Religion, Nations, and Geopolitical Review: Saturday May 18

by A. Joseph Lynch and Dr. David Pence

WEEKLY BRIEF

COHERENCE IN THE CULTURE WAR: SEX, LOVE, POLITICS AND PROTECTION
The debate about religion, sex and politics is getting clearer (see Abortion Laws below). The American nation has been deeply compromised from within by the elevation of individual rights and autonomy as the highest social good. The United States is a religious nation based on an assertion that there is a Sovereign God and a sacred order which our nation must submit to if we are to endure. The God who made the Universe made humans as males and females capable of producing future life. Every male is made of millions of cells with 46 chromosomes of DNA. One kind of cell-his sperm has 23 chromosomes and is made to join with a female egg (also only 23 chromosomes and incapable of life alone) to make a new cell. That new cell (zygote) conceived in the fallopian tube seeks the uterine environment to implant and develop into a new person with a new set of tissues and organs made up of cells with a new combination of 46 chromosomes. It is the miracle of femininity that her body is not her own but she is the home and bread for another soul. Christian culture holds that the gift of human life comes not only from the union of the sperm and egg but also from the permissive touch of the hand of God. How a man and his culture treats his sacred seed and how well a woman and her culture protect her sacred interior are hallmarks of Christianity. Every human soul is uniquely called into life by God and is utterly dependent on the sacrificial and nutritive love of woman. The cultivation of a Christian female personality whose honor code elevates virginity and the protective duties of motherhood is most clearly manifested in the Catholic cult of Mary-the Blessed Virgin and Mother.
The cultivation of a masculine personality who is chaste and a social protector is the Christian knight, the faithful husband, the loving brother, the citizen soldier. Men are not male mothers. The way we protect our offspring is by establishing territorial agreement with other males to establish a larger territorial community of order, protection and provisions. This is the noble and high form of masculine public love (phileo adelphos-brotherly love) known as citizenship, civics or politics (politikos-a participating male member of the polis-city). In the political structure of the American nation, men bind in local units called cities and counties to provide police protection and in larger state units to establish criminal and civil law. This notion of a republic of brothers is as old as Israel but it was a rediscovered political insight of the Protestant Reformation lived out dramatically in the New World settlements of English, Dutch and Scottish colonials.
All of the movements of the last fifty years that elevated individual autonomy significantly undermined the authority of local citizens functioning as communities in policing and law making. In every instance the Protestant Covenant gave way to the despotic individualism of the Enlightenment. Much of this damage happened because the sexual autonomy movements masqueraded as the natural heirs of the Christian and nationalist civil rights movement.
The American interracial civil rights movement was an extension of political accord linking men as fellow citizens in towns, cities and the nation. Reverend Ralph Abernathy and Rev. Martin Luther King plotted their Beloved Community as fellow Baptist preachers in a southern city with a virile civic identity.   In Christian culture, men bind as brothers in a common city, state, or nation. Black men were not allowed to share in the duties of citizenship. This violation of the Christian command of  brotherly love  and the Declaration's assertion of natural law was a contradiction that could not endure.
 The Christian interracial movement was not just public and political. It always implied that men and women of different skin color could bind in holy marriage. It is a horrible betrayal and desecration of that movement when white males compare their acts of sodomy with interracial marriage. That is both a moral insult and a category error in logic. It is not "gay" but a sign of deep confusion when males mistake the digestive tract of another male for the interior of a female. Pleasure can be simulated if one is morally numb enough to countenance the act. But neither our language nor our marital laws have to "respect" this disoriented delusion. Such acts are more akin to incest than marriage. They are not remotely comparable to marriage. They deeply offend virtue and masculinity which is why so many cultures cannot even speak of the deed much less hold parades to celebrate.
Fatherhood, sonship and fraternity--those are the blood ties that men make holy by consecrating their  kinship to the higher spiritual claims of the priesthood and the polis. Male maturation develops wide radius trust not selective intimacy. Every Jewish male has  already shed blood for the larger group in his first month of life.  "Let all men count with you but none too much." said Kipling.  The Christian personality of a chaste man obeying the Father by living out the public brotherhood of his own nation in fraternity with the other nations is the carrier of Christian culture. Such a man is not only meant to build his own nation but speak for fraternal order among all the nations. Jesus wept especially for Jerusalem but he suffered and died for all mankind. Nationalism joining black, brown and white men in the public brotherhood of citizenship is the real son of the civil rights movement. The republic of brothers is as old as Israel but as Christian political theory was the insight of the Protestant Reformation.  If you want peace, build civic order among the adult males. "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the sons of God." The template of the nation as a fraternity of duty is Our Lord Jesus Christ who founded "a holy nation, a royal priesthood" with his Apostles. He was a loyal son of Israel. He was crucified as the King of the Jews and that was inscribed in three languages so no-one missed the point. The ultimate good of  Patriarchy-the rule of the Father was restored by the obedience of the Son. Sacred Patriarchy will be established "on earth as it is in heaven" by ordered brotherly love- the baptism of the nations. This is the Christian reality that makes America great but only when she actually lives out  the bonds of affection and ordered loves of a Christian nation.
Our children are utterly confused by the breakdown of the authoritative sexual distinctions and roles that safeguard a culture of life. They cry out for an adult culture which protects life through those distinct matured personalities of civic fathers and familial mothers. Just look at the purple haired "transgender girl/boy" who has now joined the Darwinian slayer at Columbine as a teen murderer in the drug haven of Colorado. Her plea should be "criminal insanity"--of Colorado and American baby boomer culture. God has given us the gift of life and natures meant to participate in life, love and protection.  We owe it to God, our ancestors and our children to repeal the sexual revolution and restore the civic and cultural order that reflects the Sacred Order. We are not just asking for rights to think differently than the gender confused media and educational establishment. We are proposing that the life of our nation depends on a renewed lived out Christian culture that in custom and in law downplays class and color differences but sharpens and consecrates the distinctions and duties of men and women. 

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

HOMOSEXUALS IN BRAZIL SEMINARIES: A problem still, and a large one.

