IF I WASN'T AFRAID THAT I'D JINX HIM I'd announce that I am 100% all in on Pritzker for president.
Of those being often mentioned, he seems to be the best to me, so far. He seems to know what is needed whereas Gavin Newsome doesn't. He has Washington experience which I consider an absolute requirement for anyone who wants to be president. But I won't jinx him by supporting him until after the convention.
I DON'T WATCH movies about the Catholic Church because they're either nauseatingly and dishonestly pious or sensationally and dishonestly anti-Catholic. I never watch movies about real People because they are so unreliable and, so, inevitably bear false witness. That didn't bother me until I found out in conversations online that many PhD holding teachers at accredited universities and prep-schools mistake movies for history or biography. If they're so duped by Hollywood why should anyone expect those with lesser educations to make the distinction between reality and make-believe? Make-believe is dangerous when it's mistaken as reality.
In the many things I read and heard about the upcoming conclave and about the events leading to it, I was horrified to hear someone say how many People on their plane trip to go to Rome for the funeral of Good Pope Francis were watching the movie INCLUDING A BISHOP. I mentioned how I suspected the putrid and pious and grotesquely unrealistic "The Shoes of the Fisherman" led to the election of Karol Wojtyla as John Paul II - a really bad papacy - so hearing that bishops were watching that movie put me on my guard.
So far as I know, very little about what has gone on in any modern conclave has been leaked by a reliable source and what has leaked is often tainted by ulterior motives so I doubt much about it is accurate. Much of the lore surrounding the elections of Popes is sensational and even more obviously ideological and polemic so it's mostly useless if you want to really know. That is what happens when such a choice is made in secrecy by a small group of insiders - like the legendary smoke-filled rooms where presidential candidates of the major parties were said to have been chosen. Of course, back then we got a few good ones whereas today good presidents are even rarer than they once were, The well meaning democratic reforms of the primary system were more than swamped by the Courts opening up the airwaves to millionaires and billionaires flooding the American political system with lies so as to influence voters. I don't think opening up the choice of the head of the Catholic Church to that would be likely to make things better. Imagine if the likes of Tim Busch and the media operations like EWTN and The National Catholic Register (NOT TO BE MISTAKEN WITH THE GENERALLY EXCELLENT NATIONAL CATHOLIC REPORTER!) and their like around the world flooded the airwaves with American style lying.
For some ideas of what might be an alternative to that but which is almost certainly not likely to ever happen, you might look at this piece at Religion Dispatches. Much as I favor democracy as the only potentially valid means of selecting a legitimate secular government, without major protections against the influence of lie campaigns and prejudice ruling, its capacity for producing better results drastically erodes. There is no world-authority who could do that for the Catholic Church. Hell, we can't even protect American democracy at home from it under our Constitution.
As I said, we'll have to see what the Cardinal Electors give us. If they give us someone at least as good as Francis was - and while I think he was a great Pope, he was hardly perfect - all well and good. If they give us someone as timid as Paul VI, as power-hungry and controlling as JPII or as incompetent as Benedict XVI (dear God, not another academic theologian!) that will be typical. There have been remarkably few great presidents of the United States, even though we get a new chance to get a new one every four years. There have been remarkably few great Popes though I think there have actually been a higher percentage of good ones than we've had good presidents. Some of them like Benedict XV have been far better than they have been accorded by history (the late Richard McBrien convinced me of that) some have been downright awful. Just like leaders in putative democracies are, it's a mixed bag.
It's a lot safer and easier for movie makers to make a sensational and false movie about the Catholic Church than it is about secular politics, the old idea that a Catholic audience is going to refuse to watch a movie if the bishop tells them not to was likely always exaggerated and is certainly not true today. I don't care to watch fiction when I can read about reality. I like fiction to be fictitious and not something that tries to risk rational people mistaking it for reality. I've heard at least two people who believed "Conclave" informed about the truth when it is reported to contain nonsense - an unknown Cardinal presenting himself to the Conclave as a Cardinal Elector when those qualified to participate have to be publicly declared by the Pope before hand and a Cardinal breaking the seal of confession - which would mean automatic and immediate excommunication if they did it and every other person in the Conclave would know that. Lord knows what's in it that I haven't read about, yet.
Here are words to live by, which come from my favorite comedy series, Corner Gas "MOVIES AREN'T REAL."
We continue to celebrate the memory of writer Jennifer Johnston who died on the 25th of February 2025. Best known for her novels including The Captains and the Kings, How Many Miles to Babylon?, Shadows On Our Skin (which was Booker shortlisted in 1977) and The Old Jest (which took the Whitbread Book Award in 1979), Jennifer was also a prodigious playwright.
