I Just Had To

Introducing Katrina and Her Human

I've started a new blog for cat lovers.  Check it out here.

Komen Also Stops Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research Centers | LifeNews.com

Komen Also Stops Funding Embryonic Stem Cell Research Centers | LifeNews.com

YES!!!

Our Dear Bishop Olmsted Speaking Out Against the HHS Mandate

Click the image to read the blog article from the Diocese of Phoenix.

Occupiers Dump Condoms on Catholic School Girls

Posted in Top Stories | 883 comments

Jan 31, 2012

By Todd Starnes/FACEBOOK

A group of Occupy Wall Street protesters disrupted a Right to Life rally and threw condoms on Catholic school girls inside the Rhode Island state capitol building.

GET TODD’S NEW BOOK ON THE CULTURE WAR – “DISPATCHES FROM BITTER AMERICA”

Barth Bracy, executive director of Rhode Island Right to Life, said their rally had to be cut short after the Occupiers began screaming and refused to allow a Catholic priest to deliver a prayer.

“This is their idea of civil speech but we believe it’s an outrage,” Bracy told Fox News & Commentary “They started heckling, chanting and blowing whistles. They shouted down a priest.”

Last week’s rally was held inside the rotunda of the state capitol in Providence. Bracy said the Occupiers, along with some pro-choice demonstrators, infiltrated the crowd of some 150 pro-lifers. He said the pro-life crowd was made up of senior citizens, mothers with young children, Cub Scouts, and school kids.

Bracy said one of the most egregious incidents occurred when an Occupier climbed to the third floor balcony and dumped a box of condoms on girls from a Catholic school.

“What kind of individual throw condoms at Catholic school girls,” Bracy asked.

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Bracy said capitol police were outnumbered and overwhelmed by the protesters. At one point they even attacked State. Rep. Doreen Costa.

“This was one of the most disturbing sights I’ve ever seen,” Costa told Fox News & Commentary. “It was horrendous. “

Costa said a female Occupier hit her on the head with a sign and shoved her “moppy” hair in the lawmaker’s face.

“I told her that she really stunk bad and needed to take a bath,” Costa said.

Costa said she was “speechless” when they showered the young girls with condoms. So was Father Bernard Healey, the executive director of the Rhode Island Catholic Conference.

“It’s disgraceful behavior,” Healey said. “The week before, the pro-abortion people had their rally and no one bothered them. Apparently freedom of speech only applies to those who agree with you.”

Healey called the protesters “mean-spirited” and “ugly.”

He was trying to deliver a blessing to the crowd when the demonstrators shouted him down.

“I led the crowd in singing ‘God Bless America’ to try and down out their awful chants,” he said.

Joseph Little, the chief of the capitol police, told Fox News & Commentary that he did not receive any reports of condoms being dropped on children. He also said to his knowledge, nothing happened to that rose to the level of needing to call in additional support.

Little said no one was arrested.

It's Catching On!

Baby On Life Support

Barack Obama - Enemy of the Catholic Church

Komen for the Cure abandons Planned Parenthood funding | LifeSiteNews.com

Komen for the Cure abandons Planned Parenthood funding | LifeSiteNews.com

NOW I will gladly wear a pink ribbon! Thank you Komen for cutting ties with Planned Parenthood!

Shoe Thrower vs Finger Pointer

MRC.org - Media Research Center

The media goes nuts because our Governor pointed a finger at Mr. Obama. But they thought it was hilarious when a protester threw his shoes at President Bush. Don't these people know how two faced they look?

Obama Sandbags the Archbishop

Patrick J. Buchanan

At the end of Sunday mass at the church this writer attends in Washington, D.C., the pastor asked the congregation to remain for a few minutes.

Then, on the instructions of Cardinal Archbishop Donald Wuerl, the pastor proceeded to read a letter.

In the letter, the Church denounced the Obama administration for ordering all Catholic schools, hospitals and social services to provide, in their health insurance coverage for employes, free contraceptives, free sterilizations and free “morning-after” pills.

Parishioners were urged to contact their representatives in Congress to bring about a reversal of President Obama’s new policy.

Now, not only is this a battle the Church must fight, it is a battle the Church can win if it has the moral stamina to say the course.

In forcing the Church to violate its own principles, Obama has committed an act of federal aggression, crossing the line between church and state to appease his ACLU and feminist allies, while humiliating the Catholic bishops.

Should the Church submit, its moral authority in America would disappear.