TO REFORM THE CHURCH, ABOLISH THE PRIESTHOOD: Ex-priest James Carroll reiterates the strategy of the Protestant Reformation. What is good about his article is that it might force some Catholics to understand that abolishing the male only patriarchal priesthood is abolishing the Eucharistic Church. Pope Francis has directly rejected this by centering reform on a deepening of the authority of bishops. Four Strategies are before us:
1)Renew and Reform Apostolic Fraternity: defending the consecrated fatherhood and fraternity of a priesthood centered on the presence of Christ in the Eucharist and the authority of the Bishop in the local Church(diocese).
2) Lay Empowerment and Clericalism: Self-absorbed careerism and homosexual cliques remain in key positions of parish finances and chancery job assignments. Meanwhile promote  liturgical and teaching that strips the priesthood and altar of its deepest sacral and masculine character. The careerist priest is well paid and asked to do very little. Most of day to day parish life is assigned to his overwhelming female staff and liturgical ministers. Father is hard to reach and gone a lot.
3)Become Protestants: The James Carroll "liberal Catholics" approach. 4)Traditionalist/Rejectionist Model: Resist! Resist the Holy Father! Embrace! Embrace the You Tube purists!  Pope Francis is a heretic. The Second Vatican Counxil was a horrific failure not inspired by the Holy Spirit. The Novus Ordo is not really the Holy Mass but a desacralization of the Eucharist--avoid it. Cardinal Burke is the paragon of the masculine priesthood and Bishop Vigano is a self sacrificing truth teller.

ECUMENICAL WARFARE: The Vatican has opened its classes on Satan and exorcisms to non-Catholic clergy. This is the kind of ecumenism we need. The "ecumenism of blood" unites Christians in martyrdom while a "ecumenical warfare" unites us in combat against the Evil One.

II. PRESIDENT TRUMP AND AMERICA

ECONOMIC NATIONALISM - AMERICA, BRITAIN, JAPAN, AND CHINA: A historical reminder from Pat Buchanan.

PRAYER IN THE AMERICAN CLASSROOM: A rabbi who was shot during a synagogue shooting last month is not denouncing guns but rather calling Americans back to prayer, particularly in schools. The rabbi believes that "children when they start their day should take a moment of silence to think about themselves and to realize that they are children of God, that they have a soul, that they are created in the image of God, to value life, and to value more of life than just the materialism, that there's a spiritual dimension to life." It's not guns we should fear but rather people who don't pray and have no conception of the spiritual order.

III. THE NATIONS

NETANYAHU ON NECESSITY FOR US TO ATTACK IRAQ BECAUSE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS - FROM 2002: VIDEO - He testified to the US Congress as "a private citizen".

IRAN AND US FINANCIAL WARS OF GEORGE BUSH AND NUCLEAR NEGOTIATIONS OF BARACK OBAMA: This is the major foreign policy difference which should be discussed in the Senate now and the Presidential election of 2020. Jay Solomon author of Spy Games, Bank Battles and the Secret Negotiations that Reshaped the Mideast is no fan of the nuclear agreement but he describes it well. He gives a clear recount of 2006-2016 US-Iran relations from the intense banking wars directed by Treasury officials in the Bush White House to the "secret negotiations" which left out "allies" like the Saudis and UAE. A very clear speaker. Worth the 45 minute listen. We do not agree with his hostility toward the nature of the Iranian state but he is a very good reporter/historian/ teacher.

IRAQ AND THE SHIITE MILITIAS: When ISIS took Mosul, the Shiites of Iraq formed their own militias to protect the Shiite Holy Places (Karbala and Samarra). They welcomed Iraq Sunnis fighting against the mostly foreign Sunnis in ISIS. Iranians (90% Shiite) have a deep religious connection with the holy sites in Iraq. They come to Karbala to pray. Many extra governmental  Iraqi Shiite militias formed to fight against the Sunni targeting of their holy places, Often they would come in conflict with American troops trying to put down "sectarian violence." Without the Shiite militias(which were independent but better fighters than Iraq government troops) major portions of Shiite regions around Baghdad and Karbala would have fallen. The Iranians were effective and significant allies in defending the holy places from ISIS. Now the Shiite miltias of Iraq are being called "proxies of Iran"  just as the Houthis of Yemen have been bombed for the same crime. The Shiites of Iraq do not want the US to go to war against their closest ally. They certainly don't want to be attacked for staying loyal to the one nation with co religionists who shed blood so they could defeat the salafist jihadists who were destroying their holy sites. Making these distinctions seems beyond American policymakers and journalists. Let's keep trying to include religious literacy in the discussion.

WHO WANTS WAR WITH IRAN: It will not help the US or Iran but others push our countries. Pat Buchanan.

DUTERTE WINS BIG IN PHILLIPINES: Tough on Crime. Chinese ally; not the US. The People Vote Yes! 

ORBAN AND HUNGARY: Law and Liberty essay on the substance of politics, religion and nation vs. the procedures, individualism and trans nationalism of the EU. Why Viktor Orban of Hungary and those nations of Eastern Europe demand a more substantive basis for their public life.

BOLSONARO AND BRAZIL: Very different foreign policy from popular but corrupt leftist "Lulu".

