Pray for the cardinals!
As promised, here is the article I mentioned on the other thread.
Thanks for posting.
OK...someone has to ask. What’s with the crude stereotype of a negro (?) King (Queen??) that’s also on his coat of arms?
So, the pope is a bear...
What does he do in the woods?
I don't think His Holiness planned it this way. However, the job of getting Europe re-conquered for Christ began with his Regensburg address and the "dictatorship of relativism" meme. He was truly a great pope, for a great burden.
"In fact, just last year Benedict himself placed on your shoulders and mine a burden which we cannot—and must not—shirk. Just over a year ago, Pope Benedict told our American bishops that in the face of hostile forces that threaten not just our Christian faith, but humanity itself, committed believers must never fall silent."Catholics, he told them, must confront anti-Christian forces—the very ones inflamed to harm him now—with 'rational arguments in the public square' to help shape the values that will shape the future.
"Essential to this task, Benedict told our American bishops, is 'an engaged, articulate and well-formed Catholic laity endowed with a strong critical sense vis-à-vis the dominant culture.' That’s you and me. You and I have become St. Corbinian’s bear!"
All Americans might think about the implications of these remarks.
America's Founding princples--the principles which can enable citizens to recognize which are true ideas of liberty and which are counterfeit ideas of tyranny--are under assault.
In 2008, Michael Ledeen, on another subject altogether, wrote of the degree to which Americans have been "dumbed down" on some basic ideas underlying our freedom:
Ledeen said, "Our educational system has long since banished religion from its texts, and an amazing number of Americans are intellectually unprepared for a discussion in which religion is the central organizing principle."
In the Pope's speech in Germany a few years ago, he observed:
"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures."
What a powerful analysis!
Ledeen put his finger on a problem that stifles meaningful dialogue and debate in America. Censors [disguised as "protectors" (the Radical Left's ACLU, NEA, education bureaucracies, etc., etc.)] have imposed their limited understanding of liberty upon generations of school children.
From America's founding to the 1950's, ideas derived from religious literature were included in textbooks, through the poetry and prose used to teach children to read and to identify with their world and their country.
Suddenly, those ideas began to disappear from textbooks, until now, faceless, mindless copy editors sit in cubicles in the nation's textbook publishing companies, instructed by their supervisors to remove mere words that refer to family, to the Divine, and to any of the ancient ideas that have sustained intelligent discourse for centuries.
Now, it is the ACLU which accuses middle Americans of "censorship" if they object to books, films, etc., that offend their sensibilities and undermine the character training of their young. Sadly, many of those books and films are themselves products of the minds that have been robbed of exposure to wisdom literature in the nation's schools and universities.
Thankfully, America's Founders were not "deaf to the divine"! A rediscovery of the ideas of liberty among ordinary citizens of today would expose the purveyors of tyranny and oppression under counterfeit notions of "change" and "fairness."
Thank you, Charlie, for a eloquent, moving and insightful essay. You are blessed with the gift of communication.
Very much a bear! He was not afraid to get many things back to basics, removed clerics from their positions that they were not fulfilling, calling a spade a spade, inviting the LeFebryites back into the flock.
He was full of surprises and carried the load well.
God bless and keep him.
God Bless and be with the Cardinals.