So what element(s), if any, of my original post do you dispute as being incorporated/interwoven?
Doctrine.
Morals.
Social Teaching.
Everything is "interwoven."
I dispute how the Jesuits pull at the threads, choosing minor threads to be "non-negotiable" while ignoring the burning holes in the fabric.
Open border migration is unjust and unmerciful.
Mass deportation of illegal aliens is less merciful than I would like, but at least is seeks to restore justice.
Meanwhile, Democrat policies are pagan brutalities that Christians must fight against. And Democrats mean to fight us to the death. Do you recall that they surveilled Latin Mass Catholics as potential domestic terrorists? SWAT raids on pro-life sidewalk counsellors?
As much as gay Jesuits want us to support their LGBT Democrats, we cannot ally with enemies who seek to destroy us.
I dispute how the Jesuits pull at the threads, choosing minor threads …
[…]
Mass deportation of illegal aliens is less merciful than I would like, but at least is seeks to restore justice.
[…]
"Minor threads", eh?
Let's see what the Pope sez:
Pope Francis wrote:“I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” the pope said.
[…]
The act of deportation “is not a minor issue,” the pope stated.
Wosbald wrote: 09 Apr 2025, 11:11
Let's see what the Pope sez:
Pope Francis wrote:“I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations,” the pope said.
[…]
The act of deportation “is not a minor issue,” the pope stated.
No one says that deportation is a "minor issue." Just as no one says that open borders/illegal immigration is not a "major crisis."
It seems a matter of which side of major crisis that either side wants to ignore. I regret the lack of wisdom, nuance, and respect for Justice and Mercy that both sides fail. Both open border Democrats and MAGA Republicans have gone to extreme positions.
Unfortunately for the gay Jesuits, their licentious Democrats are on the wrong side of all the other moral issues.... and they aren't even rightly centered on immigration. MAGA Republicans won the popular vote on the platform of mass deportations, and so it shall be.
Nobody cares if you or me or the Pope would prefer mass amnesty for peaceful families. That's not on the menu, anywhere.
I do appreciate that Trump, Noem, and Homan are concentrating on violent illegal aliens first.... giving space for peaceful illegal aliens to arrange their affairs unmolested by ICE. That is generous.
Wosbald wrote: 09 Apr 2025, 07:32
The product of The Catholic Thing has lately been of rather spotty quality (among other things, too many writers trying to channel the shade of GKC),
GKC was generous with providing high quality shade. You could say he was built for it.
Here's the latest essay from Anthony Esolen in The Catholic Thing:
Worshiping the Clock and the Calendar
Anthony Esolen
The eternal does not “develop.” That is a contradiction in terms. So says our Lord, in the days before his Passion, when he spoke to his disciples of the last days and the coming of the Son of Man in glory. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” he says, “but my words will not pass away.” (Matthew 24:35)
His saying so can become too familiar to us. We hear it at Mass every year, but it must have left the disciples dumbstruck. Moses does not say that about himself. Isaiah and Jeremiah do not say it. Such a statement is predicated only of God – as Jesus and his disciples knew. “Lift up your eyes to the heavens,” says God, “and look at the earth beneath: for the heavens will vanish like smoke, the earth will wear out like a garment, and they who dwell in it will die in like manner; but my salvation will be forever.” (Isaiah 51:6).
The prophecy stands on the border of time and eternity. It is meant not only to convey the future, as Jesus does when he says that the last days shall be as in the days of Noah. (Matthew 24:37) It is meant to turn their eyes beyond time, above the stars, for “in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1) They have their morning and their evening. They will pass away, but the Word of God, through whom all things were made (John 1:3), “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1:15), “Alpha and Omega, the first and the last” (Revelation 1:8), is beyond time, for time, bound to heaven and earth, is also a creature.
Now, at the heart of all modernist notions of evolution lies a trust in time. Given enough time to work in, and the fits and starts of experimentation, whether technological, artistic, intellectual, or political, human beings become better and their lives freer.
With many reservations, we can admit that there is something to this sense of development. It is better, more culturally advanced, to be Wagner composing Lohengrin, than to be an aboriginal wailing out a war dance in the night. Yet Homer composed the Odyssey about 2,700 years ago, and many people say it is unsurpassed for poetic grandeur, coherence, beauty, and psychological insight. Or if it is surpassed, only Dante’s Commedia stands above it, and that poem is itself more than 700 years old.
Most of the important ancient Greek cities had public works of astonishing beauty, such as the Parthenon in Athens, or the temple of Diana at Ephesus; do our cities of similar size boast the like?
But even if our progress in cultural matters were regular, reliable, and noticeable (it is not), that still does not mean that Christ and His words are subject to the same experimentation with its successes and failures – for success and failure are but the ratchet-gears of cultural change, and they have a habit of lurching or sticking or slipping even so.
Nicholas of Myra striking Arius at the Council of Nicaea, a fresco from the 1300s [Soumela Monastery, Northeastern Turkey]
We may learn more about Christ, as through the Holy Spirit He reveals more of Himself, more of the truth, insofar as we are capable of receiving it. But we cannot learn anything other about Him, anything that would contradict what went before; as if some prior truth should vanish like the dinosaurs, or should be cast aside like the horse and buggy.
To believe that the Word of God is the Word of God, not some human word subject to change, is to understand also that God, who used to speak through the prophets, and who gave the Law to Moses by the ministry of angels, “in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom he also created the world.” (Hebrews 1:2)
There is thus no revelation beyond Jesus, as there is no time beyond eternity. We do not ask what Jesus would do if He were alive today; we might ask it of Plato, or any wise man, any creature of time. We ask what He did, what He does, what He said, what He says. Otherwise, we would be imagining a pseudo-Jesus scratching His head and saying, “Ah, well, I never foresaw such a situation as yours. Let me see. All right, how about trying this?”
If anything, it is a sign of our own cultural and intellectual regression that our heresies are so lame and flimsy. The men at Nicaea and Chalcedon struggled to understand the nature of Christ as true God and true Man, one Person with two natures. To fall to the Arian side would have meant, eventually, the sort of Unitarianism that has played itself out among us in these last few centuries, losing the Trinity, reducing Christ to a sage, and being but the current wisdom of certain social elites, with a steeple, a bell, and a hymn or two purged of its old significance.
But those who say that the Church can tinker with the “truth,” or who imagine Jesus as a current political player, a Jesus in the conditional mood, are Arian at heart. We must worship Jesus, not enlist Him.
And for what cause, in our time, do we set up this Christ as Buddha or Socrates or the pleasant social worker who pretends to deep feelings? To alter or abandon what the Word of God said was so “from the beginning,” that “God made them male and female,” and “for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.” (Mark 10:6-8)
To abandon that, and then to advance into muddle, bad faith, and perversion; to say, in effect, that Jesus’ words will pass away, but the flesh and its desires will not, so Jesus, or the Church, had better get with the clock and the calendar already. Even Arius was better than that.
"Prov'dence don't fire no blank ca'tridges, boys."
--- Mark Twain in Roughing It
