Supreme Court Hears Arguments… The Most Important Abortion Case In 30 Years

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

On Wednesday, December 1, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the most important abortion case to come before the Court since it heard Planned Parenthood v. Casey 30 years ago. The mood on December 1 was light-years away from that during the Court’s discussion of Casey. There was tension in the air, as the Court’s once-confident pro-abortion majority realized that for the first time, they might be outnumbered.
Those stalwarts delivered valiant defenses of “stare decisis,” the principle that the Court should rely on precedent — in this case, Roe v. Wade and Casey (making abortion a “super-precedent,” in Justice Breyer’s words).
Yes, it’s sort of ironic that the Left should so warmly praise tradition, normally its enemy and target for annihilation. But, as Lenin instructed the enlightened, “Whatever furthers the Revolution is ethical.” The dialectic permits its practitioners to return tomorrow to contradict today at will — for isn’t that the price of “progress”?
On that Wednesday, the Orwellian task required to sully and slime the notion that the unborn might have rights after all was assigned to a clearly perturbed Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She was shocked, Shocked!! at the possibility that that Roe v. Wade, the Left’s Prime Mandate for a half-century, might indeed be consigned to the dustbin of history. The bitterness fairly burst from her rant, which was designed to be glorified in friendly media as the preferred slur to cast at the Court’s advocates of a restoration of the Constitution’s integrity. Sotomayor packaged her remarks in the language of the sewer so dear to Karl Marx in his salad days:
“Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception — that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible,” she said early in the hearing.
Each word brims with crass DoubleThink. “Institution”? The Supreme Court was indeed instituted by the Founders in their desire for the separation of powers — and it is Democrats, not Republicans, who threaten to destroy it if the Justices don’t bow to their revolutionary agenda.
“Public perception”? Here Madam Justice pretends to read the hearts and minds of the public, while in reality giving her marching orders to the Thought Police of the elites’ public persuaders. And it is those elites and their institutions, by the way, who have happily embraced, even celebrated, the “stench” that is the battle cry of the destroyers of morality, order, freedom, and life itself, even of the most innocent.
Sotomayor helpfully reminds us that the Left always blames its enemies for its own sins. They taunt us with lies to appeal to our moral sense even as they seek to destroy it. Rather tiresome, actually.
In coming months, endless analysis will prosper as the nation awaits the Court’s ruling in Dobbs. If tradition prevails, the decision is likely to be announced at the end of the Court’s current term next June. Here we will focus on Madam Justice Sotomayor and the rancorous wreckage of her comment.

A Nice, Smart Catholic Girl

Sonia Sotomayor was born in the New York City borough of The Bronx. Her family lived in Bronxdale Homes, a public housing project, while she attended Blessed Sacrament Grade School, where she graduated as the valedictorian of her eighth-grade class. She then attended Cardinal Spellman High School before entering Princeton, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1976.
In all those years of study, she apparently didn’t learn the history of her own state.
On July 26, 1788 the government of New York convened a convention to consider the Constitution written by the Founders in Philadelphia the year before. By a vote of 30-27, the assembled delegates approved New York’s entry into the United States, and became the 11th state to ratify the Constitution, according to the New York Historical Society. That was a close vote because many New Yorkers, like their neighbors who had lived under the Articles of Confederation for seven years, were reluctant to confer too much power on a more-centralized federal government.
Sotomayor complained on December 1 that the Court, and thus the Constitution, was “political,” but the Constitution voted on by New Yorkers was a political document that was the subject of a fierce political debate. The documents known today as the Federalist Papers were published as newspaper columns. Their goal was indeed political — to encourage citizens of the state to support the Constitution proposed by the Founders in Philadelphia the year before. Those New York citizens, by the way, had on the average a fourth-grade education, yet reading and debating the same text today is beyond the ability of many college students and perhaps even a few fourth-grade teachers.
And while the Constitution was ratified by conventions in states gathered politically, it was based on history and principle. Signposts along the way include pre-Norman Saxon law, the Magna Charta, the Mayflower Compact (which begins, “In the Name of God, Amen”), and the Declaration of Independence, which mentions God six times. In fact, even today, the Constitutions of 47 of the original 48 states begin with a bow toward the bountiful Providence of the Almighty.

