Cardinal George of Chicago Questions Rahm Emanuel’s Jewish Values – Chick-Fil-A

Cardinal George of Chicago, a Christian Evangelical Conservative has come down on the side of Dan Cathy’s conservative Christian hatred of gays and the funding of gay hate projects, some co-sponsored by the Catholics.

These days, the conservative Catholic Hierarchy have in all but exact word and deed negated the brotherhood and sisterhood generated towards other faiths out of Vatican II.

Along with forgetting Vatican II is the negation Pope Paul VI’s wrongful Catholic blame of the Jews for the mythical figure of Jesus and his death. Read Cardinal George's revised remarks below on that chestnut. RIP Paul VI.  RIP Vatican II.

So when I hear Heir George speak about Rahm Emanuel’s values I know what the coded anti-Semite message is (wink, nod).

Prove me wrong! Show me one photo of Cardinal George standing next to Mayor Emanuel, shaking hands and "smiling".

http://hotair.com/archives/2012/07/31/cardinal-to-emanuel-just-what-exactly-are-chicago-values/

http://slatts.blogspot.com/2004/02/cardinal-george-encourages-people-to.html

Cardinal George on Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ flick:

…There is a priest in the archdiocese who has a lot of experience in filmmaking, and he has sent out to the parishes all the information on the film and how to participate in viewing it. I have sent out the documents from Rome and the USCCB on how to read the Passion stories in the Gospels. I would encourage people to see the film. 

I would then say something else. We should see it not only as Christian believers; we should try to watch it with the eyes of the Jewish people. 

The history of anti-Semitism, a very sorrowful history, has made many Jews very sensitive to any recognition that even some Jews were involved in the death of Jesus. Obviously some Jews were involved in the death of Jesus. He had enemies among his own people. His apostle Judas betrayed him and some of the leaders of the people were against him. Read the Gospels. At the same time, all Jesus' friends were Jews, as were the first apostles and disciples - everybody was a Jew within this story, except the Romans who, in fact, killed him. They killed him in their own fashion - a terrible execution, torture. And all of that torture is attributed to the Romans in the film. 

But the push to have him condemned is attributed to some of the Jewish leaders, even though the Romans are primarily responsible. Jesus had enemies among his own people. He also had friends and disciples among his own people. Jesus was a Jew. And you can hardly tell the story of Jesus' life, certainly not the story of his death, without saying that some Jews did this and some Jews did that.

 – Cardinal George 13 February 2004 - St. Vincent Ferrer Parish, River Forest, Illlinois

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Birther and Sedevacantist Movements - Similarities

Is the Oval Office truly empty???

Doing my hobby of researching the millions of pages of faith, Christian and otherwise, a thought occurred to me (I do have them on occasion) (and they are not all eccentric).


It struck me that the whole birther movement, in the denial of legitimacy of the 44th POTUS (a god of sorts with a small g) is not unlike the Sedevacantist (empty chair) movement in the RC church.


That aside from the Clinton campaign starting this whole birth certificate thing in 2008, the ferocity of this continued meme/myth/urban legend thing has overtones of religion all over it as much as it has coded racism.


Just looking at the flash mobs at the White House, Times Square and the Phillies/Mets game on Sunday night reminds me that the super patriotism thing is a tribal, almost secular religion thing. Every recognizable country has at the base of its identity this “we are great” “we are the only true ones” “we are first” tone of things.


As such I wish I had the time and money to follow through on this theme. I see a parallel between the Birther movement and the “Sedevacantists” in the RC church who believe that the Chair of Peter has been empty (Sede Vacante) since the death of Hitler’s pope Pius XII – the Great Appeaser.


John XXIII and his Vatican council thing ticked off a lot of traditionalists and their worship of the Latin mass thingy going in favor of the vernacular service. Modernism and democracy are both sins/depravities in the eyes of the RC dogma.


I have to wonder if the birther movement is a pure redneck populist movement. I have to wonder if big bucks behind the scenes from the likes of Mel Gibson and his more catholic than the pope Dad, along with Opus Dei justice Scalia and Sen. Santorum etc., have not been bankrolling this insane belief that the Oval Office is empty?


