The Nuns' Stories

Two US nuns who belong to liberal congregations part of the LCWR printed an article in the liberal Jesuit mag America, purporting to challenge the notion that liberal orders are dying,

while the orthodox ones of CMSWR are growing.

Despite their puffed up ethical promise to provide data without bias, their first bit of info gives the game away:

One of the most striking findings regarding new entrants is that almost equal numbers of women have been attracted to institutes in both conferences of women religious in the U.S. in recent years. As of 2009, L.C.W.R. institutes reported 73 candidates/postulants, 117 novices and 317 sisters in temporary vows/commitment. C.M.S.W.R. institutes reported 73 candidates/postulants, 158 novices and 304 sisters in temporary vows/commitment. 

The CMSWR was founded as an orthodox alternative to the much larger LCWR. 80% of US nuns are part of LCWR orders...so the number of entrants and new members, while "almost equal", is greatly disproportionate. If a group of 800 people grows by 20 and a group of 200 people grows by 20...well, you can see the difference between a 2.5% and a 10% increase. Were these Sisters not paying attention when Sister taught them math?

You don't have to have a degree in statistics to see that what is not being said makes a lot of difference. Applicable to a lot of things.

Speaking of varied quality

Here's more American nun-talk...

LCWR National Board -- August 16, 2010

The following is the insight reached by the LCWR national board members at the conclusion of their meetings following the LCWR assembly. 

The real gift for us during this time of sharing was the clarity of thought that coalesced around the notions of solidarity and inclusivity. We have experienced a new, deep connection with one another and a sense of real communion as we live our way into new expressions of creative fidelity. We sense bonded energies and radical openness to what is unfolding. We are willing to wrestle with chaos – wherever necessary -- cognizant of the possible cost of such discipleship.

Our response will be: WTF?

There's acres of this inflated indigestible stuff here.

And they wonder why they are turning grey and dying out?

More revelations from The Beyond

Latest LCWR newsletter

 As lithely envisioned

“A problem cannot be solved within the same
consciousness that created it.” –Albert Einstein

Thirty-five LCWR members and justice and peace
coordinators gathered at Bethany Center near
Tampa from March 5 to 8 to explore “Consciousness
and Campaigns: Spirituality and Politics beyond
Dualism.”

In a society and church increasingly characterized
by polarization and misunderstanding, how can
people of good will find common ground? Where can
people of faith find communion?

Dr Trelawny, Divination Professor at Hogwarts

With the guidance of executive director of NETWORK,
Simone Campbell, SSS, and composer and retreat director
Jan Novotka, the group journeyed from contemplative
silence and meditative song, to analysis of systems
that divide, to an awakening to the essential unity of all.

Sleeeeepy...you are getting veeeeery sleeeeeepy...

Saving the best for last...

Participants were challenged to dive deep into the mystical
unitive consciousness and to cross the false boundaries
and categories which divide and limit efforts to
effect systemic change.

Or...how do we nuns get everyone to vote Democrat????

As cetateanly eventuated

Un-processed cheese product

The LCWR has made a first response to its receivership status. Not surprising.

It did bring back memories of the times when I worked with a lot of feminists. One of their favorite issues is process. If they don't like an outcome, they attack the process. And process can always be critiqued as insufficient. In this case, "a flawed process that lacked transparency."

In the misogynist part of my soul, I hear echoes of women fighting with their men (or of the feminine in men fighting with their men). Instead of dealing directly with the issue, they move to the process: Why didn't you tell me this sooner? How long have you been keeping this from me? Can't you see what bad timing this is? Your words are so hurtful.

Process is the bureaucracy of the progressives. A way to avoid substance.

It's a funny characteristic of contemporary Catholicism that when groups or individuals migrate out of the historic faith, they deny that this is what they are doing. During the Reformation, the protest-ant people and groups couldn't break with Rome fast enough, establishing their own organizations to confront, reject and expel the Great Whore of Babylon. But the massive diminution and dilution of actual Catholicism by the post-Vatican II generation has almost always been denied by them. They want to stay within the institution's boundaries while altering it beyond recognition.