Roe And Bigotry: Twin Evils

Yes, in a most ladylike fashion, Sotomayor invites Americans to attack her fellow justices, especially those nominated by Donald Trump, as garbage — or worse.
Let’s look at Mme. Sotomayor’s “precedent.”
When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died last year, we observed: “The current uproar engulfing Washington, also known as ‘mourning the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,’ proves once more that abortion is the issue, period. After all, if you can kill the most innocent, you can kill anybody.”
Those on the Left who today cheer “precedent” were celebrating Mrs. Ginsburg’s “legacy” — which consisted solely of rubber-stamping Roe in the spirit of the sacred “precedent” set not by the Founders or the Court, but by Margaret Sanger.
“Frankly,” Ginsburg told The New York Times in 2009, “I had thought that at the time that Roe was decided, there was a concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
So even the Left’s secular goddess recognized that Roe was based not on “precedent” or “stare decisis,” but on racism, bigotry, and the false gospel of population control preached by Paul Ehrlich in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, full of sheer slop which today stands as the paragon of the population controllers’ false “science” and ideological bombast.
To be sure, senior Democrats were already waging war on the Constitution long before Mrs. Ginsburg’s death. Hillary Clinton advocated abolishing the Electoral College. Cong. John Dingell, Jr., the longest-serving Member of Congress in history, wanted to abolish the Senate.
Joe Biden is today an ardent defender of Roe. If the court’s decision next year reverses Roe or, as Justice Barrett suggested December 1, simply sends it to the dustbin, count on Biden to work with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer to pack the Supreme Court, FDR-style.
In her star “stench”-spewing performance, we note that Sotomayor must appeal to feeling, not logic and argument. That is good news, in that even this very intelligent jurist cannot find a legal to justify her position.
The bad news is that, in public schools in the 48 years since Roe was decided, a couple of generations of American students have been trained to feel, not taught to think.
Whatever the Court decides, our work is cut out for us. And prayers are in order.

As December Begins . . . High Court Ponders If Long Abortion Journey Too Burdensome