And all this birther religious like fervor or insanity is not being funded by church tax free money that should be otherwise taxed and put to better use?

Jezus van Nazaret - the Movie - Verhoeven

Here some meat and potatoes and looking for an interesting movie about the life of Jesus and his teachings. Dutch director and author Paul Verhoeven intends to make a movie out of his book Jezuz van Nazaret.

Basic Instinct director plans film about Jesus

In an interview with MTV, the Dutch film-maker reveals that his newly-translated book Jesus of Nazareth, is intended as a staging post on the path to a movie version. Verhoeven wants to tell a story free from suggestions of miracles, and bereft of the crucifixion and resurrection scenes often seen in previous films depicting Jesus's life. The director prefers a humanist, scholarly approach, and will focus on his subject's ethical teachings….

Verhoeven says Jesus was a man who was consistently persecuted throughout his life, surrounded by enemies and forced to flee at every turn. Brushing off concerns over the negative attention his proposed film might receive from religiously-minded critics, he said: "Is it controversial? It's the truth."

The Dutchman is, perhaps unsurprisingly, not a fan of the most famous recent retelling of Jesus's final days, Mel Gibson's blockbusting The Passion of the Christ. Furthermore, he suggests that the crucifixion probably wasn't nearly such an appalling experience for its victim as the movie suggests…

"[Gibson] reduced it to two hours of suffering," complained Verhoeven. "The suffering of Jesus is not the important thing. It's terrible, but many people have terrible endings. Even with sicknesses that are so horrifying that crucifixion that took six hours is perhaps not even that important in comparison to what people have to go through, especially if they are wounded, lose limbs, whatever. Terrible things happen in the world. I think that's not the essence. The world is full of violence and terrible things. The whole universe is filled with disaster."

A modern view of Jesus for a modern global reality. Not a blood filled Mel Gibson medievalist fantasy tale.

I was especially surprised to see that this Dutch man is also a member of the Jesus Seminar. He obviously has the passion for a secular Christianity of the 21st century of our common global era.

Paul Verhoeven is a member of the Jesus Seminar. He is the only member who does not have a degree in biblical studies, although he graduated in mathematics and physics at the University of Leiden. Since he is not a professional biblical exegete, his membership in the Jesus Seminar has occasionally been cited by opponents of the Seminar as a sign that this group is less scholarly than it claims. On the other hand, some Jesus Seminar members were unhappy with Verhoeven's portrayal of Jesus as an eschatological prophet.

In 2007 Verhoeven authored the book Jesus of Nazareth (Dutch: Jezus van Nazaret) about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The book reviews the ideas of Jesus of Nazareth and the alleged corruption of these same ideas over the last 2,000 years. The book may be a preparation for Jesus: The Man, a controversial film project about the life of Jesus. Verhoeven's book tells about the Jewish uprising against Roman rule and characterizes Jesus as terrorist. He rejects all supernatural happenings and miracles as unproved or unprovable. Marianna Sterk of the publishing house J.M. Meulenhoff said "Jesus of Nazareth: A Realistic Portrait," has been released in September 2008 in Dutch and will be published in English in April 2010 by Seven Stories Press. Wikipedia

Good luck in his modern refreshing telling of the Jesus story.

The Way of the Cross and or Crucifix

There is a story in the British newspapers about how an employee of British Air challenged her employer's dress code with the labor board and lost. The dress code in question required that no jewelry including a small gold cross be worn outside one’s uniform while on duty.

Of course this gets thrown around the press and in some cases, the cross becomes a crucifix. A lot of non-believers or marginal Christian types sometimes do not know the difference. A cross is a cross. A crucifix has the image of a body crucified on it. And in the case of religion, the crucified man is Jesus.

Interesting thing tracing this crucifix thing through the centuries. For the first thousand years of western Christianity, the cross was important but the crucifix was not as visual you might see in a church today. The rich had small metal decorations, covers for prayer books or inch or two long partial relief crucifixes in gold or ivory but they were on books or on relic boxes. The public in general did not see a three dimensional crucifix in any large life size until the Gero Crucifix, made of wood and painted, made its appearance in Cologne in Germany in 970. That crucifix exists to this day (image above). It was the talk of Europe in its day and well worth a pilgrimage to that city.

