Act of love of the holy priest of Ars

I am looking forward to Archbishop Prendergast's updating his blog. In the meantime, I had hoped to steal a beautiful prayer that he included in this most recent post. But alas, it won't seem to paste for some reason. So, go on over and visit the Archbishop's excellent blog for your edification. You won't regret it, even if you are one of my evangelical readers.

He makes the life of a bishop seem like such a joyful enterprise.

UPDATE:

Here's the prayer. A gift and not stolen!

ACT OF LOVE OF THE HOLY PARISH PRIEST OF ARS

I love you, oh my God and my only desire is to love you until my last breath.

I love you, oh infinitely loveable God and I prefer to die loving you than to live a single moment without loving you.

I love you, oh my God and I long for heaven only in order to know the bliss of loving you perfectly.

I love you, oh my God and I only fear going to hell because there I will never experience the sweet consolation of loving you.

Oh my God, if my tongue is not able to say at every opportunity that I love you, I want at least my heart to repeat it to you as many times as I take a breath.

My God give me the grace of suffering out of love for you, of loving you while I suffer. Give me the grace of one day breathing my last out of love for you and at the same time feeling how much I love you.

The closer I come to my final end the more I beseech you to intensify and perfect my love for you. Amen

Isn't that beautiful? I especially love this verse: My God give me the grace of suffering out of love for you, of loving you while I suffer. Give me the grace of one day breathing my last out of love for you and at the same time feeling how much I love you.

Michael Harris calls it a cover up

Michael Harris's investigative journalism has led to I don't know how many Royal Commissions, but there have been more than a few. Now a talk radio host on CFRA, Michael also has a Friday column in the Ottawa Sun. Today's is blistering on the Communion controversy. He writes (my bolds):

For observant Catholics, the host is the body of Christ in the Eucharist, so it obviously matters to them. We do all Catholics a disservice by trivializing or totally ignoring that part of the story, no matter how deep our secular stupor has become.

Does it matter to the prime minister? Of course it does, because he says he received the host, which means his credibility is on the line. It also matters because he was apparently set up by someone to make Canadians believe he had palmed the wafer like a card shark might slip an ace up his sleeve in a crooked poker game.

Does it matter to the newspaper that broke this story, the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal? Now we are back to Scobie and Graham Greene, for this is a matter of the newspaper’s soul. This is not getting something wrong, this is making something wrong.

snip

The apology is a cover-up, not a remorseful recognition of a mistake. I have been a publisher and an editor-in-chief. I know that what happened at the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal had nothing to do with “editing.” The copy of two reporters was transformed and sent on a mission, not edited.

Michael demands the answers to a number of questions that I, frankly, am surprised to see that he is the only one asking. But then, Michael has a prophetic streak and saw the innocence and railroading of Donald Marshall when everyone had written him off, who recognized the sexual and physical abuse of Mt. Cashel orphans by Christian Brothers when no one else is paying attention, and so on.

He concludes:

Someone tried to corrupt the public record through a newspaper. If that’s a laughing matter, the joke is on everyone.

Not the way to woo Catholic voters

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has been making a concerted effort to Catholic voters back through the efforts of Liberal MP John McKay, a staunch pro-life evangelical. They want to show that socially conservative Catholics and evangelicals have a home in the big Liberal tent. I know John and he's a good guy. I've met Michael Ignatieff and heard him speak on religious matters and I like him.

But like "revanche," who made the following comment over at Steve Janke's site, I'm puzzled by the official Opposition Leader's Office response. Here's "revanche."(my bolds).

I am surprised Iggy's office is still flogging that YouTube video in their official response.

Very classy.

Mr. Ignatieff, If you really are interested in defending the sacred, start by contemplating what the Eucharist is, the grace it represents and what it cost the Giver to bring us all to His table.

Then ask yourself, is it wise to ask people who take this seriously to take offense where clearly none was meant?

If this is your strategy to attract Catholic voters, then you really do not understand Catholics at all. Do you now understand why this "scandal" backfired on you, why your YouTube video isn't getting many hits?

As an alternative, why not try forming policies that respect Catholic values?

Not comfortable bringing religion into politics? Funny, you brought it up...

You can see the official response at Steve's site or at Kady O'Malley's blog.

The issue isn't when and how Harper consumed Communion. The continued focus on that is offensive. Those who keep referring back to the video, to what most believing Catholics have been willing to forgive, are making a grave mistake if they think it'll win Catholic voters by harping on this.

Time to doff the clown suits

Great essay by Edward T. Oakes, S.J.:

In 1968, a professor of theology at the University of Regensburg wrote a modestly sized treatise on the Apostles' Creed called Introduction to Christianity. Its impact, however, was anything but modest, for the book so captivated Pope Paul VI that he made its author archbishop of Munich (and later cardinal, one of his last appointments to the college); and just a few years later, the new pope, John Paul II, summoned the same man to Rome to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. His name, of course, was Joseph Ratzinger.

Not many books have changed history, but this one certainly did, not just for the author personally but also for the wider Church. For it would be hard to exaggerate the influence of this bookish Bavarian, not just on John Paul II (perhaps the most influential pope in history) but on Catholics worldwide through the cardinal's role as doctrinal overseer and enforcer of magisterial orthodoxy, and now, as the Supreme Pontiff himself. What made the book itself so remarkable was not just its deft use of the Apostles' Creed to explain Christianity to the lay reader or its acute analysis of unbelief and the secular mind. An even greater virtue of the book was the future pope's keen analysis of why the promising spirit of Vatican II failed to bring about a reunited Christianity and a re-Christianized Europe.

According to Ratzinger's analysis, post-Enlightenment Christianity in Europe had been conned into adopting an evangelical strategy too superficial in its approach and too intimidated by Enlightened objections to Christian doctrine. He illustrated the reasoning behind this anemic strategy with a parable, one that Søren Kierkegaard once recounted about a fire that breaks out backstage right before a circus is set to perform. In panic the stage manager sends out one of the performers -- a clown as it happens, and naturally already in costume -- to warn the audience to leave immediately. But the spectators take the clown's desperate pleas as part of his schtick; and the more he gesticulates the more they laugh, until fire engulfs the whole theater. This, said Kierkegaard, is the situation of Christians: The more they gesticulate with their creed, the more laughable they seem to their skeptical neighbors, until the world becomes engulfed in the flames of war and mutual hatred -- a hell on earth as prelude to the hell after death. If only these Christian clowns had first thought to change out of their goofy costume, he implied, the theatergoing world might have been spared.

This is really good

All of this David Layman post on the Spengler First Things blog is well worth reading for its look at the parable of the Good Samaritan:

I was trying to locate some of the 0ld warnings about mixing religion and politics. So I searched for “God not Republican”. I was informed, however, that that “Campaign [is] Unavailable.” The “alert has expired.” Fuggedaboutit. Drop it. The crisis is inoperative.

The Alert has expired!

On further thought, I realized: boy, that’s a relief. Another fearsome enemy of democracy and the American way has been vanquished. The dark clouds of the Bush theocracy that were about to terminally overshadow our freedoms forever have dissipated in the bright light of Obama’s smile.

Alas, just when I thought as a believer that it was safe to let politics be politics and God be God, the claim that God does take political sides reasserts itself: Oliver Reed disingenously asks the question: “Would God back universal health care?” What?

Please read the whole post.

Then consider this. If we are coerced to be neighborly, are we fulfilling the law of love?

There does need to be redistribution of wealth, self-sacrificing love of the neighbor. But the key is that it must be voluntary if it is to be truly charitable.

The problem with statism and utopian Marxist dreams of universal equality is the way they trample on human freedom. Some virulent forms end up being murderous towards those who refuse to cower before the system.

Shameful, shameful, shameful

So, I open up my Citizen and my National Post this morning and there is nothing about the Communion scandal--the real one---the Telegraph Journal apology for the original bogus story and the fact that every major news media treated it as fact and covered it upside down and backwards for days.

Well, maybe tomorrow. Maybe on the weekend we'll see a column or two looking back at this. I am an optimist and have the great fault of thinking more highly of people than they really are.

Charles Adler has these thoughts:

This story was supposed to be a Tory shroud, a garment to bury Harper with. But instead of burying him, they simply confirmed for him and to him and everyone else that is paying attention, that the newspaper had an agenda and maybe those who took it seriously and repeated the lie also have one. Now while the paper ran an apology there was no apology from the CBC or anyone else for treating the story as NEWS, not as a sideshow, not as a carnival, not as a oddity on the Internet, but as NEWS, like it really happened, like it was really truthful. Question to any mainstream media people listening. If you didn't fall in love with the story, but felt it was important to take seriously, why wouldn't you check with the priest, why wouldn't you check with the reporters on the story? It's clear as a bell their story was doctored as well, torqued, perverted, changed. They too were on the receiving end of an apology.

If the CBC and others want to continue to masquerade as agents of truth, as entertainers like me, talk shows hosts and pundits like me...if they want to pretend they are journalists why not practice Journalism 101, check out the facts as the newspaper laid them out. Confirm the story or drop it or say it's in one newspaper, one very liberal friendly newspaper. But if you simply adopt the story as truth because it conforms with your religiously held belief that the Prime Minister is an unknowing, uncaring, unfeeling, insensitive, anti-Catholic scoundrel, well then I suppose you would do what you did. And what you did wasn't honest, ethical, truthful, or useful. And you have not succeeded in portraying the PM as a scoundrel. But you have made yourselves look like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

Amen to that.

But hey, the truth will win in the end. The battle is the Lord's and everything that is hidden now will be shouted from the rooftops.

Here's what Douglas Todd had to say in the Vancouver Sun:

The slow-news summer “story” about whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper actually ate or pocketed a Catholic communion wafer had a bad smell even before the editors apologized for it, which they did today.
It had been the kind of religion story, unfortunately, that many cynical journalists are drawn to. Why? Because it makes Catholics and Protestants look like kooks, hung up on elaborate ritualistic niceties – rather than focussing on actually practising love or lending a hand to those who need it.

He also quotes John Stackhouse at length. Stackhouse supplies what I think is the most likely explanation for the Prime Minister's seeming hesitation after receiving the Host.

Oh, and here's the Star's contribution to the story.

Conservatives privately fanned a CTV report that suggested Liberals planted a false – and since retracted – story with a New Brunswick newspaper that the Prime Minister pocketed a communion wafer. The Liberals called the suggestion nonsense, and pointed to a CPAC video of the incident as self-explanatory.

It just gets curioser and curioser . . .

Kady O'Malley has this response from the Opposition Leader's Office (OLO) about the Communion controversy that the mainstream media continues to call "Wafergate."

“This is nonsense. We didn’t record the videotape – CPAC did. And as the saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Canadians need only look at the video on You Tube to see what happened.”

In other words, about that Telegraph Journal apology to the Prime Minister and retraction of the accusations that he pocketed the Host? Nothing to see here, folks. Instead, look at the video because it proves our case.

But the video is inconclusive, if you look at it from an objective standpoint. Harper does not consume the Host on camera. But the camera moves away.

And, really, do most Canadians care?

This is really inside baseball for Catholics and evangelicals, two core constituencies that could make or break the Liberals in the next election. For most secularist journalists it's a joke.

But what's missing from the equation is genuine outrage from grassroots Catholics. Frankly, I know a lot of grassroots Catholics. I know a lot of people in the Catholic hierarchy. What the Prime Minister did at the funeral is not a big object of concern for them. There is forgiveness and a willingness to overlook what seems to have been an honest mistake on the part of the Prime Minister and the Moncton archbishop.

But if it proves true that what is sacred has been used as a political football, I dunno, the grassroots feeling on this could change drastically.

Check this Lisa Keenan column out from July 10

This is most interesting. From the July 10 Telegraph Journal by Lisa Keenan (my bolds):

I'm not sure that it will receive as many hits as Abraham Zapruder's film footage of John F. Kennedy being shot, or Susan Boyle's rendition of "I Dreamed a Dream," but video footage of Prime Minister Stephen Harper receiving the Holy Eucharist at Romeo Leblanc's funeral last week managed to send the Internet into a tizzy just as things were winding down from the Michael Jackson funeral. In the future it may be known as "The clip that launched a thousand blog entries!"

I would have missed the "scandal" entirely if I hadn't gone for my morning Tim's and run into a Liberal colleague, who chuckled, "We're going to force for an election over this!"

"What now?" I asked, with a pained expression.

"It seems your leader took communion in your church."

This is an election issue? Well, it may be now but not in the way said Liberal colleague planned.

If the Communion scandal was orchestrated . . .

it will only serve to drive away the Catholics and other religious voters who take their faith seriously. But that's my opinion.

Here's my latest news story on this at the Catholic Register's website.

Interestingly, while Liberal MP John McKay vigorously denies the Liberals had anything to do with planting a story in the Telegraph Journal, a Liberal partisan is still running videos on his blog, having uploaded a new one that was just posted on YouTube 20 hours ago. In other words, some Liberals are continuing repeat the allegation that Harper did not consume the Host.

I do not doubt John McKay was telling me the truth. But is he in the loop? Is Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff? Who is running the show? Is there, as I suspect, division in the Liberal Party over this?

Steve Janke at Angry in the Great White North raises some interesting questions about corruption of the media:

Political parties feed stories to the media all the time. To bloggers too. But journalists, professionals or amateurs, attempt to establish the veracity of the story before running it. It is part of their job, and a political party trying to push a story into the headlines knows that this is the case. Indeed, a story without any credibility would not likely get this far, the pols knowing it would never get past even the most sympathetic journalist. But in this case, as per Bob Fife's report, the political party bypassed the journalists to go to the publisher who then injected the unverified (and as it turns out, false) information into the story filed by two professional journalists. This is corruption in the classic sense -- the data delivered was not the data originally reported. This is not an example of trying to influence the media. This is an example of corrupting the media. The Liberals have to respond to Bob Fife's allegations -- admit that the allegations are true and reveal the details so the corruption can be rooted out, or accuse Bob Fife of being mistaken, and challenge him to provide more substantiating information. Because if the allegation is true, and that corrupting influence remains in the Liberal Party, unrevealed and free to continue his or her efforts or the credibility of the media is at risk.

Could this be the sponsorship scandal of the next election?

Well....if the votes of Catholics count in 2009 or 2010, it very well could be. But interestingly, the Catholics who really care about the Blessed Sacrament, (the ones targeted to be offended against Harper if the campaign was orchestrated), are the ones most likely to be completely and utterly turned off by the cynical manipulation of the central, dearly-loved element of their faith, the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist.

Small "l" liberal Catholics who believe more like Protestants that the Host is merely a symbol and would like a more open Communion table, won't care one way or the other what the Prime Minister did with the Host because to them it's not sacred. These small "l" liberal Catholics did not abandon the Liberals for the Tories. If they left the Liberals it was for the NDP or the Greens, unless they tended to be liberal on social issues and more conservative on the economy and national security---Blue Liberals, in other words.

