The new Catheo/Fascism - against all free conscience in America - Catholic / Theology / Fascism = Catheofascism

One of the pluses of hanging out on this blog for the past four years has been an almost daily education of the finer details of Catholic and Christian theology or the approach to the concept of the abstract G*d thing.

I am, many times. a day or two late and more than a few dollars short on the subject of theology BTW.

But I am reminded of two things as the religious parasite crowd in this country wants more and more handouts of cash from the government for its charity and education rackets.

Lori, Harrison, Mitchell - A Catholic, A Lutheran and A Baptist go into a Bar and demand Free Whiskey...

I am not anti-religion.  I am Areligionist - without dogma and or religion, with a background dose of Cultural Christian in my everyday mindset.

The two things are related to a third thing – the civil rights issue of marriage equality.

I am reminded of the Bishop of Denver sanctioning the turning out of two small children from their catholic school in an affluent suburb because their parents were an unmarried lesbian couple living together.  Apparently it is not legal for the "Spouse One" and the "Spouse Two" boxes on many marriage certificate applications in America to be filled in with the names of people of the same gender in Colorado, a wild west territory until 1876.

Modern Invented Definition - Homosexual - Source: Dictionary.com

Beyond that there are too many stories of gay men and women who are not openly, but covertly, fired from jobs in Catholic and probably Christian education as well  because they dare to walk out of the shadows of a lie that society builds around the misunderstanding of human sexuality, built on invented terms, many of which were invented in Victorian England and in reflection of the obsessive compulsive disorder of the German Prince Consort Albert and other compulsive Victorians.

I am reminded of the Mormons who had to give up their socially designed redesign around the marriage thing in the form of one man marrying many women and calling his concubines "wives" and married in Mormon Temple etc. That the Mormons had to abandon polygamy in order to gain statehood in the United States as the state of Utah.

Zion Ranch Texas - Mormon Wives - 2008 

That I am reminded that it is the Mormons who raised the most cash to turn back the California law allowing civil, not religious, marriage for taxpaying gay citizens, male and female.

This spiteful Mormon deal carries over onto the Catholic landscape where the latest hate campaign against gay catholics is at a fever pitch and in obedience to monies paid to the RC church from the fundamentalist Christian Right and the Mormon Church to introduce American society over a period of decades to the concept that it is alright to openly hate the gays in the form of disqualification from marriage (sorry, failed the religious litmus test as defined precisely by G*d hisself) and eventually other civil rights as well.

 

And not just for gays but eventually all people of free conscience in a once free land that was founded to protect people from the dark shadows of things like Catheofascism among other dark religious beliefs and laws in Europe.

The second thing is the firing of a catholic school teacher in June in Minnesota for saying that she believed in the concept of same-sex marriage on her self-filled out evaluation. The story made all the papers for a day or two.  The teacher, Trish Cameron, no doubt could not live with the hypocrisy of a lie that so many of the majority of the closeted gay clergy can live with every day to protect their meal-ticket lifetime jobs with the Vatican. 

I pray that one day we gain back the morality and integrity of a non-majority Catholic United States Supreme Court to state that yes, Catholic Clergy are employees of an international corporation and that Headquarters in Rome can be sued for hate, fraud and buggery as part of that worldwide organization.

It may be me alone and too many people may be too lazy to notice it but expelling children from Catholic Schools, children from Bishop Chaput’s diocese school for their parents beliefs and sexuality and the firing of teachers and theologians and others from Catholic institutions reminds me an awful lot of the early days of the National Socialist Regime in Germany in the early 1930s.

"Kauft Nicht" - Don’t Buy...

In fact the recent story, greatly upset me, of the Catholic Church in Germany wanting, demanding its 8% income tax on German citizens for accident of birth and or accident of baptism in one particular faith, as a financial burden for the rest of their lives of these catholic victims by birth, whether they believe in the faith or whether they attend church or not.  

That I have to wonder when did this right of Catholic Church taxation of German citizens begin – the German/Vatican Concordat of 1933? 

Signing Away German Catholic Civil Rights for Vatican Privilege 

No doubt Ross Douthat of the NYT, Michael Sean Winters of NCR, Raymond Arroyo of EWTN and Bill Donohue of Timbo Dolan NYC Inc. will soon be churning out the Catheofascist propaganda PR about how what a great and efficient idea a Catholic Tax in America will be, to have it imposed on all the population etc., Catholic or not.

