Category Archives: Roman Catholicism

Catholic priest cancelled

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It didn’t take long for cancel culture to invade the church. The Roman Catholic church; the Anglican church has already cancelled itself, so no invasion is necessary.

Monsignor Owen Keenan, priest at Merciful Redeemer Parish in Mississauga, was foolish enough to express the opinion that there may have been some good done in the residential schools.

Admittedly, his timing was bad and perhaps he is wrong and nothing good whatsoever was done in the schools – a proposition I find implausible. But that isn’t the point. He surely should be allowed to voice his opinion without being fired – well, he “resigned”.

But no, there are some things you just can’t say and expect to get away with it. Including in the RC church. To make matters worse, he committed the secular mortal sin of denouncing the flying of Pride flags by Catholic schools.

I don’t suppose Keenan has a death wish; he is probably just harmlessly naïve.

From here:

A priest who referred to the “good done” by the Roman Catholic Church in residential schools has resigned from his role as pastor, the Archdiocese of Toronto confirmed on Friday.

During a sermon last Sunday, Monsignor Owen Keenan, the pastor of the Merciful Redeemer Parish in Mississauga, west of Toronto, talked about the remains of an estimated 215 children discovered at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. run by the church.

“Two-thirds of the country is blaming the church, which we love, for the tragedies that occurred there,” he said on a video that was posted to the church’s YouTube page but was later deleted.

“I presume the same number would thank the church for the good done in those schools, but of course, that question was never asked and we are not allowed to even say that good was done there. I await to see what comes to my inbox.”

In a statement on Twitter Friday, the Archdiocese of Toronto said Keenan resigned from his role as pastor and has been placed on an indefinite leave of absence.

“We apologize for the pain caused by his remarks,” the Archdiocese said.

The parish has issued an apology as has Keenan. It is suitably grovelling but, as expected, insufficiently so to save his job. You can read both here.

Church installs vending machine for the easy purchase of religious paraphernalia

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From here:

Holy VendorThe world’s first religious vending machine has been installed in a church to allow worshippers to buy holy accessories before attending a service.

Churchgoers can now buy rosary beads and armbands with religious motifs before taking their seat inside their place of worship.

The machine was the brainchild of pastoral assistant Sebastian Fiebig at the St. Joseph Church, in Hamburg, Germany.

He designed the machine and believes it is a fun idea.

The 39-year-old said: ‘I walked passed a vending machine for umbrellas a long time ago and it was then that I came up with the idea to make one for the church.

‘I purchased an old vending machine on the internet, repaired it, gave it a new coat of paint and then filled it with the rosaries and armbands.’

After putting the money in the slot, a white cardboard box drops into your hands, and the wooden rosary is inside.

A wooden armband with religious motifs will set you back two euros and features images of Jesus, Maria and the Pope.

Maybe it’s just me – and I don’t want to give North American Anglican Churches any ideas – but that looks as if it was once a condom dispenser of the kind one encounters in airport bathrooms.

Requests to nullify Baptism on the rise

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From here:

An elderly French man is fighting to make a formal break with the Catholic Church, in a case that could have far-reaching effects.

Rene LeBouvier, 71, has taken the church to court over its refusal to let him nullify his baptism after losing his faith in the religion.

Though he was raised in a community where Catholicism dominated every walk of life, Rene changed his views in the 1970s after spending time with ‘free thinkers’.

On first glance this seems plain silly – on second glance too, come to think of it.

After sober reflection, though, it occurred to me that perhaps LeBouvier has a point. I was confirmed by the Diocese of Niagara: I will be applying to be de-confirmed forthwith.

 

Coptic Christians kicking the Toronto Catholic school board where it hurts

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From here:

The Coptic Orthodox Churches in Toronto are threatening to withdraw 4,000 families from the Toronto Catholic District School Board if it does not amend its controversial equity policy to protect Catholic teaching in the schools.  According to one expert in Ontario education, if the threat were carried out, the board could lose upwards of $40,000,000 in annual public funding, and over 150 teachers.

If the board implements its policy, wrote Fr. Jeremiah Attaalla on June 22nd, “we will not hesitate to withdraw our children at once from attending any Catholic school within Toronto or [the Greater Toronto Area].”

The equity policy, passed earlier this year as part of the Ontario government’s sweeping equity and inclusive education strategy, has sparked an unprecedented mobilization of parents who fear that it will give homosexual activists a foothold in order to further subvert already weak Catholic sexual teaching in the schools.

The Canadian separate school system has always been one of – well, inequality. Why should Catholics have a state funded school system when evangelical Christians or Muslims have either to send their children to a secular, increasingly anti-religion school, or pay to send them to a private school in addition to paying taxes to fund public schools?