Tonight Drama on One presents, Old Men Are Jealous by Jennifer Johnston - A reimagining of WB Yates's, Deirdre of the Sorrows
Eileen Colgan played the old woman
King was played by Ger Carey
Dee was Roxanna Níc Liam
Laurence Kinlan played Nick
The Dramaturg was Jesper Bergman
Sound Supervision was by Damien Chanel, and
the broadcast coordinator was Margaret Hayes.
Old men are jealous by Jennifer Johnston was produced by Kevin Reynolds
Old men are jealous was a commissioned response to WB Yates's, Deirdre of the Sorrows
The late Jennifer Johnston, gave the announcements to her play.
THE ADMIRABLE RMJ who is more qualified than I am to have an opinion on the topic has a critique of Jeffrey Pullum's video on the passive. It's certainly worth reading.
I still agree with the fuller arguments that Pullum made. Here's a post to what will play as a play list if you follow it up. It takes a few of the short videos to get to the heart of his argument.
who will be elected to replace Good Pope Francis but I doubt it will be the candidate I'm seeing pushed all over the trad-cath web, Robert Sarah, who has been rumored to aspire to be Pope Pius XIII. For one thing he's almost eighty, for another he was clearly an enemy of Francis and, indeed, of the entire last sixty years of modern Catholicism. I can't think of anything the Cardinal Electors could do that would more damage not only what Francis has accomplished but, in fact, every Pope since Pius XII. As I mentioned here the other day the real hard-core trad-caths think Pius' changes such as having the Epistle and Gospel read in a language the congregation could understand, who knows if someone as wacky as Sarah would try to go back even farther than that.
As I said the largely multi-millionaire-billionaire financed "trad-catholic" LARPing cult* will almost certainly either mount or force a schism between those who believe the Catholic Church is a Christian Church and those who don't have much need for Jesus other than the name and title and holy pictures and statues. If someone like Sarah became Pope those who take Jesus seriously would have no home in the Church.
I've read that the millionaire-billionaires have had hired hacks digging up dirt and rumors on alternative candidates and there are at least several of those who will be in the Conclave who would carry that into the meetings. They dug it up on Francis even as he was Pope, even some of those who he either appointed or kept in offices, Sarah's infamous book which he lied about Benedict XVI co-authoring was part of that kind of stuff. The late and scandal tainted George Pell anonymously during his life and explicitly after his death was another such prominent vilifier of Francis. He was often named as an alternative to Sarah in the dreams of the trad-caths, he definitely wanted to turn back to some of the worst of the pre-Vatican II church.
I would guess that by this time next week we will know who they've given us and within six months we'll have a pretty good idea of what they've given us. Till then, it's going to be a bumpy ride no matter who comes out a Pope and not a Cardinal.
* Every time I see a young Woman or Girl wearing a mantilla at mass (a good sign of someone trad-cath LARPing) I remember when, before they relaxed the rule about Women having their head covered in the 1960s the ones who wore the longest mantillas often had the shortest mini-skirts on. I'd forgotten that but it must have made an impression on me at the time. I should talk to some of them because I'd really like to know what they imagine they're getting out of it. Especially those whose families aren't affluent, I know what the affluent hope to get out of it.
Update: I forgot, they changed the rules so it will be a couple of weeks before we have a new Pope. The Conclave won't even have begun by a week from now, at least I think that's true.
HERE I AGREE WITH attorney Dave Aronberg in my extreme dislike of Sarah Palin and everything she stands for - or rather sinks to - while I think he, like the conventional lawyer's POV, entirely misses the real significance of her second loss in her lawsuit against the New York Times.
First I'll give him his say:
I analyze this differently, it's Sarah Palin getting bitten by a Supreme Court ruling and media practice that no side has benefited more from than her Republican-fascism and, especially Trumpism. If the Sullivan decision had been a loss for the NYT and the instruction was that they pay a nominal fine and court costs and issue a retraction the entire sixty years of Republican-fascist ascendancy through media lies about Democrats would never have happened. She and Trump and a series of the worst politicians in the subsequent decades would never have had political careers and the subsequent Rehnquist and Roberts Courts would likely never have been appointed to the Court. In no area is the legal profession as this one exposed as being supremely superficial and wrong.
Most consequential to our situation today, if the Sullivan Decision had never been issued, the New York Times would not have so freely slandered Hillary Clinton, they would not have issued lies about her immediately before the 2016 election, piling on with the Republican-fascist enabling and grotesquely sanctimonious James Comey to sway the election to objectively the worst president in American history, appointing the worst Supreme Court since at least the Taney Court of the 1850s.
If the Sullivan Decision and the line of those decisions building on it, Donald Trump would probably never have had a political career, he may have ended up sued into the flames of hell by those he slandered and libeled, including in a paid opinion piece published by the NYT as it published the original factually deficient ad that led to that decision.
