I'm hoping to be a little more specific, to analyze the grossest causality of this tragedy. Our Holy Father identified Moral Relativism as the greatest danger facing mankind in his April 18, 2005 homily on his last night as Josef Cardinal Ratzinger, and expanded remarkably on it in his 2009 encyclical letter, Caritas in Veritate.

John-Henry Westen of Lifesite News in 2008 published this critique of the "Batman" film that was released that year, and that is suspected in having some sort of influence on the death of its star, Heath Ledger. Today, Westen's piece seems somehow prophetic: asking about a future where young people might take their moral cues from the most powerful influences cited in culture, rather than from the objectively right influences. As officials around the world prepare for the horrifying possibility of "copycat" crimes adjacent to this film, the terrible question they must proactively confront of "might there be others?" hangs like low smoke.

The crux of this causality is the popularity of a story portraying an imagined power of evil as being more capable of victory than of good. How many people have internalized that message? We see sadly that at least one person made such a philosophy his personal sine qua non.

Many people will take from this disaster in Colorado the notion that evil is powerful, and must be overpowered. But evil's intrinsic physical power remains weak. Assault weapons and gas canisters are dangerously powerful, but not intrinsically evil in and of themselves. This is an illusion. Neutral items like this should be kept out of the hands of those with evil intentions to be sure, but these items are not the cause, intention to do evil is the cause.

The intrinsic, therefore real, therefore powerful ability of evil is its promise of "power" in the absence of a powerful alternative for good, and under the desire for personal power to manipulate others. The "Batman Rises" murderer was studying sciences to help mankind, but traded that promise to become a terrorist.

News Corporation in Australia this morning lumped into a laundry list of this suspect's known attributes and life ingredients, the phrase "heavily involved in church," whatever that is intended by News Corporation to imply.

The clear implication of course is that because this suspect was "heavily involved in church" as he grew up, either this involvement or "church" itself, somehow contributed, along with the rest of the list of ingredients, to become the crimes of the shooter. It isn't explained how; it's supposed to be enough that "church" is categorized as an influence in his life. YOU are supposed to fill in the blanks and cry out with the crowd the illogical conclusion: "Therefore, off with its [church's?] head!"

When placing any figure on media trial for horrific crimes, the media court almost never neglects its self-appointed duty to smear "church" whenever and however possible because it always helps to sell papers.

According to the apparent editorial policy of News Corporation, the horror of terrorism isn't enough in itself: the terrorist's motive has to be somehow -- no matter how tenuously, and no matter with how little substance -- even gingerly, associated with "heavy involvement in church."

Just in case more evidence becomes available in the future, I suppose. Can't beat breaking a new story.

Lynn Colliar the host reacts to the revelation of the plucky little girl's lie.

"It has a whole magical world to it."

Well that's probably fine for a fantasy story of course. But how does it resolve the hero, a little girl, not asking permission from her mother to work for a witch?

Has anyone read this book yet?