No, the ones that really will care about this issue have probably already abandoned the Liberals and this will not make them eager to come back....that is if it can be proven that it was orchestrated.

Honduras the new pariah state

Dennis Prager is broadcasting his radio program from Honduras as a show of support. He writes:

The way in which nearly all the world's media portray the legal, Supreme Court-ordered ouster of President Manuel (Mel) Zelaya is one major reason for the universal opprobrium. Because military men took part in the deportation of the sitting president, it has been portrayed as a classic Latin American "military coup," and who can support a military coup?

The lack of context in which this ouster took place has prevented the vast majority of the world's news watchers and readers from understanding what has happened.

I wonder how many people who bother to read the news -- as opposed to only listen to or watch news reports -- know:

-- Zelaya was plotting a long-term, possibly lifetime, takeover of the Honduran government through illegally changing the Honduran Constitution.

-- Zelaya had personally led a mob attack on a military facility to steal phony "referendum" ballots that had been printed by the Venezuelan government.

-- Weeks earlier, in an attempt to intimidate the Honduran attorney general -- as reported by The Wall Street Journal's Mary Anastasia O'Grady, one of the only journalists in the world who regularly reports the whole story about Honduras -- "some 100 agitators, wielding machetes, descended on the attorney general's office. 'We have come to defend this country's second founding,' the group's leader reportedly said. 'If we are denied it, we will resort to national insurrection.'"

-- No member of the military has assumed a position of power as a result of the "military coup."

-- Zelaya's own party, the Liberal Party, supported his removal from office and deportation from Honduras.

-- The Liberal Party still governs Honduras.

Why the Liberals are so desperate to get the Catholic vote back

McGill political scientist Elisabeth Gidengil delivered this paper to the Canadian Political Science Association in May.

Entitled "Anatomy of a Liberal Defeat," she looks at the Liberal dominance in the year 2ooo and its precipitous decline up to the 2008 election.

"The Liberals were able to coast to victory in 2000 with the support of two key groups: visible minorities and Catholics," Gidengil writes on page 3. "By 2008, the Liberals could not longer count on their loyalty. The visible minority vote dropped 14 points between 2000 and 2004."

The NDP was the main beneficiary, she said, but in 2008, the Liberals lost "a massive 19 points."

"In fact, minority voters were almost as likely to vote Conservative in 2008 as they were to vote Liberal."

Then she goes on to say the Catholic vote "tells a similar story."

"Catholic support has dropped a massive 24 points since 2000. In 2006, Catholics were as likely to vote Conservative as Liberal. In 2008, they clearly actually preferred the Conservatives to the Liberals."

Gidengil also notes a "troubling developed for the Liberals" regarding age. "Younger voters were significantly less likely to vote Liberal in 2008 and this cost the party one and a half points."

She has a lot that's interesting to say about a range of issues, from the economy to the environment and how effective the Liberals have been on those issues. Also, she notes the negative effects of the Sponsorship Scandal.

She concludes: "The Liberals can not longer take the support of Catholics or visible minorities for granted."

On page 10, she says: "Catholic and minority voters have been the twin pillars of Liberal dominance, but their support is clearly crumbling."

Now, it has been my opinion that there are two reasons why the Liberals have lost Catholic support. One is the Liberals' ramming the redefinition of marriage through Parliament and the other was partisan messaging that painted traditional marriage supporters as unCanadian and anti-Charter and that attacked Christian voters in general.

But Gidengil says her research does not support the idea that same-sex marriage drove Catholics away from the Liberals. On page 25, she writes:

"The common assumption has been that the same-sex marriage issue cost the Liberals the support of many Catholics," she said. "This is simply not the case, at least in 2004 and 2006. Opposition to same-sex marriage did not have a significant effect on the prpobability that a Catholic vote [sic?] would vote Liberal, but in 2006, views about abortion did. What really mattered, though, in both 2004 and 2006 was the sponsorship scandal. But for the sponsorship scandal, the Catholic vote would have been eight points higher in 2004 and five points higher in 2006. The story is different in 2008. It was not Dion and it was not the green shift. In contrast to 2004 and 2006, Catholics who oppose same-sex marriage were less likely to vote Liberal. And for the first time, Catholics who believe the Bible is the literal word of God were significantly less likely to vote Liberal."

Most interesting. Most interesting.

Okay, where's the front page coverage?

Now that the Telegraph Journal has apologized on its front page for the bogus Communion story, where are the similar mea culpas from mainstream media outlets across the country for running with the story and displaying it prominently.

The Toronto Star, which had the Communion issue front and centre on its website when it hit the news July 8, has nary a mention of it this morning, except on Susan Delacourt's blog.

A couple of unusual things about this newspaper apology. First, it appears on page A1 of the Saint John Telegraph Journal. Second, it goes into some detail about the mechanics behind the story; absolving the reporters of blame and placing the fault at the feet of the editors. Usually, newspapers claim collective blame for any mistakes (a sometimes infuriating policy for reporters.)

I'm very curious about how comments were included in a story without the reporters' knowledge. That too is unusual, and way beyond ethical.

Kudos to Susan for raising it in her blog. Let's see some front page coverage and some investigation into whether mainstream media outlets were conscripted into laying the fake sod.

Here's why I suspected Astroturfing (a political attempt to make something appear like a grassroots movement):

* The timing. The funeral happened on July 3. The story did not break until July 8, five days later, but did not include a rebuttal from the Prime Minister or his staff because they were flying over the Atlantic Ocean July 7 on their way to the G8 meetings in Italy. Why the five day wait? Could it have been for maximum political damage to embarrass the PM in advance of his papal audience and to upstage coverage of his G8 participation?

* The YouTube videos. Some professionally produced YouTube videos demanding an apology simultaneously appeared on the Internet. A couple of these videos were put up under the user name Catholicregister but the Catholic Register, a venerable national Catholic newspaper, had nothing to do with them and asked for them to be taken down. Interestingly, one of the "Catholicregister" videos was in Italian, accusing the PM of desecrating the Host.
The videos were designed to look like they came from grassroots Catholics who were upset.

* The Spambot email. I received an email from a group I'd never heard of or subscribed to calling itself Catholic evangelization with an anonymous person saying they were upset to see the PM put the Host in his pocket. The email had a link to a Catholic apologetics site but at the site there was no sign that whoever owned it had sent the video or took that point of view. Grassroots Catholics don't have Spambots--computers that generate lots of unwanted email such as Viagra ads.

* Grassroots conservative Catholics were not upset with the PM. This was the first tip off to me after seeing the initial YouTube video that something was amiss. Though LifeSiteNews.com linked to the video and carried news stories on it, it also included the PM's rebuttal AND distanced itself from the editorial content. LifeSiteNews.com was more critical of the Moncton archbishop for offering communion to a known Protestant than at Harper for accepting it.

Social Conservatives United also did not reflect outrage at the PM and subsequently the SoCon blogged on his suspicions the story was planted.

Also, in my talks with members of the Catholic hierarchy, I have not encountered anyone who is upset at either Harper or the archbishop. It is viewed as a mistake and something that should have been overlooked.

* The political stakes. It is widely held that Catholic voters, who had historically been more at home in the Liberal Party, helped Stephen Harper win his first minority government because of their concern over the redefinition of marriage. The Liberal Party and the New Democratic Party have both made public efforts to woo Catholic voters, who may be up for grabs in the next election as the Tory Party is not championing any issue dear to socially conservative hearts. Also, the Conservative Party has made big inroads into ethnic communities that have traditionally voted Liberal. These communities are often socially conservative but economically liberal. Some have argued that if the Conservative Party can lure enough of these ethnic voters away from the Liberal Party, it can win a majority even without increasing its seat count in Quebec.

It is interesting to me that while in Rome, journalists were questioning the political motives of Harper's seeking a papal audience, but utterly uninterested in questioning whether they were being manipulated for political reasons in the timing of the bogus Communion story.

I have to say that if this was in fact orchestrated, whoever did so did a masterful job. Even over the last few days, I have encountered person after person who has asked me "Did the Prime Minister put the Communion Host in his pocket?"

My dental hygienist, my next door neighbor, a friend in Nova Scotia . . . so it is in the Zeitgeist now. These are all people who are reasonably well-informed but not news junkies.

However, interestingly, none of the above were hostile to the PM about this. And Catholics who really care about the Blessed Sacrament are much more disturbed by the news coverage and its sacreligious tone. They are also hurt by many of the comments on various news sites. If links can be shown to any political party as the source of this, what was masterful could backfire into a huge political embarrassment.

Well, CTV's Ottawa Bureau Chief Bob Fife had this to say on last night's newscast (h/t Angry in the Great White North):

Robert Fife's stunning report starts at the 10:15 mark in tonight's CTV News webcast:

Lisa, most of us will remember the story that went all around the world about the prime minister apparently not eating the host when he was at the funeral of former governor general Romeo LeBlanc. That story was first published in the St John Telegraph Journal which is owned by the billionaire Irving family. The prime minister hit the roof. Well, today, a grovelling apology from the paper. They said the story was not true. So what happened? Well, I'm told that the Liberals passed the story to young Jamie Irving who was the publisher of the paper. He passed it to the editor who put it in the paper without checking it out, and today the editor has been fired, and Jamie's father has suspended his son for thirty days, and I'm told the prime minister is pretty thrilled with that.

Well, will there be any examination by various news outlets of how they were conscripted into making this story go around the world?

Liberal MP John McKay, who has been tasked with outreach to religious voters, both Catholic and non-Catholic, just told me Fife's comments strike him as gossip and hearsay.

He said he would like to see more proof.

McKay said he was disturbed by the original stories.

"As I understand the religious sensitivities here they are quite significant," he said.

It’s a classic case of media who have absolutely no appreciation of religious sensitivities, blundering about in an area about which they know nothing, inflamingg sectarian issues, he said.

McKay said he sympathized with the Prime Minister on this story.

The Globe on Communion-a-quiddick

James Irving, the scion of the Irving family who chose journalism over the traditional strongholds of oil refineries and pulp mills has left his position as publisher of the New Brunswick Telegraph Journal.

This came as the newspaper offered an apology to Stephen Harper and two of its reporters for factual errors inserted into a story that accused the Prime Minister of pocketing a communion wafer at a funeral mass earlier this month for former governor-general Roméo LeBlanc.

The apology, published on the front page of Tuesday's paper and on its website, said the wafer story was “inaccurate and should not have been published.”

“We pride ourselves in maintaining high standards of journalism and ethical reporting, and regret this was not followed in this case,” the apology stated.

A spokeswoman for the paper offered no further information on Mr. Irving's action yesterday. She said that editor Shawna Richer is also no longer in her position.

Video footage of the July 3 funeral service shows Mr. Harper receiving the communion wafer, but the camera cuts away before the Prime Minister puts it in his mouth.

Debate ensued about whether Mr. Harper committed a sacrilegious faux-pas by walking away with the body of Christ.

Mr. Harper insisted he consumed the wafer.

Remember that story about Harper and Communion?

The Telegraph Journal retracts and apologizes:

On Wednesday, July 8, 2009, the Telegraph-Journal published a story about the funeral mass celebrating the life of former Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc that was inaccurate and should not have been published. We pride ourselves in maintaining high standards of journalism and ethical reporting, and regret this was not followed in this case.

The story stated that a senior Roman Catholic priest in New Brunswick had demanded that the Prime Minister's Office explain what happened to the communion wafer which was handed to Prime Minister Harper during the celebration of communion at the funeral mass. The story also said that during the communion celebration, the Prime Minister "slipped the thin wafer that Catholics call 'the host' into his jacket pocket".

There was no credible support for these statements of fact at the time this article was published, nor is the Telegraph-Journal aware of any credible support for these statements now. Our reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras, who wrote the story reporting on the funeral, did not include these statements in the version of the story that they wrote. In the editing process, these statements were added without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support for them.

The Telegraph-Journal sincerely apologizes to the Prime Minister for the harm that this inaccurate story has caused. We also apologize to reporters Rob Linke and Adam Huras and to our readers for our failure to meet our own standards of responsible journalism and accuracy in reporting.

Wow. H/t Small Dead Animals.

Stephen Taylor has more:

I’ve learned from a source close to one of the journalists that at least one of them may have gone so far as to seek advice and consider a lawsuit against the newspaper if the paper did not retract the story and absolve (no pun intended) the journalists of fabricating a significant portion the article.

Printing such a false hit piece can get a journalist frozen out of any future access to the PMO under the current administration. It’s a rare sight to see journalists defend their integrity against their senior management in the newsroom, however, in this case it may have been a matter of professional self-preservation.

What motivation was there behind torquing over three quarters of the story? Did somebody in Ottawa (or Toronto) pick up the phone and push a more interesting story to the editors instead?

Well, I smelled Astroturfing from as far away as Rome when this story first broke, especially after videos started appearing on YouTube, some under user name of Catholicregister, even though the Catholic Register, a venerable national Catholic newspaper, had nothing to do with uploading them.

This is even worse than I thought.

The Calgary Herald reports:

TORONTO— A controversy over whether Prime Minister Stephen Harper pocketed a communion wafer has resulted in fallout at one of New Brunswick's most prominent newspapers.

The Telegraph-Journal, which published the strange allegations three weeks ago, issued a front-page apology to Harper on Tuesday and the company confirmed that the paper's chief editor and publisher have both been removed from their duties.

The apology came on the same day that a dozen professors from some of the province's universities released a statement saying they were boycotting the newspaper over an earlier decision to fire a student intern over errors that appeared in a story.

Harper — who initially slammed the communion wafer story as a "low point" in journalism — on Tuesday accepted the newspaper's apology, spokesman Andrew MacDougall said. The prime minister had not been seeking any legal remedy for the inaccuracies in the story, he noted.

Harper's office has always maintained he consumed the wafer during a Catholic funeral mass for former governor general Romeo LeBlanc in Memramcook, N.B. But a short amateur video of the funeral mass that began circulating on the Internet was inconclusive, which in part fanned the controversy.

Catholic doctrine holds that once consecrated the wafer, or host as it is sometimes called, becomes the actual body of Christ and pocketing it would have been considered sacrilege. But the priest who presided over the ceremony later told Canwest News Service that Harper did, in fact, consume the wafer.

The incident erupted as a brief media sideshow after the story was picked up by news outlets across the country while the prime minister was at the G8 summit in Italy.

In its apology, which acknowledged there was "no credible support" for the statements accusing Harper of pocketing the host, the newspaper clears the story's reporters of any fault and attributes the errors to the editing process.

