The Harrowing Of Hell

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 Choice We Will Make Whether We Like It Or Not

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.

We sat embarassed, listening to the water splash . . . Our hopes of glory gone, we sat in silence

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

Christianity as Whitewash Over Trump's Antichristianity

"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. 

Open Letter To The White Supremacist Who Trolls Me

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.

The U.S. Constitution Has Failed Catastrophically We Won't Fix It Until We Admit That

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.  

Broken Link?

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.