspoken subtext of The Synod which is Congregationalism for Catholics.

Acts 17: (Now all the Athenians, and strangers that were there, employed themselves in nothing else, but either in telling or in hearing some new thing.) 

Why doesn't the Synod just announce they are Athenians?

Friday Fun (I'll be gone for a fortnight so here is a bonus post before I jet)

If Joe and Hunter Biden were fish, what type would they be?

Joe - A Bony Eared Ass-Fish

The fish has no bone mass, possesses the smallest brain-to-body ratio of all vertebrates, and lives within a part of the sea where food is substantially scarce. Its lack of a brain means it has no proper thinking elements to engineer true survival traits. 

Hunter - A Blowfish

Blowfish contain toxic venom that’s dangerous to predators, but they’re not aggressive toward humans. 

Blowfish prefer to pad about the White House using their short arms and strong nostrils to snort anything that looks like a really skinny short white snake 

Divers should not touch any species of blow or pufferfish because their toxins can transfer through the skin.

Friday Fun Bonus because I am going on vacation for a fortnight

America's Military, Fighting to keep us free from

Christianity

Vatican Two,. Lies our fathers taught us.

 https://akacatholic.com/nostra-aetate-and-ephesians-2/

https://akacatholic.com/all-israel/

From an upcoming post

...Benedict XVI’s new prayer for use with the old (1962) Missal reads as follows: 

Let us pray also for the Jews: 

That God and our Lord may enlighten their hearts, so that they may recognize Jesus Christ as the savior of all men. 

Almighty and eternal God, whose will it is that all may be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth, graciously grant that, as the fullness of the nations enters your Church, all Israel may be saved. Through Christ our Lord. Amen. 

Some commentators were quick to stress that the last part of the prayer is a reference to Romans 11: 25-26, wherein St. Paul speaks of a “mystery” by which “a hardening has come upon Israel in part, until the full number of the Gentiles comes in, and thus all Israel will be saved”. One widespread interpretation of this text is that the apostle is prophesying a mass conversion of virtually the entire Jewish people to Christianity in the apocalyptic ‘end-times’ leading up to the parousia – the Second Coming of Christ. And some have argued, on this basis, that the prayer is not encouraging any organized Christian attempts to evangelize Jews here and now. One would have to add, however, that neither does it discourage the present-day evangelization of Jews. The ablative absolute construction ending with the word intrante is in the present, not the future perfect, tense, and so expresses a desire on the part of the Church that while the gentile nations are entering the Church Jews too may be converted. This reading of the prayer is reinforced when we note that its preceding clause is an equally unmistakable reference to another Pauline text, I Timothy 2: 3-4: “This is good and pleasing to God our savior, who wills everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”. And God surely desires everyone on earth at any given time to “come to the knowledge of the truth”. (How could he who is truth itself prefer that a whole ethnic and/or religious group – or even individual men and women – remain in lifelong error or ignorance about his revealed plan of salvation?) ...

What our authorities tell us about the religion of Judaism is a myth, a fantasy, wishful thinking because many of them (most?) are superstitious polytheists

 

From the Jew Ron Unz:

On the most basic level, the religion of most traditional Jews is actually not at all monotheistic, but instead contains a wide variety of different male and female gods, having quite complex relations to each other, with these entities and their properties varying enormously among the numerous different Jewish sub-sects, depending upon which portions of the Talmud and the Kabala they place uppermost. For example, the traditional Jewish religious cry “The Lord Is One” has always been interpreted by most people to be an monotheistic affirmation, and indeed, many Jews take exactly this same view. But large numbers of other Jews believe this declaration instead refers to achievement of sexual union between the primary male and female divine entities. And most bizarrely, Jews having such radically different views see absolutely no difficulty in praying side by side, and merely interpreting their identical chants in very different fashion.

Furthermore, religious Jews apparently pray to Satan almost as readily as they pray to God, and depending upon the various rabbinical schools, the particular rituals and sacrifices they practice may be aimed at enlisting the support of the one or the other. Once again, so long as the rituals are properly followed, the Satan-worshippers and the God-worshippers get along perfectly well and consider each other equally pious Jews, merely of a slightly different tradition. One point that Shahak repeatedly emphasizes is that in traditional Judaism the nature of the ritual itself is absolutely uppermost, while the interpretation of the ritual is rather secondary. So perhaps a Jew who washes his hands three times clockwise might be horrified by another who follows a counter-clockwise direction, but whether the hand-washing were meant to honor God or to honor Satan would be hardly be a matter of much consequence.