By DEXTER DUGGAN

On the first day of December 2021, the month that commemorates the birth of a Christmas Child, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments about results of the permissive abortion that it suddenly thrust on the nation nearly 49 full years ago, shortly after Christmas, in the new year of January 1973.
Enough years to amount to a lifetime for some. Or the ending of tens of millions of preborn babies’ lifetimes. None of the justices in 1973, middle-aged or elderly, is still alive.
Had carrying the burden of pro-abortion extremism for nearly a full half-century begun to exhaust the Court so much that it would no longer consent to responsibility for such a load?
Chief Justice John Roberts questioned U.S. abortion law going so much further than most other countries’, placing this nation at the level of Communist China and North Korea, LifeNews.com posted on December 1. In the past, Roberts hasn’t regarded U.S. permissive abortion as unfavorably as has, say, Justice Clarence Thomas.
The top story on page one of the December 2 New York Times was headlined, “Justices Indicate They Will Uphold Curb on Abortion — Mississippi’s ban after 15 weeks poses a direct challenge to Roe v. Wade.”
Actually, the justices had issued no such declaration, but the pro-abortion Times apparently was worried enough by what was said that it made this concession.
Roberts also wondered if 15 weeks wasn’t time enough to make the abortion decision, and he noted that 15 weeks isn’t much earlier than “viability” as currently recognized medically.
Politico posted on December 1: “Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett . . . were even less sympathetic to arguments against Mississippi’s law. Barrett repeatedly suggested that the option of giving a baby up for adoption obviated the need for abortion, while Kavanaugh cast overturning of Roe and allowing states to enact bans as they see fit as courts ‘returning to neutrality’ on the question of abortion rights.”
LifeNews.com posted an interview at The Daily Signal with Alliance Defending Freedom senior counsel Erin Hawley about the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, during which she said:
“So, Mississippi restricts abortions . . . after 15 weeks; it has robust exceptions for the health and life of the mother. It allows months for women to get an abortion. It is consistent with over 90 percent of the abortion laws nationwide.”
As has been the case for decades, the basics of abortion law ended up on the High Court’s doorstep. It was not always so.
A half-century ago, the infant pro-life movement in individual states had begun defeating the elitist pro-abortion cause that suddenly emerged like a tarantula from its hole and began to victimize a nation caught unaware. Abortion had not yet been federalized.
Think of that passage of time. A 50-year-old pro-lifer from then would be 99 now. A 50-year-old pro-lifer now was just being born.
In 1972, even the New York state legislature, stung by a grievous error it made in 1970, repealed the permissive abortion law it had enacted. However, pro-abortion liberal Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller vetoed the repeal.
Also in 1972, the power of energized information and popular sentiment resulted in overwhelming rejection by public vote in November of pro-abortion referenda in Michigan and North Dakota.
However, before pro-lifers could continue building on such successes to affirm traditional protection of the innocent, the Supreme Court jumped in desperately two months later, on January 22, to announce an amazing basic constitutional right previously undiscovered throughout U.S. history to perform abortion nationwide.
This was one of the earlier instances of the High Court’s predilection to be an activist liberal super-legislature furthering what it considered to be socially or culturally necessary, not the work of a neutral judiciary. This generated the response of “social conservatism.”
Although often touted as a “women’s rights” ruling, it actually was framed as conferring the abortion right on doctors supposedly exercising their professional judgment. The 1973 opinions decided by 7-2, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton, were written by Justice Harry Blackmun, who once served as counsel for Minnesota’s renowned Mayo Clinic.
Blackmun made the grave error of viewing potential abortionists as the kind of upstanding medical professionals he associated with, hardly the actual profile of someone whose focus would be to end defenseless preborn babies’ lives as often as possible.
It was as if Blackmun had written an authorization to apply the death penalty by professional executioners who viewed tens of millions of their already born, innocent fellow citizens as deserving extermination. Whatever Blackmun had thought he was doing, he was dead wrong.
Radical abortion pioneer Bernard Nathanson, MD, was thrilled by Blackmun’s decision but came to realize how wrong this was. Nathanson later became a pro-lifer and then an actual practicing Catholic (as distinct from today’s brand of fanatical pro-abortion phony Catholic like left-wing Democrats Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi).
Eventually succumbing to cancer in 2011 in New York City, Nathanson even pleaded for babies’ lives from his deathbed. Blackmun, on the other hand, never apologized for his deadly error, even though permissive abortions soared into the millions and any illusion Blackmun may have had that he resolved this social dilemma was destroyed.
On January 4, 2016, as that year’s anniversary of Roe and Doe soon was to arrive, the Time magazine website posted a brief portion of historian Daniel K. Williams’ new book, Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade (Oxford University Press). Time headlined this, “What You Don’t Know About the Abortion Fight Before Roe v. Wade.”
Williams noted the media depiction of the pro-life movement being a Catholic cause, “but by 1972, that stereotype was already outdated.” What “had looked like a last-gasp battle against the forces of progress” was transformed when pro-lifers “changed their strategies, and figured out how to win legislative battles. In 1971, 25 states considered abortion legalization bills. Every one of them failed to pass,” Williams wrote.

