Posted on 02/12/2018 10:33:26 AM PST by SeekAndFind
A 2015 Pew survey reported that the total number of Catholics in the United States dropped by 3 million since 2007, now comprising about 20 percent - or one-fifth - of the total population. Catholicism is losing more members than it gains at a higher rate than any other denomination – a recent development which the radical progressives at Salon celebrate. Why is this an issue that should worry Americans and the Western world at large?
One key reason is that the fastest-growing religion in the country and around the world is Islam – something Salon radicals also no doubt celebrate. The fundamentalist brand of Islam that is once again on the rise is antithetical, indeed openly hostile, to the values of Western civilization, and for many centuries Catholicism as a central component of European identity was a bulwark against its spread. But for various reasons the West has lost confidence in its cultural identity and moral authority in recent decades, and the result has been submission to decadence, to , and to Islam. If we are to reverse a civilization in rapid decline, we must undertake a resurgence of Western exceptionalism with a militant Christian ethos at its core.
For Catholics who have backslid or grown apathetic, that means waking up to what is at stake, and then making a renewed commitment to understanding and manifesting the tenets of their own religion, a religion that has been steered toward emasculation, socialism, and interfaith suicide by the radical left. For non-Catholics as well – even atheists – it means acknowledging how crucial a revivified Christianity is to a defense of Western civilization, and educating themselves about the myths and realities of Catholicism.
Enter John Zmirak’s timely book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism, published by Regnery. Zmirak is an editor, teacher, screenwriter, political columnist, and the author of the popular Bad Catholic's Guides and The Race to Save Our Century: Five Core Principles to Promote Peace, Freedom, and a Culture of Life. His work has appeared in First Things, The Weekly Standard, USA Today, and FrontPage Magazine, among other venues.
The book’s cover declares Catholicism to be “the most politically incorrect institution in the world!” and features a trinity of grinning nuns with guns – itself politically incorrect enough to trigger leftists who prefer a less militant, more social justice-oriented, and submissive Christianity. The cover also features such triggering bullet points as:
and perhaps most politically incorrect and offensive:
Zmirak seeks to dispel misconceptions about the Catholic Church, including the notions that it is “the greatest mainstay of the patriarchy,” an institution designed to oppress the poor, an institution designed to liberate the poor, and even the “Whore of Babylon” mentioned in The Book of Revelation.
In fact, Zmirak notes, among the good things the Church has brought to the world are the university, the hospital, the world’s greatest art, modern science, the strongest check in history on the power of the state, and overall a new and improved Western civilization in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire. In our culture’s rush to inflate Islam’s reputation by crediting Muslims with inventing everything from algebra to the astrolabe, Catholicism’s actual achievements by comparison are world-beating.
The Guide’s dozen chapters cover such topics as where the Church stands on birth control and abortion, the limits of papal authority, the free market, immigration, amnesty, socialism, progressivism, sex, science, self-defense and capital punishment, and yes, the scandal of “priestly pederasts,” which the author does not whitewash.
Zmirak addresses the fragmentation of the Catholic Church which began with the Second Vatican Council in 1960 and remains to this day, exacerbated by the issue of birth control. He covers the impact of secular modernity on the Church, and the “explosion and radicalization of progressive dissent” which embraced a social justice agenda and which has resulted in many Catholics taking positions “on economics, welfare policy, and defense that [a]re a virtual mirror image of the Democratic Party platform.”
This explains, the author notes, how “politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Joseph Biden can support partial-birth abortion, same-sex marriage, and legal mandates that nuns such as the Little Sisters of the Poor distribute the ‘morning-after’ abortion pill – and still go to Holy Communion. They haven’t abandoned the Church. They are in fact its progressive vanguard…”
As for the Crusades and the Catholic “just war” doctrine, Zmirak points out that the Church “has never taught that pacifism is the appropriate response to conflict.” True, there are strict requirements for legitimate defense, but “Christian pacifism would leave Christian nations defenseless from conquest and persecution at the hands of aggressive non-Christians.” If non-resistance to violence were practiced consistently, he adds, “it would mean that we’d have no police either, and that parents should not defend their helpless children from murder or rape.” The Crusades, which today are condemned as evidence of “a hideous, anti-Christian endeavor for which the Church should never stop apologizing – and which Muslims are justified in resenting to this day,” were in fact, in large part, “a heroic if doomed attempt to liberate conquered nations from the yoke of intolerant Islam.”