Along comes the schism between the eastern and western Christian churches in 1040. Both sides excommunicating each other etc. and with that trade from east to west slowed down. After fifty years of no coffee so to speak in the Vatican, the pope jumps up on a soapbox and starts the First Crusade to bypass Constantinople and make some new trade with the middle east. Of course, the emperor of Constantinople had asked for some political aid in the wake of Arab military gains in Turkey as a minor historic footnote.

To make a long story short, I will skip the first three crusades, some successful, some not. Along comes 1202 and the French with a load of knights and no European wars to fight, want to free the Holy Land again or whatever. The bankers in Venice finance the deal and the project lands in Constantinople where they sack the city and take tons of gold, icons and books back to Europe.

I don’t know how the fourth crusade turned out but the City of Constantinople never got over the sack, never fully rebuilt its walls and defenses and two hundred and fifty years later the Muslim armies more or less walked in and took over. All this over a bit of theological schism and bankers greed (Venice) and over whose interpretation of sacred scripture is more real or more genuine.

The eastern icons of Jesus Crucified were quite plentiful after that. First came frescoes and then came more wooden crucifixes and then the carved stone statues of the Renaissance that we think of as standard iconography today.

Along with the imagery of a man tortured on the cross came the mythology or the emphasis of the torture process to build up the Jesus story. Valid? Well when Mel Gibson made his flick the Passion of the Christ, he had the special effects to put the fear of God or of the Roman Empire into each and every one of us. Mission Accomplished.

When seeing the Gabriel Byrne interview previously listed here, I was struck how modern Christianity in its present form has no place for marginal believers. I am struck how Quakers will let you sit in on one of their services if you are agnostic or atheist. The spirit within, the emerging soul is something real and tangible in the mind of some modern men and women. Yet the medieval church and the Prots too cannot grab onto new thoughts, nuances, subtleties to give marginal humanity a place to gather and be in some sort of communion with the message of Jesus, and the ultimate message of God and humanity.

In the case of Gabriel Byrne he seemed to hesitate when push came to shove and reluctantly listed the story of the resurrection of Christ as allegorical. If I had a few minutes with him, I would tell him like a Jewish rabbi that “God rules the world!”. As such God can raise anybody from the dead. Take from that what you will.

With an emphasis to keep using the old standard black and white - A,B,C answers to a “Are you a true believing Christian?" TEST - the institutional Christian church keeps pushing marginal believers, people living in a very real stressful and modern world, away. Life is not a monastery or an ivory tower. The Christian message is more important sometimes than adherence to real or imagined myth.

There is some movie company in Europe with a major budget which is going to make a movie called the Resurrection of Christ. No doubt profit is the motive and Mel leads by example. I cannot help but think about how what separates many modern people and religious people are the iconic images and iconic words of scripture written in the stone age.

I remember how a pastor I was very fond of was disappointed at the end of the 1965 George Stevens movie The Greatest Story Ever Told – he was disappointed that the director did not show Christ rising from the dead. The final scene is a clever cut to a Risen Jesus in a fresco and not in three dimensional being. I have since researched this flick which I think is the best Gospel movie of all time and I found out that Stevens was a very religious man. I can only imagine that he left some doubt in the end of his movie as a means to show the movie to people without or outside faith.

So too, it would be good if people outside the Christian experience, like Muslims, could be exposed to just a little bit of Christian scripture, perhaps they would read more and be in a frame of mind to see how closely Islam is to other monotheistic religions. And vice versa.

I have often thought how Catholics and Muslims should get along better with each other because they both seem to live more for traditions within their religions than by perspective scripture alone. At this point in time neither side does much talking to one another on any broad base with individual people involved outside of clergy.

In any case, the flick about the resurrection will not prove any thing. Faith is a funny thing. You either have it or you don’t. I feel though that a minimal view could open more doors for others to come inside and smell the incense so to speak. Emphasis on icons like a Crucifix or an empty grave does and also does not affect the message of love and universal brotherhood.

Earlier, I was remembering the crucifix of the church where I grew up. The body on the cross was clean shaven, with no beard. When I asked about it as an altar boy, I was told that the founding pastor of my church said that Jesus was not married and therefore was clean shaven as only married Jewish men grew beards. I think Jesus as a revolutionary soul did about anything he wanted to.