IV. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

ABORTION LAWS: A GIFT FROM GOD; A WOMAN'S RIGHT;  THE PROTECTIVE POWER OF THE STATE  
Georgia, Kentucky, Ohio, and Mississippi have all passed laws outlawing abortion after a heartbeat is heard. These states have reasserted their traditional legislative and police powers which were usurped by the federal judiciary in the 1973 Roe vs Wade decision.  In Georgia, if pregnancy is from a rape or incest (verified by charges filed) abortion is allowed until week 20. In Alabama, all abortions except those to save the life of a mother or involving an ectopic pregnancy are banned with no time limits. The doctor in such a case is the only person charged with a crime-Class A felony punishable by 10-99 years in prison.
Any law that takes effect at 6 weeks, 8 weeks or heartbeat detection allows a woman time to abort after an act of intercourse in which she does not want a child. Within 6-8 days after ovulation for a blood test and 12-14 days for a urine test the presence of a hormone produced by the fetus becomes detectable. Women who know they have had intercourse and know that they don't want to have a baby can detect the presence of the new life within three weeks of the act of intercourse in well over 90% of pregnancies.  
Should a woman be punished for securing an abortion? In the law she is treated the way we treat attempted suicides. An attempted suicide is an attempted murder but the law treats self inflicted violence in a different category. The woman is like a woman who cuts off her own arm hoping to bleed to death. Will she be charged with murder? No . Will she be punished? For the rest of her life, she has no arm.
The role of  the medical profession in not banning abortion through professional ethics has been a disgrace. The consumer model of medicine in which the paying customer dictates what the "provider " shall provide has desacralized the healing profession. Medical standards dropped through the basement while medical costs went through the roof. Doctors much more than politicians are to blame for the carnage of abortion. They were supposed to be the guardians against abortion on demand. They turned it into fee for service. May good Christian statesmen overturn the doctors' money tables. Felony charges are not too severe for a shepherd who morphs into a cross between wolf and hireling.

ABANDONING DARWIN: The biological argument - good synthesis of why the untenable theory will soon collapse, by David Gerlenter.

A RUGBY PLAYER IN AUSTRALIA AND A PRESIDENT IN AMERICA: Two positions on homosexuals. The country's top rugby player (Israel Folau) loses 4 million dollars for upholding Christian teaching in a text message. The county's commander in chief (President Trump) says "great" to "gay marriage".

'Good Shepherd Sunday' -- The Shepherd: protector or nursemaid?

[first published April 26, 2015]


by David Pence

"I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. He who is a hired hand, and not a shepherd, who doesn't own the sheep, sees the wolf coming, leaves the sheep, and flees. The wolf snatches the sheep, and scatters them. The hired hand flees because he is a hired hand, and doesn't care for the sheep. I am the good shepherd. I know my own, and I'm known by my own; even as the Father knows me, and I know the Father. I lay down my life for the sheep."  

                                     (from the Gospel of John, read on Good Shepherd Sunday)

The heart of the shepherd is that of a protector ready to shed his own blood in the face of wolves attacking the sheep. It is unfortunate that the dominant iconography of the good shepherd is not a man standing in front of his flock taking on a wolf, but the image of a usually mawkish Jesus cuddling a lamb in his arms. Now, Christ himself said in Scripture that he would leave the ninety-nine sheep to go find the lost one, and "lay it on his shoulders, rejoicing." That image was also well known in the ancient world as the kriophoros—the “ram bearer” as a figure preparing for sacrifice.
                                                                                 

But the shepherd in today's Gospel is in a different stance. There are many traits of the Shepherd which Scripture teaches, beginning with the clarity and recognition of his voice by his sheep. Abel and Abraham and the first Christmas witnesses were all shepherds. I always think of those noble shepherds of Christmas night coming to protect the babe in the cave from wolves and beasts, who in nature often sense the vulnerability of birthing. Certainly, Satan might have thought to send an animal precursor to Herod’s men. But Joseph had his shepherd brothers there. Like so many times in history when strong good men are present, there is no vicious tale to tell, and thus the work of the protective peacemakers is unheralded.

The greatest of the shepherds until Christ was, of course, King David. He has never been confused with a nursemaid. David was consecrated by Samuel, but he won the allegiance of the men of Israel by his courage against a wolf-giant that had frightened Saul’s soldiers into their tents. When King Saul berated David as no match for Goliath, the son of Jesse reminded him:

“When a lion or a bear came and took a lamb from the flock, I went out after him and [attacked him], and rescued it from his mouth; and when he rose up against me, I seized him by his beard and struck him and killed him. Your servant has killed both the lion and the bear; and this uncircumcised Philistine will be like one of them, since he has taunted the armies of the living God.”

                                                   

The pope wears a pallium over his shoulders made of lamb’s wool to show his authority as a shepherd. Let us make for every bishop a new icon of the Good Shepherd—a picture or statue of a man seizing and striking a lion or bear to protect his flock. The feast of the Good Shepherd reminds us that the first service of the ruler is to protect—even if that means death. For today’s priesthood that means to risk reputation and career pathway to clean out the soft wolves among the shepherds, those men who have emasculated the apostolic fraternity. This corruption of the masculine protective personality has paralyzed the nations of Christendom. Our fathers have left us wealthy, well-organized, and well-armed; but as our fellow Christians are slaughtered in Africa and the Mideast, we watch like hirelings behind the bushes.

The evil we are hiding from was foretold in the Book of Revelation. Satan was infuriated that he could not harm the woman who was giving birth to her Son. "Enraged at her escape, the dragon went off to to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep God's commandments and give witness to Jesus."

Lest we allow ourselves to become too comfortable that this bloodletting from afar is an inevitable work of the Evil One causing us sadness but no protective response, we should look to Revelation again for the last of the Biblical references to the Shepherd: "She gave birth to a Son -- a boy destined to shepherd all the nations with an iron rod."

                                                                     