Meeting the Pope

My personal account of meeting the Holy Father is up at the Catholic Register site:

The big day arrived. A white minibus picked up the small contingent of journalists that included a television crew, some photographers, a Radio Canada reporter, a couple of print journalists and some PMO staff. The bus took us to St. Peter’s Square, which had already begun to fill with tourists. The weather in Rome was perfect: warm, dry, sunny with a pleasant breeze.

We passed through a checkpoint of Swiss Guards beside St. Peter’s Basilica, through narrow passages and archways into the Cortille San Damaso, a courtyard inside the Apostolic Palace. As we waited, a group of Swiss Guards, wearing the multi-coloured striped uniform designed by Michelangelo marched into the courtyard, while another Swiss Guard raised the yellow and white papal flag from a second-storey window. A red-patterned carpet was being set in place for the PM.

We did not witness the Harper’s arrival. Instead, we were escorted through the rooms and hallways the Harper delegation would soon pass through. We passed an honour guard of Swiss Guards standing at attention, then through the magnificent frescoed hallway of 13 arches painted by Raphael.

Pictures from the day are here.

The Gates controversy continues

This is not good for Obama.

The Shakedown Song

In honor of Ezra Levant, Lindy Vopnfjord sings the Shakedown song.



Spread the word. Let's see if we can get 100,000 views.

And don't forget Mark Steyn's Ezra Levant fundraiser at the Steyn Store starting at midnight tonight.

Or you can donate to Ezra's legal fund via his website. Ezra writes:

To battle stations!

P.S. Thanks very much to everyone who has chipped in to my legal defence fund. Seriously, that's the only thing I'm worried about here, running out of money for lawyers. I've got plenty of fight in me -- I'm the most stubborn person I know. If you can help shore up my legal defence fund, I promise to fight until I'm done. Not until they're done, but until I'm done. Jennifer Lynch knows what I mean.

Please click on the PayPal button below. If you’d prefer to send in a cheque by snail mail, please make cheques payable to my lawyer:

“Christopher Ashby in Trust”

Attn: Ezra Levant defence fund

Suite 1013, 8 King Street East

Toronto, Ontario, M5C 1B5

Thank you very much. With your help, I promise to fight this battle all the way to the end.

"I am not a registered non-profit organization. Donations are not tax deductible for federal income tax purposes."

Cardinal Ouellet third on Newsweek's list

Newsweek asks who could replace Pope Benedict XVI and number three on their list is:

Cardinal Marc Ouellet
Archbishop of Quebec, Canada

Noted for his cheerful, open, and apparently humble persona as well as his uncompromising orthodoxy, Ouellet, 64, is often regarded as the cardinal to watch for the future. A lone voice surrounded by Canada's often aggressive secularism, he has nonetheless remained one of the most staunch public defenders of the Catholic faith. A native French speaker and the author of many books, he is also a proficient linguist, at home outside the corridors of the Vatican and the intrigues of Italy.

He was on a list of papabile the last time around, too.

The healthcare debate

Healthcare is one of those debates that I'd rather avoid. It was the topic of conversation when I was in California and I would do my best not to participate as it feels too much like work and I was on vacation.

I also think that there is a lot of hype and hyperbole on both sides. Living in Canada, I'd say our single payer system is not as bad as some claim, or as good as others claim. There are trade-offs, no matter what you do. And I also think it is unfair to describe the American system as profit-driven or market-driven. It's a hybrid that has been already grossly distorted by huge government interventions. It needs reform, but maybe those reforms need to be more in a free market, competition direction and not a statist, one-size fits all approach.

That said, a government-run health care system is not free health care. We pay dearly for it through our taxes. I think if people saw the health care bill separated out of what they pay in taxes, the expensive private insurance options in the United States might look like a bargain.

And our taxes in Canada make a huge difference in our respective standards of living.

I confess, I like the feel of the government safety net below me. But I also like the fact that we have a private tier of health care in the United States of America so that when Canadian officials tell me I can't see a specialist for 6 weeks for what my family doctor suspects is a malignant cancer, I can go south and see one within a few days. I'm also glad to be living in Ottawa where it is possible to get world class medical care, it being the nation's capital and all.

But I am challenged as well by arguments that Mark Steyn and other conservatives raise:

What’s so moral about relieving the citizen of responsibility for his own health care? If free citizens of the wealthiest societies in human history are not prepared to make provision for their own health, what other core responsibilities of functioning adulthood are they likely to forego?

The fact is that some people won't take responsibility and some people, even with our Canadian system and even when they do take steps to take care of themselves, cannot bear the catastrophic costs of major illness, a bad car accident or disability even with insurance and the safety net.

Once upon a time, the solution was charity. Catholic and Salvation Army and Jewish hospitals were built, communities rallied to support (and still do) those who were struck by catastrophe.

Then what faith and love and a desire to further the common good built, was handed over lock stock and barrel to government funding and increasingly government control. When there was still a basic Judeo-Christian ethos to society it looked like a good idea: instead of leaving one's healthcare to the vagueries of local decision-making where some might fall through the cracks, why not professionalize the whole thing for the sake of equality and efficiency?
No one thought though about how professionalizing anything would drive the costs up.

But now that our society is moving into postmodern and relativist conceptions of morality and the human person and of human dignity, look at what is creeping in. Obamacare has elderly people in the United States fearing that it will be euthanasia by the back door, and the fact that the new bill will have mandatory counselling on end of life options is sending chills down peoples' spines and not in a good way. Abortion is already paid for and defended as a necessary health service in Canada and conscientious objections are being trampled on. This, too, is coming to the United States.

It's sad to me that government is the knee-jerk default solution for everything. People rarely think of civil society solutions to anything anymore. That's the problem with government, it shrivels civil society and individual responsibility. Why couldn't dioceses or religious organizations, for example, take out group medical insurance in the United States so that they can ensure that people with previous medical conditions or no jobs can get insured? Why does it have to be government? But then if people think government is going to do everything, they put chump change in the collection plate. That's what's happened in places like Quebec and Sweden.

WHen I was a kid the polio epidemic was going on. One of mothers in my neighborhood was in an iron lung. My cousin got polio. But Dr. Dow would make house calls, carrying his little black bag. Somehow people got by. They contributed to the Jimmy Fund so kids with cancer could get treatment. A milkman in my neighborhood earned enough to afford a mortgage on a duplex big enough to house his six children. Now in that Boston suburb, those same houses are out of reach except for well-paid dual income professionals.

Most of us had moms who stayed home, so one income earner was enough. But then we had second hand furniture, we made do, my mother economized. We had one bathroom.

I remember talking to someone from the Fraser Institute years ago, asking him why it was possible for a working class family with one income to afford a house that would be impossible for them to afford now unless they inherited it.

Values, he said. A difference in values. He also pointed out that the more government programs there are, the more people who actually produce things have to pay in taxes to support all those government employees who aren't producing anything. Interesting.

Holy Smoke on the TAC's talks with the Holy See

More rumors about the Traditional Anglican Communion:

The model for the move to Rome could be the proposed reception of the Traditional Anglican Communion into the Catholic Church. But Broadhurst has very firmly denied that Forward in Faith is throwing in its lot with the TAC, a rebel Anglican group that has already submitted to the Magisterium.

Now, if there’s one thing I know about Bishop Broadhurst is that he’s a wily old fox. He blows hot and cold on the subject of Rome, perhaps because he was baptised a Roman Catholic. I’m sure he wouldn’t dream of joining the TAC in any shape or form - but he’ll be jolly interested in the details of any deal it does with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Obama and the healing of racial guilt---without change

Victor Davis Hanson on what Obama's presidency meant to a lot of liberal whites.

The media and the liberal elite ignored these telltale signs, and instead were eager to accept the implicit pact that the soothing racial healer Barack Obama offered them. It was an unspoken understanding that might be paraphrased as something along the following lines: “Vote for me and I will offer you instant exemption from all prior racial guilt — and yet allow you to live your rather secluded lives as usual.”

In other words, the endowed professor, the corporate attorney, the green CEO, the endowment officer, and the high-school teacher could all continue to live in safe and separate neighborhoods, ensure their children went to mostly white and Asian schools (whether elite public or private), and through taxes for entitlements and abstract support for affirmative action still feel they were doing a great deal for race relations. As they saw it, they elected one comfortable and hip Barack Obama as their president — without living among, going to school with, or working alongside the Other.

John Allen Jr. on the split he sees in the American Catholic Church

I see this divide in the Canadian Catholic Church as well. John L. Allen Jr. writes:

This is the first papal social encyclical to so thoroughly blend economic justice with the defense of human life from conception to natural death.

"These indications of Caritas in Veritate don't have value merely as exhortations," Crepaldi said. "They invite a new way of thinking, and a new praxis, that takes account of the systematic interconnections between the anthropological themes linked to life and human dignity, and the economic, social and cultural themes linked to development."

Benedict XVI's handling of his predecessor, Pope Paul VI, reinforced the point.

Impressions of Paul VI have long been "exhibit A" for the phenomenon of cafeteria Catholicism. Conservatives tend to hail Pope Paul's birth control encyclical, Humanae Vitae, as an act of courage in the teeth of tremendous pressure, but regard his other social teaching -- especially the 1967 encyclical Populorum Progressio -- as an embarrassing concession to the radical political currents of the late 1960s. For liberals, it's precisely the opposite. Populorum Progressio stands as a high-water mark of progressive papal thought, but Humanae Vitae looms as a critical failure of nerve by the "Hamlet pope."

In Caritas in Veritate, Benedict not only defends both encyclicals, but argues that one can't be understood without the other. He hails Populorum Progressio as "the Rerum Novarum of the present age," and says that reading it in tandem with Humanae Vitae underscores "the strong links between life ethics and social ethics."

Of course, the idea that defending unborn life and defending the poor go together is not terribly revolutionary at the level of principle. It's been repeated so often in official Catholic literature that there are probably T-shirts someplace emblazoned with that mantra.

Statements of principle, however, often fail to account for the gap between what we say and what we do. In that sense, Caritas in Veritate amounts to a direct challenge to the sociology of American Catholicism.

Both at the grass roots and among the chattering classes, the American church is often described as split between its pro-lifers and its peace-and-justice contingent. More accurately, it's divided between those who see Catholic teaching as a useful tool to support their partisan preferences, whatever they may be, and those for whom the faith comes first and secular politics second.

Put differently, the real "losers" from Caritas in Veritate are Catholics who operate as chaplains to political parties, cheerleaders for political candidates, and spin doctors for either the Bush or Obama administrations, cherry-picking among church teachings to support those positions. Needless to say, the American Catholic landscape is dotted with prominent examples of all the above.

I love this Orthodox blog

I was baptized Russian Orthodox. But the people on my father's side of the family were originally Ukrainian Catholics, living in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in what is now Slovakia. Among the names for their ethnic group: Trans-Carpathian Slovaks, Russyns, Ruthenians. My mother's father was Russian, but born in Kiev, and looked like he had some Tartar blood in him--high cheekbones, almond shaped eyes. Her mother was Estonian and Finnish?, born in Tallnin. Her English father's family lived for generations in Archangel, above the Artic Circle. He owned a hemp factory that manufactured rope for the shipping industry. My grandmother spoke perfect English with a thick Russian accent.

When my father's people arrived in New Jersey in the early years of the last Century, the Roman Catholic bishops did not recognize them as Catholics because of their married priests and Byzantine liturgy. So they sought protection under the Russian Orthodox bishop and soon their children were singing in the Russian Church choir.

My father kept up the tradition of choral singing that was in his family's genes and used to sing in the best Episcopal Church choirs in the Boston area. He called himself a mercenary Episcopalian because he got paid to sing in choirs that attracted some of the top soloists in the city.

My mother was more of a Unitarian if anything, because during World War II, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee brought her and her sister, then a year later her parents, to the United States. They were stateless persons, refugees from Paris and in danger of Hitler's death camps.

So during my childhood, sometimes we went to Russian Orthodox church, but I knew no Russian and none of the liturgy made sense. I do recall loving the Russian choral music though.

Sometimes I went with my dad to Episcopal church, but it always meant a long wait alone while he had his Sunday a.m. rehearsals prior to the service.

Sometimes I was sent to the Episcopal church in my neighborhood. When I was older, I was sent to Congregational Church.

I went to Unitarian Church and joined the Unitarian youth group when I was in high school.

I abandoned the Christian religion when I was in college, but returned to it, though in a rather Gnostic, heretical way, when I was in my early twenties.

Seeker-friendly Kanata Baptist Church was just what I needed when I began to have a teachable spirit. But once I had embraced the basics of the faith, I felt drawn to a more liturgical and sacramental tradition. Thus I found my Anglican Catholic Church.

Meanwhile, I got a job writing for Roman Catholic newspapers and that has exposed me to Catholicism in all its beauty and radiance, as well as the very interesting earthly aspect of the institution.

My little Anglican Catholic Church has asked to come into communion with the Holy See, with we hope, our Anglican liturgy via the Book of Common Prayer, our King James Bible and our married priests left intact.

But our Anglican Catholic Church is also open to communion with Orthodox churches.

I told someone recently that I saw myself as a blood corpuscle in the Body of Christ because I have moved around from place to place so much within the Body and I have an appreciation for each place that I've been and what it has given me. And I have a passion for unity and for people who are say part of the arm not to be so critical of the leg because it is not an arm, or the eye people upset because the ear people don't act like eyes.

I also have a passion for the unity of the Body of Christ.

So anyway, in searching the blogosphere, somehow I happened on this blog from the Orthodox side. It looks like a good spot to bookmark. (My bolds below)

On the one hand, these efforts can hardly be faulted from an Orthodox point of view. The more people explore the “tradition,” the more likely they are to confront the faith – which was, after all, “once and for all ‘traditioned’ to the saints,” for that is the meaning of Jude 1:3. But on the other hand, there is a danger in confusing the outward trappings of “tradition” with “Tradition” itself. For what was once and for all delivered to the saints, was not so much questions of liturgy and incense (although all of these ritual and liturgical elements of Orthodoxy do carry with them the content of Tradition – they are not electives), rather the faith that was once and for all delivered to the saints was and is indeed the content of the faith - the living union between the true and living God and man. That faith truly reveals to us and makes accessible to us the true and living God, and it also reveals to us and makes accessible what it is to be a truly living human being. The content of the Christian faith, the living Tradition, is the truth of both God and man, and the truth of our salvation through union with God in Christ.

The content of the Tradition is not a set of ideas – but a reality - God with us.

And this is the problem that always accompanies attempts to reach that reality through reform. It is not our reformation that is the problem in the first place. We cannot reform ourselves into union with Christ. We can submit ourselves to union with Christ and not much else. We can cooperate with union with Christ.