Now, undeniably, the church milquetoast of past decades that refused to discipline pro-abortion Catholics allowed the impression to form that while the hierarchy may protest, eventually it will go along to get along with a Democratic Party that was once home to most Catholics.

Obama’s problem today is that not only is he forcing the Church to violate her conscience, he dissed the highest prelate in America.

In November, New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, held what he describes as an “extraordinarily friendly” meeting with Obama at the White House.

The president assured the archbishop of his respect for the Church, and the archbishop came away persuaded Obama would never force the Church to adopt any policy that would violate her principles.

Ten days ago, Obama sandbagged the archbishop. He informed Cardinal-designate Dolan by phone that, with the sole concession of the Church being given an extra year, to August 2013, to comply, the new policy, as set down by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, will be imposed. All social and educational institutions of the Catholic church will offer health insurance covering birth control, or face fines.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Archbishop Dolan, who went on:

“To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their health care is literally unconscionable. … This represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”

Where do Obama and Sebelius get the power to do this?

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, the colloquial name for which is “Obamacare.”

NARAL Pro-Choice America is celebrating the new policy. Planned Parenthood’s president, Cecile Richards, calls it a “health care issue … based on what’s best for women’s health.” Others have argued that many Catholic women practice birth control.

But that Catholics choose to ignore doctrine does not justify the U.S. government imposing on Catholic institutions a policy that violates Catholic teaching.

Even Washington Post liberal E.J. Dionne, in a Jan. 30 column titled “Obama’s Breach of Faith,” charges that the president “threw his progressive Catholic allies under the bus. …

“Speaking as an American liberal who believes that religious pluralism imposes certain obligations on government … the Church’s leaders had a right to ask for broader relief from a contraception mandate that would require it to act against its own teachings.”

Why did Obama do it?

Facing a close race for a second term, Obama chose not to antagonize his left. Yet he must have known that siding with them meant leaving Archbishop Dolan with egg all over his face. Obama, calculatedly, came down on the side of those he believes to be more crucial to his re-election.

This affront should tell the Catholic hierarchy, if they did not already know, where they stand in the party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Kathleen Sebilius. And where they sit — in the back of the bus.

Yet if the bishops will look upon this crisis of conscience, this insult, as an opportunity, they can effect its reversal and recapture a measure of the moral authority they have lately lost.

Not only should the bishops file suit in federal court against the president and Sebelius for violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state, they should inform the White House that no bishop will give an invocation at the Democratic Convention.

Then, they should inform the White House that in the last two weeks of the 2012 campaign, priests in every parish will read from the pulpit at Sunday mass a letter denouncing Obama as anti-Catholic for denying the Church its right to live according to its beliefs.

If Obama loses the Catholic vote, he loses the election.

The White House will come around, fast. Rely upon it.

COPYRIGHT 2012 CREATORS.COM

Pope Benedict slams Obama's America

Timothy Whiteman

Wilmington Political Buzz Examiner

Pontiff blasts rising 'Radical Secularism' in the United States

It's not every day that the Bishop of Rome fires off a volley.

But when he does, it's usually of Biblical proportions.

Pope Benedict XVI shocked many by his specifically naming of the United States, and by inference, the current Obama administration, in attacking all of Christianity.

As reported by CatholicCulture.org, the Pope stated to a group of visiting American clerics:

In America... as enshrined in your nation’s founding documents, was grounded in a worldview shaped not only by faith but a commitment to certain ethical principles deriving from nature and nature’s God.

Today that consensus has eroded significantly in the face of powerful new cultural currents which are not only directly opposed to core moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, but increasingly hostile to Christianity as such.

Sign The Petition

Please click here to sign the petition to rescind the HHS Department Mandate.

Bishop accused of incitement to hatred in homily - National News - Independent.ie

Bishop accused of incitement to hatred in homily - National News - Independent.ie

The day has come when Priests can't preach the truth without ending up in trouble or even in jail.

I've Said It All Along. He's Muslim.

If I find out this is photo shopped I'll take it down right away.  But I've said ever since I heard him talking about the call to prayer, that Islam is what is in his heart.  He can sit in an American pew and say he's Christian, but his soul is Muslim.

Stolen from The Little Catholic Bubble Blog

I am so over Mike Clancy and the Arizona Republic

Mike Clancy's latest piece for the Arizona Republic is painful to read (as usual), partly because of its falsehoods and distortions about the Catholic Church and Bishop Thomas Olmsted, but also because it's embarrassing for Clancy. His facts are so consistently wrong and his bias so obvious that it actually makes me cringe.


