We have fallen upon hard times in the rhetorical question business. At one time, these questions could be safely asked because there was no risk of going intellectually bankrupt.
No longer.
Consider these three common* rhetorical questions.
1. Is the Pope Catholic?
Ok, for obvious reasons, we at ABE Ministry have ruled that question is no longer rhetorical.
2. Must a TV series of at least two years duration be required at some point to feature Jimmy Smits as a character?
Jimmy Smits. Like an incurable VD, he seems to flare-up every so often.
3. Did Mahomet drink camel pee?*
ABS teaches that drinking animal pee leads to violence.
*“Narrated Anas: The climate of Medina did not suit some people, so the Prophet ordered them to follow his shepherd, i.e. his camels, and drink their milk and urine (as a medicine). So they followed the shepherd that is the camels and drank their milk and urine till their bodies became healthy. Then they killed the shepherd and drove away the camels. When the news reached the Prophet he sent some people in their pursuit. When they were brought, he cut their hands and feet and their eyes were branded with heated pieces of iron.” (Sahih Bukhari 7.71.590)
Hey ABS, why didn't you ask, Has the bottom fallen out of the girdle market?
Because we have very high standards around here.
* Does ABS just make-up stuff on the spot? That's a rhetorical question.
Rector of the Latin-American Rabbinical Seminary ‘M. T. Meyer,'
Rabbi of the Benei Tikva Congregation, Buenos Aires
Nostra Aetate is the declaration approved by the Second Vatican Council on October 28, 1965. It discusses the relationship between the Roman Catholic Church and the non-Christian religions. It undoubtedly created a theological turning point for the Catholic Church that fostered a new vision of respect and dialogue with the Jewish people.
Two fundamental axioms are developed in chapter 4 of this declaration, which is dedicated to the relationship between Catholics and Jews.
On the one hand, it removed any reason to doubt that the covenant which God shares with the Jewish people, described in the Hebrew Bible, is still considered valid from a Christian perspective. Therefore the special relationship between Jews and God continues into the present. On the other hand, Nostra Aetate affirms that, although in the days of Jesus there were some Jews implicated in actions that ended in his crucifixion, one cannot impute guilt to all the members of the Jewish population of that time, let alone accuse Jews of later generations.
Once and for all, the ignominious vilification of a so-called deicide people, cursed by God, which was hung upon the Jews, and which justified their persecution, humiliation, and oppression, was abolished.
Nostra Aetate was the Catholic answer to the Shoah. Centuries of Christian theology in which Jews were denigrated contributed to European anti-Semitism. The Nazis tapped into this deep-seated prejudice to build the death camps in cooperation with the active and passive indifference of a great part of the European population. One third of the Jewish people, six million souls, were exterminated in the most atrocious form that human history records.
To recognize the Jewish People as fully loved by God after this abominable tragedy was an act of spiritual audacity which Saint John XXIII was able to introduce, something which had apparently been unattainable for Pius XII.
At the same time, this challenged Catholicism to construct a new theological vision based upon the rediscovered truth that the old covenant between the Creator and the Jews was not abolished. Thus both covenants, the new and the old, complement each other in seeking to elevate human beings spiritually and to guide them in building a reality of Justice and Love, of the redemption of the human being.
The Declaration Nostra Aetate, signed by Blessed Paul VI, served as a solid basis for a renewed encounter between Jews and Christians. On October 22, 1974, he created the Pontifical Commission for Religious Relations with Judaism, which redacted in 1974, 1985, and 1998 three very important and substantial documents developing the concepts that Nostra Aetate had referred to only in an embryonic way.
These documents – "Guidelines and Suggestions for Implementing the Conciliar Declaration Nostra aetate No. 4" (1974), "Notes on the Correct Way to Present Jews and Judaism in Preaching and Teaching in the Roman Catholic Church" (1985) and "We Remember: A Reflection on the Shoah" (1998) – helped to establish the habit of dialogue that Christians and Jews are able to enjoy today.
Through symbolic acts of enormous significance, Saint John Paul II profoundly reshaped the Jewish-Catholic relationship. The Great Synagogue of Rome is very near the Vatican. It takes only a half an hour walking at normal speed to traverse the two places. Yet many centuries had to pass for a Pope to walk this short distance to greet his Jewish neighbors. John Paul did this in 1986, the first pope to do so in perhaps two millennia.