Led Astray

The energy and enterprise were on the pro-life side, then the High Court’s extremist activists parachuted in to abort everything. Although not as extreme as today, dominant media even then were pro-abortion, and were led further and further astray by the fanatical New York Times.
Pro-life activities weren’t worth publicizing. Deep, cogent criticisms of Roe and Doe were ignored. The fight was over, media megaphones declared, even as the Times did its lying best to make the nation think Roe was some sort of mild, reasonable, popular measure.
Now, as 2021 winds toward a close, pro-abortionists were left to sputter on December 1 that no matter how wrong a Supreme Court decision may be, it still must prevail unless some major change has occurred.
Well, how about the major change of advancing medical science? None of 1973’s justices ever saw a preborn baby clearly dancing about on a sonogram, and the Court that year pretended to tell us when the Constitution set the age of “viability,” which was about as sensible as saying the Constitution disclosed the maximum speed at which a rocket could fly.
As December began, strongly pro-abortion Justice Sonia Sotomayor — another of those bad Catholics whose careers got ahead courtesy of pro-abortion fanatics like Democrat Barack Obama, who named her to the High Court — was aware of preborn babies moving around in the womb. But Sotomayor ghoulishly likened this to jerking by a brain-dead body.
The abortion warriors never seem to miss a chance to cheapen themselves.
Sotomayor also made the incredible suggestion that if the Court stopped behaving as the nation’s abortion dictators, this would be a terrible stain on its reputation — as if the Court hadn’t revealed itself as a thoroughly political body since 1973, inventing and negating laws to suit a highly ideological agenda.
Politico quoted Sotomayor: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts? I don’t see how it is possible. If people actually believe that it’s all political, how will we survive? How will the Court survive?”
Washington attorney Megan Wold posted at Real Clear Politics on December 1 that the Supreme Court should defend itself by overturning rather than upholding Roe.
Wold wrote: “The majority’s opinion in Roe has undermined the court’s legitimacy for nearly a half-century. Roe relied on dubious reasoning to remove a contentious policy issue from the reach of the American people, placing all abortion policy in the hands of the unelected and unaccountable judiciary. As a result, Roe has politicized the Court and poisoned the judiciary.”
The Roe Court delivered its opinion despite knowing that more than half the states banned abortion except to save a mother’s life, that the Hippocratic Oath had forbidden abortion for thousands of years, “and that abortion had been restricted under civil, canon, and Anglo-American common law,” Wold wrote.
As just another example of Roe’s irrationality — an overreach that even Bill Clinton-appointed pro-abortion Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg subsequently criticized — Wold pointed to the Court’s claiming that the 14th Amendment protected choosing abortion, even though 30 of the then-37 states in the U.S. banned abortion by the time that amendment was ratified.

Pelosi And The Pope

As to viability, even The Washington Post noted on December 1: “In 1973, babies born at 28 weeks of pregnancy were thought to have little chance of survival. In the following decades, however, that timeline compressed by about one week every 10 years, thanks to medical advances and better understanding of treatments.”
The Post story added: “These include the administration of steroids to the mother before a premature delivery to help with a baby’s lung development, and new instruments for performing delicate surgery on tiny babies.”
Bad Catholic pro-abortion fanatic Pelosi, who had dashed off to Rome in October to exchange loving smiles with Pope Francis, was in her usual mode as a “hitman” for the “murder” that is abortion, to use the Pope’s own terms, as she warned that the Court better protect it.
The Washington Examiner posted on December 1 that Pelosi — using her familiar euphemisms — said the Court had the “responsibility to honor the Constitution, the law, and this basic truth: Every woman has the constitutional right to basic reproductive health care.”
The Mississippi law at issue, Pelosi huffed, is “part of a nationwide assault against women’s freedoms” and “is brazenly unconstitutional and designed to destroy Roe v. Wade.”
Demeaning mothers who don’t work outside the home, and pushing the propaganda line that they must be “freed” from giving too much attention to childbearing, with the assistance of such tools as permissive abortion, goes back to the early days of the radical feminist movement that detested men.
These feminists completely broke with historic feminism, which saw abortion as an evil, not a necessity.
In addition to Roe and Doe themselves, left-wingers live in a fantasy world where permissive abortion is wonderful and the public celebrates it every day. But the Washington Examiner noted on December 1:
“That didn’t happen last month in blue Virginia. Democratic gubernatorial nominee Terry McAuliffe spent millions telling voters that his opponent would sign a restrictive abortion law like the one that had just taken effect in Texas. Exit polling shows that the voters who voted based on abortion actually broke for the Republican, Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin, by 20 points.”
The Court is expected to announce its opinion by next June.