Strangely enough, many of the traditional rituals are explicitly intended to fool or trick God or His angels or sometimes Satan, much like the mortal heroes of some Greek legend might seek to trick Zeus or Aphrodite. For example, certain prayers must be uttered in Aramaic rather than Hebrew on the grounds that holy angels apparently don’t understand the former language, and their confusion allows those verses to slip by unimpeded and take effect without divine interference.

Furthermore, since the Talmud represents a massive accretion of published commentary built up over more than a millennium, even the most explicit mandates have sometimes been transformed into their opposites. As an example, Maimonides, one of the highest rabbinical authorities, absolutely prohibited rabbis from being paid for their religious teaching, declaring that any rabbi who received a salary was an evil robber condemned to everlasting torment; yet later rabbis eventually “reinterpreted” this statement to mean something entirely different, and today almost all rabbis collect salaries.

Another fascinating aspect is that up until very recent times, the lives of religious Jews were often dominated by all sorts of highly superstitious practices, including magical charms, potions, spells, incantations, hexes, curses, and sacred talismans, with rabbis often having an important secondary role as sorcerers, and this even remains entirely true today among the enormously influential rabbis of Israel and the New York City area. Shahak’s writings had not endeared him to many of these individuals, and for years they constantly attacked him with all sorts of spells and fearful curses aimed at achieving his death or illness. Many of these traditional Jewish practices seem not entirely dissimilar to those we typically associate with African witch-doctors or Voodoo priests, and indeed, the famous legend of the Golem of Prague described the successful use of rabbinical magic to animate a giant creature built of clay.

The Attitude of Judaism Towards Non-Jews

If these ritualistic issues constituted the central features of traditional religious Judaism, we might regard it as a rather colorful and eccentric survival of ancient times. But unfortunately, there is also a far darker side, primarily involving the relationship between Jews and non-Jews, with the highly derogatory term goyimfrequently used to describe the latter. To put it bluntly, Jews have divine souls and goyim do not, being merely beasts in the shape of men. Indeed, the primary reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve as the slaves of Jews, with some very high-ranking rabbis occasionally stating this well-known fact. In 2010, Israel’s top Sephardic rabbi used his weekly sermon to declare that the only reason for the existence of non-Jews is to serve Jews and do work for them. The enslavement or extermination of all non-Jews seems an ultimate implied goal of the religion.

Jewish lives have infinite value, and non-Jewish ones none at all, which has obvious policy implications. For example, in a published article a prominent Israeli rabbi explained that if a Jew needed a liver, it would be perfectly fine and indeed obligatory, to kill an innocent Gentile and take his. Perhaps we should not be too surprised that today Israel is widely regarded as one of the world centers of organ-trafficking.

As a further illustration of the seething hatred traditional Judaism radiates towards all those of a different background, saving the life of a non-Jew is generally considered improper or even prohibited, and taking any such action on the Sabbath would be an absolute violation of religious edict. Such dogmas are certainly ironic given the widespread presence of Jews in the medical profession during recent centuries, but they came to the fore in Israel when a religiously-minded military doctor took them to heart and his position was supported by the country’s highest religious authorities.

And while religious Judaism has a decidedly negative view towards all non-Jews, Christianity in particular is regarded as a total abomination, which must be wiped from the face of the earth.

Whereas pious Muslims consider Jesus as the holy prophet of God and Muhammed’s immediate predecessor, according to the Jewish Talmud, Jesus is perhaps the vilest being who ever lived, condemned to spend eternity in the bottommost pit of Hell, immersed in a boiling vat of excrement. Religious Jews regard the Muslim Quran as just another book, though a totally mistaken one, but the Christian Bible represents purest evil, and if circumstances permit, burning Bibles is a very praiseworthy act. Pious Jews are also enjoined to always spit three times at any cross or church they encounter, and direct a curse at all Christian cemeteries. Indeed, many deeply religious Jews utter a prayer each and every day for the immediate extermination of all Christians...If nearly all Jews for a thousand or two thousand years were taught to feel a seething hatred toward all non-Jews and also developed an enormous infrastructure of cultural dishonesty to mask that attitude, it is difficult to believe that such an unfortunate history has had absolutely no consequences for our present-day world, or that of the relatively recent past.

https://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-oddities-of-the-jewish-religion/#the-attitude-of-judaism-towards-non-jews

What do Jews really believe and are they our friends?

Should our  Catholic Hierarchy continue to bow and scrape before our superstitious enemies and try to please those who hate us and want us exterminated?

https://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html

Cardinal O'Malley on the Holocaust

O, this Holy Holocaust?