                                                            David the Shepherd as Slayer

Religion, Nations, and Geopolitical Review: Saturday May 11

                                               by A. Joseph Lynch and Dr. David Pence

                                                                   WEEKLY BRIEF
 Senators Run for President:Abandoning their Post while the Nation Veers Toward War
The United States has no reason to go to war with Iran(see arguments below). Both Israel and Saudi Arabia for their different reasons desire lethal hostilities between the US and Iran.  The US Senate is the constitutional institution which declares war for our republic. It might even be called a "constitutional crisis" that our Senators are not asserting their deliberative role in debating this pending war. The  media and partisan hatred toward President Trump is preventing serious criticism of his alliance with the venomous hatred of the Wahhabi Saudis for all things Shiite.
We need a foreign policy debate about the US and Iran and Israel far more than an examination of  the Byzantine world of the President's past taxes. Senators who distinguish themselves in a real foreign policy debate might offer themselves as candidates for the Presidency arguing a counter strategy.  But for too many of our public officials, the purpose of being a Senator or a Secretary of State is to add a bullet point to a resume in order to run for a  higher office. The next career step is a far stronger magnet than the present duties of office. Careerism and partisanship has replaced the noble profession of politics. In fact politics which means acting as a CITIZEN( a man of the city or body politic) has become the dirty word which  we should reserve for the infighting and backbiting of "factions" or careerists. Our federal government is populated at every level by power couple careerists.  Washington DC and New York City however have social networks of much more accomplished men than the Marco Rubios and Chuck Schumers of nightly news soundbites. The  global megacities are the hunting grounds of aggressive men of other countries like Britain, Israel and Saudi Arabia who are functioning with national interests in mind. These nation men like leading corporate executives who work in the same stratosphere are very good at manipulating the narrow concerns of partisans and careerists for the bigger goals of their own institutions. Our pygmies are no match.
An experienced British patriot spy like Christopher Steele played our agency heads (Brennan, Comey and Clapper) like Kim Philby played our CIA after WWII. It is true that  Philby helped the USSR while Steele opposed Russia but in both cases British intelligence officers sabotaged our country's interests while promoting their own.  British foreign policy supports an Anglo alliance of the white countries of the British Empire (The Five Eyes consortium). As a national policy they are against a revitalized Russian-US alliance. There are more agents than Christopher Steele who wanted to bring down Donald Trump. Remember they are acting in concert not as careerists or because they got money from the DNC. They are acting as British patriots trying to stop an American Scotch frontiersman from going rogue.
Saudi Arabia wants the US to fight Iran and the Shiite Houthis of Yemen.  Israel wants weak and divided neighbor states. President Trump wants a nationalist foreign policy with strong nations keeping order in  their respective territories. He is opposed by globalist careerists who don't think like nationalists and he is staffed by neoconservatives who are bellicose for "Western Judaeo-Christian values". That is actually another form of globalism with the US military fighting and Israeli intelligence directing the project of saving "the West". The Saudi royal family supplies money and a Muslim cover. This is not American nationalism.
50 years ago the Democratic Senator from Minnesota was Eugene McCarthy. He ran for president to debate the war in Vietnam and the approach of the US to the post colonial wars of national  independence. He first used his Senate seat with other Senators to debate the policy of the war. Debating the role of America among the nations was even more important to him than constituent services. In this era the Democratic Senator from Minnesota is Amy Klobuchar. She too is running for President. Her office is remarkably adept at constituent services even if she must tyrannize her staff to keep her friendly, available, next door neighbor image intact. Like a lot of feminist careerists, who are already in an office that dwarfs them, she sees moving one more rung up the career ladder as her next logical step. She has taken the path of Hillary Clinton when Minnesotans needed another  Eugene McCarthy. America needs a public discussion of war and peace.  Journalists and citizens can all help focus this serious conversation but in the end it is our Senators who must do their duty.

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

POPE ISSUES MOTU PROPRIO ON ABUSE: This short clear reform mandates a reporting and investigative mechanism in every diocese as well as the use of metropolitans (the archbishop of an ecclesiastical province which includes adjacent dioceses) in the reporting chain for complaints against bishops of that province. This is a stunning and necessary decentralization of governance for abusive clerics. We have advocated establishing a "promoter of justice" in every diocese as the basic mechanism of reform. This initiative describes what is needed in many less words than we used.  All Clergy are obligated to report offenders (mandated reporters in civil law - this is a huge expansion of eyes and ears). Laymen have a new and ready instrument where we can send our own investigations and reports. Clerics are mandated reporters; laymen are invited reporters. This is a sea change from the old clerical culture that argued that since only a pope could depose a bishop only the Vatican could  initiate investigations of bishops and cardinals.  Abuse of sisters and seminarians is included as reportable in the same category as crimes against minors - that will offer an important path for reform  against the McCarricks, Nienstedts and Maradiagas of the Church.
 The Pope's first emphasis is, "I desire that this commitment be implemented in a fully ecclesial manner..."  His emphasis is like the American military officers who refused the advances of feminist Senators who tried to establish a civilian commission to judge military officers in cases of sexual harassment.  The generals argued this would destroy the military chain of command. The Pope has saved us from American hysteria about "lay reform" that would have compromised the priestly character of the Church.  The Pope has left open wide use of lay staff members and lay initiative in reporting clerics, but the policing is with the consecrated priesthood and flows from the diocesan bishop. This is in the true spirit of Vatican II which was very much about an ecclesiology centered on the Eucharistic office of the local bishop. The Eucharistic office includes Christ washing out Judas on the night before He died. His insistence on the personal authoritative duty of local bishops to rule is a major part of his approach to annulments as well.
Putting 60 and 30 day time limits on responses from  Vatican dicasteries is also revolutionary. The definition of minors is reestablished at 18 after the craven maneuvering of Pope Benedict's man at CDF - Cardinal Levada. Levada, part of the San Francisco contingent of the American bishops' lavender mafia,  reversed the Pope John Paul II definition of minors as younger than 18. He inserted "younger than 14" in the definition of child pornography on computers. This brazen act has been unnoticed and unreported by the mobs so busily filing their briefs against Pope Francis and the many very bad men at his side. ( Scroll down this link and read: The Levada Loophole)

These new mandated local reporting and investigative agencies can easily become diocesan offices of "promoters of justice" which at a later date could add clerical consensual homosexuality as a reportable punishable offense. The Pope has acted. Now let bishops, metropolitans, and national conferences respond. Let a thousand investigative offices arise! We should not let our knowledge that there are so many corrupt bishops misdirect our efforts to abolish the apostolic priestly character of Church governance. The Catholic Church is "a holy nation, a royal priesthood". The pastor of Rome has resisted the mob and reinforced the ruling functions of the Shepherd Bishops. His battle against the shroud of clericalism is not a war against priestly identity. The sacred fraternity in every diocese finds their identity as shepherds when they act out their protective and punitive duties of spiritual fatherhood. The Pope has has given every diocese a new book of matches. We will see who responds  by burning off the old wood of clericalism to cleanse the stone altars where priests celebrate the Holy Mass.