In the first place, full disclosure, I am (I hope) a faithful Catholic. In the second place this man has done imprudent people and the public authorities, not to mention the local ordinariate, an enormous favor with his discovery and warning about infected water that people were... Assuming he has no reason to lie about anything... Eeee-yuck... In the third place I see nothing about the response of the local bishop but instead, just the usual comically irrational -- coming from people who call themselves rationalists, mind you -- and vague, light-your-hair-on-fire, standard-issue anti-Catholic canards that must needs feature words like "powerful" and don't forget "dark ages". De rigeur. Irrational rationalists. Do they not even realize how this makes them look? Maybe they don't care. In the fourth place, hey Great Britain, especially if any of your Internet petition signatories are Catholic, there's a little word we use: subsidiarity. Look it up. Subsidiarity is something so-called rationalists seem to find irrational. You wouldn't march up and knock on the door at #10 Downing street to demand immediate commands from the Prime minister because you heard a report of someone in India jay-walking would you? Are you sure you aren't irrationalists? A repeated typo could explain a lot of this. So far all I see is a successful self promoter, maybe doing a public service to some people more pietistic than prudent, running away from charges laid by a real court, while a self-appointed global kangaroo court of public lynching sentences the Catholic church, as usual, to being "powerful" and "dark ages" like a character in another idiotic Dan Brown fantasy. I have no idea why this guy ran away. Maybe he's got a pile of unpaid parking tickets? Did the rationalists consider anything like that? But how does the Catholic Church (worldwide of course, and the Pope in particular) become guilty of something other than not discovering the leak on its own? If indeed the leak is the cause. I'm sure a simple lab test or a simpler colored dye test could determine very quickly the cause of this water dripping. But that's the sort of thing the local ordinary will order. Funny how the rationalists are so irrational they can't use the interwebs to learn anything whatsoever about the actual rigorous process by which the Church investigates each claim of a "miracle." Instead they just rely on nonsensical presumptions about "darkness" and "ages" bolstered by a cavalierly specious approach. Doesn't seem very rational. It's almost as if these rationalists are so irrational that they believe there is no such process in existence. But of course the important thing is to get that kangaroo court sentence enacted so that everyone can jump on the anti-Catholic bandwagon again, led again by self-styled "rationalists" and well, bolstered by an online petition to the Pope. Started in the UK. Yes, THAT United Kingdom. Oh, yeah, baby. Now we're talking some serious public pressure leverage. We all know when it comes to commanding the Pope, the UK's online petition community has got it going on. How rational does all this look to you?

Because of the nearly universal popularity of reductionist thinking, I have taken to illuminating the fact that the 16 documents of the II Vatican Council are a different matter entirely from an imagined "spirit of Vatican II" anecdotally cited in an attempt to justify violence done to the holy Liturgy.

I have found that when you formulate the distinction between the 16 documents promulgated, and the frequently insane attempt at "application" of a disunderstanding of those 16 documents, you can help realize an 'a-hah" moment in the listener. At least you may raise their consciousness about the existence of such a distinction, most likely for the first time ever.

There is a tendency to want to diagram the unjustness of this woman, and indeed she deserves the legal consequences of her actions, if the police will act in justice.

And we are to pray for her.

There is nothing new under the sun. In the mid-20th century, the publishing industry was panicked by first the popularity and rapidity of radio, then film, then television. In response they needed to break new ground and create products that would motivate consumers to go to buy books instead of watching free television at home.

Publishers found a bonanza starting with the disgusting work and career of one Albert Kinsey a "researcher" shunned by his colleagues for the statistical shoddiness of his questionable "research." Kinsey asked death-row inmates in prisons full of the most heinous of convicted sex criminals what their "sexual preferences" were. He wrote these up in a book labelled as research on Americans, and presented the premise that if you weren't interested in these practices, your desires were somehow dishonest because they didn't include the lurid "clinical" descriptions in the book.

Kinsey kept close with NAZI pedophile rings, too. But the media of the day seems to have taken a "don't ask, don't tell" approach. Nobody likes to see their hero publicly soiled.

None of this could be done in the mediums of film and television of course, because the Catholic Church still had a strong, even if increasingly marginalized, hand in influencing productions away from the objectively and even subjectively, or even near occasions of sin, immoral. With books, no such limitations.

Judith Gelernter Reisman, Ph.D. has researched and written extensively to cut through the persistently believed lie that Kinsey was some sort of misunderstood freedom fighter in the "sane" cuturkampf against the Catholic Church's "restrictive" attitudes and "demands" against "healthy" human sexuality.

The fact is that from the beginning, the Consensus Content Kings, banded together for all their own best interests when they discovered how many books they could sell containing sexual perversions to a public that had decided the Church (in particular the Catholic Church) had no sensible advice on the subject.

Owing again, to a collective form of ecclesial angelism, as identified by Fr. Robert Barron in his talk "The YouTube Heresies" (q.v.) a chain of non-sequiturs ('Kinsey perversions popular, priests celibate, therefore Catholic Church's wisdom about nature of sin absurd') became "just common sense" and everyone suddenly knew "the truth" that the Catholic Church was too (_fill in synonym for prudish_) to "accept" or "support."