He also established full diplomatic relations between the Vatican, the Holy See and the State of Israel. He asked for God's forgiveness for Christian sins of the past towards Jews, whom he called “elder brothers” and "the people of the Covenant."
Beginning with Nostra Aetate, the official teaching of the Church considers the relationship with the Jews as unique and special. This fact is reflected in Pope Francis' 2014 Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium. He writes:
We hold the Jewish people in special regard because their covenant with God has never been revoked, for “the gifts and the call of God are irrevocable” (Rom 11:29). ... Dialogue and friendship with the children of Israel are part of the life of Jesus’ disciples [§247-248].
I first came into contact with Jorge Bergoglio, today's Pope Francis, when he began serving as Archbishop of Buenos Aires. Being elder than me and holding such a high Church office, I initially left the initiative for interfaith activities between us in his hands. Over time, I came to understand that in the course of his spiritual journey he had developed deep theological respect for Jews, , and that we shared a common understanding of the importance of dialogue in general and the interfaith dialogue in particular. These were the reasons that bound us to one another. Each of us had recognized in the other the partner for the enactment of the commitment to interreligious dialogue that we both took as a central priority in our lives.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel´s “No religion is an island” was a guide and an imperative I incorporated into my soul. He was one of the most important Jewish contributors to the development of Nostra Aetate. Chapter 4 of the declaration echoes much of a statement the Rabbi sent to Cardinal Augustin Bea in the conversations they had while the Council was in preparation.
The founder of the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano, of which I am the rector today, Rabbi Marshall Meyer, was one of the beloved students of Heschel at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Meyer spread Heschel's ideas in Latin America, especially by translating his works into Spanish.
The spirit of Nostra Aetate and the ideas and challenges that developed in its aftermath impacted Cardinal Bergoglio and me and led us to write a book together, to record 31 television programs, and to do so many other things together.
Since Bergoglio became Pope Francis, his commitment to the Jewish Christian dialogue has been revealed through many deeds and statements.
The twentieth century witnessed, both before and after the Shoah, great Jewish thinkers and scholars who understood that the original dialogue between the first Christian community and its Jewish brothers needed to be started anew if Christians and Jews were to collaborate, each from their own perspective, in the construction of a better world. Mordechai Martin Buber, Joseph Klausner, and Abraham Joshua Heschel are some of the very many Jewish leaders who took it as a personal mission to renew this dialogue. Nostra Aetate, which was nurtured through the dialogue of Rabbi Heschel and Cardinal Augustin Bea, was the best answer to their dreams and ideals.
In the old city of Prague, at Number 1 of the Nový Svět (New World) Street, we find the house where the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe lived. The astronomical measurements of Brahe were the data with which Johannes Kepler was able to formulate mathematically his three laws concerning the movement of the planets around the sun.
A new world was discovered at that time. The heliocentric description of the solar system, the existence of new continents to explore, the conquering of new navigation routes, as well as so many other advances allowed human beings to contemplate a New World.
Today we have brought our perceptions to Pluto at the fringe of our solar system. We have taken pictures of its surface , and received much entirely new information. Mankind has begun deeply studying characteristics of a world that is no longer foreign to us.
The new challenge for humankind is not to discover a new world but to create a “new world”, a new reality with no more hunger or injustice, no hatred among peoples, no more wars. The world in which each individual enriches spiritually through the dialogue with neighbors in whom he or she sees a brother or a sister. The challenge facing us is to create a new world where each individual makes a place for God’s presence.
The ultimate aim of Nostra Aetate was to create a new reality for Jews and Catholics, a new world. A world in which they are not opposed but can actively study and learn together, and so enrich each other and assist each other in walking their covenantal lives with God. We are no longer "foreigners" to each other. This idea is represented by the very significant sculpture we are about to dedicate, which will remind all who will see and contemplate it in the future about the achievements of the past and the challenges for the future.
In the eighth century BCE, the prophet Isaiah (65, 17), said in the name of God, that God will create new heavens and a new world (earth), where no former tragedies will be recalled.