Invariably, the great stumbling block faced by various attempts to “recreate” or “rediscover” the “early Church,” is that the “early Church,” is not an historical reality. It is a present reality – not simply as the “early Church” (this is not a Biblical phrase anyway). The present reality is the same as the “early Church”: it is the Body of Christ, the Pillar and Ground of Truth, the true and living Way. It never ceased nor was overcome by the gates of Hell. It has lived and thrived in enough places to have picked up many languages, many customs, but always the same faith.

This always comes as a stumbling block, I believe, because the existence of the Orthodox Church stands as a stark witness to the True and Living God - not the idea of a God – but God. In my own conversion, I was utterly shocked by this fact. I had read about Orthodoxy for years. I agreed with it for years. I would have even readily agreed for years to everything the Orthodox Church said of itself, and yet I remained outside. When, at last, my family and I were actually received into the Church, I was staggered by the reality of God. I know that sounds strange (since I had been an ordained Anglican priest for 18 years prior to that) but such was the case. There was no longer any question about discussing God, or refining the tradition, or even debating how all of it was to be applied. I was now in the thick of things and God was reigning down in canon, text, Bishop, sacrament, penance, sight, sound, rubrics (which I could not begin to fathom at first) – everything!

Thus, I surprised friends constantly in my first year or so of Orthodoxy when they asked me what was the most important thing about my conversion. My constant reply (to this day) was: the existence of God.

This, somehow, is the content that sets the Tradition apart from all discussions of appropriating tradition, etc. You do not appropriate something whose content is God. You are Baptized into it. You are Chrismated into it. You are absolved for ever having lived apart from it. You are fed it on a spoon. You are splashed with it. But you cannot appropriate it. To paraphrase: Your life’s to small to appropriate God.

Wow. Most interesting.

Father Stephen on the "fascination of wickedness"

It occurs to me that in the course of our daily lives we often concentrate on judging ourselves. We struggle not to sin (and with little success) with far greater energy than we struggle to do good (which we would find easier). Simple acts of kindness, generosity, forgiveness, patience, mercy and the like have a transforming power for both those who do such things and for those who receive such acts. In my own life, two of the kindest acts I have ever received were from Christians whom I considered to be “adversaries” (the attitude of my heart brought ‘coals of fire’ on my head). We cannot know whom God may appoint to show us mercy – but we should be ever at the ready to be used in such a way.

The state of our heart before God is perhaps the most important element in our spiritual life. For ‘God resists the proud,’ but ‘gives more grace to the humble.’ We cannot live well in this world without speaking the truth. Neither can we live except in love. I think the best path to take towards this maturity is to direct our efforts ever more towards the simple acts of mercy which God has prepared for us.

A duty to die . . .

From my article on euthanasia, now up at the Catholic Register site:

Boulva said a national conversation is needed to combat the confusion.

“Euthanasia can never be considered as care,” she said. “It is killing.”

Promoters of euthanasia and assisted suicide use “verbal engineering” through words like “dying with dignity” but they mean deliberate killing, Boulva said.

The experience of countries and American states that have legalized forms of euthanasia show how promised safeguards become eroded.

“The so-called right to choose death when you want it becomes the right of other people to choose for you when you are unable,” she said. “The autonomy and control demanded by a few become abuse of the vulnerable many.

“The so-called ‘right to die’ often becomes a ‘duty to die,’ ” she said.

Shelby Steele on the real problem underlying race relations

Shelby Steele has a most intelligent column about how affirmative action fails to address the problem of underdevelopment (my bolds).

Disparate impact and racial preferences represent the law and policymaking of a guilty America, an America lacking the moral authority to live by the rigors of the Constitution's "equal protection" -- a guarantee that sees victims as individuals and requires hard evidence to prove discrimination. They are "white guilt" legalisms created after the '60s as fast tracks to moral authority. They apologize for presumed white wrongdoing and offer recompense to minorities before any actual discrimination has been documented. Yet these legalisms are much with us now. And it will no doubt take the courts a generation or more to disentangle all this apology from the law.

But fortunately race relations in America are not much driven by the courts. We argue over affirmative action and disparate impact because we don't know how to talk about our most profound racial problem: the lack of developmental parity between blacks and whites. Today a certain contradiction runs through black American life. As many of us still suffer from deprivations caused by historical racism, we also live in a society where racism is simply no longer a significant barrier to black advancement -- a society so sensitized that even the implication of racism, as in the Henry Louis Gates case, triggers a national discussion.

We blacks know oppression well, but today it is our inexperience with freedom that holds us back almost as relentlessly as oppression once did. Out of this inexperience, for example, we miss the fact that racial preferences and disparate impact can only help us -- even if they were effective -- with a problem we no longer have. The problem that black firefighters had in New Haven was not discrimination; it was the fact that not a single black did well enough on the exam to gain promotion.

Today's "black" problem is underdevelopment, not discrimination. Success in modernity will demand profound cultural changes -- changes in child-rearing, a restoration of marriage and family, a focus on academic rigor, a greater appreciation of entrepreneurialism and an embrace of individual development as the best road to group development.

FrontPageMag symposium on "the closing of the American psyche"

In a most interesting discussion, Theodore Dalrymple echoes Pascal here (see my bolds):

I think that the thinning of the way in which we account for the psyche (not just in America but elsewhere) is paralleled by the thinning of the psyche itself.

First let me say something about the thinning of the psyche, or the character, or the personality. We seem to live in highly individualistic societies, but societies without much individuality. (Individualism and individuality are very different.) No doubt there are many reasons for this. One of the things that strikes me about people nowadays is how little they like to be alone, at least alone without any stimulation from electronic apparatus. We cannot be in a bar, an airport, a store, a railway station, and in some cases a bus or train without having stimuli poured into us as if we were too fragile for our own thoughts and had to be entertained 100 per cent of the time. A high proportion of homes have televisions or computers constantly illuminated, often several at once. Young people now cannot bear silence; it makes them nervous, confronting them with their own thoughts. But a capacity to bear silence, and even a desire for it, are necessary for concentration, contemplation, reflection and probably for creativity.

Social pressures to conform to demotic tastes are, paradoxically in an age of mass bohemianisation, very strong, much stronger than, say, 50 years ago, which is thought to have been an age of conformity. In the name of diversity and the freedom of the individual, uniformity develops.

Just when I was thinking there was nothing to link to

This happens.

As Kathy Shaidle writes:

Aren't you squirming in your seat right now? Has this news not just made your entire life worth living again?? Don't lie.

Well, maybe not worth living again, but it sure makes it a whole lot more entertaining.

But, good entertainment costs money, so how about sending a donation Ezra's way to help defray the costs involved in defending his side of these most engaging spectacles.

This would never happen in my church

The lady officiating that is. I should talk to Bishop Carl about whether the dancing up the aisle would be allowed though. I love this video. It makes me very happy for some reason. Bruce Maiman writes:

However, if ever you wanted to make an entrance, this would be the way to do it, courtesy of Kevin Heinz & Jillian Peterson and company:

Kind of ironic they picked a Chris Brown song ("Forever"), but good for them, and good for the church that was okay with them doing that. Make a joyful noise, as they say. The fact that they could get a dozen or so of their closest friends to dance like this in front of a crowd with cameras rolling, and that the guests in the pews had a great time, too, speaks volumes. They are clearly loved, as individuals and as a couple, and maybe this marriage has a better chance than most.
Although you just know some wife in the crowd elbowed her husband saying "Why didn't we do something like that when we got married?"

I do recall that once our now retired Bishop Robert Mercer processed into our little cathedral to the drumming of Sudanese drummers. Bishop Robert was once an Anglican Bishop in Zimbabwe and I imagine there is a lot of dancing in the aisles of the Anglican churches there.

Go read the rest of the post for lots of other interesting videos on weddings.

H/t Kathy Shaidle

This is pretty funny

Via Ruth Gledhill's blog:

You say 'I do', they say 'I won't'

Perhaps one reason we should all support the Church of England's decision to publish a joint hatch'n'match liturgy, reported in The Times today as the splash and inside, is the new potential it creates for YouTube hits.

How Mark Steyn handles an altercation with police

Never underestimate the power of the pen:

Last year I had a minor interaction with a Vermont state trooper, and, 60 seconds into the conversation, he called me a "liar." I considered my options:

Option a): I could get hot under the collar, yell at him, get tasered into submission and possibly shot while "resisting arrest";

Option b): I could politely tell the trooper I object to his characterization, and then write a letter to the commander of his barracks the following morning suggesting that such language is not appropriate to routine encounters with members of the public and betrays a profoundly defective understanding of the relationship between law enforcement officials and the citizenry in civilized societies.

I chose the latter course, and received a letter back offering partial satisfaction and explaining that the trooper would be receiving "supervisory performance-related issue-counseling," which, with any luck, is even more ghastly than it sounds and hopefully is still ongoing.

Professor Gates chose option a), which is just plain stupid. For one thing, these days they have dash-cams and two-way radios and a GPS gizmo in the sharp end of the billy club, so an awful lot of this stuff winds up being preserved on tape, and, if you're the one a-hootin' an' a-hollerin', it's not going to help.

Lucky for Sgt. Crowley he doesn't live in Ontario

Because truth is no defense and intent or motive don't matter, you can be judged for even unconscious acts under the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal.

A human rights tribunal verdict of racial profiling against a Toronto constable sets "an impossibly high standard" that will be challenged in court, Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair said yesterday.

"We're not denying the existence of bias or the possibility of racial profiling," Blair said in an interview with the Star.

He said the tribunal's decision last month that Ron Phipps, who is black, was a victim of racial profiling by Const. Michael Shaw, who is white, means "you can have the best of intentions and be totally without bias but none of that matters if someone wants to believe you are biased."

The Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario ruled that by stopping Phipps while he was delivering mail on a Bridle Path street in 2005, checking with a homeowner he spoke to, trailing him and verifying his identity with a white letter carrier, Shaw was guilty of racial profiling. There was no overt racism, the tribunal said, but Shaw's actions showed he acted "whether consciously or unconsciously" because Phipps was a black man in an affluent neighbourhood.

Marriage Commissioner loses

What does this court decision say about conscience rights and religious freedom in Canada?

Alas, to me it says that human rights commissions are merely a symptom of a much greater problem as Canada shifts from its Judeo-Christian foundations into postmodern relativism and secularism---which says there is no truth except everything is relative unless you happen to have religious beliefs that say there is truth and morality and therefore you will not be allowed to practise it. Unless, of course, you come from an identified victim group religion that can be as absolutist and as threatening to secular values as it pleases as long as it is not Judeo-Christian and identified with Western Civilization in any way.

So if you in any way have a public sector pay cheque, then you must check your conscience and your religious beliefs at the door in order to serve and accommodate the choices and preferences of whomever you serve. If you are a doctor, pretty soon (if euthanasia is legalized) if someone says I want you to kill grandma by lethal injection, then you may face losing your license to practice medicine, as doctors in some provinces might soon if they don't make abortion referrals.

There is something gravely wrong with this picture. Why couldn't there be reasonable accommodation of this marriage commissioner's views when there were other commissioners ready and willing to perform the service for the same-sex couple in question?

No, we no longer have religious freedom in this country. We have a new religion--a secular, atheistic form of religion---that is state sponsored, with its own inquisition and its own version of the rack.

It's ironic, because the gay rights activists who have led the charge in pushing Christian expression into the closet, with all the levers of state coercion to do so, may find that the Christians they once condemned as hateful are the only ones who will stand up for them and with them in the persecutions they are now facing in once tolerant cities like Amsterdam.

It's good to know that there are many gay and lesbian folks out there who are not part of the coercive mindset of some in the vanguard of their movement. We can agree to disagree and remain civil and respectful of each other as human beings, no? We can even be friends in our care for the common good even if we don't see eye to eye on some particulars.

Yikes! And this guy is Obama's science advisor?

Michelle Malkin writes:

After investigative bloggers and this column reprinted extensive excerpts from Ecoscience, which mused openly about putting sterilants in the water supply to make women infertile and engineering society by taking away babies from undesirables and subjecting them to government-mandated abortions, the White House issued a statement from Holdren last week denying he embraced those proposals. The Ehrlichs challenged critics to read their and Holdren’s more recent research and works.

Well, I did indeed read one of Holdren’s recent works that reveals his clingy reverence for, and allegiance to, the gurus of population control authoritarianism. He’s just gotten smarter about cloaking it behind global warming hysteria. In 2007, he addressed the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference. Holdren served as AAAS president; the organization posted his full slide presentation on its website.

In the opening slide, Holdren admitted that his “preoccupation” with apocalyptic matters such as “the rates at which people breed” was a lifelong obsession spurred by scientist Harrison Brown’s work. Holdren heaped praise on Brown’s half-century-old book, “The Challenge to Man’s Future,” then proceeded to paint doom-and-gloom scenarios requiring drastic government interventions to control climate change.

Who is Holdren’s intellectual mentor, Harrison Brown? He was a “distinguished member” of the International Eugenics Society whom Holdren later worked with on a book about – you guessed it – world population and fertility. Brown advocated the same population control-freak measures Holdren put forth in Ecoscience. In “The Challenge to Man’s Future,” Brown envisioned a regime in which the “number of abortions and artificial inseminations permitted in a given year would be determined completely by the difference between the number of deaths and the number of births in the year previous.”

Brown exhorted readers to accept that “we must reconcile ourselves to the fact that artifical means must be applied to limit birth rates.” If we don’t, Brown warned, we faced a planet “with a writhing mass of human beings.” He likened the global population to a “pulsating mass of maggots.”

Peggy Noonan on why Obama's health plan is in trouble

She writes (my bolds):

The final bill, with all its complexities, will probably be huge, a thousand pages or so. Americans don’t fear the devil’s in the details, they fear hell is. Do they want the same people running health care who gave us the Department of Motor Vehicles, the post office and the invasion of Iraq?

Let me throw forward three other things that I suspect lessen , or will lessen, support for full health-care reform, two of them not quantifiable.

The first has to do with the doctors throughout the country who give patients a break, who quietly underbill someone they know is in trouble, or don’t charge for their services. Also the emergency rooms that provide excellent service for the uninsured in medical crisis. People don’t talk about this much because they’re afraid if they do they’ll lose it, that some government genius will come along and make it illegal for a doctor not to charge or a hospital to fudge around, with mercy, in its billing. People are afraid of losing the parts of the system that sometimes work—the unquantifiable parts, the human parts.

Second, and this is big, some of the bills being worked on in Congress will allow for or mandate taxpayer funding of abortion. Speaking only and narrowly in political terms, this is so ignorant as to be astounding. A good portion of the support for national health care comes from a sort of European Christian Democrat spirit of community, of “We are all in this together.” This spirit potentially unites Democrats, leftists, some Republicans and GOP populists, the politically unaffiliated and those of whatever view with low incomes. But putting abortion in the mix takes the Christian out of Christian Democrat. It breaks and jangles the coalition, telling those who believe abortion is evil that they not only have to accept its legality but now have to pay for it in a brand new plan, for which they’ll be more highly taxed. This is taking a knife to your own supporters.