Zmirak concludes the book with a call to arms: “There can be no truce, no respite, no surrender. As the price of calling ourselves Christians, we must make our case for natural law, religious and economic liberty, the sanctity of life, and the truth about sex year in and year out, regardless of the vagaries of particular candidates and party platforms.”
He notes that he collaborated with Whole Life program founder Jason Jones to identify the five “Ideologies of Evil” that made the twentieth century the bloodiest in human history:
In opposition to those evils, Zmirak and Jones list fundamental Catholic principles “that must animate any decent politics”:
There is so much more to The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism than this brief review may suggest. The book is dense with information (including thirty pages of endnotes), but it is entertaining as well as enlightening for both believers and non-believers. It also provides a wealth of other sources for further investigation, in frequent sidebars called “Books You’re Not Supposed to Read.” In this time of rising Islamophilia and openly anti-Christian bias among our cultural elites, John Zmirak’s book itself is one you’re not supposed to read, but definitely should.
Hebrew Bible, we call that the Old Testament. It’s been fully included in the Bible for several centuries longer than protestants, and we include the books you leave out. I wonder if you are getting your ideas from some strange source aimed at defaming the faith?
Evidently you didn't read my response to Campion in which I told him to check any current Catholic Bible with nihil obstat and the imprimatur other than a reprint of the Douay-Rheims. They all teach evolution.
Let me ask you a question: does the Catholic Church consider whether or not the "virgin birth" described in the "new testament" is literally true, or is that also a matter of "discretion?"
Furthermore you ignore the fact that it isn't just evolutionism that the Catholic Church propagates, but higher criticism as well--the higher criticism invented by liberal Protestants. All of the first eleven chapters of Genesis are dismissed as Babylonian and Canaanite mythology. Esther is dismissed and its leading figures identified with pagan "gxds," G-d forbid! Jonah is turned into an Aesop's fable. Daniel is late-dated into a pseudepigraph written after the fact of the events it allegedly foretells (I guess all those prophecies "about J*sus" will have to go as well). Why? Because the world described there doesn't operate like the one we know today? Then I guess you must also dismiss the "virgin birth," "resurrection," "miracles of J*sus," and the "real presence." After all . . . don't we all know better now, thanks to the science Catholicism worships and fawns on? And the very fact that you consider cosmology none of religion's business and a field belonging exclusively to empirical science shows exactly where you stand.
You, Sir (or Madam) are a hypocrite.
Catholicism is not full of rules like some people portray. We have dogma, doctrine, praxis, and then people are free to think and choose.
Oh yeah. The "unchanging one true religion" that claims to be semper idem has no opinions on anything. And there's so much "freedom" if you're a homosexual (as long as you belong to some traditionally Catholic ethnic group). Every diocese in the United States has a department ministering to "gay and lesbian persons" so they don't feel out of place. But what about "literalist persons?" They can just go elsewhere, can't they? Or what about if one's conscience informs one that the Messianic kingdom will be a literal messianic kingdom, not some "social kingdom" run by people. I note that any form whatsoever of literal messianism (such as millennialism) is not permitted and seems to be the one opinion held in common by both far left and far right Catholics, since it takes the world out of man's hands and places it directly under the governance of Heaven. Can't have that.
Hebrew Bible, we call that the Old Testament.
I know what you call it. The name you give it shows the contempt you hold it in.
It’s been fully included in the Bible for several centuries longer than protestants,
And before that they were part of the TaNa"KH, long before there was a Catholic Church to appropriate and misuse them (only to eventually deny them altogether). But no matter. I am stressing that contemporary Catholicism ignores all previous Catholic Biblical interpretation and instead reinterprets everything through Darwinian science and Protestant historical-criticism (Catholics nowadays have to subscribe to Protestant historical-criticism to prove they aren't Protestants!). Deny this if you will.
and we include the books you leave out.
Oh . . . you include a lot more books that I leave out that you can imagine!
I wonder if you are getting your ideas from some strange source aimed at defaming the faith?
You mean like the six years I spent in the "one true unchanging religion" where all of the clergy and laity believe exactly as I have described, where every approved "bible" had the exact commentaries I have described, ever Catholic publication carried articles explaining that most of the "old testament" were Aesop's fables and attacking people who held to total Biblical inerrancy as stupid, and where I was finally asked to leave by "my very own" Catholic denominational counselor because my simply taking the Bible's words at face value was "not Catholic?"