Come on, be serious. When a Cardinal speaks publicly about the greatest crime ever committed he is speaking about what happened to the Jews (and them alone) during World War Two

 O’Malley, who organized the event, called the Holocaust “the greatest act of inhumanity ever perpetrated on this planet,” and said yesterday’s event was intended “to assure the entire community of the Holy Father and the church’s commitment to furthering these wonderful relationships that have been cultivated the last decades.

Hatred of Jesus and His Mother became part of Judaic "tradition" in The Talmud. This is the hateful psychotic Tribe our authorities in Rome want us to be pals with.

H/T Maurice Pinay Blog

https://mauricepinayblog.wordpress.com/

 Contra Celsius, Origen

https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0416.htm

Chapter 32

But let us now return to where the Jew is introduced, speaking of the mother of Jesus, and saying that when she was pregnant she was turned out of doors by the carpenter to whom she had been betrothed, as having been guilty of adultery, and that she bore a child to a certain soldier named Panthera; and let us see whether those who have blindly concocted these fables about the adultery of the Virgin with Panthera, and her rejection by the carpenter, did not invent these stories to overturn His miraculous conception by the Holy Ghost: for they could have falsified the history in a different manner, on account of its extremely miraculous character, and not have admitted, as it were against their will, that Jesus was born of no ordinary human marriage. It was to be expected, indeed, that those who would not believe the miraculous birth of Jesus would invent some falsehood. And their not doing this in a credible manner, but (their) preserving the fact that it was not by Joseph that the Virgin conceived Jesus, rendered the falsehood very palpable to those who can understand and detect such inventions. Is it at all agreeable to reason, that he who dared to do so much for the human race, in order that, as far as in him lay, all the Greeks and Barbarians, who were looking for divine condemnation, might depart from evil, and regulate their entire conduct in a manner pleasing to the Creator of the world, should not have had a miraculous birth, but one the vilest and most disgraceful of all? And I will ask of them as Greeks, and particularly of Celsus, who either holds or not the sentiments of Plato, and at any rate quotes them, whether He who sends souls down into the bodies of men, degraded Him who was to dare such mighty acts, and to teach so many men, and to reform so many from the mass of wickedness in the world, to a birth more disgraceful than any other, and did not rather introduce Him into the world through a lawful marriage? Or is it not more in conformity with reason, that every soul, for certain mysterious reasons (I speak now according to the opinion of Pythagoras, and Plato, and Empedocles, whom Celsus frequently names), is introduced into a body, and introduced according to its deserts and former actions? It is probable, therefore, that this soul also, which conferred more benefit by its residence in the flesh than that of many men (to avoid prejudice, I do not say all), stood in need of a body not only superior to others, but invested with all excellent qualities.

Blessing mortal sins. Is this what our hierarchy is about to do?

 There are four sins crying to heaven for vengeance.

Willful Murder (Abortion, Unjust Wars, Drones, Assassinations)

The Sin of Sodom (So-called Gay marriage, the acceptance of sodomy as not only permissible but praise worthy)

Oppression of the Poor (Usury, which is state-sponsored theft of labor).

Defrauding Laborers of their Wages (Mass immigration which undermines the wage scale, closing manufacturing in America and relocating it overseas to be done by slaves).

Only an enemy of Jesus Christ and His Church would consider publicly blessing a sodomite intent on committing additional mortal sins of sodomy.

Would he publicly bless an assassin after he had taken a contract to kill a person but before he killed that person?

Would he publicly bless an abortionist who was just opening a new clinic?

Would he publicly bless a businessman who announced he would be closing his American factory and relocating it to China where the work would be done by slaves with the result  that his former employees would be put out of work?

Would he publicly bless a politician whose political campaign promised to end social security?

Would he publicly bless a politician who planned to beggar the poor and marginal by increasing the rate of inflation?

Would he publicly bless a slum lord who,  in the middle of winter,  planned to turn off the heat in  the apt of a handicapped widow and force her out because she couldn’t pay the sudden and dramatic rent increase?

Color me cynical but isn't it possible Francis can be both against and for sodomy by telling the world the Church can't bless sodomite unions while putting in a place of authority a man who intends to do just that?

If the CDF does permit the blessings of sodomites he can just say "It is his responsibility as head of the CDF, who am I to judge?"

If Francis and Fernandez do permit blessings of sodomites, they will be culpable for those sins.