Alas, the Christian supporters of Canadian healthcare are now stuck with paying the tab for 100,000 abortions a year in Canada, even in private abortion clinics. Yet private clinics for other ills are fought against tooth and nail.

Mark Steyn is right. Once you have a socialized health care system, it is virtually impossible to do anything but minor tinkering and even that is hazardous to one's political health.

We in Canada have always had the reassurance that we could always go to the United States to pay for superior care if we find the wait times too long to see a needed specialist, to get the MRI, or the cancer surgery.

The Gates controversy

I do not want to minimize the fact that racism does occur in Canada and the United States and that the darker the skin, the more likely one is to be stopped "driving while black" simply for having a nice car, or to have salespeople hovering around with annoying "Can I help you?"s or to find that people are uncomfortable around you or assume that your credentials are inferior. (I think affirmative action has had a lot to do with that, but that's another post.)

We white people just do not see this. And we probably cannot imagine as well how cumulatively irritating it can be.

At the same time, I think that cumulative irritation can easily become a chip on the shoulder and many well-intentioned white people are sick and tired of having to tiptoe around because of it and have had it with being called racist when they know they are not.

I sure hope this Cambridge police officer is not given the same treatment as Sarah Palin or Joe the Plumber, people who dared contradict "The One." I would advise the police officer to stop putting his trash out by the road and I sure hope there are no skeletons in his personal life that dirty tricks operatives can get their hands on.

Meanwhile, I think Victor Davis Hanson has some interesting observations:

Bottom line: Professor Gates probably overreacted, insulted a police officer who was trying to ensure that his home was not being broken into as was first reported, wrongly alleged racism on the part of the officer, and got arrested for his disorderly conduct amid witnesses and fellow police officers who confirm the arresting officer’s narrative — and then assumed — quite rightly as it turns out — that his Harvard connections, personal friendship with the president, governor, and mayor would allow him lattitudes not open to others.

Meanwhile, that the rest of the country is supposed to cringe and feel sorry that we are still a racist nation — as an African-American president, governor, and mayor all weigh in on the plight of an endowed African-American professor — seems odd. Sorry, but somehow I think most would tend to disagree.

And if the public comes away with any lasting impression, it will be that an impromptu Obama, for all the post-racial rhetoric, still sees controversies in prisms that reflect stereotyped us/them racialism rather than looking at each incident empirically.

Sgt. Crowley sounds credible to me.

And it looks like there may be tapes via 911 or the radio transmissions:

Further, Sgt. James Crowley noted in his report that he radioed police headquarters to let them know he was with the person who appeared to be the home’s lawful resident, but who was “very uncooperative.”

Upon receiving Gates’ Harvard ID, Crowley wrote he radioed in to request “the presence of the Harvard University Police.”

In a radio interview yesterday morning with WEEI’s John Dennis and Gerry Callahan, Crowley, a 42-year-old father of three, said he hasn’t heard the tapes.

“One of my first transmissions was to slow the units down and I’m in the residence with somebody I believe resides here, but he’s being very uncooperative. So, that’s in real time,” Crowley told the sports-talk hosts.

“I’m not really sure how much you could hear from Professor Gates, you know, in the background. I, I don’t know. I haven’t heard the tapes.”

Haas did not share with reporters what can be heard on the tapes, but commented, “I don’t believe Sgt. Crowley acted with any racial motivation at all.”

Gates, 58, a world-renowned scholar and documentary filmmaker on black history, allegedly ranted to police at his Ware Street home, “This is what happens to black men in America!” and “You don’t know who you’re messing with!” in addition to verbally dragging Crowley’s mother into the fray.

“More often than not,” O’Donnell said, “as the facts come out, they are more favorable to the cop. It’s crucial in the sense that it provides independent evidence. There is no question it provides corroboration. He called the tapes potentially “crucial” to Crowley’s ability to defend himself against charges of racism.

I am thinking of the Boy who Cried Wolf and the dangers of repeated cries of racism. Soon people are going to get so fed up with it that real racism will be ignored. That will be a shame.

Lots of good reads and pictures over at the archbishop's blog

One regular stop for me in the blogosphere is Archbishop Terrence Prendergast's Journey of a Bishop. He's in France at a Trappist monastery.

He writes:

Mysteriously, Jesus calls a small group to follow him, who, humanly speaking, have all the limitations we can image in a man: laziness, hesitation to believe, able to deny and to betray their Lord. Yet, the monk is invited to this kind of following, ready to devote himself to personal intimacy with the Lord, to adoration and to intercession.

He does so as a monk even in the darkness of the night, symbolizing the monk's willingness to enter into that darkness that surrounds man in his unbelief, senselessness and looking for God in the wrong places. And, from within the company of disciples (and from among monks), the Lord chooses some to represent him by renewing the Lord's one pure and perfect sacrifice for the salvation of the world.

Overcoming the passions like anger?

Rod Drehrer, the Crunchy Con, has a most interesting post that I've been pondering ever since I read it about anger and whether Christians need to overcome anger as well as other passions.

Rod writes:

The other day I spoke on the phone to an Orthodox monk in connection with my Templeton project. We got to talking about martial arts, and he said he didn't think it was appropriate for Orthodox Christians to engage in them, because to the extent they involve fighting, they call up the passions, which Orthodoxy teaches we are supposed to overcome on the way to holiness.

This is a vexing point to me. It makes no sense to me that we are supposed to drain ourselves of all anger, under every circumstance. What was Jesus doing when he overturned the moneychangers' booths in the temple? He was angry, and he was expressing anger. But he did so when confronted with evil. This evidence from the Gospel indicates that anger is not always a disordered emotion, and in fact it is quite natural and appropriate under certain circumstances. That emotion can be used for good or for evil; that it is such a powerful emotion, so easily turned to destruction, should be a warning for us. But is anger always and everywhere bad for Christians? I cannot think so.

Read the whole thing. The post has some interesting links and talks about the effects a lack of anger on such scandals as priestly sexual abuse.

I look back on my life and think that if I had been angrier, i.e. not turned my anger inward into self-destructiveness and depression, I would not have put up with much of what I put up with, perhaps thinking I unconsciously deserved it.

At the same time, I don't think it is becoming of a Christian to be ruled by passion--of any kind, whether it is anger, sexual passion, greed, envy, pride, a lust for power or whatever.

But there is a big difference in a person, especially a man, who has killed passion in himself and one who has somehow attained mastery over it, but the passion is still alive and well.

I look at some of the ascetics in some religious traditions and they seem a bit androgynous. Even their muscles are long and thin and undeveloped. I don't imagine Jesus was like this---a thin, bloodless, passionless ascetic.

While Rod talks about anger in this post, I think also about sexuality. Though the priests in my Anglican Catholic tradition are not required to be celibate, in my work I come across a lot of celibate Roman Catholic priests and bishops. It's really a beautiful thing to see--a man who is comfortable in his celibacy, but also comfortable in his heterosexuality and who is a master of his chastity but has not killed passion, merely offered it up and Christ has made it holy. There's something life-giving and wonderful about that kind of self-giving, when a man, who could have married a lovely wife and had a beautiful family, decides to marry the Church, warts and all in her earthly manifestation. Boy oh boy, can I imagine her to be a nagging, critical, often unattractive wife at times!

I imagine the same thing can be done with anger. Not killing it but acknowledging it, confessing it, offering it up, asking for it to be channeled and transmuted into something beautiful for God.

I agree with Ron that killing anger can lead to a strange passivity and lack of affect when it comes to confronting evil.

Breath of the Beast's experience with affirmative action

I was the son of a lower middle class family whose mother only graduated high school and whose father had gone to a technical school to learn a trade after high school. My family did not understand what I was doing or why and could not afford to support me in any case. So, that whole five years, I supported myself with a menial but meaningful job. I worked 36 hours per week at the Harvard University School of Public Health as an Animal Technician. I cleaned up monkey, rat and dog feces and fed them their food and assisted the researchers in the lab twelve hours a day, three days a week. I did this year-round while maintaining a full course load and dean’s list grades.

snip-

In March, just before the acceptances were to be announced, the five years of full-time work and full course loads had taken their toll on my body and I came down with Mononucleosis. I was still in bed suffering the effects when the head of the department called me to tell me that, in the opinion of the committee, I was the second most qualified candidate, my heart leapt with excitement. I will never forget the cold, sickening feeling that washed over me as he continued with a “but”.

Racism exists. Black people do get passed over for jobs. I know this for a fact. While efforts have to be made to level the playing field, I'm not sure affirmative action, especially when it devolves into quotas, is the answer. It puts in doubt the credentials of those who achieved against great odds, for one thing.

Interesting

From the Crunchy Con:

To Wilson's utter surprise, the people literally could not see the film that was being shown to them. It was so far outside their experience that their minds could not make sense of what was being shown them. The only thing they remembered from the film was the brief appearance of a chicken, which was the only thing that corresponded to what they knew as reality.

This is, or should be, profoundly unsettling -- and accounts for why a scientist like Everett is still not certain what happened in the Amazon that day. Was the tribe undergoing a mass hallucination -- or was there some sort of entity manifesting itself that day, that neither Everett nor his daughter could see, because their minds were not conditioned to perceive it? How can we know for sure who is "blind" in this way, and who is seeing what's really there? Talbot says this depends at least in some way on "how the collective arranges the world." Which implies that, in some strange way, and to some indeterminate degree, mind constructs reality.

The Toronto Star is committed to truth!

The Star's public editor Kathy English writes:

A news organization's credibility depends on its commitment to truth, accuracy and fairness. Though all media now face the rapid and radical evolution from print to digital, those ethical and professional principles are the gold standard of journalism.

Wow! I am so impressed the Star is committed to these principles!

As Pontius Pilate once asked, "What is truth?" as he washed his hands.

The Truth was standing before him and Pilate allowed the truth to be crucified by the mob.

I dunno, but wasn't the "gold standard" of journalism thrown out with the slogan "comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable"?

In a post modern, pro-Obama journalistic universe where victim narratives prevail, it's rather touching to see an old-fashioned idealistic appeal to objectivity and fairness.

If the Liberals ever get into power, I would not be surprised to hear Kathy English got appointed to head the Canadian Human Rights Commission, replacing Tory appointee Jennifer Lynch.

There's a strange similarity in the earnest, irony-challenged, humorless tone of these two gals and that of others in the leading edge in the "human rights industry" that assumes their perspective is the truthful, objective, fair one, and everyone else who disagrees is [insert your favorite ad hominem here: homophobic, racist, Islamophobic etc.].

The problem is the ideology of most mainstream media outlets is as obvious as the noses on their faces, but those who labor within their confines think they are objective, fair and truthful and anyone who challenges their assumptions is by definition dishonest, unfair, lacking in objectivity, and somehow eeeeeeebil, as the Binks would say.

I dunno. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we grow up in a progressive ethos that informs our a priori assumptions from birth to adulthood with little exposure to other arguments and assumptions. Maybe it has something to do with the "birds of a feather flock together" tendency in journalistic establishments that seeks out diversity in "gender" and skin color but not in opinion, because, well, the opinions held by the "birds" are not considered opinion at all, but established, plain-as-day, "objective" reality and anyone who doesn't see that is suspect of "having an agenda." I remember encountering this "it's self-evident" mindset in the marriage debate. To most of my colleagues it is self-evident that redefining marriage is a human rights and equality issue. The mind is closed to any arguments to the contrary. I am sure in the upcoming euthanasia debate the mindset will be that euthanasia is "death with dignity" full stop.
Fairness will consist in straw men, specifically chosen to represent the opposing point of view so as to discredit it.

I think the whole Farber t-shirt issue is silly. I mean really silly. Really who cares whether Farber is gay or not. Those of us in the blogosphere are enjoying the post-Seinfeldian nature of the whole ridiculousness.

I bet it drove unprecedented traffic to Zerb's blog.

A beautiful wedding

I attended a lovely wedding in Toronto yesterday. My friend and fellow blogger Alan (the Sheepcat) married Theresa, a lovely young woman I look forward to getting to know.

It's always a good idea to have tissues handy for ceremonies like this. What made me lose my composure was reading a little note at the bottom of the wedding program about Alan's long deceased father. The note remember the former United Church minister and thanked him for the prayers that made the wedding possible.

To find out why those prayers, years ago, long before Alan ever met Theresa or would have conceived of marrying someone like her, visit Alan's blog.

Is Sarah Palin hated because of her son Trig?

Gary Bauer thinks she may just well be:

Palin is controversial, in part, because America is divided over disability. We’ve established laws and institutions that protect people with disabilities. But we also do everything we can to make sure they don’t see the light of day.

Trig is a reminder of our fierce ambivalence over disability. Every mention of his name is a pinprick to our conscience. Every photo of mother and son is a reminder of concepts — vulnerability, dependency and suffering — our culture no longer tolerates, as well as virtues, such as humility, dignity and self-sacrifice, it no longer extols.

Trig is also a reminder of an inescapable truth: Disability is an inherent part of the human condition. At a time of deep cultural divisions, 1-year-old Trig Palin represents the deepest division of all, between a culture that increasingly sees genetic perfection as an entitlement and a culture still rooted in the belief that human beings are defined not by their capabilities but, instead, by the very fact of their humanity.

These deserve to go viral

They are pretty funny. H/t the Anchoress, who writes:

Great fun! Enjoy the palate cleansers!

UPDATE:

Michael Coren on the altar server who would be pope

This is the next big religious freedom story. Michael Coren explains why in the National Post's Full Comment section:

This is not really about homosexuality or Scripture, but about the separation of church and state. This is important, because it is invariably the left, social activists and gay leaders who are some of the most vociferous supporters of human rights commissions, and the strongest opponents of Catholicism. These are people who lecture about the concept of church and state separation and insist that organized religion not interfere with state policies. (By that logic, they should also argue that state policies should not interfere with organized religion.)

Their history is, of course, terribly wrong. Church and state separation is an American, not a Canadian, idea — and anyway was introduced to protect evangelical Christians from the established Anglican church. More to the point, however, the argument is used with a staggering inconsistency. It is considered acceptable for a liberal Protestant to speak out in favour of same-sex marriage but heresy for a Catholic or evangelical to speak out against it. When the Pope condemns poverty in Africa he is praised, when he opposes contraceptives he is abused.

Good history or not, this latest nonsense should outrage honest atheists, statists and gay people just as much as it does Catholics and other Christians. Nobody is demanding that Corcoran not be gay and nobody is denying him a home or an income or even preventing him from attending a church. Those given authority within the Catholic Church are daring to act as people given authority in the Roman Catholic Church — to govern and decide regarding internal issues as they are obliged by oath and faith. For a non-Catholic body to interfere at all in such a manner is disgraceful; for an obviously politically driven human rights tribunal to potentially smash the barrier between church and state is terrifying.