Lawyers are not, it turns out, deep thinkers. Their ability to miss the ultimate consequences of their own profession's actions for the immediate benefits strikes me as more and more important. It extends to the senior ranks of the profession in the judges and, especially the "justices."
I'D RECOMMEND LISTENING to all six as a bare minimum. Then maybe we can have a brawl over it. I'd say easily 9 out of 10 times when someone pulls the old "passive" on someone they don't even know what passive mood is.
Update: I'm surprised you didn't catch my mistake, I meant "voice" not "mood". I guess I should have taken more than a minute to respond to the criticism. Actually, that's a lie, I'm not surprised.
Our "unique constitutional system" produced Trump and permitted him to not only misrule once THEN MOUNT AN INSURRECTION TO KEEP POWER ILLEGALLY, it let him off and permitted him to do it again . The American "free press" invented the monster and promoted him politically TWICE as it sandbagged the most competent president of my lifetime, Joe Biden. Without addressing that and, frankly, the disaster of allowing the Supreme Court to re-write the Constitution (such as the 14h Amendment) without any means of recourse, we're assuring that the world will be right if they judge the United States to be unreliable and that they have to treat us more like Putin's Russia than a reliable democracy.
Everything he's done, including crimes of the most serious potential and likely factual consequence that he has gotten away with only to gain power again HAS BEEN, IN FACT, PERMITTED UNDER OUR DANGEROUS CONSTITUTION AND THE "RULE OF LAW" AS IT IS DEFINED BY THE COURTS AND, ESPECIALLY THE CORRUPT ROBERTS COURT. To merely want to go back to 2014 and do the typical American thing of refusing to learn the lessons of the most dangerous experience, relying on the failed 18th century theories embedded in the U.S. Constitution only means that our recurring though ever worsening history will continue to spiral.
Jerome Richerdson(flute)
Hank Jones (piano)
Wendell Marshall (bass)
Shadow Wilson (drums)
Betty Carter - vocals
Ray Bryant - piano
Jerome Richardson - flute
Wendell Marshall - double bass
Philly Joe Jones - drums
I needed some Betty Carter just now.
SEVEN POPES have died during my lifetime and this is the only one whose death has really shaken me. I hardly remember Pius XII, so his death had no impact on me. I was too young to really take the death of Good Pope John the way it should have struck me.
Paul VI's death didn't leave me feeling much, I was far from the Church at the time and saw it mostly as a political event. His papacy seemed to diminish in importance as it continued.
At the death of John Paul I did have deep feelings only because I had some real hopes that he would renew things after the increasingly timid unwillingness of Paul VI to build on the great work of Vatican II and because I found the circumstances of his sudden death a month after his election to be disturbing, something I still feel.
I felt revulsion at the disgusting show biz elaborateness and obvious right wing political spectacle surrounding the death of JPII and admit that I thought and still think he was the worst Pope of my lifetime, reactionary, power hungry, dictatorial, vindictive, appointing some of the worst bishops and cardinals in modern Catholic history (who still dominate the US Catholic Conference of Bishops) and someone who often seemed to me to be a lot more of a CIA asset than the representative of Christ. His early betrayal of the peasants and clergy of Central America and Archbishop Romero (St Oscar Romero) fixed my opinion of him and his cult.
Benedict did one and only one wise and pastorally responsible thing in his entire Vatican career, retiring from the papacy. He was, if anything, even more of a pastoral disaster than JPII or Pius XII though in some ways he was a better Pope than either of them. His clear desire to take back in some of the worst of the schismatic far right, the likes of the fascist-loving antisemite members of the cult of Marcel Lefebvre (whose excommunication was one of the highlights of JPII's reign) proved to be a disaster. That along with his revolting attempt to revive the pre-Vatican II Latin Mass was even more of one, something which will eventually lead to a major schism backed by fascist Catholic millionaires and billionaires whose motive is to use that cult to further their enrichment and undermining democracy. The fascist-right-wing Catholic movement here and in many other countries is building into being one of the most serious problems that the Catholic Church and democracies everywhere where there is a significant Catholic population will face I will remind skeptics of the role that such "Catholics" have among prominent Republican-fascist politicians (especially those recent "converts" such as Vance, Gingrich and Brownback) and among sitting members of the Supreme Court.
Of course I knew that Francis couldn't go on forever, he was 88 and doing one of the more demanding jobs in the world. It is remarkable how active he was up till the end, even from the hospital and even during Holy Week and Easter, though it was clear that he was not doing well on Sunday, the pictures that showed his one last day of pastoral activity show that it took a lot out of him.