With more and more overlapping of church and state in America, with faith based “charities” handouts to foreign religious corporations, with school vouchers and other indirect subsidies to the Catholic education system that is allowed by right of some mythical God that they cannot prove to me exists, and are therefore exempt or want exemption from other secular humanist laws like laws against discrimination, well you think about it.

How long before the Catholic Church surcharge on your state and national income taxes must be paid under penalty of the law – which law – secular law or the religious laws of the new American Catheofascism?

Father Coughlin - Radio Voice of Catheofascism in 1930s America - "They're  back!"


*    *    *

Official Vatican Hit on JFK - Revised History

With fresh blood or I should say a fresh scalp (metaphor) of Bishop Bill Morris of Toowoomba on his belt, the Archbishop of the cesspool Archdiocese of Philadelphia emerges as Vatican spokesman on matters of a Catholic Institution’s entitled place on the landscape in secular America.

As Benedict XVI’s official hatchet man, apostolic delegate, an outsider, no doubt traveling on Vatican passport and privilege to Australia to do what Cardinal Pell did not have the balls to do and fire Bishop Morris.  Bill Morris committed the unforgivable sin of using that indirect vagina word (women – Yuk!) in admitting that the laity in his diocese had (shut your ears) an opinion favorable to the dogmatically impossible concept of the ordination of “females”.

Since such cheap reactionary shots at good Men like Morris are rewarded greatly for traveling papal hatchet men, I can only assume that the Vatican has put full imprimatur on all things Chaput (bow your head!) past and present.

In what I consider a political mission of Charles Caphut, on orders from the Republican National Committee in the recent 2010 election cycle, I have reviewed one of Chaput's great triumphs in the fawning, drooling, dripping, Gollum like, catholic blogosphere. 

And that is the revisionist history, and metaphoric necromancy, regarding the late (great?) President Kennedy and his speech in public, not behind closed doors, but to 300 Protestant ministers and his claim that he was an American first and a Catholic second, or some such nonsense in 1960.

In 1960, Kennedy sold the church out, sold his soul, and emphasized the famous Jefferson phrase of “separation of church and state” to verbalize his private, secular, political ambitions to be President of the United States.

WRONG!!!  He was wrong according to this revisionist Burkite, of the Ray Burke fanatic fringe lobbying group centered in both Washington D.C. and the Vatican City State.

Speech by Archbishop Charles Chaput on JFK radicalism 

“Fifty years ago this fall, in September 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for president, spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association. He had one purpose. He needed to convince 300 uneasy Protestant ministers, and the country at large, that a Catholic like himself could serve loyally as our nation’s chief executive. Kennedy convinced the country, if not the ministers, and went on to be elected. And his speech left a lasting mark on American politics. It was sincere, compelling, articulate – and wrong. Not wrong about the patriotism of Catholics, but wrong about American history and very wrong about the role of religious faith in our nation’s life. And he wasn’t merely “wrong.” His Houston remarks profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political conversation. Today, half a century later, we’re paying for the damage…”

“The Houston remarks also created a religious problem. To his credit, Kennedy said that if his duties as President should “ever require me to violate my conscience or violate the national interest, I would resign the office.” He also warned that he would not “disavow my views or my church in order to win this election.” But in its effect, the Houston speech did exactly that. It began the project of walling religion away from the process of governance in a new and aggressive way. It also divided a person’s private beliefs from his or her public duties. And it set “the national interest” over and against “outside religious pressures or dictates.” –“

“For his audience of Protestant ministers, Kennedy’s stress on personal conscience may have sounded familiar and reassuring. But what Kennedy actually did, according to Jesuit scholar Mark Massa, was something quite alien and new. He “‘secularize[d] the American presidency in order to win it.” In other words, “[P]recisely because Kennedy was not an adherent of that mainstream Protestant religiosity that had created and buttressed the ‘plausibility structures’ of [American] political culture at least since Lincoln, he had to ‘privatize’ presidential religious belief – including and especially his own – in order to win that office”--“

Secularism! Secularism!  Kennedy started secularism!  He was a bad catholic and worse than that a democrat!   What a rare state Chaput had to have been in to, in good Chaput conscience,  to examine the corpse of this failed catholic regime.  Think of the opportunities lost for the one true faith to impose “religious freedom”, “catholic Sharia law”, and corporate tax breaks for holy mother church if JFK had been a better catholic - a real catholic?