Perhaps they have noticed that they only have cultural status as dissenters within the Roman Church. Once they actually leave, they cease to be of interest. They no longer serve the liberal narrative of plucky free-thinkers battling the "tired old white men of the Vatican." Remember Matthew Fox? For years he had lots of press and speaking engagements as a courageous prophetic voice. Then he was kicked out of the Dominicans and joined the Episcopal Church and hardly anyone has heard of him since. And when he looks for some press, it's the Pope he chooses to attack. Old habits die hard.


Speaking of transparency, how many people know that the LCWR has repeated refused to give any voice at all to groups who represent young people who assert that they were sexually abused by nuns?

Sister Blovia of the UnNamed Savior

In preparation for meeting their Rome-appointed episcopal overseers, the nuns who are part of the LCWR have published this prayer: (bolding not mine, but from another site).

God’s Spirit
A Prayer for our Sisters

In this time of pain and promise,
we call on God’s Spirit to bless
the leadership of LCWR, of our
Congregation, and all women religious
who strive to live the gospel in these
uncertain times.

We call on the Spirit of God to reveal
the way forward that is faithful to God’s
dream for us and our lives together.

May all who are called to engage
in prayer and conversation come to
the table with hearts that are open,
transparent, and faith-filled. May their
reflection be marked by a deep listening
to the voice of the Spirit at work in
our world.

May the holy ones who have gone
before us inspire us by their courage
and wisdom and affirm that we are
not alone.

May we continue to faithfully live the
questions of our time and witness to
the people of God that we are women
at home with mystery and filled with
fierce hope for our shared future.
Amen.

by Immaculate Heart of Mary Sister Chris Koellhoffer

Aside from the literary unmerit of the tired faux-intense tone and the empty hyped phrases, plus the fact that it is not a prayer, speech directed to God, as much as a set of self-referential hortatories, here's a hint to Sister Chris and her fellows (!) about what the basic problem is: Whose Name, very like yours, is totally missing from this text?


__

Female Left, Masculine Right

To avoid thinking about some things I don't want to think about for a while --what we call suppression, in the shrink trade, conscious denial-- I was perusing and comparing some of the complaints against Rome from the women of the ultra-liberal LCWR, who still operate within the Church, and the men of the ultra-conservative Society of St Pius X, who operate outside(ish) of it. Fascinating stuff, about both gender and organizational psychology. And the consistency of Romanità.
.

Maenad ecofem nuns dancing around their Wise Crone at an LCWR convention

The females, American nuns, studiously avoid the very doctrinal issues which are the heart of Rome's problem with them. I have never seen them once address them. They concentrate on speculation about motivation and on emotional process. They interpret the challenge as about money, as a distraction from the sex abuse issue, as male fear of feminine power, as an attack on their "justice and peace" work with "the poor and vulnerable and marginalized." And they question the legitimacy of the post-assessment meetings because they don't feel "heard" or "seen", but "observed" and "judged."

To a post-feminist middle-class US woman, who seeks (and expects, as her birthright) constant and unwavering emotional validation above all, it's outrageously abusive.

Illicitly but validly ordained traditionalist priests with their reactionary bishops

The males, (mostly Northern) European priests, are obsessed with words, with documents, with the interpretation of texts and history. With issues. It is a conflict over ideas, traditional Roman Catholicism vs What Happened At Vatican II. The head of the organization, though, has laid out in a recent speech all the complications of process around these theological discussions and canonical meetings. For anyone, like your humble correspondent, who has lived in Rome and known people who have long worked there, it was almost hilariously familiar: double messages lost in a Mobius maze of conflicting public and private voices. Two classic examples he notes: one, receiving a strongly worded letter from Rome by mail and then receiving a phone call from the office that issued it, telling them just to file it away and forget it. Another is Rome agreeing to a document after a long and complex discussion and then submitting a revised version for signature, after the meeting, which redefines it to mean the opposite of the original.

To a tidy Franco-Germanic clerical mind, which seeks clarity and order above all, it's crazy-makingly ambiguous.

Welcome to Italy.