I think the first appearance of his successor my well tell us if he will be another Francis or if he will be a return to the unfortunate tradition of the "traditionalists." Scarlet, gold and ermine and a gold cross instead of one made of more modest materials will be a bad sign. A pope who takes the style of Francis as a much needed reform, in itself, will be a good one but it will be what the new Pope does and very fast which will tell us what we're getting. I hope it is someone who upsets the "trads" for having the odd idea that the Catholic Church should follow the teachings of Jesus. I hope they're not influenced by Hollywood as I'm convinced was the case with JPII. If that damned Anthony Quinn movie hadn't been made, that wouldn't have ever happened.
St. Francis Bergoglio, pray for us, all of us, even us Catholics.
I've put the two posts I was writing off for now.
WHEN AND NOT if Pope Francis is canonized as a saint, I hope that will be what he's called instead of the dreadful style of "St. Pope xxx whatever name and number." Actually, I hope they don't canonize him at all and The People of the Churches canonize him in the old-fashioned way, by popular acclamation. "Pope" is an earthly title, "Saint" is a higher title, the saint whose name Pope Francis chose had no such earthly title, unlike most recent Popes' choices. And there has been no less popely Pope than Francis Bergoglio. At least none who I'm aware of. His refusal of the scarlet and gold at his first appearance of Pope in favor of the white cassock I mentioned here a few days ago was only the beginning of that, his choice to live in an apartment in an apartment building instead of the papal apartmet as well.
Pope Francis joins John XXIII in the significance of their papacies in asserting the Gospel of Jesus above medieval traditions and feudalism. I'd say that Francis was even far less attached to the medieval detritus attached to the papacy than Good Pope John was.
I think Francis' encyclicals will become even more continually cited classics of theology when much of the academic theology of the theologians, including that of his immediate predecessor, the lauded academic theologian Joseph Ratzinger is mostly of interest to academic theologians. I think that is the case because Laudato Si, Fratelli tutti and Dilexit nos are about real life more than about theology. Much as I find reading theology interesting, when it becomes about theology instead of real life its importance sinks often quite rapidly.
The world needs that his successor as Pope is good, though I wouldn't hold my breath on that, it's unusual to have one great Pope followed by another. Elector Cardinals seldom have the courage to do that, though one can hope. Francis did disappoint my wishes such as opening up ordination to married People and Women, though modest in numbers and in power, his opening up of offices of actual power in the Vatican to some Women and others who were not ordained as priests was significant. I say that even as I'm aware that no Pope is going to knowingly risk a major schism and knowing that the conservatives among the bishops and cardinals have proven to be among the most schismatic forces in the church - the most lunatic of current ones think Pius XII was too progressive - and I mean that literally. They will know that millionaires and billionaires are a force even as medieval, baroque monarchs and emperors and even princes exercised power in the Church in the past. We need a good if not great Pope now and perhaps the conclave will surprise the like of me and give us another one. I certainly was't expecting a Francis a dozen years ago. St. Francis Bergoglio, help us.
The Women of Mark 16:8
"He is risen! He is not here!"
we heard - and fled
from the empty tomb,
our lips sealed by fear,
to cower in the upper room.
The Good News stayed dead
until, fed by the power
of Bread
broken,
we arose from our dread
and the Good News was spoken.
Sr. Irene Zimmermann OSF
One of the interesting things about the Resurrection narratives is the place that bread plays in it, the staple of the daily diet. And the most interesting thing about that is that it is BROKEN bread, bread broken to share it. I don't think that that is merely incidental, I think that to hold a sacramental view of the breaking of the bread and sharing the cup of wine you can't leave out that it is food that is broken, shared from that view of it. That the narratives of the sacramental institution of the Eucharist has Jesus specifically stating that the broken and shared bread, the shared wine are his body and his blood, which I think more than just implies that the action of sharing and eating and drinking is as central to the sacramentalism of the act as the so-called elements of it.
Mark's ambiguous ending which has the Women at the tomb told by a mysterious young man dressed in white that Jesus is risen and that they are to tell his disciples that he has gone on before them and will see them in Galilee. But, as the poem notes, they are presented as having been terrified and that the fled, not telling what they'd seen. Which you have to ask, how did Mark know about it, in that case. The several extensions of that ending which scholars don't believe was the original ending of it provides accounts of post-Resurrection appearance. Some think Mark ended at 16:8 with the Women not telling anyone, some theorize that the original ending was lost early in the manuscript tradition of Mark, though there isn't any way to know which is the case. It's clear that Mark did teach the Resurrection of Jesus, though he may not have chosen to go into much detail about it. It's clear from even earlier in the canonical texts, especially in Paul that the earliest known tradition is that Jesus died, was buried and on the third day he rose from the dead into a state of glory.