But Why Do Bishops Join In?. . . Media Struts Its Amnesia On Waukesha

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Last week, in one of the easiest predictions ever, we wrote that members of the entire corporate and elite universe of official opinion would send the terrorist attacks in Waukesha on November 21 down the Memory Hole.
They did.
Not one outlet addressed the massacre’s racist dimension — it was perpetrated by a black career criminal who hated whites — and none dared call it terrorism the way CNN, MSNBC, and every other outlet did regarding the events on January 6, when the only fatality occurred when a Capitol policemen shot an unarmed trespasser.
Remember? “The events on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, will be remembered as an act of domestic terrorism against the United States; as a national tragedy; and as a real-life manifestation of online radicalization,” CNN dictated a day later. And they haven’t shut up since.
But the Waukesha murders — six victims and counting as of this writing, plus half a hundred wounded, and eight still hospitalized — disappeared not only from the national media but even from the front page of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, the major local paper in Waukesha this past week.
What’s going on here?
On his first day in office, Joe Biden directed his “national security team” to conduct an evaluation on how to “address domestic terrorism, which has evolved into the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today.”
Yet, as his attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced in May, the administration adroitly narrowed the definition of that fluid term in classic racist fashion: “violence incited by white supremacists poses the most dangerous threat to our democracy,” he told a Senate Committee.
So terrorist attacks committed by blacks are of no interest to the guardians of American justice because . . . well, because they don’t fit Garland’s definition. (We note that the Biden administration also ignores the murders of thousands of blacks by blacks every year, as addressed by Pat Buchanan on p. 2A.)
But wait — maybe the media would pay attention to Waukesha if Christians nationwide would follow the leaders of Black Lives Matter, who laid out the template in their nationwide riots of 2020! Why aren’t enraged Christians rioting across the country, egged on by “CLM” — “Christian Lives Matter”? We could extort untold (and unreported) millions from corporations, as well as from bamboozled men and women of goodwill.
We recall that George Floyd’s family was awarded $27 million by the city of Minneapolis. Why can’t families of the dozens of Waukesha victims sue the district attorney who had set a bail of only $1,000 for the terrorist’s most recent crime?
That official is one John Chisholm, Milwaukee County’s “progressive” district attorney. He is one of several radical DA’s who have been elected with unprecedented financial support from George Soros. And Chisholm is pretty cavalier about his disasters. Some years back, he predicted that this lax practice regarding bail would result in murders. As the Washington Free Beacon reports, “Chisholm told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in 2007, ‘Is there going to be an individual I divert, or I put into [a] treatment program, who’s going to go out and kill somebody? You bet. Guaranteed. It’s guaranteed to happen. It does not invalidate the overall approach’.”
So Milwaukee’s version of Merrick Garland is not shocked by the Waukesha Massacre — in fact, the massacre vindicates his “overall approach.” And so far, those identifying with the victims of the Waukesha massacre haven’t gotten the BLM memo. There will be no riots, no El Paso bishops kneeling in front of “Christian Lives Matter” signs. Only sadness, mourning, prayers, wakes, and funerals.
No golden caskets need apply.
We’d better brace ourselves for more.

There They Go Again

“Racism has been part of the social fabric of America since its European colonization. Whether it be the tragic past of the Native Americans, the Mexicans, the Puerto Ricans, or the blacks, the story is one of slavery, peonage, economic exploration, brutal repression, and cultural neglect. All have suffered indignity; most have been uprooted, defrauded, or dispossessed of their lands; and none have escaped one or another form of collective degradation by a powerful majority.” 
“This new economic crisis reveals an unresolved racism that permeates our society’s structures and resides in the hearts of many among the majority.
“Perhaps no single individual is to blame,” they write. “The sinfulness is often anonymous but nonetheless real. The sin is social in nature. . . .”