Among the Jewish sages there is a discussion about this that has been going on for centuries. They asked: Is humanity in its present psychic and spiritual condition able to fashion a reality of peace and concord at all levels, or does God have to substantially modify the originally created world in order for peace to come?
The masterly opinion of Maimonides is that the human being in his present condition is indeed able to construct a reality of dialogue and of peace.
Taking into account the human impulse and the individual struggle to pursue goodness in our lives, rejecting the wars and the cruel violence that afflict us daily, there are many who understand Isaiah’s hope for a new heaven and a new earth in covenantal terms: Humanity, the partner of God in the constant recreation of Creation, will co-create this hopeful New Cosmos -- a new Reality in which Nostra Aetate and those who were inspired by it, will have made a crucial contribution and helped pave the way.
(from Left) Dr. Adam Gregerman, assistant director, Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations; Dr. Philip Cunningham, director, Institute for Jewish-Catholic Relations; Rabbi Abraham Skorka, keynote speaker; Naomi Adler, CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia; Saint Joseph's University President Mark Reed; and the statue's sculptor Joshua Koffman with his child.
Well, of course, this is largely political bullshit and his claim that Nostra Aetate teaches the old covenant is still valid is complete and utter bullshit and his has-he-been-sniffing-krazy-glue? charge can not be sustained by any honest man after reading what the document says. Nor does the document teach dual covenant theory, as even, presumably, Mark Shea now knows. Go ahead, read it: 4. As the sacred synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it remembers the bond that spiritually ties the people of the New Covenant to Abraham's stock. Thus the Church of Christ acknowledges that, according to God's saving design, the beginnings of her faith and her election are found already among the Patriarchs, Moses and the prophets. She professes that all who believe in Christ-Abraham's sons according to faith (6)-are included in the same Patriarch's call, and likewise that the salvation of the Church is mysteriously foreshadowed by the chosen people's exodus from the land of bondage. The Church, therefore, cannot forget that she received the revelation of the Old Testament through the people with whom God in His inexpressible mercy concluded the Ancient Covenant. Nor can she forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that well-cultivated olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild shoots, the Gentiles.(7) Indeed, the Church believes that by His cross Christ, Our Peace, reconciled Jews and Gentiles. making both one in Himself.(8) The Church keeps ever in mind the words of the Apostle about his kinsmen: "theirs is the sonship and the glory and the covenants and the law and the worship and the promises; theirs are the fathers and from them is the Christ according to the flesh" (Rom. 9:4-5), the Son of the Virgin Mary. She also recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people. As Holy Scripture testifies, Jerusalem did not recognize the time of her visitation,(9) nor did the Jews in large number, accept the Gospel; indeed not a few opposed its spreading.(10) Nevertheless, God holds the Jews most dear for the sake of their Fathers; He does not repent of the gifts He makes or of the calls He issues-such is the witness of the Apostle.(11) In company with the Prophets and the same Apostle, the Church awaits that day, known to God alone, on which all peoples will address the Lord in a single voice and "serve him shoulder to shoulder" (Soph. 3:9).(12) Since the spiritual patrimony common to Christians and Jews is thus so great, this sacred synod wants to foster and recommend that mutual understanding and respect which is the fruit, above all, of biblical and theological studies as well as of fraternal dialogues. True, the Jewish authorities and those who followed their lead pressed for the death of Christ;(13) still, what happened in His passion cannot be charged against all the Jews, without distinction, then alive, nor against the Jews of today. Although the Church is the new people of God, the Jews should not be presented as rejected or accursed by God, as if this followed from the Holy Scriptures. All should see to it, then, that in catechetical work or in the preaching of the word of God they do not teach anything that does not conform to the truth of the Gospel and the spirit of Christ. Furthermore, in her rejection of every persecution against any man, the Church, mindful of the patrimony she shares with the Jews and moved not by political reasons but by the Gospel's spiritual love, decries hatred, persecutions, displays of anti-Semitism, directed against Jews at any time and by anyone. Besides, as the Church has always held and holds now, Christ underwent His passion and death freely, because of the sins of men and out of infinite love, in order that all may reach salvation. It is, therefore, the burden of the Church's preaching to proclaim the cross of Christ as the sign of God's all-embracing love and as the fountain from which every grace flows. +++++++++ end of quote++++++++ See, not a single reference to the putative teaching that the Catholic Churchrecognises the old covenant is still valid and yet the Messias-Deniers routinely publicly lie about our document and yet we do not object, confront, and correct those lies. This, apparently is the new Ecumenism and the way to foster peace; To be silent and supine in the face of the aggressive lies of the Messias-Deniers.