In 1870, after the newly-formed Italy dispossessed the Pope of his states, the lands of central Italy that he had ruled for 1000 years, he sulkingly withdrew into a role as "The Prisoner of the Vatican". Well, like many apparently absolute rulers, he remains a paradoxical prisoner, but his keepers are the many members of the Vatican bureaucracy who supposedly serve him. What Benedict XVI personally wants has to pass through a labyrinth of other wills, many of which are either overtly or covertly opposed to his. Not a new, or unique, situation. Court life. For instance, he has made the old Mass available again for whoever wants it, but has not dared to celebrate it himself in St Peter's.*

I think Jung might find some of his impressions of male/female difference validated here. I can image that Hell for each of these groups might be spending eternity in each others' company :) As the old Roman saying goes, If you want to keep your faith in the Barque of Peter, stay away from the engine room.


*Speaking of St Peter's and the Prisoner of the Vatican. The new Kingdom of Italy at first offered to leave the papacy part of Rome within the Leonine Walls. These were built by Pope Leo IV in the 9th century after...get this...the Muslims invaded the city and sacked St. Peter's in 846. Yup. Betcha didn't know that. Part of The Religion of Peace's continuous 1000+ years of predation and invasion of Christian Europe. Including a huge slave trade in Whites.

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Mush(ette)

What strikes me as odd is that while reformers in the 16th century recognized that their faith was no longer compatible with the religion of the Roman Church and left to start their own bodies, proudly so, contemporary folks who find themselves inside the Roman Church but who have developed a faith even more distinct from it than Protestantism, refuse to admit that truth and leave.

The Protestant reformers and their churches were hyper-Christian: no deviation at all from the Trinity and the Incarnation --ask Servetus-- and an obsession with the Bible. Contemporary Christian and Catholic liberals are hypo-Christian when it comes to content: much more bound to universalist themes that flow from the Enlightenment and cultural Marxism than to the narrow confines of confessional and institutional churches and their sectarian and particular faiths. Take the LCWR: When you are disputing a doctrinal assessment from Rome, you invite Barbara Marx Hubbard as your keynote speaker? What could be clearer?

If you read through the years of speakers and workshops and position papers, etc of the embattled LCWR, and the websites of many of their member sisterhoods, you'd be struck --if you knew anything about 2000 years of Christianity-- about the thin, thin, thin Christology. When the Son of God gets mentioned at all, it is the romantic historical revolutionary and inclusive Jesus --basically a Jewish Martin Luther King (without the plagiarism and serial adulteries)-- or a reference to "the mission of Jesus." And when God is mentioned, it's God or The Spirit or The Ground of Our Being. Pretty generic stuff. A rightwing Unitarian could sign on to it. All designed, of course, to accomodate the real fundamental commitments of these women's groups, to eco-feminism and leftwing social activism.

As Heidegger pointed out, you can often learn more from what is Unsaid than than what is Said.

What they call old vs new "consciousness" is really Catholicism (or any kind of historically continuous Christianity) vs. Something Else.

Why don't they just man up and admit it?

PS. These wymyn are as White as any Tea Party gathering, but because they are Wymyn under attack from the Patriarchy, and belong heart and soul entire to the Democrat/Progressive camp, no news outlet has once noticed this obvious racial fact...

Catholic gender wars

It has not only been post-Catholic liberals who have been disappointed by the Roman Church after the Second Vatican Council, but traditionalist Catholics as well. The most notable schism from the Right has been the Society of St Pius X, founded by Msr. Lefebvre. They have been in talks with the Vatican over the last years, to see if they can be re-integrated.

The discussions have all been intellectual and very pointed. The break was about ideas, doctrine. Theologians from both sides meet and read each other's documents and talk them through. Of course there is feeling involved, but the medium of dialogue is ideas. The constitutive triadic unity of Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) consists of hierarchy, sacraments, and ideas, that is, doctrine.

The LCWR, IMHO, if it were as honest about its ideas as the SSPX, would also be in schism, if not worse. Luther was more Catholic than they are. But it has taken an entirely different tack. The dominant form of discourse I have read from them has been moral and emotional. The unofficial abbess of the Church of Social Justice & EcoFeminism, Joan Chittister, expressed her pain at being "observed", not being seen fully by these men, as a person, spoken "to" rather than "with". Their meeting with overseer Archbishop Sartain was about (note the adjectives) "mutual respect, careful listening and open dialogue." Covering up their obvious departure from Roman Catholicism, they have made this loaded dialogue about them (ie, their collective ego/persona) and their feelings. Read this article and ask yourself what its content is. It's all about an emotional processing that they are convinced will vindicate them.