But you know, growing up in that pointless soup of mid-20th century self-absorption we now call "the sixties" and the even worse "seventies" I can recall every time I came into contact with a justification for this bastardized ethos of pleasure, especially when it was expressed by someone significantly older, there was a guilt, a loss, a realization of wrong. An emotional commonality I can recall across many people without remembering who they were.

In a last, sort of, gasp at trying to give the culture of death's ultimate material proof of its triumphant wisdom about making the fevered preferences of death row sex crime convicts into "the new normal" Hollywood's multi-million dollar secular canonization of Kinsey was pretty much a flop with only a $17 million worldwide box office gross. In Hollywood, they call that "chump change."

Of course they nominated it for an Oscar, but that didn't work out. It was certainly no "The Passion of the Christ," another 2004 film about a certain lone real-life figure, attacked by the establishment of his day for swimming upstream against popular tides, that worked out rather better both as a film. We shall all see about how it worked out for Kinsey in real life much later, of course.

The one positively demonic thing that has always struck me as radically indicative of the media's ground-floor complicity with Kinsey from before he even "broke" as a publishing superstar, was how Kinsey obtained the data in the infamous "table 34."

It seems that at no time in Kinsey's entire career did any member of "the press" inquire as to how Kinsey collected this demonic "data." They were content to let that one ride, it seems.

Come to think of it, I've never heard "the press" ask the first black U.S. president why the most dangerous place in the universe for a black unborn human is the inside of the mother's womb, either. Lots of "professional" practice ignoring that sort of question, I guess.

Of course, the premise of this article's headline question seems to me rather naive.

Friends I seem to have discovered a very popular subject!
Needless to say, I am thrilled, as are my co-authors of this work.
Thank you!



We have never seen anything we have produced in over three years "go viral" on YouTube. It is a true thrill to see Fr. Barron hit it out of the park like this.

But I must take advantage of this little spotlight to intercede for a favor... (forgive me).

If you have not seen Fr. Barron's "Catholicism" series, I CANNOT RECOMMEND IT HIGHLY ENOUGH. If I try any harder than that, I will break my keyboard.

You will be standing and applauding in your living room before the first episode's opening credits are even finished. Even if you aren't Catholic you will be.

George Weigel has called this series the most important production in the history of the Catholic Church in the US. Being Bl. JPII's biographer, I tend to give his opinions some weight.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan has compared Fr. Barron's work to that of Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the only Catholic priest ever to beat Milton Berle in ratings. Look it up. Get and watch "Catholicism" please. You will thank me.

So, my little appeal: buy Fr. Barron's Catholicism series if you can, or at least get Father to order a copy for your parish and school library. I can't imagine why every Catholic parish on the planet would not have at least one copy of this landmark television series.

Even if you saw the episodes that PBS selected, you haven't seen the whole series. You want to see the whole series. On Blu-ray.

Full disclosure: I am not connected with Fr. Barron's production company Word On Fire Ministries in Chicago, but I can witness personally that Mrs. Nancy Ross, Fr. Barron's producer is a lovely and Godly Catholic woman. She contracted me shoot this once a few years ago. There is no financial interest on my part. I get nothing if you buy a copy. But please, please buy a copy! They spent millions of private funds producing it and if you haven't seen it, it's all on the screen as they say.

But buy the Catholicism series anyway, please. Or at least send them some money via Paypal. How many of us actually do this kind of work, seriously? Buy them a coffee at least!

You will not just love "Catholicism," you will LURVE it! And so will all the people you call up after all these years and invite over for dinner and an episode or two.

Warning: if you love Holy Mother Church, keep tissues handy at all times during viewing of this labor of love called "Catholicism."

Here is the extended preview video of "Catholicism":
www.youtube.com/watch

This is not a commercial. I am only recommending this from the bottom of my heart, and I will not get any part of their sales. Please don't let that stop you!