Now, of course I don't expect our local paper to fawn over the bishop or whitewash the Church, but is fact-checking and fairness too much to ask?


You can read the entire article, here, if you have the time and the stomach for it.* But as I did last time, allow me to comment on a couple of glaring snippets. Clancy says of the Catholic Church:

The church has taught that birth control is 'intrinsically wrong' since 1968, around the time the pill came into widespread use.

The statement is shocking.


It is absolutely no secret and easily ascertained that the Church has taught the intrinsic evil of contraception not merely for the past four decades, no, but since the establishment of the Church approximately 2,000 years ago. 


Not once (meaning "never") has the Church taught anything different.


Clancy is alluding to Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which simply reiterated, against the backdrop of the sexual revolution, the unbroken, unchanging teaching of the Church since her inception. 


How can a veteran religion reporter exhibit such a weak grasp of basic Church doctrine, the Church he's been covering for years and years? It's also troubling that he doesn't seem to have adequate knowledge of modern cultural history, either. For not only has the Catholic Church always taught that contraception is "intrinsically wrong", but until the 1930s, every Protestant denomination taught the sinfulness of contraception as well. When a committee of Anglicans was the first to abandon Christian principles on this well-established point of the moral law, even the secular world was shocked, as an editorial in the Washington Post makes clear:

Carried to its logical conclusion, the [Anglican] committee's report, if carried into effect, would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be "careful and restrained" is preposterous. -- March 22, 1931 edition.

Read the rest here. 

With Authority

When I first started learning about the Catholic faith, I ventured out onto some message boards and forums to ask some anonymous questions of Catholics.  One thing that struck me immediately was how they spoke of the Catholic Church as though she had authority over all mankind.  They were clear that if a person wanted to have a relationship with God, they needed to come through the Catholic Church and be in right relationship to the Catholic Church.  Coming from a protestant background, that was a foreign concept.  You followed this preacher or that preacher.  You read so and so's books and agreed with them or you went to this guys seminars and you agreed with him.  You picked your own camp and you could change camps any time you felt "lead" to do so. You were free to choose because there was no absolute authority.

It was a lot like the days of Christ when all of Israel followed this rabbi or that one.  When a person talked about their beliefs they would quote this rabbi or that rabbi and would choose whose beliefs they cared to align their own to.  There was room for debate.  There was no authority.

So when Jesus came along, as we read this morning in Mark chapter one, and spoke about God with authority as though he knew what he was talking about first hand, they were startled.  Who is this guy who speaks with authority as though we need to fall in line behind him in order to know God.  Who does he think he is?  He doesn't quote the rabbis, he wasn't formally educated by any rabbi.  He just shows up to synagogue and reads the scriptures as though he wrote them himself!

They must have felt as uncomfortable about Jesus' voice of authority as I felt about the Catholic Church's voice of authority.  Who do they think they are telling me that in order to know what God wants of my life I have to become a Catholic and follow the teachings of the Catholic Church?

Well, the Catholic Church looks and sounds like her founder.  Jesus left her his authority just before his ascension.  He handed Peter the keys and breathed on his first Bishops and gave them the authority to bind and loose and forgive sins.  So when the Catholic Church speaks, we need to listen because she speaks with the authority of Christ.  And if you want to know Jesus intimately, you must be Catholic and you must eat his flesh and drink his blood and follow the teachings he left for us in his Church.

God Bless Bella

This Really Challenges Me To Ponder My Life

And a Nightmare It Is!

Let Go!

Dealing with adult children is really challenging.  It's a lot like teaching them to drive.  They get behind the wheel of your most expensive possession and they go flying down the road with no experience and sometimes no idea how to keep that car between the lines.  They don't recognize the signs and they aren't familiar with driving customs that keep experienced drivers within the law.  When they realize that they are in control they often ignore the pleas of their white knuckled parents demanding that they leave more than a few inches between their car and the next. Basically they are like unguided missiles looking for somewhere to impact.

Young adults are often like that.  Parents have spent eighteen years teaching their children about life and God and how to relate to both.  Then when they feel the power of their own legal rights and especially their own living environment, they throw off all their parents' carefully presented wisdom and theology.  They have to figure these things out for themselves.

In a real way, they are correct.  God has no Grandchildren.  We must all come to that crossroad where we decide for ourselves who is behind the wheel.  Are they going to apply their parents teaching or are they going to venture out and find their own beliefs.  It's their call now.