Why the diff?

Boyz vs ghyrls.

I have no doubt that there is a lot of feeling and personal hurt and anger on the SSPX side, but the dialogue is between males and is straightforwardly intellectual. Doctrine is the issue. And I have no doubt that there is a lot of ideology on the LCWR side, --oceans of verbiage, in fact--but the female dialogue is emotional. You are not teaching the correct idea vs You don't see me as a good and equal person.

Stereotypical? Sure. But stereotypes are mostly true. That's precisely why people hate them.

Feminism is astonishingly overloaded with ideology. Unlike the intangible Father God whose Word was made flesh, their fleshy Gaia Goddess is obsessed with making words. But at bottom, in most cases, it is a typically female form of argument --animus-possessed, as Jung would call it,* where a thin but high-volume covering of intellectual half-truths hides what is entirely a feeling-based assault. It's what makes men insane when trying to reason with an angry woman.

Perhaps the Archbishop should consult a Jungian analyst.


*If you read some of this, you'll see why I still like old CG.


-

Nuns on the run

The LCWR, Leadership Conference of Women Religious, is the joint body of all the ecofeminist sisters' congregations dying off in the US. They published their annual report.

Their initiative for "young leaders"....under 60.

And an example of the bloviating language that infects the whole 30 page document.

The words "Jesus" and "Christ" appeared only once, and together, in noting that the LCWR had gotten an award for service to his Gospel,...

Female BS

LCWR leaders announce 'honest sharing of views' with Vatican delegate, but no plans for reform : News Headlines - Catholic Culture:

I continue to be astonished at the empty BS rhetoric that these women specialize in. Such inflated language.

 “a resolution of this situation that maintains the integrity of LCWR and is healthy for the whole church."
 “a profound and honest sharing of views.”
“extraordinarily rich and deeply reverent conversation.”

“As women of the Church, we will discern how to move through the turbulent aftermath of the doctrinal assessment…
 “The processes of inclusion and dialogue needed today may demand great suffering on our part as we work to create such processes…
 “We are privileged to live in a time of unprecedented challenges and grace.”
“In deep solidarity with each other, our sisters in other countries beyond our own and our other lay sisters and brothers around the world, we hear the call to respond to the God of the future, who invites us into waters of new life. This places us in situations of possibility and peril at every turn.”
“Our fidelity to and love of God’s people and our commitment to the Gospel and our vocation directs our path and that our way of being in the world is one of compassion and love. Thus, in the next three years, the critical issue before us is to be who we say we are and who God calls us to become, for the life of the world, keenly aware of the costly graces.”

This is all about feelings and bloviating and nothing about substance, all about process and not ideas. The bad feminine.



'via Blog this'

Dueling lingos

Anyone who has ever read documents from the Vatican knows that it has its own special and unloveable style, derived from both imperial Latin and from Italian floridity and circumlocution. And here it would not be altogether inopportune to note, etc. The modern Anglo-Saxon love of brevity and clarity is offended by its curial verbosity.

Oddly enough, the aristocratic Vatican's populist competitors and opponents, embodied in the aging Boomer nuns of the LCWR, have developed a style which bloviates at least as much, if not more, but in a quite contemporary...and to my ears, feminine...jargon.

A short example, where members at the meeting are asked not to come to the closed sessions unless they are prepared to keep secrets:

(she) asked members who "cannot understand or perceive confidentiality as anything other than total transparency to consider not coming to the executive sessions, not in the interest of ever excluding anyone, but in creating the kind of environment we need to really discern* with each other in freedom and openness."

What kind of mind-web do people who talk like that live in?  It really gives me vertigo. And then there's the presidential address, if you have the stomach for it. Makes papal encyclicals sound colloquial.

I find myself remembering, with discomfort, one of the loathsome fathers of political correctness, The Frankfurt School's Theodore Adorno, and his critique of existentialism, The Jargon of Authenticity. He asserted that a philosophical language which purported to reveal was instead a massive cover-up.

Even a broken clock...


*This word is as ubiquitous in contemporary Catholicism as diversity is in the larger world. And I loath both terms. Discern, because it reeks of Jesuits. Diversity because it's just a lie.