Why not order it now and give them a fantastic Monday morning surprise after the July 4th week?

Saraash:

Is it slander to wonder how this can be an authentic apparition, when the Curia has not approved it? I appreciate your conversion, and give thanks to God for it, but who do you trust as an infallible authority in such matters? It has to be the Pope or whosoever he delegates, and nobody else. Otherwise we have only mayhem.

The Holy Spirit can bring about good in the midst of good or of evil as He wishes. It's up to our bishops in union with the Pope and his councils to make all such determinations. We don't get a vote. Also, there is a process by which apparitions are investigated, and it is proven over many centuries of testing.

There are very few devotions (perhaps none, is there a Father in the house?) that are required de fide, or even named as authentic, but they are decided by Rome, not by a crowd or even by our "interior forum."

As Catholics we don't get to make up our own minds about matters of faith and morals. We don't have to, we just have to learn and apply the learning. (That's the hard part isn't it?)

There is no slander in questioning the authenticity of a newly-reported occurrence, particularly one termed "an apparition" by people with no such authority to claim.

Be at peace. You have spoken highly of Our Lady and obeyed her gentle call to your heart.

Deo Gratias!

May I also point out a video I produced for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver (British Columbia, Canada, as distinct from Vancouver, Washington, U.S.A. to the south). Producer Nancy Ross of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries in Chicago originally commissioned me through the Archdiocese to shoot Fr. Barron's talk, titled "The YouTube Heresies."

goo.gl/hnK6t

This link is to a YouTube playlist that will automatically play in sequence all five video segments of the 59 minute talk. I posted a link to it, but I don't think Gloria.tv knows how to handle YouTube playlists yet. Meanwhile you can watch the whole program with carefully placed delays of only a few seconds as each new segment buffers in.

The five video segments are actually hosted on the RCAVonline YouTube channel, because I produced it for Word On Fire Catholic Ministries (Nancy Ross, producer) and permission was given for RCAVonline YouTube channel to host my edit of the program.

The source video was edited by WoF and broadcast in Chicago and internationally by WGN Chicago/WGN America in three separate weekly episodes of the "Word On Fire With Father Robert Barron" TV series, in late 2010.

I guarantee you an hour very well spent with Fr. Barron, watching his talk on "The YouTube Heresies".

For Fr. Barron's impressive body of work over the years, be sure to visit wordonfire.org

Fr. Barron as you will learn in this series, was educated in Paris, and so I believe speaks quite Parisian French, despite his hometown Chicago cadence in English. Maybe he would do a segment or Skype interview in French if enough Gloria.tv visitors asked him nicely!

Tu jest ta sama strona przedstawiłem poniżej, ale z polskim tłumaczeniem przez Google:
goo.gl/kjSRg~~V

Uważam, że to czas dla nas, aby dowiedzieć się jak skutecznie, z szacunkiem zgłosić te rzeczy w sposób, który będzie skuteczny z Kurii Rzymskiej, a nie tylko wyrażania naszej oburzenie. Nasze oburzenie sam może zmienić nic.Prawidłowo wysłany komunikat może być bardziej skuteczne. Proszę rozważyć to w modlitwie.

(Nie mogę mówić ani pisać polski, mogę korzystać tylko z Google Translate)

Cardinal.. says.. Catholic.. Church.. Must.. rethink.. approach.. etc.

These words diagram the "thrust" of the article I believe.

Substance: what makes this Cardinal's suggestion that the Church allow a second sacramental marriage, valid?

I believe the suggestion, as it appears it's reported here, is not valid because marriage is understood in Catholic teaching as being able to validly happen only once, except in the case of death of a spouse. If a marriage tribunal finds a defect in matter, form, or minister of the sacrament of marriage, it may be considered an attempted marriage and a decree of nullity may be issued.

So is the Cardinal suggesting "rethinking" that teaching and practice of the Church? I doubt it because I don't understand how a "second marriage" can be "tolerated."