Terrifying is right.

Back in the redefinition of marriage debate my biggest concern was not over whether two people of the same sex might find a religious denomination that would marry them or even state recognition of that relationship. My fear was the state's granting recognition would then provide a state-wielded club against religious freedom as all those religions that only recognize marriage as a sacrament between a man and woman would face sanctions, expensive litigation or human rights commission persecution and be unable to teach their doctrine publicly.

My fears are coming true, not only with this case but the Christian Horizons case.

I'm all for living and letting live. But there are radical elements in a number of interest groups that not only want to use the state to advance their agenda, they want to use state power to shut up and shut down those with whom they disagree.

I am for a robust pluralism where citizens can respect each other as human beings while vehemently disagreeing and civilly agreeing to disagree as the democratic process works itself out.

But there are radicals in a number of identity groups and ardent secularists who want religious expression (or religious expression not of their own kind) suppressed.

Event for social conservatives coming up in Ottawa

Campaign Essentials for Social Conservatives

Are you a social conservative interested in getting involved in the democratic process or running for public office? If yes, then Campaign Essentials for Social Conservatives July 27 in Ottawa is for you.

Choose to attend any or all of the following dynamic sessions offered.

Winning as a Pro-Life Candidate
Rod Bruinooge, MP
One of the most strongly held views in Canadian politics today is that it’s impossible to win an election as an explicitly pro-life candidate or party. Is this true? Learn from the experience of Rod Bruinooge, a Conservative MP from Winnipeg and Chair of the Parliamentary Pro-Life Caucus.

Running Right: Lessons from the Hillier Campaign
Tristan Emmanuel
The recently concluded campaign for the leadership of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative Party featured the emergence of Randy Hillier as a leading voice for conservatism in Canada. Listen to Hillier Campaign Manager Tristan Emmanuel as he shares the highs and lows of the campaign and discusses what comes next.

In Search of Unity: Fiscal Conservatives & Social Conservatives – Myths & Facts
Joseph C. Ben-Ami
The media and academic elites like to portray the Conservative Movement as being divided between Social Conservatives and Fiscal Conservatives, each with their own agenda that is incompatible with that of the other. Joseph C. Ben-Ami shows that this is wrong and self-serving and explains how both branches of conservatism can and must work together to achieve their shared goals.

Reaching the Young
Faytene Kryskow
It’s taken for granted by pundits and pollsters that Canada’s youth have no interest in conservative causes. Faytene Kryskow has spent the past few years proving them wrong. As Director of My Canada, Faytene has been mobilizing young Canadians, teaching them about the democratic process and encouraging them to get involved. Learn about this exciting movement and how the energy and enthusiasm of young Canadians can be harnessed to bring about positive change.

Communication Essentials for Social Conservatives
Joseph C. Ben-Ami
You’ve heard about it time and time again: the liberal bias of the main stream media. How real is it and how should conservatives deal with it? What are the tools and techniques that make for effective communications? How do you motivate and inspire?

The Power of One: How to be a Catalyst for Change
Tristan Emmanuel
One of greatest impediments to change is the belief that one person cannot make a difference. As former head of the influential ECP Centre, Tristan Emmanuel spent his days proving how mistaken this belief is. Learn how a one motivated individual can lead meaningful change in their communities and inspire others to do so in theirs.

How Ideas become Public Policy
Joseph C. Ben-Ami
Whether you're a grassroots organizer or an elected official, nothing is more important to effective advocacy than understanding how ideas become policy and laws are made. Get to know the basics of the legislative and regulatory process and learn where and when to have the maximum impact on its outcome.

Where: Ottawa Crowne Plaza Hotel
When: July 27, 2009
Cost: $10.00 per session, $45.00 for all six sessions

To register online go to: http://policystudies.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=219&Itemid=72

Saint John vicar general not commenting

The vicar general of the Saint John diocese, who was quoted in the initial story that fanned the Communion furore, is unavailable for comment.

So I guess I'll never know from his point of view how the story ended up in the Telegraph Journal, who called whom, and so on.

It's a mystery. A mystery, my friends.

Tory Astroturfing?

I dunno. Some are asking whether this is Astroturfing from the Tory side.

Could be. If so, it is pretty lame and frankly it could drive up Ignatieff's bona fides among conservatives who are lukewarm about Harper or angry at him for drifting into deficit-spending.

Ignatieff's definitely on the blue side of the Liberal spectrum. That's why I don't find him as scary as Dion, who would have probably united the left with his crazy coalition idea and we'd have the Green Shaft by now and our economy would be worse than Obama's tanking U.S. economy, trillions in debt, preparing for his crazy cap and trade plan and a huge new health care entitlement when America can't even afford its present Medicare and Social Security obligations.

Maybe its not Tory at all, but further to the left, to detach the redder Liberals from the party to vote for the NDP. Or it could be Liberal to look like Tory Astroturfing to play up how nefarious those right-wingers are with their dirty tricks. This stuff gets complex.

Will there be as much attention paid to whether there is Astroturfing on the progressive or liberal side of the spectrum, Kady? How about checking out the Communion controversy?

In the Astroturfing contest, I gotta give higher marks to the left side of the spectrum because it's still under the MSM radar (or they don't give a hoot) and it's my suspicion the Tories were blindsided.

All the Communion stuff came out while the PM and his staff were incommunicado over the Atlantic Ocean, leaving a whole news cycle where there was doubt about what the PM had done with the Blessed Sacrament.

Signs of the times? We're gearing up for an election in the fall. The guerilla war has begun in earnest.

The Socon muses about the Harper Communion flap

Harper told me in an interview after his audience with the Holy Father the following about the Communion controversy (published by the Catholic Register):

Harper, in an exclusive interview with CCN, said the controversy was driven by “people who want to cause embarrassment in religion and drive a wedge between Protestants and Catholics.”

“That’s whose agenda this is and that’s not the Pope’s agenda,” Harper said. “He was very interested in the G8 and in the outcomes of the G8, especially in relation to some of the themes he wrote about in his latest encyclical.”

The Socon, a devout Catholic, says he is more and more convinced the controversy was a "deliberate attempt to embarrass Harper." The Socon, while a conservative, is not a partisan Conservative, and has often criticized Harper in the past.

Ask yourself about the angle of the camera in the Church, and why it was there in the first place. It is very unusual for a camera to be at the side of the altar like that, and then to focus on Harper receiving communion? What is the point of that, if not to catch him slipping up some how.

If this is deliberate, Harper is right. It is a new low for liberals and the media. It’s politicizing our most sacred belief in the Eucharist. Their doing it, of course, to try and wrench away religious support from the Conservatives. Like Obama south of the Border, the liberal parties in this country are wising up to the fact that they need to soak up some religious votes to get into majority territory. That’s why Iggy and Jack were at the very well attended National Prayer Breakfast a couple of months ago.

The Liberal Party, for instance, lost a lot of votes during the last couple of elections because it volunteered to carry the rainbow flag in the gay parade. Now, like Obama, they’ve realized that the religious vote (especially Catholics) even in Canada is a constituency that they cannot afford to lose permanently, much less be totally ignored.

One way of attracting the votes is Obamanize them with religious platitudes about social justice and inject liberation theology into the campaign. It worked for Obama in spades. So, like the American Messiah, they’re looking to preach some of that Obama gospel up here too. The other way - a much more riskier tactic - is try and scandalize people of faith by showing Harper as some kind of inconsiderate and beligerant fool who is not respectful of people’s religion.

Well, I think that’s what happened here, but it didn’t work. It backfired on them. Conservative Catholics - the only constituency that would really care about profanation of the Eucharist in the first place - shrugged their shoulders and could see there was no intent to offend. Instead, most of us focused on the scandalous omission of the bishop for not instructing those present as to the correct protocol for Communion.

Liberals really shouldn’t do religion. They screwed up their target market in this case. And next time they try it, it could have very grave consequences for their parties and their leaders.

Here are some questions I have about this whole thing:

The funeral took place in the Moncton diocese and the Moncton Archbishop Andre Richard is the one who went over to the front row to distribute Holy Communion to the VIPs there, including Harper. So why does the initial news story quote a vicar general from an entirely different New Brunswick diocese? Was that vicar general even at the funeral? How did he learn about the controversy?

Was the Saint John vicar general phoned by a someone who asked him, "What do you think of Harper's putting the Host in his pocket?" I'm going to try to find out. Did the vicar general call the media after someone complained in his diocese? Did he know the complainant personally?

Who produced the YouTube videos on this? Why has someone used the Catholicregister user name to give added cachet to videos--one in Italian--that say the PM "desecrated" the Eucharist. The Catholic Register publisher told me they have asked YouTube to take these videos down because this is an infringment on their trademark.

As one press gallery colleague told me in an email alerting me to the Catholicregister user name on the YouTube videos, the target seems to be both the Italian and the Catholic vote.

And who is using computers as SPAMbots to send emails trying to sound like an offended Catholic under the name of "Catholic evangelization" with a link to a Catholic apologetics site that has no mention of the scandal? Is that site being used the way the Catholic Register name has been used?

I wonder if anyone from the mainstream media will investigate this. Or will it be ignored and will Harper be the only one criticized for having political motivations in his outreach to Catholics and ethnic voters?

I see some other bloggers are starting to pick up on this. Stay tuned.

Perhaps real conservative grassroots will start growing on this and show the difference between Astroturfing and the real thing. Why? Because I personally don't think the Tories have their Astroturfing game together. Just as the Republicans were caught off guard by Axelrod's sophisticated use of the new media, the same thing could be happening now in Canada.

The most beautiful boy in the world

Guess what he is singing. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven, no?

Great analysis of the Pope's latest encyclical

Over at Mercatornet.com, a great source of commentary. This is by Ottawa's Brian Lilley:

What many in the secular media also seem to miss is that for all its calls for greater international cooperation, the encyclical spends much time expounding the long standing Catholic teaching of subsidiarity, the idea that nothing should be done by a larger and more complex organization that can be accomplished a smaller one; think of family over the state, local government over national or international government.

This point on subsidiarity is not lost on Father Robert A. Sirico, offering his views up alongside a platoon of other heavyweights at Catholic World Report. The pope does not, as Sirico points out, declare that the current economic model need be overthrown, “Never employing either the word ‘greed’ or ‘capitalism’ in the over 30,000 word document (despite some media hype), the crisis itself he attributes to ‘badly managed and largely speculative financial dealing’ without naming the specific institutions that made this possible.” In many ways, the pope’s comments on the market complement some of what Sirico’s Acton Institute was saying about the financial crisis last fall, that a properly functioning market requires those involved to act with a proper moral compass.

Now while the document is not, as some liberals have claimed, proof that the pope is one of them (I haven’t even touched on his many exhortations to respect the dignity of human life and calls for an end of tying development money to abortion and population control), the document also does not give succour to those conservatives who hoped for an unquestioning papal endorsement of the free market.

George Weigel, an authorised biographer of Pope John Paul II, declares Caritas in Veritate to be “an encyclical that resembles a duck-billed platypus.” Weigel’s contention is that the encyclical seems written by two hands, Benedict’s own clear hand, and the fuzzy thinking of The Pontifical Council on Justice and Peace. It’s a review that has been described as intemperate by Thompson on the Telegraph blog, but given the difficulty of combining, especially without clear direction, the ideas of a world political authority and the idea of subsidiarity, Weigel’s basic idea may not be far off the mark when it comes to implementing the ideas most people are grabbing onto with this encyclical.

At its heart though, Caritas in Veritate is about love, radical Christian love, brought into the market, into human and international development and into our political and civic life.

Mercatornet also links to Ross Douthat's good piece in the NYT as well. Worth the read.

Mercatornet.com is a website worth bookmarking and checking regularly.

The Pope and the Prime Minister

My story on the Prime Minister's audience with the Holy Father last Friday is up at the Catholic Register website.

Have the Liberals gone soft?

Tom Flanagan asks this in the Globe and Mail.

He writes:

All these Conservative ads belong to the most moderate and usually most effective genre of negative campaigning. They focus on the public record, repeating the words and recounting the deeds of political opponents. Mr. Dion said it's not easy being a leader; Mr. Ignatieff was out of Canada for decades; the Bloc voted against Bill C-268. The ads contain no invented allegations, no exposé of private affairs, no attacks on family members - just the recall of past news stories.

So why are the Liberals so upset? Have they really gone soft? Actually, I suspect their response is more cerebral. The Liberals are always close students of Democratic tactics in American elections, and here they seem to be imitating what the Democrats did in 2008 against the Republicans.

No, the Liberals have not gone soft and a key partisan is warning that the best hardball is yet to come.

But it will come and is coming through the new media, through the Astroturfing that David Axelrod is so well-known for as architect of the Obama campaign. That's what the Democrats did to the Republicans.

It will be much more subtle and under the radar and more effective because many mainstream journalists are 1) not on to these techniques because they are too busy to pay much attention to the new media themselves 2) are easily manipulated because they share the same basic a priori assumptions and therefore don't bother to investigate 3) or they know about them but they don't care because they want their guy to win so they will pretend they don't know.

The American media have behaved shamefully in this regard in their adulation and unquestioning support of Obama. At least no one in Canada is saying Iggy is god or getting thrills up their legs, thank goodness.

And a lot of people who actually vote won't be aware of what's happening either. They don't read blogs, they may have email, maybe a Facebook account, but they don't understand how deftly these things can be used for political advantage. They still get their news from TV, which is by nature superficial in its coverage.

Obama's campaign was on the cutting edge. The Republicans were way behind and scarcely knew what was happening to them last year.

Don't think the Liberals have not studied the techniques and adopted them.

But Flanagan is right, he warns about the dangers of going over the top. Astroturfing, if it is to work, must appear like grassroots. When it is transparently fake and the mainstream news media is rocking and rolling on the plastic turf, key constituencies will migrate to other media sources.

And the smart politicians will bypass the msm by reaching out to those alternative sources.

The alternative sources will push back, from the real grassroots against what Flanagan describes as "invented allegations, no exposé of private affairs, no attacks on family members."

In other words, one side traffics in the politics of personal destruction. But it whines that that's what the other side is doing.

Fascinating.

If you want to know the kind of hardball the people in the left like to play, look no further than what was done to Sarah Palin.

But, hey, what is the price of a soul these days?

This is breathtaking . . .

LifeSiteNews.com reports (my bolds):

Corcoran is seeking monetary damages of up to $25,000 from the bishop and $20,000 each from the 12 parishioners. But his primary interest is in restitution of a non-financial nature, he says. He states in his complaint that he wants the $20,000 from each of the parishioners to be allocated "towards a charity of my choosing." And the $25,000 from the diocese will be used to cover his legal expenses; but, he told LSN, he will be returning it through parish contributions.