FR. HESBURGH - AMERICAN PRIEST: A great interview with Fr William Miscamble, the Holy Cross priest author of the new biography of the Notre Dame legend. Fr. Hesburgh was a prototypical American - "Let us get enough of the right people in a room together and there is no problem we cannot solve". This fascinating profile by an astute historian reminds us that Fr. Hesburgh always was a priest first in his own mind. Did he interrupt his jet setting for daily Mass? "Everyday of his life but Good Fridays." Try to listen to this interview in the critical but fraternal spirit of the author. There is lots to learn about this man with a spine(especially during the student protests of the late sixties). He   sought the recognition of the Rockefeller class in elevating Notre Dame as a Catholic institution of the highest academic order. He made a deep fundamental error in where he sought social recognition. But Fr Hesburgh did something very difficult and very noble  for his Protestant country and his Catholic Church.  What a gentleman scholar priest is Fr. Miscamble! Something very holy and strong  will come from the Notre Dame which housed both other Hesburgh and Fr Miscamble.

POPE ON FEMALE DEACONS: They are not part of the sacramental ordained priesthood. But let the study continue for there is not full agreement. There are female roles in history and the present where women have a special charism. The service of women did not lead to the altar. He closes the discussion with his praise and thanks for the religious sisters he encounters as the living motherhood of the Church. {The obsession of the "Westerners" with an ordained role for women downplays the beautiful multifaceted feminine love found in religious orders throughout the world as they live out every spiritual and corporal work of mercy in their distinctive communities.}

SALVATION OUTSIDE THE CHURCH: A messy debate not totally clarified here.

II. PRESIDENT TRUMP AND AMERICA

III. THE NATIONS

WHO WANTS WAR WITH IRAN? Pat Buchanan agrees with Iranian security advisors that there is a B-Team: Bolton (John of US national Security) Benjamin (Netanyahu of Israel) and Bin Salman (the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia with his father's blessings) who want war. The fact that the US sent a carrier battle group to the Persian Gulf as a warning to Iran because of a tip from the Israelis should not give US citizens much comfort. Every target listed in this article as a potential place where the US considers Iranians to be threatening our interests consists of armed Shiites who wish to defend and govern their own lands. Religiously, Shiite rule is anathema to the Salafist Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Iran and Hezbollah are strategic problems for Israel. American nationalists will not be harmed if Iran and Lebanon are strong nations with allies in Iraq and Syria. These are the best nationalist defenses against the radical jihadist form of Sunni Islam now ruling the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina. Islam has been warped by the Salafists of Mecca and Medina in league with the Saudis. Idi Amin found refuge in the Kingdom but they are not true friends of Christianity, the American nation, or most Muslims. US policy at the highest most dangerous level is being swayed by foreign interests - they aren't Russians. Americans are blinded by partisan hatreds that are preventing us from seeing our national interests. Hatred of President Obama by conservatives has prevented us from understanding the strategic breakthrough of his Iran initiative. Hatred of President Trump has prevented his initiative with Russia that would help us withdraw from Afghanistan and Syria as well as see the international landscape with new eyes.
(AOA on bandwagoning with the big powers vs the "three encirclements").

IRAN AND IRAQ: Iran moves missles into Iraq. The US moves a battle group into the Gulf. War with Iran could involve the US or Israel in bombing Iraq. A US War with Iran is the hope of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Persia is 90 million strong. They are making a new alliance with Pakistan, the one Sunni power with serious nuclear weapons. Pakistan's greatest ally is China. Iran's ally has been Russia. John Bolton has to understand he is no longer at a think tank making tough statements to the blondes at Fox News showing how conservative men are much tougher than Barack Obama.

CHINA-INDIA-PAKISTAN & NUCLEAR WEAPONS: The pro Pakistan-Chinese strategy is an old one. India labels a terrorist in Pakistan. China doesn't veto.

SOUTH AFRICA: New players in elections.

RUSSIA AND CHINA: Civilizational states.

IV. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

DRESSED TO MODEL: Halima Aden is a beautiful Minnesota woman ethnically Somalian born in a Kenyan refugee camp. Her breaking boundaries by wearing clothes for Sports Illustrated is something beautiful. William Kilpatrick is the go-to writer on all things Muslim for Catholic neocon sites Crisis and Catholic Thing. Here is his embarrassing take on the Hijab. We reviewed Mr. Kilpatrick's very interesting, very worthwhile, very flawed book on Islam, Atheism, and Christianity.

THE MEDAL OF FREEDOM: A short history of Presidents and their recipients. One interesting cultural observation is that President Eisenhower elevated honor to God on our currency and in our pledge while JFK found a way to elevate "freedom" in the status code.

HOMOSEXUAL BULLY GOES AFTER PRO-LIFE WOMEN: Brian Sims is an elected official - he sees praying pro-life protesters as scum. He is a man of action. Do Christian men really owe "respect" to the death cult of sodomy and abortion? It seems respect is the last thing we owe them. This is where the culture war begins and ends - Who shall we honor? Who shall we shame?   

THE COMMON GOOD AND SEXUAL MORALITY BY ANTHONY ESOLEN: The  Dean of American Catholic letters is Professor Anthony Esolen. Here is more proof. An excerpt:

"It is a contradiction in terms to suggest that one can have a private sexual morality, because sex by its very nature is social, as is morality. You can no more have your privilege in that regard than you can have a private language or a private culture. Sexual morality is biologically for the begetting and raising of children, and the protection of families and groups of families. That protection is enabled in large part by the teamwork of male groups, undistracted and unconfused by the eros of buggery, formed to get difficult and dangerous things done; and with all our sophisticated tools, we still depend ultimately upon construction workers, road crews, truckers, fishermen, farmers, miners, quarrymen, linemen, soldiers, lumberjacks, longshoremen, masons, and so forth, and this is true even of the well-paid feminist professor driving her man-made automobile powered by man-drilled petroleum products and shaped by man-mined metals over man-laid roads to teach in man-raised buildings about the wickedness of men who make her job possible."

