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iloveangels
Guest
LOL. I think I only heard it mentioned once. Although, I can’t tell you that it’s a big deal. It’s not like it’s a very helpful document. It’s pretty much like most of what the USCCB puts out.
Yup.
Agree.
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HansTrappist
Guest
Masturbation is a grave matter. Why shouldn’t it be talked about in Church. The Church is in the business of saving souls.
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JMJSHJ
Guest
Has any US Bishop condemned Caroline Kennedy’s remarks at the DNC regarding her support for abortion?
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wynnejj
Guest
Ever since Vatican II, there has been an enhanced understanding of the “Whatsoever YOU do to the Least of My Brethren” final judgement criteria to emphasize that there is a collective aspect to be imposed in secular laws to work toward the common good - most especially the poor & vulnerable. If one is to interpret YOU to mean YOU collectively with Jesus’ new DO commandments, then one should also understand that the “THOU Shalt NOT” of the Ten Commandments must also have a collective aspect to be imposed in secular laws too. So all this nonsense about “you can’t legislate morality” and “you can’t impose your beliefs on others” rings false if one imposes laws that require YOU collectively DO and neglect THOU collectively Shalt NOT of the original Ten Commandments which OT Jewish society understood had a very definite collective requirement in its public laws.
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iloveangels
Guest
:bluelite::bluelite: Hermeneutic of Rupture Alert! :bluelite::bluelite:
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wynnejj
Guest
How so? ( I actually had never heard the phrase, so the following link is what I googled. )
In Depth Analysis: Benedict’s Hermeneutic of Continuity
It sounds like I’m arguing more for a hermeneutic of continuity …
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iloveangels
Guest
You’ve never heard that phrase?
To your point, we’re not Jews and this is not the Old Testament, and I’m pretty sure that’s not what the Jews believed anyway.
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wynnejj
Guest
I think if you spend some time reading Deuteronomy, you might come away with the idea that the Ten Commandments had both personal and collective aspects in Jewish understanding where Church & State were one & the same. Bearing false witness against a neighbor before a judge reverted the usual penalty for such a crime on the plaintiff bringing the false charge. If it was punishable by death, death was the penalty for the perjurer. Sins breaking marriage vows were punishable by death. A virgin betrothed to a man who is raped in the city but does not cry out is assumed to have engaged in consensual illicit relations punishable by being taking outside the gates of the city & stoned.
It is only in the last hundred years that the notion that fornication / cohabitation, adultery, sodomy, contraception & abortion have been made legal in the Christian western democracies.
Of course, nowadays we’ve gone multicultural. Unless God has changed his character, if you read Deuteronomy 7 or Jeremiah 7, you will get an understanding of how God feels about adopting pagan ways.
Of course, we’re progressive and God’s character changes over time, That’s the OT & we’re the NT with no continuity of understanding about laws in a just society.
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iloveangels
Guest
It’s true that the Judaic (and the Christian by continuity) law is both communal and individual, but that simply means that there are both communal and individual aspects to it. It doesn’t mean that communal trumps individual or anything like that. Both aspects work together for the good of the community and the individual.I think if you spend some time reading Deuteronomy, you might come away with the idea that the Ten Commandments had both personal and collective aspects in Jewish understanding where Church & State were one & the same. Bearing false witness against a neighbor before a judge reverted the usual penalty for such a crime on the plaintiff bringing the false charge. If it was punishable by death, death was the penalty for the perjurer. Sins breaking marriage vows were punishable by death. A virgin betrothed to a man who is raped in the city but does not cry out is assumed to have engaged in consensual illicit relations punishable by being taking outside the gates of the city & stoned.
It is only in the last hundred years that the notion that fornication / cohabitation, adultery, sodomy, contraception & abortion have been made legal in the Christian western democracies.
Of course, nowadays we’ve gone multicultural. Unless God has changed his character, if you read Deuteronomy 7 or Jeremiah 7, you will get an understanding of how God feels about adopting pagan ways.