Tolerance is always for persons and never for principles, because the principle is the sacramentality of the attempt at marriage. Tolerating error in principles will produce faulty bridges and buildings, etc.

The Cardinal is quoted as saying "allowing people to live." This framing I find odd, and I suspect the editorial process of the publication at work to create controversy in print.

People live as they wish. The Church has no more control over how people live than the lines on a roadway have control over drivers. When the drivers override the principles delineated by these lines, they create unexpected risk for themselves and others.

I believe the Cardinal is expressing Christian concern for souls as he should. But I don't believe in practical terms that some new form of recognitio of a state of life between two men or two women presumably living a celibate life together is pastorally wise, particularly given the nature of this disorder, and the activist tenor and messages of the culture at large.

The reason the Catechism calls acting-out of same-sex attraction impulses "gravely disordered" is that it does not have a proper place in God's plan of salvation.

Such persons, as all persons, are called to a life of continence according to their state in life. So-called "gay marriage" or not, their state of life in God's plan of salvation is single, and therefore celibate.

Some sort of "extra" way of life, perhaps a consecrated celibate partnership, starts to have a resemblance to consecrated religious orders, and perhaps the solution, in the ancient wisdom of our Church is membership perhaps as a lay religious order tertiary.

I think it is unwise for two such persons to "build in" near occasions of sin into their daily moments of life. You don't gain much protection by keeping dangerous chemicals stored in your kitchen where you trip over the container all the time.

The Lord warned in the parable, "if your left eye causes you to sin, take it out." The wise solution would be difficult for two such persons no doubt, particularly if they had shared many experiences of life, and they may with the help of the Holy Spirit continue a beautiful friendship (others have) without sin, but I think pastorally, such an arrangement would have to come from the individual maturity, moral resolve and conviction of the individuals, and not from some form of new "permission" innovated, even by princes of the Church.

Holy Mother Church has been down ALL of these roads in the past and she is very wise indeed. In my opinion any motivation seeking an exemption from this wisdom is to be circumscribed for the sake of the virtue of prudence, precisely because the salvation of eternal souls is at stake.

I think there is a powerful lesson that the Church can teach the world here. This temporal crisis can be resolved easily by the laity. All we need to do is each send a little money -- say, as much as one of our typical coffee-shop purchases -- on a single Sunday, and that's the end of the Vatican's financial deficit.

This would require a small contribution from each, en masse, of course.

If is possible we can solve the financial problem of the Vatican in such a painless and expedient way, could we solve other such problems?

It would of course require the world to trust the fiduciary prudence of the Vatican. But is not the Vatican already well into the business of solving such problems with money?

There must be some real world issues that scuttle the simplicity of this idea. Or is it really this simple? Perhaps someone can educate me.

Je crois que ce poste de fr. John Zühlsdorf sera plus instructif, dans ce cas - surtout si chaque patriote commenter ici, prend ces mêmes actions, exactement de la même manière. Je crois que le Père "Z" parle très bien français, au cas où vous souhaitez prendre contact avec lui. Cependant, peu probable, car il a beaucoup écrit et plus précisément sur ce sujet, d'une position d'avoir travaillé dans la curie à Rome depuis quelques années.

J'espère que cette traduction de Google est pas inutile:
goo.gl/fwt6T

Peut-être si vous rédiger une lettre en vertu de ces directives sages et l'envoyer au Père Z, il peut être en mesure de vous aider à élaborer pour effeciveness maximale.

Même si nous partageons notre amour de la Sainte Mère l'Eglise, et notre ardent désir de protéger ses enfants de ces hippies qui puent encore imprégnés de la «Summer of Love" rappelons-nous l'observation choquant de Hilaire Belloc que l'Eglise était ... "un institut de fonctionner avec l'imbécillité fourbe de telle sorte que si ce n'était pas l'œuvre de Dieu il ne serait pas durer une quinzaine de jours."

Dans un cas comme celui-ci, c'est à nous laïcs à offrir de correction dans la charité chrétienne.