What about the fact that the official newspaper of "my" Catholic diocese ran an article advocating the teaching of historical criticism of the Bible in public schools? Or about the sometimes implied and sometimes spoken idea that G-d permitted the rise of Fundamentalist Protestant churches because some people are simply "not smart enough" (or don't belong to the "right" ethnic group) to be Catholic? You know, like all those ultra-intellectual illiterate Mayan peasants in Guatemala who are so much better than a simple rural American "peckerwood?"
The Catholic Church is in the process of being destroyed by G-d. No one deserves it more. But you'll go down the drain claiming that there is "no connection whatsoever" between the adoption of higher criticism and evolution on the one hand and sexual revisionism on the other.
Your words have made your position on these issues perfectly clear; never fear about that.
Attend Mass every Sunday and holy day of obligation.
Go to confession annually if not more often or when needed.
Receive Holy Communion during Easter. Receiving weekly or daily is encouraged, though.
Observe laws on fasting and abstinence: one full meal on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday; not eating meat on Fridays during Lent.
Be subject to the pope.
Regarding the creation account in Genesis....do you agree that Rome leaves the understanding open? That the RCC doesn't hold to a six day (@24 hr day) understanding of Creation?
Wow, What verbosity. You are not a Christian, I see now. You are just a commonplace Catholic-hater.
** I know I’ll never get it, but I’m still waiting.**
Remember me?...... I asked you if David was a prophet. I’m still waiting.
I asked you if Messiah comes twice. You said only once.
So I pointed out about Moses telling Israel that God would send a prophet like unto him. Moses came twice.
You didn’t answer.
Think about it. Moses came as a baby, when he was grown he came to his own and his own received him not (”who made thee a judge and a prince over us”). He went away, and was found among those that were not Israelites. He came back to his own as the God empowered deliverer.
Let’s have a second witness:
Before Moses, Joseph came twice. First, as the one who was rejected because of jealousy, was symbolically slain. He was received by those that were not his own family. His next appearance to his own, he was the God empowered deliverer.
I have addressed many times on this forum what I feel are erroneous teachings by RCs and Prods alike. But you are not blameless in your testimony. I suggest you get off your high hobby horse and tells us how much of Moses writings are not really from God.
And proving once again, it is usually the Roman Catholic who resorts to the personal attack and/or profanity when the argument goes against them.
Do you or do you not have to do those things as a Roman Catholic?
You said Roman Catholicism wasn't about rules. All I did was post some of the things a Roman Catholic has to do to be a Roman Catholic.
If I'm wrong, tell me.
Canon 1247 On Sundays and other holy days of obligation the faithful are bound to participate in the Mass; they are also to abstain from those labors and business concerns which impede the worship to be rendered to God, the joy which is proper to the Lord's Day, or the proper relaxation of mind and body.https://www.ewtn.com/expert/answers/sunday_mass.htm
Can. 989 After having reached the age of discretion, each member of the faithful is ob-liged to confess faithfully his or her grave sins at least once a year.http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/__P3H.HTM
“Canon 920 §1. After being initiated into the Most Holy Eucharist, each of the faithful is obliged to receive holy communion at least once a year. “§2. This precept must be fulfilled during the Easter season unless it is fulfilled for a just cause at another time during the year.”http://www.ewtn.com/library/liturgy/zlitur565.htm
https://www.catholic.com/qa/why-do-catholics-practice-fasting-and-abstinence-during-lent
I don't expect you to understand this, but all the parallels in the world you can find between the TaNa"KH and the "new testament" do not prove that chrstianity is true or a "fulfillment" of the Torah. The Torah is the permanent true religion. The notion that the Prophets prophesied that it would later be replaced by something else is merely an assertion of chrstianity. Assertions prove nothing. To simply ceaselessly quote the "new testament" or repeat chrstian claims does not prove either the "new testament" or chrstianity. This is a logical fallacy known as "affirmation of the consequent." Ironically, the same fallacy is used by evolutionists.
I know telling you that was useless, but you can't claim I haven't answered you. Meanwhile, your only response to any defense of Torah is merely to repeat chrstianity's claims (without even trying to prove them).
public supporters of abortion can receive communion, that’s all I need to know
Uh? I don’t think going to church on Sunday is considered extraordinary for most Christians, and even some pagan types. You are trying to make mass sound overly complicated for your own purpose of making Catholicism seem formulaic.