Abbé Guy Pagès, a Catholic priest, who has aroused the suspicions of both government and Church because of his condemnation of Islam and his realistic appraisal of the consequences of Islamization for France and other countries, has seen his website summarily removed from the Internet by the police under orders from the government. It seems he is being accused of justifying terrorism! I hope to post on this, but French readers can check this article from Résistance Républicaine.
We Catholic are going to fete a long dead mad monk who taught that Jesus was a fornicator and a composite of good and evil but woe betide a Priest who speaks the truth about Mahometanism
But, ABS, he is dead -DED- dead. True enough, but consider the nominees he will never select for the SCOTUS who, he would assure us, were beholden to the Rule of Law and Judeo-Christian Values and who, upon his senate confirmation, would take to the bench and vote to legalise bestiality; think of him not being POTUS after we have been attacked, again, by Mahometans and yet still have a Mahometan Secret Service Agent as one of his guards and still being opposed to profiling; think of him not having manual or oral sex with a white house intern; think of the many wars he can not start or the high number of executive orders he can not issue; think of the long and excessively expensive vacations he will never take; consider, if you will, the number of times he will not go to, say, Australia, with his entire family to visit his first cousin who was a second cousin to a third rate aborigine in some fourth rate outback tree hollow; think and marvel at the idea he will never deliver a state of the union address; smile at the comforting thought of never learning that he likes to take naps and play video games after lunch; luxuriate in the certitude you will not be called by him a racist, a hater, or a bible-hugging gun nut; imagine him never going to Israel and claiming it is our friend, to say nothing about the high crimes and misdemeanors he will not commit while not in office. Other than the Professor, ABS sees no man worthy of a vote and as for the idea of a female POTUS (No, close, but Jeb Bush does not count) ABS has always thought the 19th amendment was a fatal error. ABS might consider voting for an entrepreneur who was selling solar powered coffins for those who live in the Northeast who are alarmed at the thought of being buried in that cold earth up there but those men are few and far between.
Click on the link to watch the first 1:36 of our local council and the invocation by Pastor Peter Bartuksa of the Wellington Presbyterian Building * ABS intends no disrespect to Mr. Bartuska but a formal prayer would have prolly proved to have been a better choice.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager briefed some of her most loyal and active fund-raisers this morning about the upcoming Nevada caucuses and responded to frustrations among some of her donors that the campaign needed to do a better job of demonstrating its successful mobilization of grassroots activists and small donors.
Robby Mook, the Clinton campaign manager
Urban Dictionary Mook: Coined in the Scorsese film, 'Mean Streets', meaning an arsehole or loser.
Many thinks to PewSitter which has recently linked to this crummy blog several times. ABS appreciates the new readers and, in addition to thanking them for taking a peek here, he wants to explain to them what ABE Ministry is all about.
ABE * (Against Basically Everything) Ministry was established by our Founder and Chairman,Amateur Brain Surgeon, and it is dedicated to denouncing all of the miscreants and mendacious muttonheads befouling The One True Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church and this once great land. * ABE Ministry has not one thing in common (morally, politically, economically, spiritually) with Honest Abe Lincoln, War Criminal and Slayer of State Sovereignty, but we at ABE Ministry never tire of pointing out that we think Honest Abe gothis nickname for the same reason a 400 Lb. Mobster gets nicknamed, Tiny.
A decrease in mortification ineluctably leads to an increase in effeminacy
ABS made-up that iron law and it got him to thinking about Mahometans and Ramadan because the reverse of that Iron Law means that an increase in mortification leads to an increase in masculinity.
