Revert To Saved Version

Bishop Fulton Sheen on Netflix

Netflix now has 4 Bishop Sheen videos available for instant viewing plus more you can add to your queue.

posted by The Jabberwock @ 11:15 PM 0 comments

Love and Law

In a letter to the Catholic Voice Nancy LeBlanc of Livermore asks:

The force of law is not a loving, Christian means for increasing the world’s morality. So why is the Church asking the state to prevent abortion and assisted suicide?

Taken to its logical conclusion, this premise would argue for anarchy, since all law entails the use of force rather than love. Suppose a man had brutally murdered a member of your family, should armed agents of the law apprehend that person and force him to spend the rest of his life in jail? Or would you instead wish to meet with the man, forgive him, share with him your Catholic faith, and pray he chooses to repent rather than kill again?

Or, to take perhaps a less extreme example, suppose I own a factory and choose to pay my workers $1 an hour and dump industrial waste into a nearby stream. What gives you the right to force me to pay minimum wage to my workers and respect the environment?

I went through a Libertarian phase in my early twenties so I know many of that presuasion would agree with my 2nd example and a few would even agree that murder would be better addressed by self defense and private security firms than by government. But what is the teaching of the Catholic Church on this issue? From Catechism of the Catholic Church 2266:

The efforts of the state to curb the spread of behavior harmful to people's rights and to the basic rules of civil society correspond to the requirement of safeguarding the common good. Legitimate public authority has the right and the duty to inflict punishment proportionate to the gravity of the offense. Punishment has the primary aim of redressing the disorder introduced by the offense. When it is willingly accepted by the guilty party, it assumes the value of expiation. Punishment then, in addition to defending public order and protecting people's safety, has a medicinal purpose: as far as possible, it must contribute to the correction of the guilty party.

posted by The Jabberwock @ 6:40 PM 1 comments

100% Chalcedon Compliant

You scored as Chalcedon compliant. You are Chalcedon compliant. Congratulations, you're not a heretic. You believe that Jesus is truly God and truly man and like us in every respect, apart from sin. Officially approved in 451.

Chalcedon compliant 100% Pelagianism 58% Nestorianism 33% Apollanarian 33% Monophysitism 33% Modalism 25% Arianism 0% Monarchianism 0% Docetism 0% Adoptionist 0% Donatism 0% Albigensianism 0% Gnosticism 0% Socinianism 0% Are you a heretic? created with QuizFarm.com

posted by The Jabberwock @ 10:10 PM 2 comments

Walk for Life 2006

Mark your calendar: the 2nd Annual Walk for Life West Coast is on January 21, 2006.

posted by The Jabberwock @ 12:03 AM

The Constitution Is Not Complicated

Lost amid all the debate over whether Harriet Miers is qualified to sit on the Supreme Court is the simple fact that our Constitution is an extraordinarily simple document. I thought it was a remarkable straightforward, easily comprehensible document the first time I read it. I was probably about nine or ten years old at the time.

I only began to appreciate its hidden subtitles when I read in my high school civics textbook that "the right of the people to keep and bear arms" actually referred to the right of state governments to organize National Guard regiments. I was further perplexed when I learned that "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof" really meant that the Supreme Court could prohibit the free exercise of religion in schools, town squares, and other public places nationwide.

But I still didn’t fathom the true profundities of our Constitution until I learned that somewhere within it lurks the right of a woman to terminate her unwanted pregnancy. Try as I might, I still can’t find that clause in my copy. Perhaps I own the expurgated version? Maybe that bit was printed in invisible ink?

So you see, I have only recently come to understand that the real Constitution bears no relation to the one I found in my parent’s almanac so many years ago. That Constitution is purely ornamental, for display purposes only. It’s the one we put out to make a good impression when we have guests over to dinner. The real Constitution is a document so monumentally complex and abstruse that only a handful of experienced judges and legal scholars can even begin to understand it. Harriet Miers has probably never even read the real Constitution, so you can see why she’s not even remotely qualified to serve on the SCOTUS. She might even make a complete fool of herself and base her rulings on that quaint little document in my parents' almanac...

posted by The Jabberwock @ 10:46 PM 0 comments