October 19, 2004

• Strange how those child-molesting priests and their accomplices didn't get excommunicated. Nah, not really.
• When Cheney's wife bitches about Kerry and her daughter, conveniently ignoring Alan Keyes' hateful speech, then its just politics as usual. I'm sure Rove made a couple calls to Pope Inc. etc. Stop expecting religious wingnuts to be consistent about how they spread their "morality" around.
• Oooh, negative commentary on Kerry from the biggest liars club in the world, how damning. We need a Pope death pool, I think. That wizened old monster can't possibly last much longer, even with his regular injections of formaldehyde and blood drained from molested children.
• Vatican = Not relevent
• Well, I can't really bitch about the Pope. I'm only a Catholic in name & only go to church for weddings & funerals. But I hear the old man is writing like mad. Actually, the lowly priests can't keep up. Hell, they can't even afford all that literature. It's letter after encyclic after proclamation. If they want the office to be taken seriously in the future, they ought to put a term limit on it. It's not the first time a Pope goes writing-crazy on his last miles. I mean, yeah, keeping that old pontiac until it blows in your face has some romantic value. But really, the smell & noise is disturbing the other road users.
• Oh, and that Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is really really creepy. Before Vatican II, it was called the Holy Inquisition. It has excommunicated most reasonable catholic theologians. And I'm saying that as someone who's against abortion.
• Latae sententiae is a sort of automatic excommunication mainly reserved for apostates, heretics, etc. The Pope didn't write a letter or anything.
• Yes. I was just waxing generics about the Catholic church.
• Rule of thumb: if it's got "worldnetdaily" in the url, hold your nose and fling it.
• Even before the publicity around the priesthood's predilection for pedophilia, the Catholic church was hemorrhaging members. A move like this would force more "nominal" Catholics out of the church, something the Vatican will do anything to avoid. Is my opinion. Vatican = Not relevent Comments like this add nothing to the conversation. Not to mention that since there are Catholics around the world who both treat their neighbors and vote in the way the church tells them to, it's not even true.
• Honestly curious, but could an informed Catholic out there please explain to the rest of us just why abortion and contraception are so particularly heinous to your sect? I'm not being snarky, I'm really wondering. What intrests me the most is why this seems to be so much more important than many other seemingly more vital matters.
• Abortion isn't the exclusive playground of the Catholic church. Even godless communists (read: me) can be against it. It all boils down to: the Only Goal of Marriage & Sex (and the only legitimate sex is between man & woman bound by the holy sacrament) is reproduction. Anything that comes between Marriage & Reproduction, or even in the way of reproduction, is therefore Evil. So it leads to the church saying really dumb things, like this.. Doctor: okay, this woman had 8 children. Another one would put her live at risk. Priest: You godless bastard! Nothing must come between Holy Marriage and the Will Of God to have many children. Woman: *Dies, and her baby too* Okay, it didn't happen to everyone. But it happened. I may be irked because my grandmother was one of three survivor out of 20 children. Most dead at birth. Did my great-grandmother really deserve to suffer that much?
• HawthorneWingo: I'm under the impression that while Western Catholics have been viewing the church with an increasingly jaundiced eye that the present direction plays well in places like South America and Africa. fatoudust: As far as contraception, the Catholic church ended up inheriting a lot of Christian thinking that essentially holds the physical world in contempt, and the flesh as sinful and wicked. The idea of sex for pleasure is a terrible thing in that world view, and contraception is a terrible evil because it enables it. You'll note that, on the other hand, even quite conservative/orthodox Jews aren't blanket anti-contraception - condoms are interpreted as the sin of Onan, but the pill is perfectly OK - because sex is a good and healthy part of a marriage; it is part of martial duties to satisfy one another sexually, and when Jews still practised polygamy it was (as it is supposed to be today with Muslims) considered poor form for a man to collect wives he couldn't pleasure adequately, just as it would be if he couldn't house or feed them. Western Christianity, especially, has a strong tradition of hating this world. The fact that, eg Richer's great-grandma suffered is meaningless in that view, because the eternal is all that really matters. (Incidentally, when the would-be theocrats of the world impose "traditional marriage" on me, how traditional are we talking? Do I get four wives, like the Jews used to? Can my wife have a girlfriend, a la Ruth and Naomi? What about Daniel and Joshua - does this mean I'm allowed some manly buttfucking on the side?)
• Just to clarify: the pressure to excommunicate pro-abortion politicians is not coming from the Vatican. (The Pope has personally given communion to pro-abortion politicians in Italy.) It is coming from conservative Catholics in the US who want to see Roe v Wade overturned. This particular case is being brought by an ultra-conservative group called De Fide, who are trying to force the Catholic archdiocese of Boston to declare Kerry guilty of heresy. There is no precedent for such a case under the current Code of Canon Law, and I doubt very much whether it will succeed. Meanwhile, the theologian who wrote the letter, Fr Basil Cole, has issued a follow-up. He says he thought he was writing a private letter to a student wanting to understand the Church's teaching, and had no idea that his letter was going to be used to attack Kerry. Skrik: a fair point, but you have to remember that the Catholics who want to see Kerry excommunicated are precisely those who are most violent in attacking the (as they see it) 'liberal' and 'decadent' church establishment for turning a blind eye to the paedophile scandals.
• Jump back! Excommunicate mahself! Heh!
• Yeah, my brother used to torture me by playing "Quit Excommunicating Yourself" when we were kids.
• Anything not by WorldNutDaily? And how come Catholics wanna ditch Kerry, but support the death penalty? Some sort of cosmic fishing limits? "Throw him back, son, he's too small." Seriously. The Pope's a loon, even though there are plenty of good Catholics... (On October 29th, 1884, a prominent supporter of James Blaine for President decried Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism and Rebellion." It was that utterance that Pulizter used to destroy the Republicans, thus electing Grover Cleveland, a man who had fathered a child out of wedlock).
• rodgerd: Good point. Sometimes you need a kick in the ass to realize your biases (I'm in the USA so of course I thought first of the liberal stance of many in the church here). Thanks.
• When Cheney's wife bitches about Kerry and her daughter, conveniently ignoring Alan Keyes' hateful speech, then its just politics as usual. Keyes is a high-strung weirdo. And he's also not running for freakin' President.
• Monkeyfilter: hold your nose and fling it.
• Keyes is a high-strung weirdo. And he's also not running for freakin' President. He did run in 1996 and 2000, though, and he certainly gets financial support from RNC-friendly elements for his current campaign. Cognitive dissonance, as usual.
• The original story from somewhere other than WND, but as it turns out ... it's not really all that true anyway.