Because they Fast and Abstain (mortification) Mahometan men are more likely than not to have an increase in masculine attributes/passions and because Mahomertan Immigration is rape culture, countries accepting them as immigrants can expect an increase of their native non-Mahometans women and girls, especially blonde Christian girls, being raped during Ramadan.
O, and because the vast majority of Mahometan Doctors are men, their mortification will result in greater numbers of surgical clitorectomies, right?
ABS went to Confession Saturday at Our Lady Queen of the Apostles in Royal Palm Beach and as he sat there waiting for Confession to begin, he noted how the majority of the men and women entered the Blessed Sacrament Chapel and simply took a seat in the pew without genuflecting. A few of the souls faux genuflected (knee not touching the floor) and made the sign of the Cross. Other than ABS, not a single soul knelt with both knees touching the floor, head bowed, sign of the Cross. ABS is an Irish Algonquin Trad who will never - as in never ever - apply the sacramental of defenestration to that which he was learnt as a young Catholic and what he was learnt was that when he entered into the presence of a Monstrance, he was learnt to kneel with both knees on the floor, to bow his head, and to make the sign of the Cross. ABS is the same age as Israel (born in 1948) and he is not quite as spry as he once was but he will not act like the vast majority who have been conditioned to act ever since the dignity-of-man-democrats began to dismantle all outwards signs of piety because ecumenism. Some of the souls who entered the Chapel were the same age as ABS. How were they convinced it was a good idea to ditch the humility and to put on the new man? ABS just doesn't get it anymore. Such sacred disrespect is now common, and not just in a Blessed Sacrament Chapel. Just look at how many souls now talk in church, loudly, before and after Mass, and notice how many have substituted a bow for a genuflection? ABS is in a tiny minority and he has known that forever and he also knows he is going down fighting because he knows what to do even if nobody knows. Will what ABS does before a Monstrance be a reminder to other men of how they ought act? Doubtful. They prolly think ABS has Tourettes, OCD, or Colitis.
Investigation Into Missing Iraqi Cash During The Iraq War Ended in Lebanon Bunker.
10/12/148:49 AM
Christoph Bangert for The New York Times Stuart W. Bowen Jr., left, a special inspector general who examined corruption and waste in Iraq.
WASHINGTON — Not long after American forces defeated the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein in 2003, caravans of trucks began to arrive at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington on a regular basis, unloading an unusual cargo — pallets of shrink-wrapped $100 bills.
The cash, withdrawn from Iraqi government accounts held in the United States, was loaded onto Air Force C-17 transport planes bound for Baghdad, where the Bush administration hoped it would provide a quick financial infusion for Iraq’s new government and the country’s battered economy.
Over the next year and a half, $12 billion to $14 billion was sent to Iraq in the airlift, and an additional $5 billion was sent by electronic transfer. Exactly what happened to that money after it arrived in Baghdad became one of the many unanswered questions from the chaotic days of the American occupation, when billions were flowing into the country from the United States and corruption was rampant.
Finding the answer became first the job and then the obsession of Stuart W. Bowen Jr., a friend from Texas of President George W. Bush who in 2004 was appointed to serve as a special inspector general to investigate corruption and waste in Iraq. Before his office was finally shut down last year, Mr. Bowen believed he might have succeeded — but only partly — in that mission.
Much of the money was probably used by the Iraqi government in some way, he concluded. But for years Mr. Bowen could not account for billions more until his investigators finally had a breakthrough, discovering that $1.2 billion to $1.6 billion had been stolen and moved to a bunker in rural Lebanon for safe keeping. “I don’t know how the money got to Lebanon,” Mr. Bowen said. “If I knew that, we would have made more progress on the case.”
Mr. Bowen kept the discovery and his investigation of the cash-filled bunker in Lebanon, which his office code-named Brick Tracker, secret. He has never publicly discussed it until now, and his frustration that neither he nor his investigators can fully account for the missing money was evident in a series of interviews.
“Billions of dollars have been taken out of Iraq over the last 10 years illegally,” he said. “In this investigation, we thought we were on the track for some of that lost money. It’s disappointing to me personally that we were unable to close this case, for reasons beyond our control.”
He is equally frustrated that the Bush administration, apart from his office, never investigated reports that huge amounts of money had disappeared, and that after his investigators found out about the bunker, the Obama administration did not pursue that lead, either.