A little and a lot of knowledge can be a dangerous thing sometimes. History is a strange thing in that with a little knowledge you could end up thinking about strange things like clean shaven Jews and even with a lot of knowledge get fancy notions to stand up on a soapbox and start a bloody crusade.

The mission is the message. The message of Jesus to love one another should be everybody’s mission – whether you are fully Christian or not.

Constantine Complex - a modern condition?

There is that thing about short men with an inferiority thing called a Napoleonic complex.

Looking at some present day figures does not necessarily bring to mind the Napoleon thing. If Napoleon had succeeded with his bloody military thing, the EU would have been born a century and a half sooner and WWI and WWII would have not likely happened. Theory and conjecture do not make a real history of facts.

Of course, now I see what I call the Constantine complex in this modern world. It has to do with megalomaniac egos and trying to start new world religions or belief systems. It has to do with marshalling the forces available to fuller the power of the one over the many by any means possible. It also has to do with “I am Right and you are wrong! Period!”

No doubt a light bulb or I should say a torch lit up in the great Emperor god Constantine’s mind when he sought the means to glue two halves of an empire back together again. The key word here is “one”. One Emperor, one world Empire, one world religion. The monotheistic christian religion was no doubt an ideal fit into the emperor god’s grand megalomaniac plan for his new world order in the fourth century.

One current candidate for the title or label of the Constantine complex is the movie maker and actor Mel Gibson. Of course if Gibson were alive in the time of Constantine he would have approved of laws forbidding Jews from owning christian slaves or Nuremburg type laws imposing death if a Jew dared to marry a christian. Constantine! What a guy! Founder and cosmic enabler of the present church in Rome.

Gibson’s grasp of defending the 16th century tridentine mass in Latin as the only bridge to the one absolute God that he and his cult alone can fathom and defend perhaps has its limits. While Mel is divorcing his wife of twenty eight years and he is about to have a child out of wedlock, he is a little upset with his congregation of 70 fanatics who he suddenly doesn’t feel loyalty from. He is supposed to have threatened to shut down his church tax shelter because his fellow congregants are gossiping about him. Minor stuff, the real Constantine killed one son and his second wife because of palace gossip. Thank God Mel is only a minor tin god reflection of the real standard.

Mel is so pure, he is more holy than the pope, more catholic than the pope etc. Of course Mel has a few mortal flaws but is none the less one of my candidates for the label of having a Constantine complex.

Fast forward and the current age of mass media which is not a two way media, and they got rid of the fairness doctrine, whereby a balanced point of view is supposed to go out on the airwaves. The king of this modern day Constantine complex thing – this absolute rule of “I am Right and you are wrong! Period!” - would have to be “Boss Tweed” Limbaugh spewing nonstop confusion and hate over the radio air waves both for himself and his dying political party.

Also, suddenly Pope Newt the First, newly arrived in the Constantine faith, is telling his constituency that besides being always absolutely right that we are surrounding by “paganism”. What the hell is Gingrich mumbling about? Or is this just a new label for secular humanism? We don’t need a new world religion Newt when so many of all the others don’t work that well or work at all.

The domestic culture wars I hope are over. While we are at it, isn’t it time for the Armed Forces of the USA to stand down from WWII and the Cold War. There are better uses for the money in the social and domestic needs of the American people. Constantine is dead and so too should be his idea of empire, combining church and state, that so many these days seem to want to emulate.

Meal Ticket to Heaven

There was a famous BBC documentary series with James Burke called “Connections”. It seemed to ramble all about and show how different historic events, inventions, ideas sometimes came together to form other historic events, inventions, ideas.

I have a similar idea and flow here and it all has to do with food and religion.

Holy Thursday was also in stellar or is it lunar alignment with Passover this year.

As such or by coincidence, the Jewish Seder, or feast meal remembering Passover was held in the White House this year with Jewish staff officiating and the First Family in attendance in the private family quarters. This is no doubt a good political or is it a PC move for a chief executive who last week or in the last few days has mentioned his family links to Islam and in a predominately Muslim country of Turkey. Astute!