He has also requested six other "remedies." First, he indicates that he "would like the group of 12 parishioners to be held accountable for their un-Christian actions, in front of their peers in a public forum, by the Bishop or the Bishop's superior." Second, he wants the Bishop to preach at his parish "on the consequences of practicing discrimination and the slanderous spreading of rumours, hate and innuendo."

Third, he wants to be restored as an altar server, and fourth, for the bishop to apologize for having removed him. Fifth, he wants the bishop to write an article for the diocesan newspaper "on the rights of persons with same sex attractions to practice their faith within the Catholic Church without fear of threats, recrimination or discrimination." And finally, sixth, he wants the diocese to develop policies "that support the human rights of all people within the church."

When asked whether he feels his complaint to the OHRC has placed him at odds with the Church, Corcoran told LSN, "I would hope that the bishop would not see it that way. … I'm still going to church, I'm still a very generous supporter of the Catholic Church, and he knows that, and I'm following his directive.

"He's asked me not to serve on the altar and I'm not," Corcoran said. "He's asked me to stay close to and support Fr. Hood, and I am. So I would hope that when he sits down with his legal counsel, he'll understand that this is really a struggle between me and the group of fellow parishioners, and Fr. Hood and the group of fellow parishioners."

Referring to the bishop's refusal to supply Corcoran with the twelve parishioners' letter, a key piece of evidence against them, Corcoran said, "Unfortunately, he passed on the opportunity to avoid being named as a respondent by not agreeing to cooperate at the outset."

My jaw is around my ankles. And this guy wants to use government power to coerce apologies and the public humiliation of a Catholic bishop, by dictating to him what he must teach in his diocese.

Though it is understandable that the diocese has entered into a mediation process because scarce resources need to be carefully stewarded, but in an ideal world, I wish they hadn't. Why? Because it feeds into what Ezra Levant has aptly called the "shakedown" aspect of these bodies. Go into mediation, let the nice bureaucrats oversee the process, and perhaps at their advice pay a small amount, or give the apology asked for, or accept some kind of rainbow sensitivity training and the problem goes away and you are spared millions in legal fees. But little by little these agencies creep more and more into areas that are clearly outside their jurisdiction, trampling on Charter rights.

More on the Communion controversy

The Ottawa Citizen has an editorial cartoon on the matter today that is disrespectful of Catholics on the Communion issue. Letters to the editor continue. But I think the tone of the coverage in the mainstream news media is going to drive more people away from them. And the Astroturfing has a similar tone---assuming that Catholic Christians are stereotypical legalists and absolutists on the Communion issue. It's getting pretty transparent that this new media campaign is being orchestrated. But hey, where are the stories exploring the possible political orchestration of this?

For most mainstream journalists this whole story about Harper and Communion is a lark, a joke, a silly thing, but if it has political overtones as a gaffe or whatever, then let the presses roll. The more it embarrasses a Conservative politician the better. But notice how little attention is paid to the concern regular church attending Catholics had over Liberal politicians who support abortion and redefining marriage yet continue to take Communion. That too, my journalistic colleagues, is a scandal. But no, that has never been the subject of a week of coverage and editorial cartoons.

But for those of us who love Jesus Christ and who appreciate His Real Presence in the Eucharist, it is hurtful and sad to see the ridicule, the trampling of pearls under foot, the mocking. I'm reminded of how Jesus was mocked with the crown of thorns, derided in a purple robe, one of the sorrowful mysteries. Every Catholic I have spoken with on this is holding nothing against the Prime Minister on this---forgiveness and charity are part of the faith, after all---but sad that the Blessed Sacrament continues to be made a spectacle and a source of ridicule.

I know not all of my colleagues are like this. Some of them genuinely want to understand why this is not a wafer, not a cracker, not a symbol for faithful Catholics.

I am an Anglican Catholic, part of the Traditional Anglican Communion (TAC) that made a formal request to come into communion with the Holy See and the Bishop of Rome. (The Pope, in other words). We believe what the Catholic Church teaches on the Holy Eucharist and once upon a time much of the Anglican Church of the Canterbury Communion shared much of the same doctrine. In fact, when Dr. Michael Ramsay was Archbishop of Canterbury, he and Pope Paul the VI committed to exploring unity and communion as sister churches, united by not absorbed.

Today I came across the blog post of a TAC bishop in Australia who quotes a lengthy article on the meaning of the mass.

It is beautiful and might help you to understand. That is if you want to.

The distinguished Anglican scholar, Evelyn Underhill traced what could be called the graph of the Mass: from the liturgy of lessons and Gospel, "God's uttered word in History," and the Great Intercession, "the unstinting, self-spending with and for the purposes of God, by intercessory prayer," of the Offertory, where Christ, she wrote, "enters the Holy Place as the representative of man, offering the humble material of man's sacrifice, that he may come forth from it as the representative of God, bringing to man the Heavenly Food." And, finally, to the Great Thanksgiving - when the gifts of bread and wine, set apart from the natural world for the Mystery, yield - "the invisible Holy Presence; Who comes under these lowly signs into the Sanctuary with an escort of incense and lights, and is welcomed by the enraptured Alleluias of the Cherubic Hymn, announcing the Presence of God."

What better has been written of this tremendous moment of the Sanctus when "all that truly happens," she wrote, "happens beyond the rampart of the world"? Sursum corda - Lift up your hearts, sings the celebrant. "The early liturgies leave us in no doubt," she continued, "as to what this movement implied: 'To the heavenly height, the awful place of glory. . . .' This cry, and the people's response, come down to us from the earliest days of the Church." It marks, she declared, "the crossing of the boundary between natural and supernatural worship"; the knowing search for what she called "that ineffable majesty on which Isaiah looked, which is the theme of the earliest Eucharistic prayers, and which inspires the great Sanctus of the B Minor Mass, with its impersonal cry of pure adoration." This is the world communicants enter as they approach the altar rail, wrote Underhill, where "the 'Table of Holy Desires' with its cross and ritual lights stands on the very frontier of the invisible." (1)

Has anyone in our time set before architect or musician, so uncompromisingly, the task the liturgy forces upon them? As Underhill put it in another place, "movement and words combine to produce an art form which is the vehicle of [the Church's] self-offering to God and communion with God." The liturgy, she knew, is "an action and an experience that transcend the logical levels of the mind and demand an artistic rather than an intellectual form of expression." (2) The honours of the church on earth significantly describe in her text what they describe, audibly and visually, in the mass. Bach is there as well as the cherubim, on the frontier of the invisible.

If you really want to go deeper in your understanding of the Eucharist, read the texts from last June's Eucharistic Congress in Quebec City.

Click on the field and a menu for the date and the time of day will pop up giving you access to PDF transcripts of the teachings at this amazing event.

It's really sad that journalists think they can cover religion when they would never send a person who knows nothing about sports to cover a football game.

Blame Michael Jackson for the economic crash!

So says the brilliant Spengler, channeled by David P. Goldman now associate editor of First Things Magazine.

He writes:

As I wrote in Asia Times Online this morning the Peter Pan syndrome among aging Americans is the source of the economic crisis, in two ways.

Something astonishing had happened, compared to which the tulip bulb craze and the South Sea bubble seem like models of sobriety. The eternal adolescence that Michael Jackson so ably represented in fantasy turned into the foundation for the great investing

wave of the 1990s. The best minds America could train worked hundred-hour-weeks in pizza-box-strewn lofts to launch the next site for web-based greeting cards or virtual-reality sex. Stock analysts valued new issues in proportion to their “burn rate”, assuming that the more money they lost, the more they were worth. The sort of things the world really needed – hardier seeds, safer nuclear energy, more efficient electrical batteries – never turned up on the radar screen.

Equity markets collapsed and never came back. In nominal dollars, the technology-centered NASDAQ index stands at one-third of its February 2000 peak. Real returns to investment in youth culture followed the same trajectory as Michael Jackson’s nose. Undaunted, Americans stopped speculating in technology stocks and speculated instead in houses. The Peter Pan syndrome continued to afflict the American economy. Rather than save, as aging people should, they borrowed more to acquire bigger houses. The housing bubble prolonged America’s collective adolescence for a few more years, for it allowed Americans to spend money on toys rather than saving for the retirement that came rushing at the baby boomers like an oncoming express train.

Separation of Church and State?

It is interesting how cries of separation of church and state go up whenever a religious official comments on a controversial political matter, usually around abortion, marriage or the like. (If a religious official makes one about a politically-popular cause like the enviroment, then hey, their moral authority is welcomed.)

But the original intent of separating church and state was just as much to protect the churches from state interference as to protect the state from being dominated by one religious denomination to the exclusion of others.

That's why the Catholic Civil Rights League has taken the following stand on the complaint issued against the Bishop of Peterborough:

Without commenting on any individual personnel situation or personalities that are involved in this case, the relationship between the Church and altar servers has none of the attributes that would make it a subject for a complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal. No one serves on the altar as a right; it is at the discretion of the pastor, who in turn is at the service of his bishop. Mr. Corcoran’s role was not unlike that of other liturgical servers, who are part of the overall presentation of the Mass.

The decision about who can serve on the altar is a matter of Church governance. While the Church is subject to human rights law when it employs people in a commercial relationship, the same cannot be said about decisions involving who is a member, or how they can best serve.

The League hopes the Human Rights Tribunal will avoid an interference with the Church's governance in this matter. It should not place itself as an arbiter of canonical precepts.

Yup.

Oh, is legalized prostitution the next big thing?

What kind of a country do we live in where political freedom of expression, religious freedom and conscience rights are increasingly circumscribed by ideologically driven human rights commissions, but hey, you may soon be able to express yourself by opening a whorehouse on your street and openly selling your sexual wares, or those of others and happily living off the income if the courts decide that prostitution is a trade like hairdressing or any other service.

And the courts don't even want to listen to arguments to the contrary?

Morality tale

Last September, my very first night in Rome I had a meal at this restaurant. The waiter persuaded me to let him bring me various dishes and I was shocked when the bill arrived. 160 Euros! About 250 dollars. "You don't have to give me a tip," he said in his thick accent.

Yeah, right! The meal was good, but not THAT good.

I took a picture of the restaurant as a reminder and thought about blogging about the experience but never did that I remember.

Well, imagine my surprise and schadenfreude when I discovered the restaurant all shuttered up. (It's the yellow building with the plants in front.)

I was told some Japanese tourists complained to the police about getting a bill for 400-500 Euros. An investigation ensued, "regularities were found" my Italian speaking friends told me the newspapers said, and authorities closed the restaurant down.

What goes around comes around. Do unto others as you would have them to unto you.

Photos of me and the Holy Father

I have found some of the photos of me with the Holy Father. I like this one and this one.

Something seems really odd

I received this email today from a group calling itself "Catholic evangelization"

(For some reason the email was not showing up on the blog and I can't seem to be able to repaste it)
My SPAM blocker blocked the pictures. When I clicked to open them, I was directed to this site.

But the phone number has an extra number in it, so it is unusable.

I just checked to see whether I had ever received an email from Catholic evangelization before and I never had. I am not on their mailing list and they used my work address, one that I more commonly use when I'm engaged in my work on Parliament Hill. I'm on a lot of Catholic and evangelical mailing lists through my work by choice.

In other words, it looks like SPAM, coming from some kind of SPAMBOT, the same kind of computer source that sends out email ads for Viagra knock offs.

When I go to the Catholic Evangelization site though, I find no indication of anything concerning the Communion controversy. Is the person behind the site responsible for the letter? Is the site address being bogusly used by whoever is putting out the email?

Some of the links on this site are the the Legionaries of Christ and Regnum Christi, Catholic movements that are undergoing big trials right now because of scandals involving their now-deceased founder.

So I don't know what's going on. I still suspect an element of Astroturfing, but there may also be some fringe Catholic (and fringe evangelical) and anti-religious grassroots stuff happening too. If so, I want to find out where its coming from.

My fellow bloggers and those Catholics who have the ability to ferret information out about these things or know somebody who knows something, write me via the comments section (they are moderated and if you tell me something is confidential I will keep it confidential, otherwise I will publish them) and let me know about this group Catholic evangelization. Is it legitimate? Who is behind it? Did they write the SPAM message above? Or is somebody else using their web address to make the SPAM seem legit?

Most interesting and perplexing.

After I saw the first YouTube video (now taken down under a copyright claim by Radio Canada) I immediately suspected a political dirty trick, what is called Astroturfing---a fake attempt at appearing like a grassroots reaction, using the new media.

There are new YouTube videos on this, seemingly professionally produced, to replace the one removed for copyright reasons. Who has the time and money to be putting up the new YouTube videos on this issue? What is motivating people? Why the anonymity? One is on Atheist Media Blog.

When I spoke to the Prime Minister about this yesterday, he had a very interesting observation about this and its relation to his conversation with the Holy Father that I will give first to the Catholic papers.

Stay tuned. When the article is published electronically I will link to it.

An insider's account of the Harper audience

I have posted some of the photos that are good enough for my blog but not good enough for the Catholic papers below. You can see the rapport that Harper developed with the Pope.

As Dr. Robert Moynihan, a Vaticanista who edits Inside the Vatican magazine and reports from Rome and Washington, D.C., Harper came into the Vatican Palace looking a little stiff.

Read Robert's most chatty and informative account that gives you some insight into the color and characters involved in papal audiences.

He writes:

Since 1984 — about the time of my own arrival in Rome — Suor Giovanna has run the Vatican Press Office press credential section with an absolutely iron hand, occasionally striking fear into the heart of journalists who misplace or lose their Vatican press passes (Suor Giovanna: "I'm sorry, but you cannot get a replacement without reporting the loss to the Italian authorities..." Journalist: "Are you sure you can't make an exception?" Suor Giovanna: "I'm sorry, no exceptions.").

But in recent years, she has grown less gruff, and this past week — the week of her retirement — she has been positively cordial (I knew she always was, of course, deep down...). Indeed, she even broke down briefly in tears last week at her retirement press conference.

"Aren't there many other journalists in line in front of me?" I asked.

"For President Obama, yes," she said. "But ask Cindy what she can do for one of the other leaders..."

She was referring to Cindy Wooden, the veteran Catholic News Service Vatican reporter. Cindy is in charge of assigning journalists to the "pool," or small group which goes into private meetings and reports back what they have seen and heard.

A couple of days later, Cindy said to me, "All right. You can go in the pool for the last visit, Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada. So you'll get to meet the Pope, after the Prime Minister leaves. The Pope will receive the two journalists of the 'pool' and several from the Canadian press. You'll have just a few seconds, unless he wishes to talk with you a bit longer..."

"Thanks!" I said.