Mr. Bowen said his investigators briefed the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. on what they found. But Mr. Bowen added that he believed one reason American officials had not gone after it was “because it was Iraqi money stolen by Iraqis.”
Spokesmen for the F.B.I. and C.I.A. declined to comment for this article.
The Iraqi government has also not tried to retrieve the money, and has kept information about the Lebanese bunker secret. Mr. Bowen said that he talked to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki about the missing money and his discovery of the bunker and that Mr. Maliki never took any action, while expressing anger at the way the United States had handled the airlifted cash.
The money so assiduously carried to Iraq from a vast facility in New Jersey operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York came from the Development Fund of Iraq, which was created by a United Nations resolution in May 2003 to hold Iraqi oil revenue.
The fund was to be used in Iraq’s reconstruction, and the United Nations resolution called for the creation of a monitoring board to make sure the United States-led Coalition Provisional Authority, which governed Iraq in 2003 and the first half of 2004 and ordered the cash flights, used the money properly for the benefit of the Iraqi people.
For the C.P.A., an advantage of using the cash from the Development Fund instead of money appropriated by Congress for Iraq was that there were not a lot of rules governing its use, and no federal regulations or congressional oversight of what happened to it. It was Iraqi money, not anything from American taxpayers.
In an interview, Paul Bremer, who was the head of the C.P.A., defended the agency’s handling of the funds, and said the money was badly needed to keep Iraqi government ministries in operation. In particular, he defended the decision to accelerate the cash flights in June 2004, just before the provisional authority closed and was replaced by an interim Iraqi government. In the last two weeks of June, the C.P.A. ordered $4 billion to $5 billion in cash to be flown to Baghdad from New York in a rapid-fire series of last-minute flights.
The Iraqi government “was broke at that point,” Mr. Bremer said. “Civil servants had not been paid for about three months. We had to get funds there right away.” He said that there was a budget process in Baghdad that determined how much cash was requested from the Federal Reserve.
“The issue is what happened to the money once it was distributed through the minister of finance,” he said. “We had a very clear record of funds going to the Iraqi system.”
Mr. Bowen was dismissive of Mr. Bremer’s defense of the C.P.A. Accounting for the funds was so lax, he said, that there were few credible records of how it was spent. “Our auditors interviewed numerous senior advisers of the C.P.A., and we learned from them that the controls on the Development Fund of Iraq money were inadequate,” Mr. Bowen said. “We didn’t make this up; we learned this from C.P.A. staff.”
Former Treasury Department officials also questioned the need for the flights. Treasury had already sent $1.7 billion in cash from Iraqi government accounts in the United States to Baghdad in the first weeks after the invasion, and then had developed a new Iraqi currency that was introduced that October. They say the new currency ended the need for further cash infusions from the United States.
“We did not know that Bremer was flying in all that cash,” said Ged Smith, who was the head of the Treasury Department team that worked on Iraq’s financial reconstruction after the invasion. “I can’t see a reason for it.”
Mr. Bowen said that Brick Tracker, his office’s most sensitive investigation, began in 2010 when Wael el-Zein, a Lebanese- American on his staff, received a tip about stolen money hidden in Lebanon. An informant told him about the bunker, which in addition to the cash, was believed to also have held approximately $200 million in gold belonging to the Iraqi government.
But by this time, official Washington had long since forgotten about the flights from Andrews. The C.I.A. expressed little interest in pursuing the matter, and the F.B.I. said it lacked jurisdiction, Mr. Bowen recalled. And when Mr. Bowen and his staff tried to conduct an investigation of the missing cash in Lebanon, they also met with resistance from the United States Embassy in Beirut.
Mr. Bowen was not allowed to travel to Lebanon on official business. Two of his investigators who did travel to Lebanon were denied permission from the embassy to see the bunker themselves because it was too dangerous.
When Mr. Bowen’s staff members met in Beirut with Lebanon’s prosecutor general, Said Mirza, he initially agreed to cooperate on an investigation, but later decided against it.
The office of the special inspector general for Iraq closed in 2013, and Mr. Bowen is now working in the private sector.