So? Who cares? This is one of the very oldest, richest and biggest global religions. Its generosity, charity, historical influence, artistic, cultural and scientific merits are incalculable.
You are free to follow your views, but no matter those little picky points, the Catholic Church is fantastic, beautiful, immense, grand, holy, diverse, the best!!! All glory and honor to the Blessed Mother of God!
You claimed Roman Catholicism wasn't a bunch of rules.
All I did was show you a few of the requirements of being a Roman Catholic.
You are trying to make mass sound overly complicated for your own purpose of making Catholicism seem formulaic.
Rome has done that enough on its own.
So? Who cares?
Obviously you do as you made the initial assertion and then said I wasn't a Christian! Further you accused me of being a "commonplace Catholic-hater."
It's been my observation that some Roman Catholics on these threads have some of the thinnest skin and just cannot handle it when various aspects of their denomination are brought to light.
This is one of the very oldest, richest and biggest global religions. Its generosity, charity, historical influence, artistic, cultural and scientific merits are incalculable.
And those things mean what to God?? Is He impressed by any of these?
You are free to follow your views, but no matter those little picky points, the Catholic Church is fantastic, beautiful, immense, grand, holy, diverse, the best!!! All glory and honor to the Blessed Mother of God!
You don't even realized what you posted....all glory and honor to the Blessed Mother of God!
But it illustrates the heart of the Roman Catholic....they place Mary at the center of their thoughts.
Now contrast your blasphemous post with Scripture:
The Word tells us, "For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever. Amen." Romans 11:36 NASB
To our God and Father be glory forever and ever. Amen. Philippians 4:20 NASB
to Him be the glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, forever and ever. Amen. Ephesians 3:21 NASB
Noah came twice. First as a faithful witness. Was lifted (by boat) above the earth. He returned and inherited the earth.
Abraham came twice to the promised land. First as Abram. Then off to Egypt where was respected. He returned to the promised land, where he was given a new name, and offspring.
Jacob was born in the land of promise. He left alone, but returned to claim his inheritance, and had his name changed to Israel.
Then the afore mentioned Joseph, and Moses.
Then there’s David. He came in faith, and was rejected, living away from his own. He returned to be the ruler of the nation.
I think you are a hypocrite. You believe what you want when it comes to the words of Moses.
The Torah doesn't authorize chrstianity. Therefore chrstianity is false.
You accept the "new testament" for no reason whatsoever. You just do. Anybody can accept any religion on its own authority. But only the authority of the Torah can be externally proven.
And evolutionist, and historical-critical, and utterly contemptuous of simple people (unless their members of traditionally Catholic ethnic groups). And quite logically, now pro-homo and circling the drain as well.
Is Genesis 3:15 (first prophecy God gave Moses) in the Torah?
14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
That is the foundation from which Christ was promised... Who were those two symbolic trees planted in the Garden of Eden? One was the ‘tree of life’ and the other was the ‘tree of the knowledge of good and evil’. When exactly did that ‘tree’ get that knowledge?
Ignorance is bliss ... The serpent has already been judged to death ... Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14... How is a serpent killed ... why you bruise his head... has not yet happened.
“traditionaly Catholic ethnic groups”?
Where do you come up with such nonsense?
Yes, so you believe, good for you. In a billion faithful some weirdos (and millions of “simple” people) will be there. What is strange is you ask Catholics about their religion and then argue with them! You are more of an expert on the faith than we are? Instead of promoting your own faith, or explaining it, you bash others’. What is the point? Seems you have a love-hate relationship with Catholicism.
14 And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.
That is the foundation from which Christ was promised...
Yes, this is what chrstianity teaches. But your continually repeating the teachings like a parrot doesn't prove them. Unfortunately, none of you seem to understand that.
“traditionaly Catholic ethnic groups”?
Where do you come up with such nonsense?
Six years in the Catholic Church reading articles praying ignorant Mayans and medieval Catholic peasants to the skies but attacking rural America for believing all the events in Genesis actually happened.
I actually corresponded for a while with the late, unlamented, disreputable Archbishop Wheelan three or four times. I still have his letters.
I will take the Words given to Moses, and the other holy prophets, over what some willingly deny. We each get to make choices and we each will get to account for what we chose. Some internet jock has no power over Christ the Redeemer.
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