How can any catholic vote for the secular democratic party of that womanizing male slut? I can only imagine the rare emotional state that poor father Chaput had to be in to have to dig up and examine JFK’s rotting corpse for the sake of the new GOP/God Party truth.

There was one Italian professor who criticized Chaput and got a wave of tongue lashings in the bloated catholic blogosphere.   One Professor Luca Diotallevi.


Saving the Catholic Kennedy. A Reply to Archbishop Chaput

”In other words, the Catholic Kennedy is alleged to have fostered a model of society inspired more by hostile French-style "laïcité" than by the "religious freedom" characteristic of America.”

“The dispute is not simply academic. Since Barack Obama became president, it has been at the center of the confrontation between his policies and the positions of the American Catholic episcopate, especially concerning life, the family, education.”

“It is a dispute that also reaches across and divides the Catholic world, in America and elsewhere. Is Chaput right in criticizing Kennedy so harshly?...”—“

“… Religious freedom – in the version of the Constitution and history of the United States, as in the British version or in that of "Dignitatis Humanae" – shows instead the possibility of a separation between political powers and religious powers without the indifference of political institutions, and without the public irrelevance of the Church.”

“Religious freedom refutes the very premises of "laïcité." Alexis de Tocqueville was probably the first European to understand how in the United States the Church "reigned" over consciences in a different way, because a reconciliation had taken place there between the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom that was unheard of in continental Europe….”

(That is it in a nut shell?  With personal freedom of people in the USA already down the drain in the Plutocracy,  the church is only concerned with staking out its entitlements in light of the reality of the new “secular” ruling corporations.  It is every Republican man jack and bishop for himself in these end days of the end game of defunct democratic institutions?)

I also have to wonder if this newly uncloseted, once minority, now majority catholic opinion of JFK from 1960, may have in some way contributed to the assassination of that Catholic President in some minor way besides those already involved in that conspiracy to bring down an evil “secular” president in November 1963, aside from other political and power reasons.

“E Tu Brute” my catholic kinsmen ?   (fascinating way of relooking at 1963 – is it not?)

Or is all this rhetoric and feigned Vatican style “scholarship” just more cannon fodder in the ongoing culture war in 2012 against another well loved “Secular” President and Christian in the form of Barack Hussein Obama.  

Kansas, Chaput’s native state, went for Nixon in 1960.  I dare say the attack on a disavowed Catholic President Kennedy, in the grave, is just a cheap parting shot in revisionist history against any democrat presently in power.

The regular GOP has been practicing this form of necromancy on FDR for decades.  It works well on FOX NEWS for sniveling little cowards and demonizing pundits to kill air time.  Now too apparently, the Burkite (Catholic), fringe wing of the GOP as well, has emerged after these many decades, and is actively part of the act.

Religious freedom involves respect.  You get it if you give it my dear little padre from Denver.  Comprende?

Whatever.  Have a nice day. 

Philly Crime Boss Rigali Quits Amid Abuse Scandal, GOP Operative Denver Archbishop Brought In to Sway 2012 Election

In a critical move to sway the 2012 election, the cynical monarchists in the Vatican are bringing in a RNC favorite to bring order to the chaos left by crime boss Big Frank Rigali in the Philadelphia archdiocese.

Gay hating Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput is being brought in to tow the church party line of total innocence in face of the massive abuse scandal in Philly.  A man who does not supposedly believe in the separation of church and state except when the state pays his way tax-free.

A bureaucrat, who gets tax free status on his parochial school system but can reject the innocent children of a lesbian couple in his schools, a move by him and Father Bill Breslin of Boulder that is not being Christian but purely Catholic. (Nothing personal you damned to hell souls etc.)

Great going Chuck.  You reek of the redneck Jesus thing!  Who are you going to endorse – god nutter Rick Perry or Opus Dei Rick Santorum?  (Has to be a man you know – women do not have souls – do they?)

Aging Rigali is moving to his newly built retirement Mcmansion in Tennessee (not pictured above but perhaps similar).   Can’t cry poor in the abuse settlements thing and live like a king in Philly anymore in the Bishop’s mansion.

Tennessee next stop for Rigali?

Father Bill Breslin of Boulder is no doubt crying today as Chaput leaves his Colorado archdiocese.  Who can he blame his gay hate on now except himself? His enabler is leaving town. 