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Echoing nuns

LCWR calls for assault weapons ban | National Catholic Reporter:

Is there any attitude, viewpoint, policy or program of the Liberal Democrats
that these women are not in utter lockstep with?

'via Blog this'

Bad religion

When I was a Dominican friar, I certainly did my share of damage while I worked out the various issues in my life. Looking back now, I certainly regret some of my actions.

But one of the most damaging things that happened to the Order of Preachers was the disastrous notion of the "Dominican Family" that allowed the friars to be swamped by the much more numerous sisters.

The kind of BS that characterizes the LCWR well characterizes the Dominican sisterhoods: they are really just eco-feminist Democrats in polyester pants suits (and now, with their aging, blue hair.)

On the website of the Order, we have this gem by a woman from the same sisterhood that taught me as a child. The bloviation is typical, starting from the title: What is Earth Asking of The Order?

Earth as a proper name.

And this resounding conclusion:

What if Earth is asking the Order—as its collective consciousness—to fashion regional, national and even international collective responses to global climate spinning out of control fashioned from/in the above silence? 

Far from being an escape from, or an evasion of action, the silence would be the matrix from which we, grounded in the Divine energy embraced in the silence, might respond boldly and creatively to the cries of people and planet with a timing, precision and energy which would be impeccable, if not always victorious. What if this is what Earth is asking of the Order?

Embarrassing.

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Inquisition cracks down on wymyn

It turns out that the Vatican intends to reform the LCWR, the flagship organization of the gray and dying liberal American nuns. The press has cast it in the terms of my post's title, of course. "Coralling nuns", as one headline put it. But really, what have the girls been thinking?

Focus in reports will be on their thundering silence of abortion and homosexuality, which the report mentions. But the heart of the whole thing will get lost, which is that Rome has discovered that as far as this group is concerned, Christ is either a cipher or an afterthought. As the document says,

the Assessment reveals serious doctrinal problems which affect many in
Consecrated Life. On the doctrinal level, this crisis is characterized by a diminution of the
fundamental Christological center and focus of religious consecration which leads, in turn, to a loss of a “constant and lively sense of the Church” among some Religious.

The Church, on most of their websites, is either The People of God or a sinful patriarchal institution which needs the reforming benefit of the sisters' "prophetic" critique, based on "the signs of the times." And the Mass, because it requires a male priest, is something of a disputed question, or an optional form of devotion. The organization will now have the benefit of three bishops to oversee their "renewal".

A lot of these women really are ecofeminist Democrats who have a lot more in common with Unitarian Universalists and Episcopalians --save for the ethnic thing. with the old Catholic or Christian shell just there for convenience and sentiment.

And whilst under investigation by Rome, who do they invite to be their upcoming Keynote Speaker? A contemporary version of Madame Blavatsky.

Do these ladies not know what the word Catholic means? 

PS A lot of commentors accuse Rome and the bishops of hypocrisy because of their catastrophic handling of the clergy sex abuse mess. No doubt they failed bigtime there and gave the Church's enemies a freebie that keeps on giving.  But what a lot of people don't understand is that, despite its big moral code, Catholicism --if I may speak of it as a mythic organism-- cares a lot more about doctrine and sacraments than about human bad behavior. Bad behavior is a constant. But perhaps precisely because of this, Catholic identity --same for the Orthodox-- is rooted in dogma and in sacraments, which means the centrality of a doctrinally and sacrally empowered priesthood. The Church authorities will always take this more seriously than bad behavior. If you don't accept that, then sooner or later you'll be a Protestant, either overtly or covertly. All that blather about The People of God --which usually sounds like Thirty of the  Good Folks Of St. Finbar's Parish-- is public relations.

PPS. NPR and the nun head of the lefty social justice org see this simply as patriarchs unable to deal with strong women. Well, that explains everything.

Letting the nun out of the bag

Part of the "religion" interest of Ex Cathedra is in how supposedly mainstream Catholic sisters, in North America especially have, in many cases, moved well beyond Catholicism into some kind of ecofeminist social justice spirituality. If you look at their websites, you don't find much Catholic, or even Christian, in the forefront. Small wonder they are dying. Small wonder that the Vatican is investigating them.