The last couple of years have been very difficult as a parent.  I've watched my adult children make choices that have broken my heart and made me ask myself where I went wrong.  I've spent untold hours before the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, in tears pleading for God's mercy and grace to be poured out on them as they go careening down life's highway.

Problem is, I've always been a control freak.  I've always wanted to supervise their every move.  I home schooled them so that the world didn't have a chance to rob them of their God-consciousness.  I made sure they knew their Bible verses.  I made sure they were at Church on Sunday.  When God called me to the Catholic Church, I was completely transparent with them about my journey (once I knew where that journey was headed).  I made sure to allow them the freedom to make their own choice concerning coming into the Church because they had been raised as Protestants and I knew that conversion to the Church was a difficult and personal decision.

But I have discovered that some of them came into the Church because the family was coming into the Church.  They were not so sure deep inside.  So when adulthood came along, they chose to follow their own conscience.  Unfortunately, that meant following their confusion right out of church of any kind.  For several weeks after learning that one of my daughters was agnostic, I sobbed into my pillow and into my Rosary.  How could this happen?  Why did they seem to sincere and now so sincerely disinterested?

At the same time that I was mourning the defection of my daughters, I attempted to give good sound advice to a couple of friends in their struggle to follow God.  That also turned into a disaster and I threw my hands up and asked God why every life I tried to touch and lead to Him was rejecting my good advice.

Eventually, when I stopped crying long enough to listen, these two words came through loud and clear.  "Let go."  It became painfully clear that God did not need my help and in fact found my help a hindrance at times.  Not that giving good advice or evangelizing our children isn't the right thing to do, but that trying to control our children and others is the wrong thing to do.  Having spoken the truth in love, my next assignment was to just "let go!"

After all, where was I when I was in my 20s?  Was I growing in grace?  Was I Catholic?  Was I busy searching out truth for myself?  Nope.  I was busy serving my own interests and light years away from where I am today.  So why do I expect my kids to be 55 year old when they are in their 20s?  Because I want guarantees that they will be in heaven and that they will realize all the wonderful things I have come to see.  All very good motives.  Perfect motives.  But I can't seem to stop trying to do God's work my way.  Frankly, I make a really bad Holy Spirit.  I just need to "let go."

Someone reminded me recently that as St. Ambrose advised St. Monica, I need to speak less to them about God, and more to God about them.  And because Jesus can't resist confidence in His grace, I need to trust Him with their eternal souls.  I need to trust His love for them to be as amazing as it has been for me.  I need to trust that they have caught more than I have been taught and know that the source of all life and all peace is found in Christ and His Church.

And since prayer is far more powerful than any influence on earth, I will pray.  I will offer every Mass I attend for  my precious children and Grandchildren.  I will accept the pain this life delivers and offer up every sacrifice that comes along for those precious souls.  I will love and encourage and hug till my dying day and then I will pray like I cannot pray now till Christ returns in glory for the souls of my descendants.   I will be confident in the grace of God and I will "let go."

Remember This Lady

Irena Sendler  Died May 12, 2008 (aged 98) Warsaw, Poland

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an 'ulterior motive'. She KNEW what the Nazi's plans were for the Jews (being German). Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids). She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto. 

The soldiers of course wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises. During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants. She was caught, and the Nazi's broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. 

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted. 

In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.  She was not selected. Al Gore won --- for a slide show on Global Warming. Later another politician, Barack Hussein Obama, won for his work as a community organizer for ACORN.

In MEMORIAM - 65 YEARS LATER
I'm doing my small part by forwarding this message. I hope you'll consider doing the same. It is now more than 65 years since the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain in memory of the six million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were murdered, massacred, raped, burned, starved and humiliated! 

Now, more than ever, with Iran and others claiming the HOLOCAUST to be 'a myth,' it is imperative to make sure the world never forgets - because there are others who would like to do it again. This e-mail is intended to reach 40 million people worldwide! Join us and be a link in the memorial chain and help us distribute it around the world.

Obama Takes Aim At Catholics

‎"The Amish do not carry health insurance. The government respects their principles. Christian Scientists want to heal by prayer alone, and the new health care reform law respects that. Quakers and others object to killing even in wartime, and the government respects that principle for conscientious objectors. By its decision, the Obama administration has failed to show the same respect for the consciences of Catholics and others who object to treating pregnancy as a disease." ~Cardinal designate Timothy Dolan

Can You Say Consubstantial?

Sick Then, Sick Now