I generally prefer the Luke tradition with Matthew's coming in second. I don't know to what extent those might be elaborations of the account in Mark - truncated or extended - or how much variation there was in the manuscript tradition. I do think that all of the New Testament is a product of the early followers of Jesus and the earliest converts expressing their experience of the Living Jesus after his death and Resurrection. I don't think it was just spinning tales. I know that some evangelicals like to use Mark's "bare bones" account of the suffering, execution, burial and Resurrection of Jesus in their line of evidence to "prove" the factual historicity of all of that, which seems to me to be alien to the tradition I was raised in. It is in that large category of mystery for which historicity in a valid sense is not possible. I think real belief in it requires that it be on the basis of experience and choice to believe. Just as every single thing in human life which is believed or taken to be known is a matter of choice based on experience. If you don't like that, it's just the way that human life is, in everything up to and including valid science and rigorous mathematics as well as things without that kind of evidentiary basis. Bread broken seems to me to be as good a basis of belief as the general cargo-cult or ideological belief in science. And it's a lot more nourishing than mathematical proof.
CATHOLICS TRADITIONALLY say the Apostles' Creed at mass though apparently the choice to say that or the Nicene Creed is a choice left to the celebrant, something I never knew until very recently. I never remember hearing the Nicene Creed said at mass. I don't remember ever hearing it set to music in a mass setting by a western composer, either, though I'd have to check if my memory is right about that.
The thing in the Creed which I never felt very good with saying was the statement that after his death Jesus "descended into hell," something I never heard discussed in any Catholic context. I was in college when I first came across literary mentions of "the harrowing of hell" in which Jesus went there to preach salvation to the souls of those who died before his death so that they could be rescued from what western Christians call "hell" but which must have been to the Apostles, the Jewish version of that, sheol. I had assumed it was from the extra-canonical writings, maybe those unofficial "gospels and epistles" that are so much peddled by ahistorical "scholars" and other such anti-Christian hucksters these days. Only I, as well as so many other too casual readers, didn't notice the subtle references to that idea contained in the canonical books of the New Testament. I won't comment on this passage from Luke Timothy Johnson's book, The Creed: What Christians believe and why it matters. It's a good Holy Saturday meditation, better than anything I could offer you.
The final moment of Jesus' earthly existence noted by the creed is that he was buried. Once more, we find the tradition of Jesus' burial both in Paul and in the Gospels.
Writing to the Corinthians around the year 54, Paul provides the summary of the good news that he had himself received and had handed on to them, and "by which you are being saved if you hold firmly to the message: (1 Cor. 15:1-2). It begins, "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, and that he was buried." Note that Paul reports that in an unadorned fashion. It is simply one of the facts" about Jesus that he received from the first believers, therefore within some few years of Jesus' death. He does not suggest that, like the death for sins and like the resurrection on the third day, these are matters predicted by the scriptures.
The same matter of factness about the burial is found in the Gospel narratives, which several small variations (see Mark 15:42-47; Matt 27:55-66; Luke 25:50-55; John 19:38-42). More striking is the strong agreement on the basic characters and actions, and above all on the fact of the burial itself. That Jesus was buried and remained in the tomb for some length of time certainly serves to confirm the reality of his death. Compare Martha's comment concerning her brother Lazarus, "Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days." (John 11:32), and the resurrection of a body so thoroughly dead must also be regarded as an act of God.
But another dimension of the burial is equally ancient and important. The burial symbolizes Jesus' descent into the realm that in ancient cosmology was most removed from "heaven" or the place of God's dwelling. He goes "under the earth," which in the Psalms is called sheol, and in the Greek translation, hades In Peter's speech at Pentecost, he quotes Psalm 16 in connection with Jesus' death; "You will not abandon my soul to hades, or let your Holy One see corruption: (Acts 2:27).
This connection may help account for the conviction that Jesus, after his death, entered into the dungeons of the lower depths in order to free those most distant from the divine presence, a motif that was subsequently termed "the harrowing of hell" or, in the Apostles' Creed, "the descent into hell." In Ephesians 4:5; Paul asks cryptically, "when it says 'he ascended,' what does it mean that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth?" The conviction is stated more clearly by I Peter 5:18-20:
He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah
Peter continues, "For this is the reason the gospel was proclaimed even to the dead, so that, even though they had been judged in the flesh as everyone is judged, they might live in the sprit and God does: (1 Pet. 4-6).
The descent of Jesus into hell is, in this view, an expression of God's universal will for salvation and a part of his cosmic victory, so that every tongue, even those "under the earth," should proclaim that Jesus is Lord (Phil 2:10). In terms of the movement of the creed, the burial represents the nadir of downward descent, the ultimate expression of Jesus' sharing the human condition, even to the depositing of the flesh in the soil like a seed (John 12:24; see 1 Cor 15:35-41).