“Sin is a personal act. Moreover, we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others when we cooperate in them...” (CCC 1868)

A person is held accountable for the sins of another in the following ways:

 by participating directly and voluntarily in them;

by ordering, advising, praising, or approving them;

by not disclosing or not hindering them when we have an obligation to do so;

The nine ways us Catholics can be accessory to the sins of others

By counsel

By command

By consent

By provocation

By praise or flattery

By concealment

By partaking

By silence

By defense of the evil done.

Pope Francis is the Vicar of Christ who has the duty to Teach, Rule and Sanctify but if he winks at this mortal sin, permits it to blessed and does not teach the truth- that those who engage in sodomy will go to Hell - he will be held accountable for his inaction and silence.

Friday Fun

  

Dec 30, 2006. Saddam Hussein executed for pretending to be Mel Gibson

 

People continue to be surprised about the power and reach of Hollywood. Even when they learn about the lengths Hollywood will go to protect its major money makers, people instinctively deny the reality of just what Hollywood would do and has done.

Recall that when George W. Bush was POTUS and decided to invade several Middle East Countries In alphabetical order as he put it?

Remember how surprised we all were when we were told that Iraq would be invaded before Iran even though that was not the alphabetical order but Bush insisted Mommy taught me the alphabet and so Dick Cheney (He had the right first name, didn't he?) calmed everybody down and so America invaded Iraq before Iran and the moguls in Hollywood convinced Bush that Saddam had to be executed for pretending to be Mel Gibson and the rest, as they say, is history.

Was Pope Benedict XVI a conservative or a traditionalist? No, he was not

GUEST ESSAY

Pope Benedict Wasn’t Conservative. He Was Something Much More Surprising.

Jan. 6, 2023

Cr

By Matthew Walther

Mr. Walther is the editor of The Lamp, a Catholic literary journal, and a contributing Opinion writer.

“The words of a dead man,” W.H. Auden wrote in his elegy for a fellow poet, “are modified in the guts of the living.” In the case of Pope Benedict XVI, whose requiem Mass was celebrated on Thursday, this process of transformation began long before his death.

During the almost quarter-century in which Joseph Ratzinger served as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, he carried on something of a good cop-bad cop routine with Pope John Paul II. Whereas John Paul’s sunny disposition and glad-handing stadium tours eventually won him the affection of nearly everyone not named Sinead O’Connor, Cardinal Ratzinger was seen by critics (and even some admirers) as a holdover from the period before the Second Vatican Council. His was an older, more aloof style of churchmanship that seemed ultraconservative, detached, forbidding, skeptical of emotion, indifferent to the experience of the laity and the lower clergy alike, much less to those of non-Catholics. His enemies called him “God’s Rottweiler.”

Having spent the last week reading again through the authorized biography by Peter Seewald and revisiting his own published writings, I find that Benedict the theologian bears almost no resemblance to popular caricatures. They are no more representative of the aging pope emeritus who resigned his office in 2013 than they are of the young romantic theology professor who wrote lyrically of the promise of postwar Bonn (“a celebration of first love”) and of his early years in Rome (“On my lemon tree on the terrace a ripe lemon is hanging for the second time, and many blossoms are promising a rich harvest”). The real Benedict is less straightforwardly conservative than many claim him to have been, an unclassifiable thinker whose legacy has more in common with that of Soren Kierkegaard or John Henry Newman or G.K. Chesterton — those idiosyncratic but somehow essential figures in the modern history of Western Christianity who, in translating fundamental questions about the nature of the universe into the language of their own era, spoke for all time.

Perhaps the best example of the disconnect between Benedict as he functions in the popular imagination and his actual views is his attitude toward the traditional Latin Mass. As one of the 100,000 or so Catholics in this country who attend the old Mass each week, I will always be grateful to him for allowing for its widespread celebration despite the promulgation of a new, vernacular liturgy.

But it would be absurd to suggest that he was some kind of traditionalist. To the end of his days he did not question the significance of the Second Vatican Council, out of which the liturgical reforms and other changes in Catholic discipline emerged, or even doubt its prudence. While Benedict felt that celebrations of the new Mass were frequently unedifying and even banal and argued that liturgical change should be slow and organic, his reasons were fundamentally different from those of critics who opposed change for its own sake. For Benedict, one great failure of the new Mass as it is typically celebrated was its neglect of what he called the “cosmic” dimension of the liturgy — a groovy-sounding concept drawn from the writings of the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, which were at one time condemned as heretical.