I stumbled on to the 2007 keynote address to the national organization that many of them belong to. Remembrance of jargons past. But the most astonishing thing was the honesty with which Laurie Brink, OP recognized the same situation. She points out that many communities of nuns are dying and refuse to face it gracefully. And as part, and only part, of her lengthy speech, this:

"The dynamic option for Religious Life, which I am calling, Sojourning, is much more difficult to discuss, since it involves moving beyond the Church, even beyond Jesus. A sojourning congregation is no longer ecclesiastical. It has grown beyond the bounds of institutional religion. Its search for the Holy may have begun rooted in Jesus as the Christ, but deep reflection, study and prayer have opened it up to the spirit of the Holy in all of creation. Religious titles, institutional limitations, ecclesiastical authorities no longer fit this congregation, which in most respects is Post-Christian."

When religious communities embraced the spirit of renewal in the 1970s, they took seriously that the world was no longer the enemy, that a sense of ecumenism required encountering the holy “other,” and that the God of Jesus might well be the God of Moses and the God of Mohammed. The works of Thomas Merton encouraged an exploration of the nexus between Eastern and Western religious practices. The emergence of the women’s movement with is concomitant critique of religion invited women everywhere to use a hermeneutical lens of suspicion when reading the androcentric Scriptures and the texts of the Tradition. With a new lens, women also began to see the divine within nature, the value and importance of the cosmos, and that the emerging new cosmology encouraged their spirituality and fed their souls.

As one sister described it, “I was rooted in the story of Jesus, and it remains at my core, but I’ve also moved beyond Jesus.” The Jesus narrative is not the only or the most important narrative for these women. They still hold up and reverence the values of the Gospel, but they also recognize that these same values are not solely the property of Christianity. Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Judaism, Islam and others hold similar tenets for right behavior within the community, right relationship with the earth and right relationship with the Divine. With these insights come a shattering or freeing realization—depending on where you stand. Jesus is not the only son of God. Salvation is not limited to Christians. Wisdom is found in the traditions of the Church as well as beyond it.

I can't help quoting the opening of her talk. It tells you most of what you need to know.

Perhaps the title of this year’s LCWR assembly, “The Next Frontier: Religious
Life at the Edge of Tomorrow,” is a bit imperialistic. It conjures up images of
conquered Indians and stalwart white pioneers. The underlying philosophy for “frontier”
is “manifest destiny.” It is our destiny to extend our grasp, to reach beyond what is
currently “ours” and to take from the other. The theological justification in the 1800s was
the salvation of heathen souls—a theology that we no longer hold.
Rather, what would it sound like if instead of “frontier,” we used “margin,” which
Webster defines as “the outside limit and adjoining surface of something.” “The Next
Margin: Religious Life at the Edge of Tomorrow.” I agree.

In James Burnham's words: "Liberalism, the ideology of Western suicide. "

Post #3400

Since late 2006 I have been ranting here, courtesy of Blogger, and this is my 3,400th post. That's a lot of bloviating. My initial fear was that, like a lot of would-be bloggers, I'd give up. Turns out that this has become compulsive and addicting.

I checked out my February stats and found that on average, about two dozen people read each one, ranging from only 9 readers to 63 for the most popular one. The top fourth ranged from 24-63 hits, the next fourth 19-24, the next fourth 15-19, the final fourth 9-15.

All told, my number of hits last month was just under 2,100. How many separate readers that is, I do not know. And who knows how many do more than glance for a second and move on?

Comments remain pretty rare, but since I am less interested, ie hardly interested at all, in engaging with a readership than just blowing off rhetorical steam, that's not so surprising. After all, describing your blog as a place of infallible truth is hardly a summons to dialogue. And I have long known that "dialogue" --one of the idols of the contemporary tribe-- is vastly overrated. To paraphrase Clausewitz, dialogue is just polemic carried on by other means.

I was already well established on the Rightish side of things re "politics, sex & religion" back in 2006. I have only gotten worse since then. Have I transcended conservatism into being a reactionary? My logo pic says a lot of it:

Religiously, I remain a non-practicing, marginal and very likely excommunicate Catholic with Gnostic sympathies. (Though still more Catholic than Garry Wills or the nunnies of the LCWR.) My dislike of liberal Catholicism matches my dislike of liberal everything, in that it tries to de-nature something while making believe it is really improving it. For all its post-Vatican II vacuity and enchantment with Euro-stupidity, the Church has been a pillar of the West for a thousand years. Undoing it in order to please a bunch of Boomers? No thanks. And my reading of Islam as an invasive alien enemy religion remains unchanged.