The extreme dangers of the presidential system of government which has devolved into dictatorship in so many places who modeled their governments on ours have reached maturity here. Since the Republican-fascists and the lawyers and law scholars who favor imposing fascism here under the Ivy League invented "unitary executive" theory of the presidency have made this try, and a lot of those sit on the Roberts Court which made Trump a monarch with impunity for his law breaking (and by extension and with the idiotic blanket pardon power in the badly written Constitution, his henchmen) we can never, ever have any confidence that our presidential system will not become the dictatorship which Trump has, to date, had a remarkable success in imposing on an unwilling country. IT IS THAT OUR COURTS HAVE YET TO STOP HIM WHICH IS THE NEWS, NOT THESE TEMPORARY ACTIONS BY LOWER COURTS.
We will either change our system, at its foundation or we will watch democracy implode into fascism. That's the choice.
LAST LESSON
(John 13:3-16)
The festive table glowed with candles,
warding off the darkness lurking
in the corners of the upper room.
As soon as we had found a place,
for once not quarreling over who
sat next to Jesus, he removed
his outer robe, wrapped a towel
around himself, poured a basin
full of water, and knelt at Peter's feet!
"Lord," he blurted, "you shall never
wash my feet!" Jesus warned him:
"If you do not let me wash you,
you can have no share with me."
Poor Peter begged, "Then wash my hands
and head as well." But Jesus answered:
"Those who bathe need only have
their feet washed." We sat embarrassed,
listening to the water splash.
Still on his knees, the Master looked
at us then. "You are clean,"
he added, "though not all of you."
And so we let him wash our feet!
Afterwards, he questioned, "Do you
understand what I have done?"
Our hopes of glory gone, we sat
in silence. He went on: "You call me
Lord and Teacher. You are right.
Tonight I, your Lord and Teacher,
have set you an example: Do
for one another as I have done."
The supper table glowed with candles
warding off the crouching darkness
as we - his chosen servant leaders -
listened to our Master Teacher
nailing down his final lesson
on the night before he died.
Sr Irene Zimmerman OSF
"Trump is the perfect vessel to carry the acid that destroys the soft tissue binding democratic governance."
IF YOU DON'T FOLLOW Catholic issues you may not know who one of the more dangerous multi-millionaire influencers in the United States these days, Tim Busch. He is really very dangerous, one of the foremost backers and pushers of the especially wacky but very influential "trad catholic" cult and a major influence in many in what I think is only honestly considered the Antichrist in our time.
There is an extremely important article by Tom Roberts about him and his influence, his relationship with the Antichrist if anyone is, Trump and his regime in the National Catholic Reporter. I'm going to give you a big chunk in case you don't follow the link to read the whole thing. I would encourage you to do that and while there you might want to read Thomas Reese's Holy Week column about how Trump as well as other manifestations of Antichrist are crucifying The Lord today.
The recent column penned by Tim Busch and headlined by the National Catholic Register, "The Trump Administration: More Catholic Than You Know," may be stunning as a political endorsement, but it is far more important as a statement that twists Catholic thought into unrecognizable shapes. It is the most recent of Busch's pronouncements that raise serious questions about Catholicism's engagement in the wider culture and who represents the voice of church authority in this era.
Given the prominence of Busch on the Catholic landscape as the founder of the conservative Catholic Napa Institute, two assertions in this piece should be taken seriously. The first, which even he labels "surprising," is his belief that the Trump administration "is the most Christian I've ever seen." The second: "Crucially, from what I've seen, the president's team is earnestly striving to apply the precepts of our faith to the policies that govern America." Let that sink in.
Donald Trump's presidency may be term limited, and politics can shift without warning, but there is no term limit to Busch's influence, and it doesn't appear his resources will run out anytime soon. Apparently, no existing structure, not even hierarchical authority, dares to challenge his public assertions.
Busch has long been an unabashed advocate for a brand of American religion that seeks respectability for the unbounded economic ambitions of its practitioners by wrapping itself in a veneer of piety. In his case, it is Catholic piety placed in service of an extreme libertarian agenda and what is turning out to be a politics of retribution, division and cruelty.
If that seems a harsh assessment, an extensive public record bears it out. Busch's wealth has gained him a significant share of the ecclesial attention economy as well as a name on the business school at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., and a considerable influence over the EWTN publishing and broadcasting empires.
It is critical to both church and state which version of Catholicism shows up now in the public square.
Knowing what led to Busch's ascendency is an unnerving parallel to realizing that how Trump came to sit in the Oval Office is far more instructive in understanding who we are as a people than is the fact that he's president.
Trump is the perfect vessel to carry the acid that destroys the soft tissue binding democratic governance. Devoid of moral compass and oblivious to any purpose beyond himself and other rich and powerful elite, he is able to say and do what would have been political suicide for anyone in the past. His destruction of norms cleared the way for the real libertarian, Elon Musk, an unelected, unconfirmed, antigovernment billionaire whose fortunes depend on billions in government contracts. Musk was given the keys to the kingdom — and permission to destroy it.