Of course, we’re progressive and God’s character changes over time, That’s the OT & we’re the NT with no continuity of understanding about laws in a just society.
That said, there are a number of different ways to regard this, some legitimate and some less so. With respect to the Catholic community, there are a variety of ways to regard it and little real agreement on them. With respect to the wider Christian community, there are again a variety of ways, and even less agreement. And with respect to the very wide multicultural community, there are even more ways to regard this, and very little agreement.
And then there are the exigencies of living in a multicultural community that we simply cannot control. Many people aren’t Christian now. Many of the older ones are post Christian; many of the younger ones have never been Christian and have never been baptized. Most of the country simply is not Catholic and never has been.
This multicultural community has built its laws on the rule of law, and the politics that surround the rule of law. Like it or not, that’s what America uses to make its decisions. We are but one faction of many here.
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wynnejj
Guest
Many people aren’t Christian now because Christianity lost its identity. The whole process started when church leadership tacitly accepted contraceptive practices in marriage, which led to cohabitation before marriage and unwanted children and abortion. When church leaders failed to address the sexual revolution and its assault on marriage & family in the public arena, then Christianity lost its identity. Who needs a truth where all tenets of the faith are up for re-interpretation? If the sexual taboos of Christianity are not believed, then why believe any of it? That is fundamentally why all the churches have low attendance … truth is not absolute under the new modernism. It begins to look like man-made fiction.
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iloveangels
Guest
It’s really a lot more complicated than this, although some of this is explanatory, yes.
What we really have is not modernism, but post-modernism.
Many people don’t realize also that there never was a time when most people were actually serious practicing Christians of the type that it takes to swim against the tide. Many people go along with whatever there is; at one point they went along with whatever Christian culture there was for precisely this reason–it was the predominant backdrop of American life and they didn’t have to “swim upstream.” However, Christians no longer dominate the culture and so those people have moved on to what does dominate the culture. They still don’t want to “swim upstream” and some of them probably never will, no matter what.
BTW, Catholics never dominated American culture, except in a few ethnic pockets in a few places in the country. The most populous of those were on the East Coast after the immigrations of the 18th-19th century, AKA Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, etc, etc. Those areas have been heavily diluted with other populations now, and are becoming more so all the time. There are vast areas of the South, the Midwest and the West where Catholics have always been much more sparse.
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wynnejj
Guest
Yes, you are right. Again I have to thank you for introducing a phrase that I had not heard (or may have but never researched the definition) so that we can keep our discussion on target.
While it is true that America was never a Catholic country and at best could only be considered somewhat Christian in its behavior, what has changed is an ambiguous premise that all social constructs of the past are to be re-evaluated in the light of idea that reality is only a personal perception. Therefore, group think of excessive toleration should supplant former group consensus of first principles of the past. In fact, there are no absolute first principles. It is like saying you can have math and derivative theory without foundational accepted postulates. Its the new math … 2 + 2 may or may not equal 4 … depending on your personal postulates.
This prayer campaign is really a struggle to reassert that there are first absolute principles that society must accept in order to exist with anything approaching logical thought:
- The postulate that the Right to Life is a first principle which protects Life from conception to natural death as a foundational rule of law.
- The postulate that Marriage is to have a legal definition of a contract between one man and one woman exclusively with the understanding that they must accept and raise any child that they produce from that relationship as a foundational rule of law.
- The postulate that Religious Freedom is a first principle which protects the conscience rights of the individual to fully exercise their religious beliefs as a foundational rule of law.
Christian foundational principles are reasonable …
- Without the Right to Life principle, we who live today have no right to life at any stage of our existence.
- Marriage laws were primarily designed to ensure stable family life for the rearing of children. They were designed to promote & protect the right of the child to be raised by his/her true parents and assign that responsibility to his/her true parents.
- Religious Freedom was to permit the full expression of religious beliefs where such principles do not conflict with the other foundational principles of society … of which include the Right to Life and the proper Marriage definition.
