…Obama’s vaunted praise of Cardinal Bernardin and his proselytizing alliance with the Catholic Church are not what they appear to be (or what the New York Times makes them out to be).
Obama and his organizing mentors were simply running Alinsky’s game on the Catholic Church, promising to help advance its goals, while in reality coopting the clergy to leftist political ventures, at odds with their intent.
Various members of this informal cadre advised JFK, welcomed the 1967 rebellion of Catholic universities against Church authority led by Notre Dame, and carefully managed the reputation rehab of Teddy Kennedy after he killed Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick two years later.
A key player in the leftward descent of the Catholic Church since the 1960s emerged during the same era. Bishop Joseph Bernardin, who eventually became Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago, was the major influence guiding the Catholic bishops’ conference from 1969 until his death in 1996.
At Notre Dame in 2009, Barack Obama repeatedly invoked Cardinal Bernardin, whom he had first met at a community organizing meeting on Chicago’s South Side. Bernardin had a “profound influence” on his life, he later told journalists.
Bernardin also had a profound influence on the life of Bishop Lynch. Russell Shaw, longtime spokesman for the USCCB, identifies Lynch as a key player among the “Bernardin Bishops.” Lynch joined Bernardin at the headquarters of the bishops’ conference in 1972, and served as his alter-ego there for a quarter-century. He became bishop of St. Petersburg the year that Cardinal Bernardin died.
CHICAGO — In a meeting room under Holy Name Cathedral, a rapt group of black Roman Catholics listened as Barack Obama, a 25-year-old community organizer, trained them to lobby their fellow delegates to a national congress in Washington on issues like empowering lay leaders and attracting more believers.
“He so quickly got us,” said Andrew Lyke, a participant in the meeting who is now the director of the Chicago Archdiocese’s Office for Black Catholics. The group succeeded in inserting its priorities into the congress’s plan for churches, Mr. Lyke said, and “Barack Obama was key in helping us do that.”
Editor’s note: This is a truly wide ranging bio on the President – probably much more revealing than Mr. Obama would prefer. And now, he may have another willing collaborator in Pope Francis.
Submitted by Bob Stanley
Forty-five years after the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village protesting police raids on gay bars, then the first “Gay Pride” marches a few years later – events which shocked many Americans more used to homosexuality remaining in the closet – the movement’s newest allies are strictly conventional: Chambers of Commerce, major business groups, and Republican lawmakers.
That’s clearly behind Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer’s veto of a “religious rights” bill allowing commercial enterprises to refuse doing business with gay individuals and couples, including those shopping for wedding products and services. The message from opponents of the bill had been heard loud and clear, and it wasn’t just gay rights groups.
As the Gannett news organization put it online:
“Apple, American Airlines, Marriott, and American Express strongly opposed the legislation, saying it would be bad for business. The Arizona Super Bowl Host Committee also called for a Brewer veto amid reports the NFL was looking at other sites for its 2015 championship game.
Editor’s note: Barack Obama is bad for business too, but these guys have no trouble supporting him.
A film so compromised even Satan failed to show up?
What would Jesus think of entertainment producers who translated his life story to the big screen in the hopes of a multimillion dollar payout? Does it make a difference if the film intends to bolster the faith of believers through shock and awe? What if it fails entirely at convincing doubters and skeptics of his worldview — or even at explaining why they should share his values?
All of the above applies to “Son of God,” a lavish hunk of sermon-tainment with all the gravitas of a Communion wafer. Married producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey had director Christopher Spencer and editor Robert Hall slice and dice their ten-hour History Channel miniseries “The Bible” (2013) — the one that supposedly cast a President Obama look-alike as Satan — into a 138-minute feature. (Perhaps to avoid further controversy, Satan does not appear in this film.)
Illustration credit: rossrightangle
Since their arrival at the White House, the Obamas have masqueraded as defenders of minorities.
Nearly 36% of all abortions were performed on black children, and overall more than half of the babies killed by abortion between 2007 and 2010 were minorities.
The Obama regime awarded $1.2 billion to a group whose founder had this to say on the rights of handicapped and mentally ill and racial minorities: “human weeds ‘reckless breeders’, spawning..human beings who never should have been born.
“More children from the fit, less from the unfit—that is the chief aim of birth control.”
Rather than asking the public at large to sign Michelle Obama’s 50th Birthday Card, the Obamas should be sending the Birthday Card that counts the most to the hundreds of thousands of babies killed by abortion: life.
Obama: I’m not a particularly ideological person
Try this “ideology” instead, Mr. (allegedly Christian) President!
Mortify therefore your members which are upon the earth; fornication, uncleanness, inordinate affection, evil concupiscence, and covetousness, which is idolatry: For which things’ sake the wrath of God cometh on the children of disobedience: In the which ye also walked some time, when ye lived in them.
But now ye also put off all these; anger, wrath, malice, blasphemy, filthy communication out of your mouth. Lie not one to another, seeing that ye have put off the old man with his deeds; And have put on the new [man], which is renewed in knowledge after the image of him that created him.. (Colossians 3:5-10)
The left’s revolt arose from partisan politics. Since 2008 liberal Catholics have wedded themselves to the Obama campaign. But in January the president used Obamacare to coerce religious objectors to provide early-abortion inducing drugs and contraception.
Faced with a choice between their Council and their candidate, liberal Catholics chose the latter. After the president’s February 10 press conference attempting to quell public protest, “Catholics for Obama” have not missed a beat. Vice President Biden proudly defended the mandate entirely in last week’s debate. Pundits at venues like Commonweal magazine and theNational Catholic Reporter have followed suit, especially in endorsing the requirement that lay Catholics provide abortifacients and contraception.