A self-centered individualist in the extreme, Trump was a perfect match for the American ideology of individualism that had been honed, through trial and error, over decades. The ideology is antithetical to the Christian Gospel.
I will break in here to say that this is one of the best assessments of how the corruption of America by turning self-centeredness into a virtue (fiction and the movies carried it so persuasively). "Individualism" is only a virtue when the individual in question is focused on the common good, the good of the least among us, the others that we are to do unto what we'd have done to us. As it is practiced by the many who practice it and as it is understood by the likes of Trump and Busch and, I'm sorry to tell you, just about everyone else who practices it, it turns the individual, the self, into the real god of their worship. "Individualism" as it is commonly understood and held to be a virtue in 2025 America is the worship of the self and is nothing more than selfishness. Libertarianism is its political ethics.
Likewise, the ideas advanced by Busch, who finds not only political commonality but sanctity in the Trump administration, did not materialize overnight or with the founding of his Napa Institute in 2010.
The libertarian/religious ideology he often places on prominent display has been under construction by others for decades. Busch, a successful lawyer who owns luxury resorts, is the perfect vehicle for carrying forward the work of those who have attempted to Catholicize ideas and rationale from the furthest extremes of secular economics and the politics of disruption.
You may also want to hear Ed Trevors on Franklin Graham's tongue bathing of Trump over some Easter message that someone else in the Whitehouse issued as Trump's ideas on Easter. Coming from someone pretending they're Trump, from inside his Antichrist of a regime, it's too nauseating for me to go into in depth.
I HAVE NEVER commented on the recent case you are obsessed with and have no intention of doing so unless something about it strikes me as going along with the theme of my blog. The fat little murderer has become a paid celebrity among your fellow fascists, so he's made a killing off of the murders he committed.
I have commented twice before on the little killer-boy who brought a gun TO A DEMONSTRATION in a state he didn't live in WITH A GROUP OF LIKEWISE OUT OF STATERS WHO WERE ARMED and killed two People. Then he was let off by a judge who obviously bent over backward for the little murderer and a jury as ready to exonerate him as the ones who customarily let off Klansmen and the like who murdered People of Color and, by the way, Catholics among others targeted by your kind. Your brat got off for murder, what are you whining about? Here's what I had to say about it at the time.
Wednesday, November 10, 2021
judge Bruce Schroeder should be removed from the Rittenhouse trial because it's been clear from the start he's trying to let the little murderer off because he thinks his victims deserved to be murdered. This is a good example of just what a lie it was when John Roberts declared the era of Jim Crow dead and so the Voting Rights Act was overturned.
The American judiciary is well marbled with white supremacy from bottom to top.
Posted by The Thought Criminal at 4:26 PM No comments:
Friday, November 19, 2021
The Pantomime of Justice Let The Maga Murderer Off
MAGA JUDGE WITH MAGA JURY LETS OFF MAGA MURDERER.
That's what was bound to happen in this trial the way it was allowed to be conducted in Wisconsin with an elected judge who made racist jokes from the bench, bent over backwards to get his boy off for murder and who conducted himself in a way that if he had an Alabama accent and Rittenhouse were accused of the lynch murder of a Black Person would fit right into a black and white movie about the Jim Crow era. But Bruce Schroeder is an elected judge in one of the states that sent soldiers to fight against the Confederacy, at one time but that was a long, long time ago. There are many such states in the North where Jim Crow is about as alive as it is in any of the states of the old Confederacy and those are any of the states with large Republican-fascist populations.
As Elie Mystal said, there isn't any great surprise in this if you're a Person of Color, it's just one of the things that White People who are not Republican-fascists are beginning to understand, those rules have always been in place when it's Black victims of crimes committed by White criminals. Black defendants who survive a possible summary execution can not count on having a Bruce Schroeder bending everything getting them off even when they are obviously innocent.
White People, like me, should get used to this because under the Trumpzi Republican-fascist regime which is in place wherever Republican-fascists have power, legislative, executive, judicial, their political identity might serve to put them in the unaccustomed class that Black People and other People of Color are in now.
As Elie Mystal said, there is no justice, there will be no peace, there will be emboldened and armed fascists killing more and more people. I'm damned if I'm going to pretend that that fat little fascist is innocent as determined by the jury in this case. The sanctity of trial by jury is just one of those sacred myths that deserves a thorough laundering because it also stinks like the rest of the "justice" system does. Especially when it is so obviously rigged as in this case.
