Ubi Petrus

For those of you who think Fox News is just a mouthpiece for the Right here’s a nice little hatchet job on Patricia Heaton because of her work on the part of the pro-life work against the Missouri Amendment 2 issue. What starts out as a decent piece of unbiased reporting quickly descends into a near polemic against the pro-life cause and fawning over Michael J. Fox because of his history as a successful actor and the success of his charity. What exactly those two issues have to do with his standing as a knowledgeable spokesman for the cause of stem cell research is beyond me, but that’s what we’re left with. Contrast this:

Heaton has been a relatively unknown political ideologist to most of her fans. My guess is they will be surprised to learn about her as she attacks Fox and repudiates his claims.

Six months ago I reported that Heaton — who then was campaigning to join ABC’s talk show “The View” as a correspondent — was honorary chairwoman of the group Feminists for Life. Jane Roberts, wife of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, is a consultant. Their slogan is “Refuse to Choose.”

Heaton has absolutely made a choice. The question now is whether her stance in Missouri will affect her standing in Hollywood.

With this:

But it’s what Fox has done with his illness that is most impressive. Since 2001, according to federal records, his Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research has raised an astonishing $80 million for research. Unlike most celebrity charities, the Fox Foundation has a Web site that even links to its most recent federal tax filing, and the filing is current.

This is an amazing achievement, considering how young the foundation is. Fox has turned his illness into something incredibly positive; the group even runs in the black, meaning its income is greater than its expenses. Last year the group finished with $7 million in the bank after giving away $17 million.

If you want to get into some real interesting reading on Parkinson’s, check out www.michaeljfox.org. Impressive!

And you tell me which side of things you think the reporter is on. I am forced to lean towards calling this irresponsible reporting. Perhaps this is Fox News’ way of maintaining they are “fair and balanced” but a hatchet job like this is hardly worthy of any news outlet.

Dale Price gives a fisking for the ages to James Carroll’s Boston Globe article on Pope Benedict’s Regensburg speech. Given the vitriol and flat-out misrepresentations rampant in the article the fisk is, unfortunately, well deserved. Wouldn’t it be nice if more Catholics actually liked being Catholic instead of seeing it as a platform from which to launch their secularist tirades, as if being a Catholic gives one some sort of authority on what Catholicism is and means over and above what the Pope, Bishops and Church as a whole would say? Some day, maybe…

The indefatigable American Papist is providing some good coverage (here, here and here) of the Amendment 2 issue in Missouri. While I know I don’t get the kind of circulation he does, if I get even one person who can vote to read a little it’s worth the time. The long story short of it is that Amendment 2 is being portrayed as a way to fund stem cell research and sold as outlawing cloning while having specific language that codifies a state constitutional right to cloning. I love politicians. The good news is that some big names are coming to the defense of humanity, including Jim Caviezal and Jeff Suppan (pitching tonight, BTW).

Father Jonathan at Fox News also has begun posting entries on this at his blog. I’m going to lift a little from him because he explained it very well if I do say so:

Do Missourians know what they are actually voting for?

Opponents of the referendum say the lengthy 2,400-word amendment serves as a master plan of deceit to trick Missourians into legalizing human cloning. They point to two apparently contradictory sections within the Amendment.

Section 2 (1) states, “No person may clone or attempt to clone a human being”

A voter who reads this may think that he or she is voting to approve embryonic stem cell research as long as it does not permit human cloning.

Not so fast, say opponents.

Section 6 (5) defines embryonic stem cell research to include a common method of cloning. “Human embryonic stem cell research, also referred to as ‘early stem cell research’, means any scientific or medical research involving human stem cells derived from in vitro fertlization blastocysts or from somatic cell nuclear transfer.”

“Somatic cell nuclear transfer” is the scientific term for therapeutic cloning, the very same method used to clone “Dolly”.

I’ve managed to pick up a copy of C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity and I must say from what I have read so far it earns its reputation as an insightful piece of work. I hesitate to call it apologetics just yet because it steers clear of the doctrinal issues common in that field, but it certainly approaches it. The book is certainly not as light a fare as other Lewis I’ve read, but when one takes into account its setting in war-time England and as an extrapolation of the goodness and truthfulness of Christianity, and thus of the rightness of the English in their fight against the Nazis in a way, flights of whimsy would be rather out-of-place.

I’ll snag a quick quote that caught me. It’s a nice summation of the central tenant of Christianity – that of a God who takes human form and dies for our own salvation, as St. Paul said “a stumbling block” for those who would not believe. But Lewis turns that a bit on its ear and I think they are both right in their own way:

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies – these over-simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.

It kind of goes with the saying, “truth is stranger than fiction”.

Again, from What It Means to Be a Christian:

It means just seeing the whole reality and burden of our Christian life without fear and bringing it before the face of God, as judge and savior, even if, like Job, we have no answer to give about it all, and the only thing left is to leave it to God himself to answer and to tell him how we are standing here in our darkness with no answers.

I find the phraseology in this quote particularly poignant. After all, how many of us after a long day don’t find ourselves in bed in the dark talking to God knowing only that we don’t have any answers? But at the same time I find his statement warmly encouraging: even though we have no answers we need only trust in God’s goodness as did Job and we have the Christian promise, or perhaps more directly the promise of Christ, that he hears and understands, and that we only need to ask that we may be forgiven. How much better does it get?