Let me go free flow on this. In my article about Saint Paul, I had mentioned my encounter with a Hindu salesman in an Arizona parking lot over a decade ago and his mentioning family and meals as the basis of response for questions I had about his religious background. Perhaps he was secular and did not know or did not want to go into detail with me within the context of a western, predominately in the past, Christian country.

And then there is Mel Gibson, sad soul, a RC traditionalist, that blames the Jews for Jesus’ Jewish mission in life. One of his seeming passions in life is anti-Semitism. That and transubstantiation of the conversion of Bread during the mass into the body of Christ – no satisfactory religious chefs after Vatican II for him. Does he resent the Jewish tradition of Passover or would he rather have had Jesus being secular and eating at Burger King?

Mr. Gibson’s profound anti-Semitism is I think rooted in his Irish Catholic American background not unlike my own. Irish American you say? A side trip to Australia as a young child and into adulthood didn’t much improve his cosmopolitan or lack of it view of the planet. Is it anti-Semitism or a profound lack of the knowledge of Jewish culture?

Moving along, I think of all the nuns who taught me as a child. Was their involvement in the faith profound, spiritual or was it all a meal ticket thing.

Standing behind three nuns in a polling place in the 1976 presidential election, I was surprised to hear that the nuns had legal names and they had to announce them to people running the election polling station. One by one they announced their legal names and one by one I heard the first real name of Mary for each and I don’t remember the other two’s last names but the third one of Mary Clancy – that sure hit a note of recognition of an good sounding Irish Catholic name. Then I thought to myself. All these nuns attached to a religious order that used the name Mary in the title of the order, they were all named Mary as well. Did they choose their vocations or were they steered toward vocations by parents who named them and groomed them for such.

This brings me in thought to Vatican II. I think the lay people did not panic so much then as it was the priests and nuns that jumped ship in droves that began a downward spire in the whole full life RC thing. Perhaps these deserters wanted a whole full secular life thing with sex and all that. Fewer nuns. Lay teachers cost more. Tuition for a RC education and a few decades later no more free Catholic grade schools for the average Catholic.

The priests, after Vatican II, saw the medieval church melt in front of their eyes and standing there Sunday after Sunday preaching the same lame boiler plate religion message just got so unspeakable.

The nuns and the priests for better or worse I classify under the meal ticket thing. That when Catholic families had five, six or eight kids, the parents had to do some futuristic planning about what to do with so many kids. One son for the priesthood and one daughter for the convent took care of two children. The others would marry and reproduce and take care of the parents in old age etc. It seemed like a good plan.

There has always been a percentage of priests and nuns who leave religious orders after their parents die. My aunt who had been a nun for twenty five years gave up the career after her parents, my grandparents died etc. Meal ticket or not, sometimes breathing your own free secular air is what life is really all about.

This brings me to the four gospels and how perception is everything. The Gospel of John seems to have been written by a non-Jew or a profoundly ignorant about his own culture Jew or anti-Semitic Roman Empire type. Only three of the gospels bothers to mentions the traditional Last Supper scene, the Jewish Seder, in the context of the Bread and Wine sacramental thing that has held a great deal of Christianity together for close to two millennia.

If one steps back and looks at these other three synoptic gospels, you realize that the menu is quite sparse there too.

Which makes me think? Did either secularized Jews or Hellenistic Jews write the gospels as “eyewitness” accounts? Or maybe non-Jews wrote them. That or they date further down a timeline well into the second century of the Common Era or got rewritten all the way up until the time of Saint Constantine the Great in the fourth century.

The oldest known existing fragment of the gospels is one page from John and that is in a museum in England and is dated to around 130-140 AD. Those dates triggers off a possible connection to the second Jewish rebellion during which The Third Temple got temporarily dedicated to Yahweh out of the recycled temple stones from Herod's time or the unfinished Temple of Jupiter on temple mount.

Not a lot of recorded history there. Josephus Flavius was dead and Jewish historian types were scarce at the second most total and most long lasting decimation of the Jewish nation in 135 AD. No doubt Hadrian wanted the facts covered up and did not even try the PR thing altogether. The emperor Hadrian has a favored status among most western historians. His collecting antiques and boy toys gets more mention in history books and you have to dig a lot to find his ranking in holocaust standings.

