Victory Only Comes Through the Cross

An election like this one can cause a great deal of discouragement. The results were practically a worse-case scenario for the most fundamental building blocks of society: The right to life, religious liberty and the family.

His story starts with his birth into the life of a refugee one step ahead of a murderous king. It ends with him being dragged away from his fleeing apostles and crucified.

After that came a Church whose fights and sins are the subject of the letters of St. Paul. Then came torture and martyrdom for his followers — followed all too quickly by the long march of heresies that denied the very identity of Christ. Around the year 1000, the Church was torn apart by human pettiness in the Great Schism. About 500 years later, an overbearing, arrogant and worldly Church would get torn apart again and again.

Over the years, powerful Catholics have advanced or allowed terrible evils that the Church’s teaching denounces: simony, slavery, and various other atrocities, up to and including genocide and abortion. From Peter’s betrayal to Pope John XII’s, from the days when Judas sold Christ to the days when Catholics sold slaves, the Church’s story is a long, sick tale of sin.

But, as I have written before, the Church isn’t the sum of its failures and sins. The Church is the sum of its sins plus grace, which is to say it is an institution always being dragged back from the brink of failure and handed victories by God.

It also means the real history of the Church is the history of saints and charity. At each stage in that story of sin, the Church was also a multinational organization transforming the world through love. We invented hospitals, schools — and science, and principles of human justice. We created works of stunning beauty with pens, brushes, chisels and musical instruments. Our scriptures and our sacraments built families that brought cheer and comfort to a world that had often lacked them.

Just ask Pope John Paul II what it looks like for the forces of secularism to triumph. His nation was overrun by murderous Nazis — only to be replaced by Communists for decades.

Or ask Pope Benedict XVI what it was like to live under aggressive secularizers — Nazis euthanized his Down Syndrome cousin and his family had to move several times because his father opposed them. The Nazis were replaced by a new Germany that before long would deny the unborn the right to life and succeed in marginalizing the faith.

What lesson did these two great men learn from watching the constant triumph of secularism over Catholicism in their time?

“We can and must believe, with the late Pope John Paul II,” Pope Benedict XVI told Americans in 2008, “that God is preparing a new springtime for Christianity.”

It is absolutely providential that this Election Year is also the Year of Faith. The Pope and the bishops have called for us to do what every other generation of Christians has done: Turn to Christ in our hour of need, and carry his cross to victory.

I found some good insight here:

“Be content to trust in the Lord” by Thomas McDonald

“No profound thoughts or gnashing of teeth this morning. There’s simply relief that this is all over at last, and that we can get back to living and worshiping as we shiver in the shadow of tyrants. Our faith was forged in the shadow of tyrants: a shadow that fell upon the ground in the shape of a cross. We think these things matter because we’re surrounded by a culture that tells us so at every turn, but really only God and family and neighbor matter. The rest can make our lives miserable, ruin our economy, lie to us, destroy the institutions we hold dear, and even take our lives or liberty, but they can’t touch our souls.

We should, indeed, rejoice that the period of suffering and persecution is upon us, as the early Christians did. The Office of Readings this week featured telling sections from 1 Maccabees, in which the Seleucids order the Jews to violate their consciences and break the Torah. Some go along with it, and they are the shame of the Jewish people. But some resist, and from their resistance comes a restoration of the Torah to the people.”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/godandthemachine/2012/11/be-content-to-trust-in-the-lord

Blaze Analysis: The Catholic Vote Went to Obama Over Romney Despite Contraception & Religious Freedom Debates

Posted on November 8, 2012 at 9:12am by Billy Hallowell

The Catholic Church, infuriated over the notion that the government would force associated organizations to violate conscience by providing employees with birth control free-of-charge, launched into a nation-side campaign against the provision. Despite a concerted effort on the part of Catholics and evangelicals, alike, to expose the issue as government intrusion on personal and institutional religious liberty, on Tuesday, President Barack Obama still won the majority of the U.S. Catholic vote.

Read full article here:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/blaze-analysis-catholic-voters-chose-obama-over-romney-despite-contraception-religious-freedom-debate/

CATHOLICS FOR OBAMA (CFO)

“A project of Catholic Democrats, Catholics For Obama (CFO) was formed to promote the presidential candidacy of Senator Barack Obama in 2008. Noting that “Americans are weary of being pitted against one another over issues of race, disparity of wealth, and religion,” CFO stated that “Senator Obama has made bringing Americans together to solve common problems the central theme of his campaign.” One CFO board member called Obama “a presidential candidate of historic accomplishments,” and lauded his background as a 1980s-era community organizer whose efforts “to [economically] empower the lives of thousands of people” had received vital “funding from the U.S. Bishops.” Obama’s employer in the eighties had been the Chicago-based Developing Communities Project, an initiative of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.”

Though Obama has been an unwavering backer of abortion rights throughout his years in politics—he opposed even the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act as a state senator—CFO says that by the standards of “Catholic Social Teaching,” Obama is technically “pro-life” because he “has spent his entire career striving for the common good.” Specifically, CFO praises the President for supporting “health care programs that will cover all Americans, a living wage for working families, and solutions that allow distressed families to stay in their homes.” Moreover, CFO reasons that Obama’s presidency will ultimately reduce the number of abortions “by promoting health care for pregnant women and better infant care, day care and job training.”

Maintaining that “the state has a positive moral function to promote the common good,” CFO views the expansion of governmental power as a preferred means of solving society’s most pressing problems.

The president and board chairman of CFO is Patrick Whelan, who also serves as president of Catholic Democrats. A member of the pediatrics faculty at Harvard Medical School and a co-director of Pax Christi Massachusetts, Whelan was formerly a national co-director of Catholics for Kerry; he served for three years on the Democratic National Committee’s Faith Advisory Council under Howard Dean; and he volunteered with the Catholic Worker communities in Los Angeles and Houston.

Other CFO board members include:

- Victoria Reggie Kennedy: The widow of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, Victoria is an attorney and an activist who has been an official with numerous groups focused on reducing gun violence and restricting access to firearms.

- Kathleen Kennedy Townsend: The eldest of Robert F. Kennedy’s eleven children, Townsend served two years as deputy assistant attorney general during the Bill Clinton administration, and later as Maryland’s lieutenant governor (1995-2003).

- Thomas P. O’Neill III: O’Neill was lieutenant governor of Massachusetts from 1975-1983. Today he is CEO of O’Neill & Associates, a government and public-relations firm in Boston.

- James Roosevelt, Jr.: Formerly the chief legal counsel for the Massachusetts Democratic Party, Roosevelt currently co-chairs the Rules and By-laws Committee of the Democratic National Committee. He is also president and CEO of the Tufts Health Plan.

- William D’Antonio: This retired professor of sociology was once the CEO of the American Sociological Association.

- Lisa Schare: This Cincinnati-based high-school art teacher serves as state chair of the Catholic Democrats of Ohio. A longtime Democratic Party activist, she did volunteer work for the Clinton/Gore, Gore/Lieberman, and Kerry/Edwards presidential campaigns.

Read full article here:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/groupProfile.asp?grpid=7727

Fruit of their labor in Chicago?????

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Obama Supporters Celebrate Election Victory: ‘No More Israel… **** That S***, Kill Those Mother ****ers’

Posted on November 7, 2012 at 11:09pm by Jason Howerton

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/obama-supporters-celebrate-election-victory-no-more-israel-fk-that-sht-kill-those-mother-fkers/

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