Religion, Nations, and Geopolitical Review: Saturday May 4

                                                by A. Joseph Lynch and Dr. David Pence

                                                                   

I. POPE FRANCIS AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH

PRIVILEGED OR PERSECUTED? Are Christians Privileged or Persecuted? This  perceptive essay by Ross Douthat of the NYTimes reminds us that Christianity really isn't the West and the people who know this best are non-Western Christians who keep getting killed. Our essay answers: Global Christianity and the West are not the same. The faces of Christian persecution. In this Religious War - the two authority centers of Salafist Sunnis are 1) the caliphate of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and ISIS. (They have been seriously degraded by losing their territorial claim of authority. Sunni caliphs are not supposed to be occult.) 2) the Wahhabi cleric/Saudi royal clan Guardians of the Holy Places-Mecca and Medina. The funding and ideology of the most murderous brand of the Hanbali school comes from here and will not cease until this regime is broken. Their greatest rivals for authority are Shiite led states (Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon), other national Sunni governments not at war with Shiites (like Qatar and Turkey), and Hashemite rivals for  religious legitimacy (Jordan's King Hussein)

DARKNESS DESCENDS ON GOMORRAH: A Christian essay for our times by RV Young.

EVELYN WAUGH, THE HOMOSEXUAL TRADITIONALIST: Bemoaning Vatican II as a source of evil.

CARDINAL DONALD WUERL: Building a case against one of the slickest most destructive clerics in America. Donald Wuerl, thy name is clericalism.

SCHOLARS ACCUSE POPE FRANCIS OF HERESY AND MORE: An open letter to bishops.
62 page document. A story from LifeSite News. The compilation of bad people around Pope Francis is a good and helpful summary. The charges of heresy are ridiculous. They reveal the deeply anti Catholic propositional spirit of elite Western intellectualism. The global Church has a great opportunity for clerical reform and fraternal witness to the nations after the bloodbath of the 20th century. Catholic priests and laymen must become a template for the nations of public fraternity and protection. But it's hard to see the diocese and parish in front of you and the nations beyond when you are so consumed with resentment toward the Father. This latest screed is pathetic at one level and deeply troubling at another. Is it sad or bizarre that so many intellectual Catholics are  using modern communication technology to project public personas as papal scolds.  Is this Catholic witness or hundreds of Martin Luthers "speaking truth to power" by blog posts? The Accusers started with gay ray burke  and the "Dubia." The conversation turned decisively to "get Pope Francis" when the venomous vigano used a spectacular bilingual PR manifesto of accusations against Pope Francis. This was to reverse Italian stories about Vigano's failure to deal with McCarrick when he was papal nuncio in America. It also veiled Vigano's disgraceful shutting down of diocesan priests and auxiliary bishops investigating high flying homosexual Archbishop John Nienstedt.  Vigano exposed a great deal of truth about the "homosexual parish" at the heart of Vatican governance.  But like the master deceiver, he used that truth telling to divert attention from his own multiple sins to start a movement to shoot at Pope Francis.  Many decent "conservative catholics" took the bait and have spent months of their own heads and hearts undermining the Holy Father. All of this has strengthened the hand of those who see Vatican Two as a demonic catastrophe, the Novus Ordo as false worship  and Pope Francis as a heretic. Truly this is the work of Satan.

GETTING CHRISM MASS WRONG IN CHILE: Welcoming Judas on the day Our Lord washed him out. Holy Thursday Chrism Mass should be a diocesan cleansing of the Apostolic Priesthood as it was when Christ ordered his apostles to do what He had done. It was not a command to pile up service hours but to exercise the office of the High Priest in expelling traitor clerics.

“When Thy glorious disciples were enlightened at the washing of their feet before the supper, then the impious Judas was darkened …” FROM EASTERN HOLY THURSDAY LITURGY

II. PRESIDENT TRUMP AND AMERICA

MIND BEHIND PROTECTIONISM: Economic Nationalism, Frederick List and Breaking the Free Trade Economist Monopoly.

AMERICA'S CHURCHES AND HOMOSEXUALITY:  A conference of the United Methodist Church held homosexual practice incompatible with Christianity and said no to homosexual ministers - their high court agrees. The Catholic Church, the Southern Baptists, and the Methodists are the three largest church groups in America. All judge homosexuality as a serious violation of natural law, biblical teaching, and church discipline. The "churches" of the elite and university professors from Unitarians to Episcopalians see gender differences as oppressive and homosexuality as a form of love. As always the theories and theology of the upper classes dominate the educational establishment and mainstream media. Remember the culture war really is a debate about God and what are the fundamentals of our civic religion. What shall we protect at home and abroad? In this corner we have : Drug Use, Profanity, Pornography, Sodomy and Abortion. In this corner we have: Religious worship, prayer, national interracial brotherhoods, marriage, feminine coverings and virginity.

III. THE NATIONS

VENEZUELA: Juan Guaido called for a military uprising and didn't get one this week. He seems like a Latin Beto O'Rourke--not enough substance to contend for serious political rule. Boris Yeltsin is the last man we saw stand unarmed against a military and change their loyalties.  He did it as a staunch Russian nationalist in the twilight of the USSR.  Before that we saw the worker Lech Walesa who was really acting as a Catholic Polish nationalist. Guadio does not seem deep enough as a nationalist or a religious man to navigate the currents needed in this time of disintegration. When we see groups praying they are praying for Maduro more often than Guaido.  Maduro is discredited but the military men who have not deserted him know what Guaido may soon learn--if you shoot at the King, be sure you kill him.   A profile of the northern Bolivarian countries of South America including Venezuela (pop-30 million)  and Bolivar-the Liberator. Some current history on the collapse of the economy.