(If Jews want archeology opened up on the noble sanctuary, mention that you are looking for the Hadrian’s whatnot or the Temple of Jupiter, the west will approve.)

The gospels got written most likely by some Hellenistic Jews in Asia Minor (Turkey), a refugee staging area after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD and the final blow to the nation in 135 AD. That perhaps the anti-rebellion forces within Judaism in 70 and 135 is what laid the basis of anti-Semitism all the way to the present day. The present day anti-Semitism may have its beginnings on a change of internal attitudes and divisions in Judaism and the turning away from the old Judaism, more political than religious, recently passed away in 135 AD.

That said, I do not understand why they tack the Hebrew Testament onto the Greek Testament and have so little, basic knowledge among the common ranks of that long standing world religion and culture of Judaism.

The strength, salvation and possible rebirth of the dying Christian Church lies in the foundation stones of Judaism and Jesus’ (sorry Mel) Jewish mission. Two menus in one restaurant like the Old and New Testament speaks not of good eating but more like competing food court entities at a shopping mall.

Where is the horseradish? Bon appetite.

Anti-Semitism, Mel Gibson Style

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I am not comfortable talking about anti-Semitism. I do not feel qualified to talk about the subject and will not attempt to do any lengthy essay. I would like to focus on one slice of publicly displayed anti-Semitism and surrounding the public figure of Mel Gibson with his remarks in July 2006.

Without even going after remarks by his father Hutton Gibson or his own words in a drunken stupor, the basic fact of Mel's anti-Semitic remarks originate with the Constantine Bible - a bible written for a Roman General/Emperor and for the political agenda of that political person - written, assembled three hundred years after the death of Jesus. The Jews and not the Romans supposedly killed Jesus. Whatever.

What I attack here in my simple Christian belief system is the logic or lack of it regarding what this Jesus story means in terms of hating a race for the actions of some individuals, the high priests in Herod’s temple bureaucracy.

My argument is this. Who did Jesus preach to in his three year ministry? I have to say mostly Jews. They were poor working class Jews. Oh there were a few Romans and a few Samaritans but 100% percent of Jesus’ ministry on earth was to 99.9% Jews.

Did Jesus preach his Sermon on the Mount to an empty mount? Did he feed 5,000 non-Jews with loaves and fishes? Did he go to Roman wedding to change water into wine? NO! There were a few Jews present at all these mentioned events. If you look at the Gibson family mindset, they must wonder why Jesus wasted all his time with the - the - the Jews!

How do you separate Jesus from his roots and then say that his roots were not the important part of his ministry? It is all a bit twisted.

Jerusalem and Judea as a political state went out of existence about forty years after Jesus’ time.

Christianity as it got recycled with Greek and or Roman religions lost its Jewish flavor or origins. Or did it?

Did Jews who became slaves after the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. go to Rome and then buy their freedom after they helped build the Coliseum in Rome? Did they stay in Rome? This scenario has been suggested by the TV history presenter Simcha Jacobovici.

Jesus planted the seed of faith and of the new faith through Jews who ended up on the other side of the planet and without a homeland.

There are so many rich possibilities for the flowering of faith and continuation of tradition and even with paradigm shifts on a religion and a culture in transit in the first century of the common era.

When some ignorant Irish Mick spouts his mouth off and reiterates the hate of his parents, well maybe that is anti-Semitism.

I think the religious ignorance of who and what Jesus was - and was about for his people, the Jews, is something greatly monumental in the depth of stupidity and vice.

And then again maybe the anti-Semitic remarks were solely and conveniently used as a deal breaker on the proposed Gibson movie about the Maccabees. He just did not have it in him to do a great movie or do justice to that historic era.

Forget about the ministry of Jesus. Just hate a race that everyone wants to make extinct. Well, I do not think that will ever happen. There is something internal about the nature of man and culture and this indirect hated of the imperfectly formed and recycled religion called Christianity. Better to hate its origins than reform its present mess.

As for the Maccabee Movie, better that old Mel could not do it. Who would want to watch Apocolypto with a yamaka on it?