Mr. Bowen thinks at least some of the money has been moved, and said it is impossible to say whether any of it is still in the bunker. He says he is still frustrated by the lack of cooperation he got from his own government in his efforts to pursue the missing cash. “We struggled to gain timely support from the interagency as we pursued this case,” Mr. Bowen said. +++++++++ end of quotes+++++++ ABS, you aren't a conspiracy theorist are you? Conspiratorialists are insane it is said. Yes, of course. Madoff's Ponzi Scheme was a conspiracy as was Enron? Shall ABS list a dozen other examples? O, and remember to listen to conservatives when they tell you to vote and whom to vote for because they know what they are talking about and they went to Ivy League Schools and they are much smarter than thee. For example, here is NY Times Lap Dog Faux Conservative, David Brooks, writing about his political philosophical musings in response to the first time he met the Mahometan Mulatto from Kenya;
“I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.”
This book review is by a Seminarian Priest Professor and just note the bolded parts which are ahistorical when they are not hysterical (but not funny).
This approach is going to be forced down our throats and it is GUARAN-DAMN-TEED to result in an even more emotional and feminised Church which will chase even more men away. This is a program for sissies and faggots and men easily manipulated via the group process and it is redolent of many of the features of the 1960s encounter groups - think Carl Rogers, who wrecked convents in the 60s and 70s, and who later apologised for ruining the faith of Nuns. http://www.culturewars.com/CultureWars/1999/rogers.html
THIS is the model for modernity, THIS is the answer to our problem? Only if we think we already suffer from too few epicene ecclesiastics.
Only mad men and women think men will put up with this shite.
If we want men to return to the One True Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, we must ditch the demented desire to ape protestants and to return to the Real Mass and Real Catechesis and STOP trying to revive the 1960s.
The One True Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church HAS the answers to the current anthropological problems the Shadow Church has generated and not one of the answers has to do with - Let's be more like protestants. O, and breathes there a well-known convert from Evangelical Christianity who does not have a book or program to sell to Catholics and/or a new program of instruction for the Church? Just think of the recent converts -Shea, Hahn, Bromley, Waddell, Eden, etc etc etc - who have become THE go-to resource as to what Catholicism means while the Early Church Fathers, the Ecumenical Councils, the Great Saints, the Great Catechisms, Manuals etc go unread and unrecommended
My friends know that I appreciate candor, and that I can be frank to a fault. I don’t tolerate it well when everyone in the room is desperately trying to ignore the proverbial eight-hundred pound gorilla sitting in the corner.
Author Sherry Weddell does not tolerate this well either.
And she would like us – “active” and presumably committed Catholics, lay, religious, consecrated and clergy – to focus on one rather large gorilla sitting in the corner of our contemporary Church: the reality that a disturbingly large proportion of Church-going Catholics fail to live as disciples of Jesus – as intentional disciples.
She begins by sharing some disturbing statistics she has extrapolated from her own analysis of a 2008 study by the Pew Research Center. Among them:
• Only 30 percent of Americans raised Catholic are still “practicing” (which in the survey meant “attending Mass at least once a month”).
• Another 38 percent hang on to the Catholic label – cultural Catholics – but seldom or never attend Mass.
• The other 32 percent no longer consider themselves Catholic. Of these, 3 percent follow a non-Christian religion, 14 percent consider themselves "unaffiliated," and 15% have joined a Protestant faith community.
Weddell observes:
“[W]e have asked hundreds of diocesan and parish leaders from sixty dioceses throughout the English-speaking world this question: What percentage of your parishioners, would you estimate, are intentional disciples? To our astonishment, we have received the same answer over and over: ‘Five percent.’”
More troubling still is her discovery – after working with hundreds of parishes, and personally interviewing a couple thousand practicing Catholics, most of whom described themselves as “active” and “heavily involved” in their parishes – that many of them have tremendous gaps in their understanding of the faith. They might be in Church every Sunday: ushers, lectors, parish secretaries, religious ed teachers and so on. Yet Weddell not infrequently discovered many who – upon sharing with her their own experience of the faith – did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, or who intimated that that they don't even believe in a personal God at all! Her personal experience in these one-on-one encounters seems to confirm one of the most disturbing implications of the Pew study. Weddell explains:
“It is especially sobering to learn that when Pew surveyors asked the question, ‘Which comes closest to your view of God: God is a person with whom people can have a relationship, or God is an impersonal force?’ only 48 percent of Catholics were absolutely certain that the God they believed in was a God with whom they could have a personal relationship.”