Benedict himself was considered suspect in the 1960s, by no less an authority than Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the leader of the anti-progressive faction at the Second Vatican Council and the last cardinal to oversee the fabled Index of Prohibited Books. For Ottaviani and his allies, part of the problem was the language of the new theology. In the past, church councils had issued long series of condemned propositions that the Catholic faithful must abjure under penalty of excommunication; the style of these announcements was technical and precise, leaving no room for ambiguity about what must be believed. By contrast the documents of Vatican II contain little — indeed, arguably no — dogmatic material, and in place of the precise terminology derived from Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas they substitute phenomenological jargon typical of midcentury continental philosophy.

The young Ratzinger was very much at home in this new world, one in which Edmund Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre were treated as authorities on the same level as the early church fathers, and grandmotherly devotions centered on the Virgin Mary (such as the Miraculous Medal and the brown scapular) were regarded as embarrassments. In the decades to come, his orientation and interests did not shift; his thought would remain, in the words of Father Aidan Nichols, “alien to the philosophical and theological tradition which has provided the customary idiom” of the church before the 1960s.

This is why for many of his younger admirers today, those for whom Benedict is simply the pope who liberalized the old Mass, his published works can be discomfiting. These books are full of observations that on first glance seem astonishing, even scandalous — for example, his claim that “the real heart of faith in resurrection does not consist at all in the idea of the restoration of bodies, to which we have reduced it in our thinking,” which seems to cast doubt on the idea that the resurrection of the dead at the end of time will be a literal, corporeal phenomenon.

For conservative Catholics of my generation, the existence of hell as a place of eternal torment is about as controversial as the existence of gravity. Yet in his “Introduction to Christianity” (widely considered his rebuke to the revolutionary spirit of 1968, the year in which it was published) the future pope describes hell as “real, total loneliness and dreadfulness,” a willed state beyond the reach of love, a definition he arrives at by way of Hermann Hesse. In “Eschatology,” he writes, “No quibbling helps here,” before admitting that hell “has a firm place in the teachings of Jesus.” Not exactly fire and brimstone.

It is precisely because Benedict did not feel at ease in the era right before the reforms swept through — an era that some traditionalists regard as a lost Golden Age — that he is relevant today. For Father Ratzinger, writing in 1958, the church on the eve of the Second Vatican Council was a “church of pagans, who still call themselves Christians,” a church exhausted by empty formalism. The Scholastic theology that had emerged out of the Middle Ages was unsuited to the task of bringing the most fundamental questions faced by our species — not only whether God exists but why matter does; the possibility of a coherent account of the good in ethics and politics; the role of reason in public life — to a coming generation that would not be grounded in basic Christian assumptions about the world.

This is why it seems to me that Benedict’s greatest legacy is the one that he has bequeathed — unasked for, needless to say — to nonbelievers. In 2011 he devoted an unusually large portion of his remarks at the World Day of Prayer for Peace not to his fellow Christians or even to members of other religions but to agnostics, who are “seeking the truth,” he said, “the true God, whose image is frequently concealed in the religions because of the ways in which they are often practiced.” For Benedict the “struggling and questioning” of agnostics was an admirable posture, a radical openness that ought to motivate believers “to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible.”

When asked by irreligious friends to recommend a book about God, I do not suggest a work of philosophy or any of the famous arguments meant to prove God’s existence but a slim volume of talks given by Cardinal Ratzinger on the Book of Genesis in the 1980s. In these pages the cardinal assumes that his readers are familiar not only with modern scientific accounts of the origins of the universe and humanity but also with the idea that the Bible has a great deal in common with other ancient Near Eastern myths about the creation of the world.

Instead of denying the similarities, he acknowledges them, but he also draws our attention to the crucial differences. In the “foreboding picture” of the Babylonian account, the “world is a dragon’s body, and human beings have dragon’s blood in them” and the fundamental chaos at the heart of creation can be tamed only by the dictatorial representative of a cruel god. In Genesis, an omnibenevolent being recognizes the inherent goodness of the world that he has created.

For Benedict, this is the dazzling possibility that believers must share with their fellows: that all of us are the inheritors not of an ancient chaos but of something that despite the brokenness in our midst is fundamentally and recognizably good, a good we are invited to share for all eternity with a being who does not merely love but who is love itself.

++++++++++++++++++

Corpus Christin Watershed Blog: 

...Someone has written that as a young Peritus at the Council, Ratzinger acted as “one of the theological young Turks leading the charge against the status quo Ottaviani emodied . . . Ratzinger was among the behind-the-scenes plotters who ensured that the council foiled Ottaviani on virtually every issue...” 

https://onepeterfive.com/1966-letter-reveals-cardinal-ottavianis-post-conciliar-concerns/