Sexually, I have increasingly differentiated between my own homoeros and the package deal that is gay (or worse now, LGBT) culture, which is just a sub-department of feminism, victimism and leftism. Insofar as those three things are separate anyway.

Politically, I don't know if it's worth much to be an American conservative anymore. After the electorate chose the death of the Republic twice, and the Supreme Court decided that buying a mandatory health plan was a tax, what is there to conserve for the future?  The drift of the country --as with the whole of the West-- seem irrevocably leftward, toward the tyranny of the Victim Minorities. The only group at all interested supporting even as pussyish a semi-conservative as Mitt Romney was Whites; just sixty percent of them, and they formed ninety percent of his voters.  Straight Gentile Christian male and married-female Whites to be exact.

And that brings me to the touchiest subject that has come to find a place at Ex Cathedra: race.  I remember being kinda horrified back around the turn of the century to find myself agreeing with people I had long considered simply evil and inimical: conservatives. All of whom, by the, way bent over backwards to toe the egalitarian line on this matter. It took me a few years or more to describe myself as conservative without a voice in my head saying, "Really? Are you serious?" Running up against what I now believe to be the realities of race is likewise uncomfortable for me. And I suspect for my readers, too.

I know of no other subject more taboo-laden. (Any therapist worth his salt can tell you that where taboos accrue, you're likely to have a lot of repressed lies in the basement.) But, as with most of the Liberal ideology, what I am asked to believe, no, absolutely required to believe, seems less and less believable all the time. When I look at the actual behaviors of groups, as groups, over time, it becomes impossible to maintain the official line anymore. Jefferson was wrong. And multiculturalism is a lie, designed to dispossess Whites, the only group that "racism" is a moral issue for.

As one honest man put it:

"All people are 'racists,' to the extent the term has any meaning at all, but only white people are excoriated for it. The charge of 'racism,' therefore, functions merely as a club to intimidate whites into not looking out for our own ethnic interests."

None of this is a recipe for optimism. But my character has never made me famous for that. Even when I left the Church, I never gave up believing in Original Sin.

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Girl talk

The keynote address at the LCWR is a long and bloviated song of narcissistic praise to absolute identification with Western liberalism and the agenda of the eco-feminist Democrat Left as the culmination of history and divinity. The suicidal disappearance of women's religious orders is, in classical Burnham style, celebrated as their greatest achievement.

The word "Christ" is only mentioned once outside of quoting Vatican documents. The word "Catholic" never appears.

Despite "bravely" quoting feminist icon Alice Walker that "we are not girls", that's exactly what they are.



'via Blog this'

What's in a name?

On FB, a Sister of Charity who is also my cousin, and a wonderful person, has posted the equivalent of a bumper sticker, responding to the recent Vatican decision to reform the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the umbrella org for most orders of greying US nuns. It reads: My conscience tells me to stand with the Catholic Sisters.

Well, that is really the question: are the Sisters still Catholic? At their 2007 meeting, even their keynote speaker admitted that some of their member congregations had quietly "moved beyond" Christianity while remaining Catholic on paper.

If you were a space alien and wanted to know about this big 1 billion member 2000 year old  religion and decided to check out the websites of the orders of Catholic sisters which belong to LCWR to find out, you'd get a seriously deranged picture. It's not only what they emphasize, but what they are resoundly silent about. An odd version of Wittgenstein's dictum: Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent.

Although Ex Cathedra does not practice his ancestral faith, he knows what it is; it was partly out of respect for the reality of what Catholicism is rather than what I wanted it to be. Like his general reaction to the liberal Regime of Lies, it is not really about hypocrisy or heresy, but about being insulted: asked to buy what is patently a ten-minutes-old bill of goods as if it were the real thing. So when its representatives want to use the cover and prestige of their Church belonging to foster ecofeminism and lefty liberation-theology social justice statism, etc. he is not a fan.