This is tragic. But this is the reality on the ground in today’s Catholic Church. And we should be thankful to Sherry Weddell for forcing the issue, and presenting a clear strategy to bring these brothers and sisters of ours to a personal relationship with Jesus, to a state of being intentional disciples.
One of the most important contributions of Forming Intentional Disciples is Weddell’s articulation of what she calls the “thresholds of conversion.”
The idea is simple.
“Catechesis” in the Church is meant for those who are already deeply committed to Christ as disciples; catechesis is meant to build on a foundation that already exists. But non-believers, or those who have become estranged from the faith, or those who only understand Jesus notionally (but not personally) are almost certainly not ready to be “catechized.” That’s why, as Weddell points out, the problem we are facing in the Church today – though often chalked up to “poor catechesis” or “poor adult faith formation” – is way beyond resolution through “better” catechesis.
To be genuinely catechized (nourished in an ever deeper understanding of the faith) presupposes that one is already a disciple of Jesus in mind and heart. What Weddell and her collaborators have discovered and demonstrated over the past decade is that many of our baptized Catholics never made it to that threshold; in fact they are quite a few thresholds away from getting there. Consequently, attempts to “catechize” them are often futile. They must be met where they are and gently coaxed and accompanied to discipleship.
To get there, most people need to cross at least four other thresholds: first they need to trust – to trust those in whom they see modeled something which they themselves lack: a robust and joyful living of a personal relationship with Jesus. Having crossed this threshold, they would then ideally become imbibed with curiosity about Jesus. That curiosity would then be nourished and grow to genuine openness to learning more about Jesus, which would then move them to seek Jesus actively; then – and only then – they would be in a position to take the final step to following Jesus as an “intentional disciple” in the midst of his Church.
Catechists, and evangelizers, and many a committed Catholic are often frustrated in their attempts to draw others back to Church for the very simple reason that we have failed to understand the psychology of this fundamental process of going from non-practicing (or non-believing) to committed discipleship. Weddell’s paramount contribution – and what makes Forming Intentional Disciples one of the most important books written in the past decade on the topic of evangelization – is precisely to focus our attention on this process, to explore it, and help us to understand it so we can become much more effective in our evangelizing efforts.
In an online interview with her Bishop Michael Sheridan of the diocese of Colorado Springs, she notes that when she and collaborators at the Catherine of Siena Institute began using the term “intentional disciple”, they drew fire from many different groups. Were they being elitist? Judgmental? But here again, if Weddell has touched a nerve, that may well indicate that she is exactly right in her assertion that a vast majority of Catholics lack in their self-understanding the very category of committed, active “discipleship” that should be in the very DNA of baptized Christians.
So what does she mean by the term?
“All we meant,” she explains to Bishop Sheridan, “was ‘intentional’ as in Peter and his brother, on the sea of Galilee… They dropped their nets, and they followed him.” You don’t do that accidentally… you don’t do it in your sleep… And neither can any of us be disciples in our sleep!”
Deliberate, conscious discipleship.
On one occasion when I was speaking recently to Weddell – who is herself a convert to Catholicism from Evangelical Protestantism – I asked her if she is optimistic about the prospects of the New Evangelization. “Of course I’m optimistic,” she responded without missing a beat, “because I am watching people do it.” In further explaining her optimism, she added: “I come from a world [evangelical Protestantism] where this is normal – making disciples. The question is not whether this is possible, but what are the resources at our disposal. The Church has already supplied us with everything we need.”
To be sure, Sherry Weddell has supplied us with one amazing resource – Forming Intentional Disciples – which is must-reading for any Catholic who wants to be realistically, honestly and effectively engaged in the drama of making disciples.
Father Thomas Berg is a priest of the Archdiocese of New York and Professor of Moral Theology at St. Joseph’s Seminary (Dunwoodie). More of Fr. Berg’s publications are available at www.fatherberg.com.