That isn’t the inequality that could be the undoing of the Catholic school system in Canada, though: it is the hellish “equality” that demands the levelling of human values, particularly sexual values, to the point where copulating with just about anything, animate or otherwise, holds equal significance as raising what used to be thought of as a normal family.

And the Toronto Catholic school board, wishing to protect its government funding, is acquiescing to this.

It seems to be backfiring, though: perhaps the school board should have stuck with its principles and inequalities.

Catholics to march in Ottawa Gay Pride parade

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I knew Catholics could learn something from Anglicans.

From here:

You are invited to join the Capital Pride Parade on August 28th, 2011, at 1:00PM.

We march every year, because we want to tell the Pride Parade’s participants and viewers that it is possible to live in integrity as a person of faith, who is both gay and deeply spiritual.  We believe that there is a place for everybody at Christ’s table.

Please join us at the Pride Parade and help make this message heard. All people have the same gift of love to share! Following the march, at 2:00PM, the group invites participants to the St. Joe’s Supper Table (151 Laurier Street East) for light snacks and refreshments. This event is sponsored by the University of Ottawa’s Gay Catholics, Christians and Allies Group (GCCA).

 

h/:t Big Blue Wave

 

Fr. Raymond Gravel, the suing priest

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Every time I sink into a slough of despond produced by the certain knowledge that the Anglican Church has a monopoly on batty priests, something turns up to give me a helping hand out of the mire. This time it’s in the form of Roman Catholic priest, Raymond Gravel, a man who is not only just as daft as the dottiest Anglican prelate but exceeds most in native deviousness.

Gravel was forced by the Vatican to relinquish his seat in parliament as a member of the Bloc Québécois; the Vatican does not allow priests to serve in public office – a restriction that can hardly have been news to Gravel when he first stood for the Bloc Québécois, even though he received a dispensation from his bishop to do so.

While an MP, he distinguished himself as a politician-priest chimera by opposing Bill C-484, which would have recognized injury of a foetus during a crime as a separate offence from an injury to the mother, and by supporting  abortionist Henry Morgentaler’s receiving the Order of Canada – all of this while claiming to be pro-life. He also supports same-sex marriage and homosexual priests; he used to be a homosexual prostitute but all that is now behind him – as it were.

Lifesite News has done its best to expose the duplicitous Gavel and, since he has now been booted out of his position as a catechist in the Quebec Diocese of Joliette, he has decided to sue someone. After astutely assessing his options, he decided that Lifesite News is an easier target than the Vatican, so he is suing them for $500,000 in damages.

If he wins, Lifesite News will be shut down: a loss for Christianity, the pro-life movement, free speech and the Catholic Church.

Read more here.

 

 

How not to sell ice-cream to Catholics

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From here:Add an Image

Two ice cream adverts, one showing a pregnant nun and the other two male priests about to kiss, are facing a ban by the advertising watchdog after offending Roman Catholics.

The provocative slogan ‘immaculately conceived’ appears on the image of the nun eating from a pot of Antonio Federici Gelato Italiano.

Meanwhile, the picture of two men in cassocks and clerical collars, embracing with their lips inches apart, bears the words ‘we believe in salivation’.

The Advertising Standards Authority received complaints that the adverts, which have appeared in Grazia, Look and The Lady, are offensive to religious believers.

It has indicated the image of the nun is likely to be banned and is still investigating the advert featuring the priests.

British firm Antonio Federici said the adverts celebrated the ‘implied forbidden Italian temptations’ of the ice cream.

Creative director Matt O’Connor said the company would lose a substantial sum if it had to pull the campaign and was considering a legal challenge.

He said: ‘Only a tiny proportion of those who have seen the ads have made complaints. They seem to be upholding the views of a bigoted minority over the majority.’


Personally, I’m all in favour of free speech and would like to see an ad featuring a woman in a burka eating ice-cream – how is it done?

In the meantime, the Catholic Church could put out its own ice-cream ad. Something like this:

The Roman Catholic Church in disarray

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The Roman Catholic Church likes to think of itself as the one true church, a notion that does not sit particularly well with most non Roman Catholics, including me. Understandably, people expect an institution that makes such an audacious claim to hold itself to high standards; when, instead, they find child abuse, systematic cover-ups and hypocrisy, it does little for any of the RC Church’s claims, let alone the pretension that it is the one true church.

Ruth Gledhill reports the imminent implosion of the RC church:

Catholic Church ‘imploding’ over child sex abuse.

That is the view of a senior journalist in Rome over the latest round of revelations of the extent of paedophilia among Catholic clergy.

Unsurprisingly, no-one is more smugly satisfied over the troubles in the RC church than Christopher Hitchens:

The Great Catholic Cover-Up

The pope’s entire career has the stench of evil about it.