UnSplits

It surely must be part of how my mind works that I see irreconcilable opposites all over the place. Although part of my therapy tool kit is to be aware of interpersonal splitting as a form of denial and defense, my larger intellectual tool kit rather specializes in detecting either/or phenomena and quite often affirming them. There are times when Hegel and Jung are right, when opposites become transformed in a third novum. But this is neither a universal fate nor an everyday desirable. The world functions not only out of cooperation but by competition.

When I wander through the religious cybersphere, I detect irreconcilable oppositions. Catholics vs Protestants, no matter how much dialogue goes on, are two quite different kinds of Christians. Or at least two different kinds of Christian religion. And liberal Catholics vs orthodox Catholics: I fail to see any reasons other than inertia, habit or likely disadvantage --in status or wealth--why the vast majority of liberal Catholics do not form themselves into a separate body or into a pre-existing body which matches their beliefs and values: the Episcopal Church. To my knowledge, nothing at all that liberal Catholics want is missing in the Episcopal Church. And no proposal for change coming from liberal Catholics eventuates in anything other than the Episcopal Church. Yet they refuse to budge.

The way the current conflict between the Roman CDF and the American LCWR has been played in the press and in a lot of the Church shows the irreconcilable worlds that are there. It is ironic that an ex-theologian "gets" Rome's problem with the lefty nuns. For the consensus, it is all about male domination and right-wing politics. They can't see what is right in front of them, that for Rome, and for history, Catholic identity is doctrinal: underneath the moral issues is the nuns' decades-long resounding silence on the Trinitarian God, on Christ as the Incarnate Son, on the Church and its sacraments. Wherever Catholicism clashes with feminism, Catholicism is always and in every case dumped.

As far as America goes, I see all kinds of unworkable and unsustainable divisions. Is it my dark attitude that makes me imagine that we are living through an undeclared Second Civil War? One that has been going on for a half-century?

I see it not only as ideological but as racial. (And that is not just an American, but a Western phenomenon: a second Barbarian Invasion of the Empire.) Neither Christianity nor Islam have been able to eradicate group warfare within their own realms. And most of that warfare tribal, blood and kind and land based. And these are religions, perhaps the most powerful kinds of trans-tribal archetypal containers in human history. And we are supposed to believe that Enlightenment Liberalism --a form of thought unrivalled by its unrooted abstractness-- will create a world without ethnic/racial/tribal strife?


Only White people, I suspect, are foolish enough really to believe that.

I see the battle of the sexes as something quite real as well. Feminism has raised this immemorial tension, this oppositional lack of interchangeability, to the level of warfare.

As always, I have one set of rules for individuals and another for groups. But the group realities are undeniable.

Not everyone sees what I see, of course. I myself have looked at the world differently from how I now do. But there it is.

Suicidal lemmings for Jesus

I don't know how the upcoming Synod on the Family in Rome will turn out, but everything to do with it indicates to me what a destructive clown the Holy Father is.

Like the feckless Anglicans (and all the other mainline Prots), he seems to focus on pleasing The Cultured Despisers of Religion. And if history and experience show anything, it is that every capitulation to them only increases their despite.

Homosexuals are, in the US, less than 3% of the population. And damned few of us are committed Christian church-goers. LGBT culture is flamboyantly (of course) and contemptuously anti-Christian. And yet the US Episcopal church picked a gay man to be a bishop, knowing the internal fractures that would follow. Why? To signal to The Cultured Despisers of Religion --quite a few of whom are Anglican clergy, apparently-- that they would Do The Right Thing No Matter The Consequences. How brave. How beneath contempt. How White.

It is certainly a sign of my residual Catholicism that it would never have occured to me in a thousand years to make a pro-gay move that would create schism. And the Anglicans have fatally wounded themselves just to please a tiny group of people who despise them..

Which brings us back to Francis The Talking Pope. Who knows? Maybe the Synod will pull it out of the fire and maintain Catholic doctrine on marriage despite the damage His Narcissism has wrought. But this Evita Peron in clerical drag seems bent on trying to curry favor with the least committed at the price of severely demoralizing the most committed. For just one example, while letting the post-Christian eco-feminist nuns of the LCWR off the hook entirely, he has put a traditionalist Franciscan order under virtual house arrest. WTF?

Part of me is amused that part of me cares about this. After all, my current feeling is that Christianity has betrayed two groups that are important to me: men and Whites. So why should I care what they do about divorced people and communion?

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