I just finished Pope Benedict’s (then Cardinal Ratzinger, of course) book, What It Means to Be a Christian, which is a collection of three sermons he gave in Munster in 1964. It’s very short at only 86 pages and keeps itself from being heavy reading. I’d say it’s typical Benedict – uncannily precise without being weighty or difficult to penetrate. It was, however, packed with quotables so I’ll be dropping them here and there as I get a chance. First up, a pointed critique of a faith lived with its eyes closed:

It seems to me that we quite often run a particular risk: that of not wanting to see these things. We live with shades down over our windows, so to speak, because we are afraid that our faith could not stand the full, glaring light of the facts. So we shield ourselves against this and push these facts out of our consciousness, so as to avoid falling on our face. But a faith that will not account for half of the facts or even more is actually, in essence, a kind of refusal of faith, or, at least, a very profound form of skepticism that fears faith will not be big enough to cope with reality. It dares not accept the fact that faith is the power that overcomes the world. In contrast to that, true believing means looking the whole of reality in the face, unafraid and with an open heart, even if it goes against the picture of faith that, for whatever reason, we make for ourselves.

Gerald has this story about a woman who was arrested at her home in Germany and thrown in jail for the heinous crime of homeschooling her twelve children. From the story he points to, the European Court of Human Rights stated,

“Parents may not refuse the right to education of a child on the basis of their convictions,” adding that the right to education “by its very nature calls for regulation by the state.”

If you’ve read my last post already and think my concept of a secular humanist dhimmitude was bloviating hyperbole, perhaps this story will make you at least think twice. The rule of thumb is always, “never give control of something to the state which you may wish to control in the future”. But you knew that already, right?

Father Jonathan in his latest post included a series of links to articles he found that may be of interest. The one that caught me was a story regarding Europe’s just-beginning realization that their current “ignore the problem and it’s not a problem” stance on Islamic extremism may not cut it any more if they wish to survive. Thinking that it would be a nice way to start the day to know that our elder brothers realize that Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement strategy still is not a way forward I hopped into the story. What caught me, however, was a quote from an entirely different direction:

“We live in Europe, where democracy was based on criticizing religion,” said Philippe Val, editor of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. “If we lose the right to criticize or attack religions in our free countries … we are doomed.”

As Shaggy would say, “zoiks!” I utterly cringe to think that it just may be possible a majority of Europeans consider the criticism of religion to be the basis of democracy. If that is, indeed, a prevailing opinion, even if an subconscious one, it certainly explains the secular humanist onslaught and the emptying of the pews that continent has seen.

Maybe it’s just an American thing, or maybe it’s just the teachers I had growing up, or perhaps even some latent understanding of the necessity of religion for the proper direction and upkeep of man and society but I’ve always felt, going back even so far as my fairly early childhood that the French Revolution and the militant secularization it wrought were a classic case of a small good coming of a great evil. Certainly the continent had need of moving beyond the divine right of kings and the inherent eventuality of corruption. But it always seemed obvious they had thrown the baby out with the bathwater (indeed, they had thrown the bath tub out as well one could say) by so drastically distancing the state from religion. Now, we’ve all heard of the wonders of the separation of Church and State, but the European (and more and more now the American) mode of separating religion in any shape, form or fashion from any act by any member of the state and its apparently intentional disrespect for religious faith and expression as a natural right of humanity would, one should think, be considered a step too far.

I’m all for defending the rights of people to practice the religion of their choice, including those who see fit to deride religion, but one does begin to wonder if saving this militantly secular society from the militantly fanatical members of a religion might come to be a case of a great evil coming of a small good. Perhaps that is worded too harshly. Certainly we cannot allow the Eurabia that many speak of to become a reality, at least not in the dhimmitude sense which normally underlies it. But, to play the ugly American, doesn’t it also seem about time for the Europeans to grow up and realize their experiment with secular humanism and institutionalized agnosticism (or is it, in fact, atheism?) is dangerously close to failure? I shudder to compare which would be worse – a radical Muslim dhimmitude where those who do not follow the rules of Mohamed are punished, or a radical secular humanist dhimmitude where those who do not follow the rules of “if we can we must” and “all truths are equal” are equally punished. I’m sure I’ll have offended many (if there are many who see this, that is) but it is a question which, frankly, I only wish to ask that it might be explored to greater depths, not necessarily an assertion of a strongly held truth.

Okay, well, he’s not actually coming in persona but to have anything by him in these liberal wilds of New England is always a pleasant surprise. My parish will be showing his series on the Catechism starting on November 17th. I’m hoping the series will be sufficiently well-attended to attract the idea of trying to bring him here for one of his talks. According to the flyer, the events will be every Tuesday starting the 17th, we will have a Scriptural Rosary at 6:30pm followed by the week’s installment of the series at 7:00pm and then desert and fellowship afterwards. If you’re anywhere near Manchester, NH and are interested email me (frival3 at gmail dot com) and I can give you details since our parish’s website is woefully out-of-date. I’m still trying to figure out who our webmaster is, but that’s a whole different story…