Father Bill Breslin and his Cafeteria Dogma 

GOP is delighted that the plan moves forward to turn blue state (2008) Pennsylvania back into RED.  With Chaput in the pulpit ready to get rid of Senator Casey, a tolerant, weak, human being, Rick Santorum, the only good Catholic man on woman left, will gladly deliver the Commonwealth back to Catholic Jesus Sharia Law.


Group of Bishops Using Influence to Oppose Kerry 

Galvanized by battles against same-sex marriage and stem cell research and alarmed at the prospect of a President Kerry - who is Catholic but supports abortion rights - these bishops and like-minded Catholic groups are blanketing churches with guides identifying abortion, gay marriage and the stem cell debate as among a handful of "non-negotiable issues." 

To the dismay of liberal Catholics and some other bishops, traditional church concerns about the death penalty or war are often not mentioned. 

Archbishop Chaput has discussed Catholic priorities in the election in 14 of his 28 columns in the free diocesan newspaper this year. His archdiocese has organized voter registration drives in more than 40 of the largest parishes in the state and sent voter guides to churches around the state. Many have committees to help turn out voters and are distributing applications for absentee ballots. 

In an interview in his residence here, Archbishop Chaput said a vote for a candidate like Mr. Kerry who supports abortion rights or embryonic stem cell research would be a sin that must be confessed before receiving Communion. 

"If you vote this way, are you cooperating in evil?" he asked. "And if you know you are cooperating in evil, should you go to confession? The answer is yes."

You may call me nuts!  But you can’t make this crazy religious shit up.  It is too strange for fiction.

And so it goes.

Fighting to Pray in Cordoba

Here is a real odd one that challenges all the phony PR press releases from the RC church about interfaith dialogue.

Two arrested after fight in Cordoba's former mosque

Trouble broke out when the visitors knelt to pray in the building, a former mosque turned into a Christian cathedral in the 13th century, where a local bishop, Demetrio Fernández, recently insisted that a ban on Muslim prayers must remain.

Half a dozen members of a group of more than 100 Muslims from Austria had started praying among the marble columns and coloured arches of the vast building when security guards ordered them to stop.

"They provoked in a pre-planned fashion what was a deplorable episode of violence," the bishop's office said in a statement.

Bishop Demetrio Fernandez Gonzalez of Cordoba is a new hard ass bishop installed in February and is not allowing Muslims to do a prayer thing in the museum attached to his cathedral.

If you look at the picture above the ancient Mosque of Cordoba once occupied all the interior space of a flat roofed mosque. No airy space but good solid bones of beautiful architecture. The cathedral got plopped down in the middle of the Mosque. The mosque as an indoor space is not part of the cathedral. In fact, the former kings used the mosque space as office space and part of the royal court for conducting business.

Like most RC houses of worship with historic importance in Europe, you have to pay a fee to see the architecture of belief in God in another age. Is there belief in God these days by the owners of this once sacred Real Estate? I have to wonder.

The conflict arises these days when tourists, Muslims in particular do not want to wander through church property labeled as museum space when a growing Muslim population would like access to a part of their religious heritage.

Escudero said a space for Muslim prayers would not inconvenience visitors or disturb the cathedral and would promote dialogue and understanding between the two religions. He said there were frequent incidents of Muslims being prevented from praying.

"They argue that canon law does not allow Muslims to pray there, though they have been happy to permit visiting Saudi princes and other dignitaries, including Saddam Hussein, to pray," he said.

"A new bishop was appointed recently and one of his first public statements was to say that Muslim prayers would not be allowed as this would create confusion," he said. "It seems the guards have instructions to prevent prayers with violence, if necessary."

Cathedral authorities reiterated their ban on prayers. "The shared use of the cathedral by Catholics and Muslims would not contribute to the peaceful coexistence of the two beliefs," the statement from the bishop's office said.

There’s that “Confused” word being used again by the Catholics. They used it in Father’ Breslin’s parish in Boulder Colorado where two children of gay parents would be “confused” by church teachings on homosexuality and the entitlement to salvation only to heterosexuals.

Now mere belief in one God would no doubt “confuse” catholics if they see that a world, a whole universe is saved within the Muslim part of the spectrum and without the use of Roman clergy.

Get a life. Get tolerance. Get sincere belief in your own belief system and stop issuing PR reports about interfaith dialogue when you lock the house of God off to believers in God.

...my house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations. ISAIAH 56:7

Words do not count in faith. Actions do!