On March 10, the chief exorcist of the Vatican, the Rev. Gabriele Amorth (who has held this demanding post for 25 years), was quoted as saying that “the Devil is at work inside the Vatican,” and that “when one speaks of ‘the smoke of Satan’ in the holy rooms, it is all true—including these latest stories of violence and pedophilia.” This can perhaps be taken as confirmation that something horrible has indeed been going on in the holy precincts, though most inquiries show it to have a perfectly good material explanation.

Hitchens, as an atheist, likes to indulge in play-morality, and, so, is eminently unqualified to give an opinion on what is evil; for an atheist, such categories are merely preferences induced by the occasional stray spasm of a neuro-mechanism. The fact that Hitchens has said something about a church that is not all wrong, in itself means that there must be something really rotten afoot.

At the moment, the storm for the RC Church has just begun; for the institution to survive, it will need a long-overdue pruning – a pruning that would have to remove and bar homosexuals from the priesthood (60% of the cases involved priests who were sexually attracted to male adolescents). If it happens, there will be great wailing and gnashing of teeth among liberals.

Pope’s Progress

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Ruth Gledhill notes that the Pope has attacked the UK’s Equality Bill; good for him:

In what was interpreted as an attack on Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill, which is going through Parliament, the Pope urged the 35 Catholic bishops from England and Wales in Rome on a five-yearly ad limina visit to make a united stand against it. He claimed that the proposed equal rights laws threatened “longstanding British traditions” of freedom of speech.

While Damian Thomson reckons the Pope is excoriating the entire Labour Party; even better:

“Your country is well known for its firm commitment to equality of opportunity for all members of society. Yet as you have rightly pointed out, the effect of some of the legislation designed to achieve this goal has been to impose unjust limitations on the freedom of religious communities to act in accordance with their beliefs. In some respects it actually violates the natural law upon which the equality of all human beings is grounded and by which it is guaranteed.”

Is that a direct attack on Labour policies? Yes.

And George Pitcher is creating a diversion by still obsessing about all the homosexual Anglo-Catholics that the Pope has saddled himself with:

Pope Benedict has enraged Harriet Harman’s Equality Police by laying into her plans to stop churches discriminating against homosexuals.  But the pontiff is sending out some mixed messages here.

Last year, he famously launched his Anglican Ordinariate, offering Anglo-Catholics, disaffected with Anglicanism over issues such as women bishops, a welcome in the Church of Rome. I don’t have the statistics to claim that the overwhelming majority of Anglo-Catholic clergy in the Church of England are gay. But I think we’re on safe ground if we say that homosexuals form a higher proportion than the national average in that denomination

Labour MPs are “appalled”:

Labour MEP Stephen Hughes hit back after the Pope warned that the UK Equality Bill would be unfair on religious communities.

“As a Catholic, I am appalled by the attitude of the Pope. Religious leaders should be trying to eradicate inequality, not perpetuate it.

And gay rights groups are on the defensive:

“People should not be denied access to services and employment purely because they are gay.

“We’ve got to guard against sweeping exemptions seeming to protect one person’s freedom, which actually really impact on other people’s.”

He added: “What you can’t start doing is saying that religious people have hard-won freedoms, we’ll now restrict those, we won’t give them to gay people, we won’t give them to women.”

To upset so many with one dose of plain common sense demonstrates a rare talent: well done, Benedict XVI.

To incite equivalent unrest, Rowan William had to resort to promoting sharia law, an idea he pulled from his grab-bag of liberal Anglican asininities.

The last temptation of Anglo-Catholics

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The Apostolic Constitution has been published to the delight of Anglo-Catholics. It allows married priests and, effectively, married bishops; it is clear that the Pope has, as Anglicans like to say, drawn the circle wide and thrown open the doors in his bid to attract Anglicans disgusted with their own denomination. Unlike Anglicans, though, he has managed to do this without the benefit of Conversation, Dialogue, the Listening Process or Indaba Groups: he just did it.

For the Anglicans who accept what the charitable view as a more than generous offer and the cynical as opportunistic poaching, I wonder how they will feel when the Pope acts – and he or his successor will – on something they don’t agree with. Presumably those who are tempted by the current offer were not sufficiently tempted by previous ones or they would already be Roman Catholic; which means they don’t believe that the Roman Catholic Church is the one true church. Or perhaps some of the RC specific dogma about Mary, the authority of the Pope or praying to the saints stuck in their craw. For the priests,  maybe it was the prospect of losing Anglo-Catholic paraphernalia – which now they can keep along with their wives; if that was the case, though, it seems like a shallow reason (well, apart from the wives) for resisting the call which has now become so compelling.

I have a friend who used to be an evangelical and converted to Roman Catholicism – mainly because he became convinced of the truth of transubstantiation. I asked him how he copes with some of the RC beliefs that are quite opposed to his previous views. His answer was that he ignores them – after all nothing is perfect. True enough, but I wonder how long Anglo-Catholic euphoria will last once the “Anglo” part fades under the weight of the Roman Magisterium.