"But listen," she said. "We have a lot of clients in Canada. I'm relying on you to give us every detail. I want you to look at your watch at the start of the audience, and at the end of the audience, and tell me how many minutes it lasted. And what the Prime Minister's wife is wearing. And what the gifts are. That's important. And any words you hear at the start of the meeting. The cameras will be clicking, so it may be difficult to hear, but try. They usually speak a sentence or two. Sometimes you can catch a phrase..."

"I'll take good notes," I promised. "What time should I be here?"

I had my own encounter with Sr. Giovanna in the room where we waited with the other journalists outside the Papal Library where the audience took place. Her face was aglow with peace. She is a tiny woman, maybe about 5 feet tall. She took my hands in hers and told me I should never underestimate the importance of my work as a journalist. "It is a dedication, an apostolate," she said, her eyes on mine. What a kindness and a blessing!

Also, Robert tells of going up to the area where the journalists would meet the audience via the Bronze Doors to the Secretariat of State. These are off St. Peter's Square next to St. Peter's Basilica under the beginning of the right hand side of the Colonnade. The Canadian journalist were bused directly into the courtyard of the Apostolic Palace. The pictures show the scale of the courtyard. You can see a Swiss Guard, in a uniform designed by Michelangelo, raising the yellow and white Papal flag and the honor guard marching across the square in preparation of meeting the Prime Minister, who also entered via this courtyard.

Harper, his family and the rest of the Canadian delegation passed through various rooms in the palace, including the loggia painted by Raphael. The Canadian journalists passed through the same rooms before Harper arrived, then we waited to get the first pictures of his entering with his delegation behind him.

We were allowed into the library for about a minute for initial photos, then herded back out to the side chamber where we counted the length of the audience---a little more than 20 minutes.

Then we were back in for photos of the Holy Father's greeting the family members, the various members of the delegation, then the gift exchange, (for info on the gifts, read Robert's account), then gifts to the family members, then the journalists were lined up to meet the Holy Father ourselves.

What an opportunity.

The pictures above show the side room where the journalists waited. Now if I told you I deliberately achieved the effects above, we could call the photos art! But I was trying to shut off the flash on my camera and testing to see whether my trial and error efforts were successful.

One picture shows Fr. Frederico Lombardi, the Holy Father's Press Secretary. The other shows part of Matteo Bruni, who works in the Vatican Press Office. Even the smaller side rooms have beautiful art, the accumulation of centuries of inspiration through the Catholic faith.

Pictures from inside the Vatican's Apostolic Palace

I met the Holy Father yesterday

I will have more on this later as I am only just back from Rome and my first obligation is to write up stories for the editors of the Catholic papers I write for.

It all went by too quickly but Pope Benedict XVI is as people have described. Even with a line of people behind you, he addresses you alone, doesn't look over your shoulder for the next person and gives you his full, loving attention. I'm so grateful for this once-in-a-lifetime experience.

I was one of the few journalists who were allowed into the Vatican's Apostolic Palace where the Holy Father met with Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his family. That in itself was an amazing privilege.

I took a lot of pictures and some of the less technically sound ones will appear on the blog--the newspaper-worthy photos I'll save for the papers.

What struck me was the warmth and rapport the Holy Father and Harper shared. Harper, who sometimes comes across a little cool and aloof, seemed transparently joyful. Afterwards, even while the cameras were rolling, he and the Holy Father continued to speak in a relaxed, unselfconscious manner.

And watching the Pope greet the Harper children Ben and Rachel and seeing the loving looks of parental pride on the Harpers' faces was a thing to behold. What a beautiful family! It goes against the stereotype out there that Harper would not hug his son when dropping him off at school, but just shake his hand.

I think young Rachel Harper stole the Holy Father's heart. There's a moment I captured on camera---lousy shot technically--where as she is leaving she turns around to glance back and the Holy Father is beaming at her.

And no, the communion issue did not come up at all in the 20 minutes or so of the private audience in the Papal Library. I got that straight from the Prime Minister after the audience.

In the meantime, here's the official statement from the PM following the meeting:

VATICAN CITY – Prime Minister Stephen Harper today had a Private Audience with His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI.

“It was an honour to meet Pope Benedict and hear his perspective on a number of important issues, including human rights and an ethical response to the global economic crisis,” said the Prime Minister. “I expressed my deep appreciation for the Holy Father's moral and humanitarian leadership as an advocate of human dignity, peace and religious liberty, and for the spiritual leadership he provides to Catholics in Canada and throughout the world.”

Pope Benedict XVI is the head of the worldwide Roman Catholic Church and spiritual leader of one billion Catholic Christians worldwide, including more than 14 million Canadian Catholics.

The Prime Minister also introduced Pope Benedict to his wife, Mrs. Laureen Harper, and their children, and to a delegation of Canadian Parliamentarians.

Following his Audience with Pope Benedict and his meeting with Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone, the Prime Minister toured St. Peter’s Basilica.

And here are reports by Canwest's Peter O'Neil (one "l" he tells me, seeing as I spelled his name wrong in a previous post) and the Toronto Star's Tonda MacCharles where I'm quoted on the significance of the meeting.

Also, the issue of abortion and stem cell research and other hot button issues did not come up in their talk either.

But it did the previous day with U.S. President Barack Obama.

One of Obama's first acts as president was to end his predecessor George W. Bush's restrictions on government funding for embryonic stem cell research and for family planning groups that carry out or facilitate abortions overseas.

After the audience, the conservative pope, a staunch opponent of abortion and contraception, offered Obama a copy of an "instruction" on reproductive technology, issued in December last year.

The document titled "Dignitas Personae" (Dignity of the Person) lists biomedical techniques considered "illicit" by the Roman Catholic Church such as the therapeutic use of stem cells and the use of the "morning-after" contraceptive pill.

BTW, the U.S. president was accorded a slightly different protocol as a head of state than Harper who is a head of government. That explains the difference in the Pope's attire on the two occasions. Note that both Michelle Obama and Laureen Harper wore black veils for their visit.

I was a little worried I didn't have one as I didn't know upon leaving for Rome that the Pope would greet journalists individually after the audience. But I was told not to worry about it, that I was not expected to.

I figured the Holy Father is more concerned about whether I have a veiled heart and have put on Christ rather than specific outward apparel.

I promised the sisters at Casa Santa Brigida where I stayed in Rome to give their greetings.
"Tell him we love him," Sr. Patricia told me to say on their behalf. She said that when he was Cardinal Ratzinger he had a close relationship with them. So I did. He seemed glad to hear that.

The picture above is an official PMO photo by Jason Ransom.

My breakfast companion

I moved to the media hotel today and had an unusual breakfast companion.

You can see St. Peter's Basilica off in the distance. One of the other views shows the Borghese Gardens.

The Marriott Grand Hotel Flora is a wonderful place to stay.

The seagull sat near my table eyeing me like a begging dog. And when some other folks left their table for a moment, the bird hopped on their table and seized some smoked salmon or something.

The Communion controversy

Here's a link to the story I did on the Communion controversy from Rome. I am frankly amazed that this story has become such a preoccupation---still---in the Canadian media. Where was the similar coverage when former Governor General Adrienne Clarkson, an Anglican, went forward to receive communion?

But you know, this story offers many opportunities for teaching moments about what Catholics believe about the Blessed Sacrament.

Canwest's Peter O'Neill filed this story where the Prime Minister speaks for himself at a news conference closing out the G8 meetings:

Harper, during a lengthy news conference at the conclusion of the three-day G8 summit, also denounced a report in a New Brunswick newspaper earlier this week saying he pocketed the Holy Communion host during the funeral at a Catholic church for former governor general Romeo LeBlanc.

"First of all, as a Christian I have never refused communion when offered to me. That's actually pretty important to me," he said.

"Somebody running an unsubstantiated story that I would stick communion bread in my pocket is really absurd and I think it's a real, frankly, a low point. This is a low moment in journalism, whoever is responsible for this. It's just a terrible story and a ridiculous story and not based on anything as near as I can tell."

Interestingly, a Catholic told me yesterday that he would have been more offended if the Prime Minister has refused to accept the offer of Communion. That would be like refusing Jesus, he said.

I dunno. I agree with the Prime Minister that this was a low moment in journalism and I would not be surprised to see this media incident gloated about in a memoir of political dirty tricks someday.

The State has no business in the sancturaries of the nation

This complaint should be dismissed out of hand. The Ontario Human Rights Commission has no jurisdiction in this case and to assume it does is an egregious Charter violation.

There is no "right" to be an altar server. The SoCon observes:

What do you suppose this does to the idea of freedom of association? What business is it of the State to tell a religious association who it can and cannot use in its religious functions?

The State has no business in telling a Catholic Bishop who can or cannot participate at the altar. We have a right as Catholics to associate with like-minded Catholics. We would not accept a priest living with a woman and claiming that it was purely platonic. That’s scandalous and we are permitted to act against anyone who is causing scandal.

Giving one individual the right to dictate to a whole group what they must accept involuntarily is the very definition of tyranny.

Blogging Rome

BC Catholic is posting some blog entries I'm sending from Rome here.

I think I have finally adjusted to the new time zone. The weather is fantastic: warm but relatively dry. It gets a little hot if you have to travel on a packed bus, but otherwise it's great for sitting outside. Not that I'm getting to do that much! But the media room for Canadian journalists is in a lovely hotel in a swanky area of Rome and I have the suite all to myself right now.

One of the stories I have blogged on is the one about Harper's taking communion during the Catholic funeral of Romeo LeBlanc.

I dunno, but the whole thing smells fishy to me.

The YouTube video is anonymous and professionally done. The conservative Catholics who might object to Harper's taking communion or the Moncton archbishop's giving it to him usually post under their own names and take the heat for it.
I can't see liberal Catholics getting all heated up about this. They are more likely to be annoyed that people are questioning this.

As someone who used to take communion in Catholic Churches because I once did not know any better, I wish the PM had just crossed his hands over his chest and asked for a blessing. That's what I do because Anglican Catholics are not yet in communion with the Bishop of Rome. I don't know what I would do, however, if an archbishop, who knew I was not Roman Catholic or a member of a church in communion with the Holy See, offered me communion.

But then, I believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. I believe in what the Catholic Church teaches about the Eucharist. And it's because I believe and because I love the Catholic Church that I respect her rules in this regard, even though it sometimes causes suffering.

I suspect this story was designed to embarrass and upstage the PM while he's attending the G8 meetings and days before his audience with the pope.

I think it's what they call Astro-turfing--- an attempt to make an issue look like a grassroots response, but it's as fake as Astroturf and orchestrated by political operatives. But it could have been done by rogue operatives acting on their own without the knowledge of their leader, to give plausible deniability. That's the problem with any political party, you can't always control who is part of your coalition.

I think a lot of Catholics are very interested in this issue, but not all of them will take a similar position on it.

Greetings from Rome!

After a long weekend in Phoenix, Arizona and a week in California, I flew to Rome yesterday on the Prime Minister's plane. While the other journalists are off in L Aquilla covering the G-8, my interest is in the new encylical and the Prime Minister's audience with the Holy Father on Saturday and whatever other stories with a Canadian angle I can rustle up.

The encylical is here.

Here's an excerpt of an interview National Review Online editor Kathryn Jean Lopez did with Kishore Jayabala:

LOPEZ: What can the non-Catholic learn from the encyclical?JAYABALAN: He
doesn't distinguish between Catholics and non-Catholics in the encyclical but
calls all of us to broaden our use of reason beyond the merely technical or
scientific. Benedict also recalls the limited nature of the state and its
inability to provide the most important thing — love.As Benedict argues in his
previous encyclicals, as well as the current one, the state is no replacement
for the family or the church: The state cannot love us — and it would be a
scary thing even if it could.Even where the state does have some
responsibilities, it may obey the principle of subsidiarity — that is, let
individuals, families, churches, businesses, and local communities handle their
own problems first. This is the setting for the pope's call for fraternity and a
vibrant, diverse civil society.

This is important, because so often we are looking for the state to do things it is not capable of doing.

Sam Gregg, also of the Acton Institute, has this commentary:

Relativists beware. Whether you like it or not, truth matters – even in the
economy. That’s the core message of Pope Benedict XVI’s new social encyclical
Caritas in Veritate.
For 2000 years, the Catholic Church has hammered home a
trio of presently-unpopular ideas into the humus of human civilization: that
there is truth; that it is not simply of the scientific variety; that it is
knowable through faith and reason; and that it is not whatever you want or
“feel” it to be. Throughout his entire life, Benedict XVI has underscored these
themes, precisely because much of the world, including many Christians, has lost
sight of their importance.
Perhaps Caritas in Veritate’s most important
truth-claim about economic life is that the market economy cannot be based on
just any value-system. Against all relativists on the left and the right,
Benedict maintains that market economies must be underpinned by commitments to
particular basic moral goods and a certain vision of the human person if it is
to serve rather than undermine humanity’s common good: “The economy needs ethics
in order to function correctly — not any ethics whatsoever, but an ethics which
is people-centred” (CV no.45)
“Without internal forms of solidarity and
mutual trust,” the Pope writes, “the market cannot completely fulfill its proper
economic function” (CV no. 35). This surely has been amply confirmed by the
recent financial crisis. America’s subprime-mortgage market collapse was at
least partly attributable to the fact that literally thousands of people lied on
their mortgage application forms. Should we be surprised that mass violation of
the moral prohibition against lying has devastating economic consequences? “The
economic sphere”, the pope reminds us, “is neither ethically neutral, nor
inherently inhuman and opposed to society. It is part and parcel of human
activity and precisely because it is human, it must be structured and governed
in an ethical manner” (CV no.36).
Contrary to the pre-encyclical hype of
certain American commentators and the ever-unreliable British press, predictions
of papal anathemas against “global capitalism” have – as usual – been found
wanting. In economic terms, the pope describes as “erroneous” the tired notion
that the developed countries’ wealth is predicated on poor nations’ poverty (CV
no.35) that one hears customarily from the likes of Hugo Chavez and whatever’s
left of the dwindling band of aging liberation theologians. That’s a pontifical
body-blow to a central working assumption of many professional social justice
“activists”.
Nor will they be happy with the pope’s concerns about the ways
in which foreign aid can produce situations of dependency (CV no.58), not to
mention Benedict’s strictures against protectionism (CV no.42) as well as his
stress that no amount of structural change can possibly compensate for people
freely choosing the good: “Integral human development presupposes the
responsible freedom of the individual and of peoples: no structure can guarantee
this development over and above human responsibility” (CV no.17).
Nor does
Benedict regard the market as morally problematic in itself. “In and of itself,”
the Pope states, “the market is not . . . the place where the strong subdue the
weak. Society does not have to protect itself from the market, as if the
development of the latter were ipso facto to entail the death of authentically
human relations” (CV no.36). What matters, Benedict claims, is the moral culture
in which markets exists.