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zonie
Guest
wow… no one even commented on my post some pages back. I guess I’m not surprised. The question I posed about squaring Europe’s and other developed countries taxes vs. our HHS- and how the Pope has to be the Pope of everyone, escaped you. Logic is hard to argue against… so all of you avoided it. I see this every time I mention this to people who are so hardcore opposed to HHS. My offering was on page 9 in this thread. I wonder how you can justify paying taxes in Europe, but not accepting HHS? how should our Pope respond to other countries? tell then to stop paying taxes that go for abortions & birth control? 
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iloveangels
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No, those are not the basic foundational units of Christianity, wynnejj, and that may shock you. The basic idea of Christianity is the idea of an omnipotent God, whose very Son was willing to die for our sins. The things you are talking about are the theological consequences of that basic idea. In order to bring about a society that values life again, you have to convert a large enough number of people to some version of the Christian faith in a fairly robust form to provide a “herd immunity” to these post-modern ideas. Just railing at them with “principles” and “postulates” won’t work. They have their own principles and postulates, and in the absence of the recognition of truth, yours are no more compelling to them than theirs are.
The problem, so often, with talking about this with other Catholics is that they have accepted the faith only on the level of culture, principles and postulates themselves. That’s how it’s usually been taught to them. And usually in the context of a bunch of ethnic stuff that they can’t separate from Christianity.
Herd Immunity: In immunology, herd immunity refers to a situation in which a sufficiently high percentage of a population is immune to a disease, such that the disease is halted in its tracks because it cannot find a large enough number of new carriers for the disease to propagate.
If we cannot re-evangelize society to the degree that this “herd immunity” to death comes about, then we have to recognize our real place in this new society and work wisely within it. This has been done by Christians many times before in many places, although it’s new to American Catholics and in fact, American Christians in general.
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wynnejj
Guest
OK. We’ve got 78.5% of America on board with some form of Christianity.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States#Religion
So what’s your plan?
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iloveangels
Guest
Many of them are Christian in name only. And that is apparently below the “herd immunity” number, which is evident from the kinds of things we are seeing.
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wynnejj
Guest
I’m unaware of any Catholic effort to suggest that taxes should not be paid by citizens if there is some unsavory aspects to the nation’s public policies, whether talking about the HHS mandate or any other policy. By the same logic that the Pope is the pope to the whole world and there are many social issues to address, it may be an incorrect interpretation to assume that he is referencing the USA situation when he speaks to social justice issues in general.
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wynnejj
Guest
So what’s your plan? Prayer campaign to reassert fundamental principles for life, marriage & religious liberty? Do you have any ideas?
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iloveangels
Guest
Evangelize Catholics. Get them reading the Bible, reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church, talking about their faith to each other, praying in groups–rosaries in the Church everyday, etc, and getting the Sacraments.
Give them something useful to do besides watching TV, and shopping.
Oh, and stop knocking Protestants in public. If they can’t bring themselves to be Catholic, it’s good if they’re Christian anyway. They are part of the herd immunity number.
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wynnejj
Guest
We have a basic point of convergence. I definitely agree that Catholics need to convert themselves first, and avoid criticizing the honest efforts of Protestants in their faith journey. For Catholics, how does one get them to read the Bible and the Catholic Catechism? For me, it was taking me out of my comfort zone by simple words that told me that I needed to correct some behavior if I were to receive the sacraments. In other words, the “or else” aspect of religion was needed. I think the first order of business is to challenge Catholics about receiving the Holy Eucharist unworthily from the Sunday pulpit. This needs to be reiterated and relevant examples cited to the current state of society’s values.Evangelize Catholics. Get them reading the Bible, reading the Catechism of the Catholic Church, talking about their faith to each other, praying in groups–rosaries in the Church everyday, etc, and getting the Sacraments.
Give them something useful to do besides watching TV, and shopping.
Oh, and stop knocking Protestants in public. If they can’t bring themselves to be Catholic, it’s good if they’re Christian anyway. They are part of the herd immunity number.
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