This stands in stark contrast to Vatican II. The Council not only reiterated the Church’s teaching on sexuality, it also insisted on two principles irreconcilable with the Obamacare HHS Mandate: religious freedom, and the laity’s identity as “the Church.”
Editor’s note: The liberals hate it and the conservatives hate it. How’s that for Catholic unity?
Our modernity is style rather than substance. It’s Obama grinning. It’s the right font. It’s the right joke. It’s that sense that X knows what he’s doing because he presents it the right way. There’s nothing particularly modern about that. In most cultures, the illusion of competence trumps the real thing. It’s why so many countries are so badly broken because they go by appearances, rather than by results.
The idea that we should go by results, rather than by processes, by outcomes rather than by appearances, was revolutionary. For most of human history, we were trapped in a cargo cult mode. We did the “right things” not because they led to the right results, but because we had decided that they were the right things. There were many competent people, but they were hamstrung by rigid institutions that made it impossible to go from Point A to Point B in the shortest possible time.
And we’re right back there today. The entire process of ObamaCare was the opposite of going from Point A to Point B. It was the least competent and efficient solution every step of the way. There was no reason to think that its website would be any better. The process that led to it being dumped on the American people was completely devoid of any notion of testing or outcomes. It was the right thing to do because… it was the right thing to do. It was cargo cult logic all the same. So was its website.
Healthcare.gov, like ObamaCare, was going to work because it was “good”.
What the Abortion President and the Modernist Pope
have in common
by Doug Lawrence
Pope Francis’ unabashed, unapologetic and unashamed public promotion of worldly, liberal and modernist religious concepts is working a lot like Barack Obama’s similarly unrestrained efforts at promoting abortion without limits.
It’s making people with authentically formed consciences think and respond – utilizing all the truths of the faith, within the proper context of sacred and apostolic tradition – as opposed to the hermaunetic of chaos, corruption and disruption that has been the “norm” in the Catholic Church, over the last fifty years.
In the case of Barack Obama and abortion, we’re seeing more anti-abortion laws being passed, coupled with long overdue enforcement, regulation and prosecution of abortion facilities and abortionists.
In the case of Pope Francis – which is not yet as far along – I predict that we will eventually see all the liberal and modernist errors and scandals in the church exposed – and we will then be called to participate in a genuine spiritual revolution that will demand (and get) a prompt return to the doctrinal sanity, traditional reliability and genuine Christ-centered holiness for which the Catholic Church (except for the last half century) has always been known.
An article at Catholic Vote by writer Tom Hoopes put me on to this idea.
I’m sure Mr. Hoopes means well and intends to fully support and defend Pope Francis in his continuing outbursts of catechetical curiosities, but for those of us who know and understand the catechism – including its many weaknesses, omissions and political calculations – Hoopes article accomplishes just the opposite.
Here’s an example:
Love, not Legalism
“If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security,’ those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists—they have a static and inward-directed view of things. In this way, faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies.”
Rejecting ideology, even religious ideology, is another central teaching of Francis. And it’s a critically important teaching for our time, which turns everything into ideology. It is also a teaching of the Catechism.
1972 The New Law is called a law of love because it makes us act out of the love infused by the Holy Spirit, rather than from fear; a law of grace, because it confers the strength of grace to act, by means of faith and the sacraments; a law of freedom, because it sets us free from the ritual and juridical observances of the Old Law, inclines us to act spontaneously by the prompting of charity and, finally, lets us pass from the condition of a servant who “does not know what his master is doing” to that of a friend of Christ – “For all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” – or even to the status of son and heir.
******
This totally ignores the fact that it is impossible to create true disciples without a certain amount of discipline – just as it would be virtually impossible to live a good, holy, Christian life absent regular prayer and study – along with full, faithful and active participation in all of the applicable work, worship, sacraments and devotions of the Catholic Church.
The liberals and the modernists attempt to quickly discredit and then discard all that is tried and true in the Catholic Church, in favor of untested novelties that appeal primarily to the inflated human egos of persons who typically possess a distorted sense of charity, equality, diversity and prudence.
They also seem to totally forget that sin is the reason for most of the world’s evil – and that traditional Catholic teachings, practices, disciplines and philosophy remain the best antidote to sin that the world has ever known.
If that’s ideological, legalist and/or restorationist, then so be it!
The Catholic bishops have already experimented with the modernistic approach to corruption in the priesthood and it has cost the church much of its moral authority, along with at least $2.6 billion dollars that could otherwise have been used to feed, clothe and house the poor. This constitutes a colossal breach of essential Christian charity as well as an almost total failure of prudential judgment by ordained persons operating at the very highest levels of the Catholic Church!
Remember … with the close of the 2nd Vatican Council
“CHANGE” had come to the Catholic Church …
and it came to the Catholic Church FIRST!
It was only after the Church of the Ages
was totally disrupted and taken out of the way
that global terrorism, big government, radical feminism, abortion,
homosexuality, the destruction of the family
and many other types of evils and immorality
were allowed to proceed, virtually unchecked!
Should Pope Francis and his supporters succeed in their efforts to further “modernize” the Catholic Church, there’s no telling what new evils might be in store for the church – and for the world.
Watch the video (3 minutes, 44 seconds)
Notice to Obama supporters: This video may seem
to make perfect sense to you, but it is a parody – a joke!
The Second City Network takes both the president and his glassy-eyed followers to task in a biting new video about Obama’s heated Syria rhetoric.
Help Kickstart World War III is a faux crowdfunding pitch aimed at Obama worshipers who will nod their heads at any decision the president makes.
Even the fictional group behind the crowdfunding campaign nails the president’s celebrity in chief status–“Americans for Whatever Barack Obama Wants, Did You Know He’s Friends With Jay-Z?”
Doug Lawrence's Catholic Site 