Posted on 05/17/2009 2:55:49 AM PDT by Scanian
Today, to the disgust and apparent surprise of many Catholic bishops and laity, the University of Notre Dame, once the pride of Catholic intellectual life in America, will behave in a very un-Catholic way by honoring, as commencement speaker and honorary degree recipient, POTUS Barack Obama, one of America's most extreme advocates of abortion.
This surprise is hard to understand. The old Latin proverb nemo repente turpissimus can be translated as "nobody becomes very evil overnight." Even Judas served a lengthy apprenticeship as an embezzler before moving on to greater betrayals. In a similar manner, I contend that the invitation to Obama was merely a milestone of a drift away from the Catholic Church that Notre Dame started decades ago.
How it Happened
One might imagine such a process taking place by external erosion, by a determinedly Catholic faculty being gradually forced to yield to the secular pressures of a materialistic world. On the contrary, I suspect that Notre Dame's decline and fall were caused by internal decay, rather like what Fr. Daniel A. Lord (a famous Catholic pamphleteer of the last century) called "spiritual termites". There is even evidence that the source of this decay was Notre Dame's own Department of Theology.
The process started a century ago, when the Catholic Church was attacked by a group of internal heresies that Pope Pius X collectively defined as "modernism".
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
Great article. Malachi Martin called people like Hines et al - Luciferians.
I didn't know these things were graded on a curve. Now I know.
It isn’t about ‘grading on a curve’, it is about inviting the most notorious and depraved advocate for unrestricted abortion to serve as commencement speaker. Here, try these other hypothetical examples and see if it dawns on you:
Notre Dame invites California inmate Scott Peterson to serve as the keynote speaker for ‘Honoring Your Wife & Unborn Child Week’...
Notre Dame invites Kansas abortionist George ‘The Killer’ Tiller to break ground for the new campus day care facility...
Notre Dame invites Jimmy Carter to speak on the evils of anti-Semitism (w/German translation provided by Pat Buchanan, lol)...
Notre Dame invites Robert Mugabe, oh wait: they already had B’rack Hussein 0bama appear, guess that’s close enough for the ‘butcher of innocents’ portion of the program, ok?
Enjoy your week.
It's a cost-cutting effort: Much cheaper to abort'em than bomb'em. Seriously. Some of the missiles we launch cost $500,000 each.
You’re worth $500,000.
I am genuinely laughing — that’s an excellent retort (sincerely) and I have absolutely no comeback. You won that exchange. I go down in defeat, and I go down laughing.
Talk about meddling in another bishop’s diocese! You are a layman from another communion! Why don’t you practice what you preach?
LOL, nothing personal KittyKat, I couldn’t possibly let that one go by, I just saw this giant half a million price tag hanging off of ya, and in a depraved sort of way, it’s a compliment. ;)
Enjoy the rest of your week!
“Talk about meddling in another bishops diocese! You are a layman from another communion! Why dont you practice what you preach?”
Well, for starters there’s no canon against it and furthermore, YOUR bishops say that the communion which exists between Orthodoxy and the Latin Church is so extensive that I am invited to partake of communion at your Mass. As an Orthodox layman it is my obligation, one of my roles in The Church, to speak out against uncanonical actions and the preaching of heresy by hierarchs which seems to have exploded among a substantial minority of the Latin Church hierarchs in America.
If you Latins don’t like that the laity will call out heresiarchs, or can’t take the criticism of your crowned heads when they violate the canons, perhaps you should encourage them to withdraw that invitation to communion and call off whatever is left of the reunion talks.
You're straining at gnats and swallowing camels. The alleged "violation" of a disciplinary canon of Nicaea -- meant to prevent bishops conducting ordinations and other sacraments without authorization in another bishop's jurisdiction, meaning that this is no violation at all (!!!) -- pales in comparison with publicly exalting a man who does everything in his power to promote and advance the wanton slaughter of the innocent.
Do you seriously think Our Lord, on the last day, is going to ask you "What did you do to make sure that the most meticulous possible interpretation of the canons of Nicaea was followed by Roman Catholic bishops?" instead of "What did you do for the least of my brethren?"
“Do you seriously think Our Lord, on the last day, is going to ask you “What did you do to make sure that the most meticulous possible interpretation of the canons of Nicaea was followed by Roman Catholic bishops?” instead of “What did you do for the least of my brethren?””
I sincerely doubt He will ask either. In the meantime, however, the acceptance of and participation in, by a substantial minority of Latin Rite bishops here, of uncanonical meddling in another diocese’s affairs is leading to schism in the Latin Church in America. I don’t doubt for a moment that both the left wing and the right wing of your sadly secularized national church would welcome the removal of each other from a “true” and “pure” American Catholic church which, as the most important Catholic church in the world we have been told, will uphold the absolute finest American traditions and be a beacon to the world. /s
You folks have created a very dangerous ecclesiological situation because you decided, as the Latin Church often has, that the ends justify the means. We disagree.
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