IT ISN'T ONLY the Trump regime declaring it will not obey the court order on its illegal abduction and rendition to a notorious torture prison of a man who had the courts' protection against that, it is the courts' and, especially the Supreme Court setting us up for this to have been an inevitable denouement. And I believe, at least in the case of the Supreme Court* it was done primarily for baldly partisan purposes by the Republican-fascist appointees to the court. Though that purpose is to serve the patrons of that party, the billionaires and millionaires, those who the legal profession serve above and all others because they can pay the best. It really starts in nothing more complex than that. That practice, which becomes a habit during the course of a professional life in the law, has thoroughly saturated not only the practice of lawyers but through rulings of courts and Supreme Courts and in the consequent legal thinking of the lawyers who so overwhelmingly have dominated the legislatures and executives of our country.
The fatal flaws of America's 18th century liberal democratic Constitution were baked into it at the start. It is a Constitution which was explicitly, from the start, radically anti-egalitarian in its service to the original corrupt deal between the blackmailing slave-holders and the northern financiers and speculators and because the aristocrats who framed it didn't really want the common People to directly determine the country's government. They had bamboozled the poor, the landless, the recently freed from slavery into fighting their revolutionary war and when, under the Articles of Confederation, the common People realized they had been bamboozled revolted over the reneged promises that were broken by the Congress. That is what is behind the Electoral College which the Rehnquist Court used to install the Republican loser of the 2000 election and which installed the loser of he 2016 election, Trump. It is what is behind the Republican dominated Senate to install the most corrupt Courts in our history, the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts. The power given to small population states has always, since the founding of the country, given more power to first the slave-states and then even more so the de-facto slave states and those which have had policies of preventing Black People, other People of Color and those who are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans all on the basis of "equal representation" of states in both the Senate and, so Electoral College which further enhances the power of those who trend to favor white supremacy and other forms of injustice.
The notorious 3/5ths provision of the original Constitution becomes WORSE BY TWO-FIFTHS when Republican-fascists prevent People from casting a vote and prevent those votes from being counted and so determining the government. Under America apartheid many of the defects of the original Constitution became worse than it was under slavery. Under the laws made laws by the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts - another very dangerous and serious defect in the U.S. Constitution - the Court made laws overturning the Voting Rights Act - we are rapidly returning to the status quo of American apartheid, only this time they are extending it well past People of Color to apply it to anyone who isn't in the minority who support Republican-fascism. They are trying to pass a law that will disenfranchise huge numbers of Americans who have voted for their entire adult lives, I am hoping that they may shoot themselves in the foot by disenfranchising many Repubican-fascist rural voters who will find it hard or impossible to get the documents they insist Americans present to register to vote or re-register to vote or to, in fact, vote. Making such People appear at an office to obtain such documents and to document their lives may, in fact, give an advantage to those who live in cities where such offices are. But I wouldn't count on that. Such laws are never applied on an equal basis.
I was glad to hear that finally a prominent lawyer, Adam Senator Adam Schiff, has finally admitted that we are in that Constitutional Crisis that has, in fact, been going on for a year and, I would argue, has been going on since Bush v. Gore. Finally, one prominent lawyer was forced by Trump's presser with the dictator of El Salvador to admit that. I hope it is the opening of the flood gate to the admission that we are well past being on the cusp of dictatorship. Though I will believe that when I see it. We have to admit the truth even as we understand how hard it will be to change it.**
Those who are hoping the Roberts Court is going do anything but facilitate the fall into Republican-fascism are living in a fantasy, they are all-in on it. Even a Court which was not all-in on it would be impotent to reign in a criminal president, as Trump certainly is, due to our dangerous presidential system. The fact is that the Republican-fascists in the Congress will block his impeachment and, even when the House voted articles of impeachment, the Republican-fascists in the Senate, either in the majority or the minority will block his conviction under our idiotic Constitution. Impeachment of a president or a Supreme court "justice" is a dangerous myth that has kept us from doing that one thing that is most essential to establishing and protecting egalitarian democracy - the only legitimate form of government - changing our Constitution from the dangerous presidential system to a dangerous but far less dangerous parliamentary system. ONE WHICH, UNLIKE THE BRITISH SYSTEM, IS BASED IN REAL, NUMERICALLY DETERMINED EQUALITY, ONE PERSON ONE VOTE AND EQUAL REPRESENTATION IN THE GOVERNMENT.
* Other courts such as the ones under Trump's and McConnell's scumbags , Ailene Cannon Matthew Kacsmaryk, are even more overtly Republican-fascist
** Hearing Lawrence O'Donnell talking last night about how the Trump lawyer-liars use terms which carry positive, even virtuous connotative meaning to name the exact opposite of them may lead to a post on that. The failure of even the college-credentialed Americans to notice that is another specialty of lawyers, judges and "justices." That practice may have started there but it has become widespread, especially among those with a little learning and lots of media exposure.
Apparently something happened to the Youtube I posted here on Saturday, it's not working on my computer this morning. I'm not getting a notice that it was taken down but it just isn't working. I'm sorry about that if I had something to do with it. It's a good opera and should be heard more.