EAST TIMOR: A Catholic profile of Asia's most Christian nation who won  independence from their huge Muslim neighbor, Indonesia. They are the most Catholic nation in the world. Their Portuguese language and Catholic faith and the rise of their martial arts clubs made assimilation in Muslim Indonesia impossible and their national independence(2002) possible.  There is a deep disconnect here because of a deficit in Catholic theology and social teaching that will consecrate the young male Maccabees who helped win national independence and Church freedom, but now are spiritually adrift and civically outlawed.

THE TRUCE OF GOD: 989AD-1300AD The Church limited the victims and times for war.

LIBYA: The alliances behind the eastern-western clash.

RUSSIA: From an excellent website Russia Matters, is a short review of career US Diplomat William Burns book - The Back Channel. In it, he shows how he warned Condoleeza Rice and George W. Bush that trying to integrate Georgia and Ukraine into NATO would lead to serious Russian intervention in those countries. An interview with Burns and Graham Allison on Diplomacy.

IV. CULTURE OF LIFE, CULTURE OF PROTECTION

PAT BUCHANAN ON SANDERS AND THE DIVINATION OF DEMOCRACY: "Under the Sanders reform, if someone murders you, he is still entitled to an absentee ballot. The right to vote is apparently more sacred than the right to life. Truly, this is the divination of democracy."

MARTIN BUBER: The Jewish philosopher and theologian (1878-1965 Born in Austria: Died in Israel) on the I-Thou relationship with God and fellow humans:  "At the heart of Buber’s theology was his theory of dialogue—the idea that what matters is not understanding God in abstract, intellectual terms but, rather, entering into a relationship with Him. Such a relationship, he believed, is possible only when we establish genuine relationships with one another. “Whoever goes forth to his You with his whole being and carries to it all the being of the world, finds Him whom one cannot seek,” he wrote. (The New Yorker, April 29, 2019). Buber contrasted this interpersonal dialogue with I-it relations. Trinitarian Christians were much more receptive to Buber than Jewish thinkers who were always skeptical. There was much to be skeptical about but the title of his book pierces to the heart of religious life. I And Thou was published in 1970.

THE MALE MILITIA: The basic American political agreement is a covenant by the adult males that we will protect our country beginning with participating in our local unit of polity and accepting the officer corps of our local policing agency. A modest proposal on local mandatory militias which we don't advocate because we think this relationship among adult American men  already exists in common law and American custom.

May Day: St Joseph the Worker and Shop Class as Soulcraft

In 1955 Pope Pius XII declared May 1 to be the feast of St Joseph the Worker. This was in response to the worldwide Communist success in making Mayday into International Workers Day. The annual multi-country multi-city marches had begun as synchronized memorials for the Haymarket Affair in Chicago on May 4 in 1886 in Chicago. Men are meant to pray, work, study, and protect. Jesus matured under a carpenter father. Renewing our religion and our country will include a return of technical schools, a rejuvenation of industrial production, and a status revolution for the men who build our buildings, make and maintain our machines, grow our food and sustain our public infrastructure. Our parishes would also be much fuller manifestations of Christian culture if we complemented our communal lives of prayer and study with centers of working and training in the tactile disciplines. This was one of the great strengths of the early monasteries that Christianized Europe, and boys' schools that turned orphan boys into Christian men. St Joseph the Worker, terror of demons, pray for us.

                       Our discussion of Shopcraft as Soulcraft. [first published June 19, 2015]

“The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. Boasting is what a boy does, because he has no real effect in the world. But the tradesman must reckon with the infallible judgment of reality, where one’s failures or shortcomings cannot be interpreted away. His well-founded pride is far from the gratuitous “self-esteem” that educators would impart to students, as though by magic.”
                  Matthew B. Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

"It is the essence of genius to make use of the simplest ideas."

- Charles Peguy

                                             

Some excerpts from Francis Fukuyama's review of Shop Class as Soulcraft:

[This] is a beautiful little book about human excellence and the way it is undervalued in contemporary America. 

Matthew B. Crawford, who owns and operates a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Va., and serves as a fellow at the University of Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, notes that all across the United States, high school shop classes teaching mechanical arts like welding, woodworking or carpentry are closing down, to free up funds for computer labs. There is a legion of experts denigrating manual trades like plumber, carpenter and electrician, warning that the United States labor force needs to be "upskilled" and retrained to face the challenges of a high-tech, global economy. Under this new ideology, everyone must attend college and prepare for life as a "symbolic analyst" or "knowledge worker," ready to add value through mental rather than physical labor. 

There are two things wrong with this notion, according to Crawford. The first is that it radically undervalues blue-collar work that involves the manipulation of things rather than ideas. Expertise with things permits human beings to have agency over their lives — that is, their ability to exert some control over the myriad faucets, outlets and engines that they depend on from day to day. Instead of being able to top up your engine oil when it is low, you wait until an "idiot light" goes on on the dashboard, and you turn your car over to a bureaucratized dealership that hooks it up to a computer and returns it to you without your having the faintest idea of what might have been wrong. 

The second problem with this vision is that the postindustrial world is not in fact populated — as gurus like Richard Florida, who has popularized the idea of the "creative class," would have it — by "bizarre mavericks operating at the bohemian fringe." The truth about most white-collar office work, Crawford argues, is captured better by "Dilbert" and "The Office": dull routine more alienating than the machine production denounced by Marx. Unlike the electrician who knows his work is good when you flip a switch and the lights go on, the average knowledge worker is caught in a morass of evaluations, budget projections and planning meetings. None of this bears the worker’s personal stamp; none of it can be definitively evaluated; and the kind of mastery or excellence available to the forklift driver or mechanic are elusive. Rather than achieving self-mastery by confronting a "hard discipline" like gardening or structural engineering or learning Russian, people are offered the fake autonomy of consumer choice, expressing their inner selves by sitting in front of a Harley-­Davidson catalog and deciding how to trick out their bikes. 

This glorification of manual labor would seem patronizing but for the author’s personal biography. Crawford grew up in a commune in the Bay Area with a theoretical physicist for a father, and worked his way through high school and college as an electrician. Along the way he picked up the ability to rebuild the engines of old Volkswagens, something that stayed with him even as he went on to get a Ph.D. in political philosophy at the University of Chicago...  

Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing. The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock. All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations. They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure. In this world, self-­esteem cannot be faked: if you can’t get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won’t pay you. 

Highly educated people with high-­status jobs — investment bankers, professors, lawyers — often believe that they could do anything their less-educated brethren can, if only they put their minds to it, because cognitive ability is the only ability that counts. The truth is that some would not have the physical and cognitive ability to do skilled blue-collar work, and that others could do it only if they invested 20 years of their life in learning a trade. "Shop Class as Soulcraft" makes this quite vivid by explaining in detail what is actually involved in rebuilding a Volkswagen engine: grinding down the gasket joining the intake ports to the cylinder heads, with a file, tracing the custom-fit gasket with an X-Acto knife, removing metal on the manifolds with a pneumatic die grinder so the passageways will mate perfectly. Small signs of galling and discoloration mean excessive heat buildup, caused by a previous owner’s failure to lubricate; the slight bulging of a valve stem points to a root cause of wear that a novice mechanic would completely fail to perceive. 

Crawford asserts that he is not writing a book about public policy. But he has a clear preference for a "progressive republican" order in which the moral ties binding workers to their work or entrepreneurs to their customers are not so readily sacrificed at the altar of efficiency and growth. He argues that there is something wrong with a global economy in which a Chinese worker sews together an Amish quilt with no direct connection with its final user, or understanding of its cultural meaning. Economic ties, like those between a borrower and a lender, were once underpinned by face-to-face contact and moral community; today’s mortgage broker, by contrast, is a depersonalized cog in a financial machine that actively discourages prudence and judgment. 

In the end I must confess that it would have been hard for me not to like this book. While I make my living as a “symbolic knowledge worker,” I have both ridden motorcycles and made furniture — my family’s kitchen table, the beds my children slept on while growing up, as well as reproductions of Federal-style antiques whose originals I could never afford to buy. Few things I’ve created have given me nearly as much pleasure as those tangible objects that were hard to fabricate and useful to other people. I put my power tools away a few years ago, and find now that I can’t even give them away, because people are too preoccupied with updating their iPhones. Shop class, it appears, is already a distant historical memory.

                                 

Dr. Pence, you say that today's culture could use a big dose of the spirit of Thomas Edison. What do you admire about him?

Edison studied materials. He experimented with them. He understood their practical properties. The light bulb was not a summation at the end of a mathematical calculation, nor did it come from the so-called scientific method of hypothesis, experiment, observation, and conclusion. Needed was a material that responded to electrical current with much more illumination than heat -- a slow bright burn, if you will. Edison's work-space looked a lot more like a farmer's work bench than a university laboratory. He knew how lots of things worked. He tried things out.

                                 

What is science?

In general I think there are many sciences. They are bodies of knowledge about defined subjects based on categories and definitions accepted in each field. I don't believe there is a Science with a capital S. That is an epistemological claim of modernists who have abandoned the disciplines of theology and philosophy. There is a branch of philosophy called epistemology which is about how we know what we know.
Most "scientists" who talk about Science with a capital S as the only way to know reality have never heard of epistemology, and are really quite puerile in discussing the subject.  I think here, especially, of Stephen Hawking and Richard Dawkins.

Is there an American science or American sciences?

I think historically there is an approach to the physical world and the various sciences which is peculiarly American. Celestial navigation, wood work, surveying, metal work, and the agricultural sciences were worked in with traditional school subjects in certain colonial schools. This was a pretty unique American approach. They didn't start as vocational tracking or class-based disciplines. I wrote my Educational Masters Thesis on the history of shop, agricultural classes and home economics in American education. I argued to reintegrate these tactile disciplines in a renewed, more integrated, approach to teaching the sciences. When we think of that peculiar American genius for different sciences, I see farmyard inventors, kids on computers late at night, and bicycle mechanics before I see German professors on their blackboards.

Come on, Pence, try imagining America's atomic bombs without German physicists scribbling on blackboards!  

Actually, that's one of my favorite examples. We needed certain physicists (not at all like Einstein) who were working with uranium as a material, and we needed General Leslie Groves of the Army Corps of Engineers to actually make them. The making of the bomb was a huge technical enterprise which we often forget. But, you are right; I will concede in this case a good deal of credit to the German blackboard.

One of the big initiatives in science education is STEM -- a program to stimulate more interest in engineering and the sciences among secondary students. As a high-school science teacher, what was your take on that?

It was too focused on pushing kids into more math. It needed more of the Engineering E in its name, and much less of the ideology of science. If it could have stressed the tactile arts -- shop, woodworking, and electronics (including the use of  power tools), it might have discovered a real untapped group of boy scientists and engineers. Instead, the special focus on girls in the sciences was another victory of ideology over reality. The focus of math over manufacturing was a victory of the cerebral and theoretical over the practical and tactile.

Is there any political or educational movement that might address these concerns?

Some community and vocational colleges are trying to get much earlier pathways for their institutions into the  high-schools. Those vocational schools have the trained staff and facilities which have been driven out of our high schools. The vocational colleges actually grew out of local school boards, not state institutions. This is a kind of full circle. A significant group of high-school boys would gain if this movement by vocational college teachers and counselors could reach them to  free them from the mechanical deficiencies and institutional biases of their high-school teachers and the ever more bizarre colleges of education which shaped them. I don’t mean to sound so anti-high school teacher. I am not. But there a group of great teachers in vocational schools down the street from our high schools who know important skills our high school kids need! They are being kept out of daily teaching contact with high school students because of institutional sluggishness and union protectionism.

"Our best ideas come from clerks and stockboys." 

         - Sam Walton

                       

UPDATE: On Ron Schara's outdoors program (show #741 -- go to the 6:30 mark), they had a good four-minute segment about city kids who put their heart and soul into learning the craft of boat-building. 
St Joseph, husband and patriarch, celebrated on March 19 by the Church is his principal feast day.