Brothers And Sisters To Us:
Bishops Pastoral Letter
On Racism, 1979

The authors of the above document admit, in their own text, that the inspiration and philosophical ground for their efforts lay in one of AmChurch’s most disastrous manifestations: “Our words here are an initial response to one of the major concerns which emerged during the consultation on social justice entitled ‘A Call to Action,’ which was part of the U.S. Catholic participation in the national bicentennial,” they write. 
Well, as the scientists say, “GIGO — Garbage In, Garbage Out” — and Call to Action was Marxist Social Justice garbage. But our shepherds persevere! Only whites, they teach, can be racists, and most of us are — of course, the sin is so “subtle” that most of us don’t even know we’re sinning.
Unfortunately, instead of reading the Catechism that appeared thirteen years later, the bishops perpetuated their errors by celebrating the pastoral’s thirtieth anniversary with another one, reaffirming the same anti-white bigotry.
And now, with Waukesha, we see once again proof that the USCCB’s adoption of the Marxist notion of systemic racism, class struggle, and “whites only” racism constitutes a fundamental metaphysical and anthropological contradiction of the Catholic faith.
And yet, not one American bishop, not even the few “good” ones, will renounce this lie, even though it represents the embrace of an ideology that by definition denies the transcendental and embraces instead a materialism of the Marxist variety.
They speak from two sides of their mouth — not necessarily duplicitous, perhaps simply ignorant — but manifesting a cowardly docility towards the spirit of the times because of the lack of both intellectual preparation and rigor, as well as the Cardinal Virtue of fortitude.
The dialectic’s contradictions abound. Look at “Catholic Joe” Biden. While they preach the Eucharist, they openly, publicly, and by an almost unanimous vote, affirm its public desecration.
And bad ideas have very bad consequences. Betraying the faithful by not teaching, by pretending to “represent” in the most craven of material ways the “Church” when acting like the typical grifting NGO, lining up at the trough in Washington to lobby for money and power and position.
Meanwhile, they fail in their true mission, as they describe it themselves.
Consider Waukesha.
In 2016, the USCCB appointed the Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, with Most Rev. Shelton J. Fabre of Houma-Thibodaux as its chairman.
One would think that Waukesha represents a classic example of a racist crime. So on November 22, we wrote Bishop Fabre’s secretary asking this question of the bishop, stating the facts as we knew them at the time:
“Has His Excellency made any statement about the racist massacre of participants, including five deaths and some two dozen hospitalized, in last night’s Christmas Parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin?”
At press time, we have received no answer.

A Texas Size Penance

By JOE SIXPACK

In last week’s article, one of the things I touched on was artificial contraception. Artificial contraception is a perversion of nature, and people who engage in perversions of nature, or perverted activity, society calls perverts. Sorry, that’s just the way things are. Now, I’m not talking about artificial contraception this week, and I won’t belabor the point; I’ll just let my previous two sentences hang in the air for contemplation.
Although I’m not handling the topic of artificial contraception this week, that topic does inspire this week’s subject. This week’s piece is on the topic of reparation (penance) for our sins. The artificial contraception issue made me think of a friend of mine in Texas.
My friend — we’ll call him Jimmy — founded and has operated what is perhaps the most successful prison apostolate in the nation. He operates only in the Texas penal system. His apostolate makes boatloads of converts, and (prepare to be astonished) his effort is showing signs of actually producing saints out of the flawed material of hardened criminals (but then aren’t we all flawed?). This wouldn’t be so significant if it were being done in medium and minimum security facilities where violence is far less prevalent, but this Catholic apostolate is operated only in the most deadly and violent maximum security facilities in Texas.
Is its reputation for success mere hype? Well, the most cynical people in the world when it comes to “jailhouse conversions” are prison wardens. This prison apostolate began in just one Texas maximum security facility — a state that has 50 prisons — and was reluctantly and cautiously welcomed by the warden.
As of this writing, my friend’s prison apostolate is now in three of Texas’ maximum security facilities…all by invitation of those same cynical prison wardens. The reason the wardens want his apostolate in their prisons is strictly (and cynically) for security motives. These wardens say that wherever my friend’s apostolate teaches, violence in the form of stabbings, assaults, rapes, and murders drops substantially.
Almost all of the men touched by this apostolate were members of violent gangs that make their money from the sale of dangerous drugs and don’t have any compunction whatsoever about hurting or killing people who get in their way. Furthermore, many of those prisoners who were associated with the apostolate are purported to have returned to their communities, began living positive and productive lives, and taking an active role in the life of their parishes.
This apostolate is proof of two things. The first is, even hardened criminals can change…with God’s help. And we owe them the benefit of the doubt, otherwise we must wash our hands of the Apostle Paul — a man who was a murderer of early Christians. The second thing it proves is that any good work God is involved in will be successful. Let’s talk about God’s involvement in this particular apostolate.
Several years ago, I asked Jimmy why he would risk his life to go into the bowels of a dangerous maximum security prison to spread the Catholic faith as founded by Christ when he could sit back and enjoy his life as he approached retirement. His response surprised and edified me.
It seems Jimmy was admittedly like most Catholics in modern America. He claims he went to Mass every Sunday and holy day, followed by Confession during Lent, but that is pretty much where his Catholicism ended. He admits he didn’t really have a good knowledge or understanding of the faith. So what changed in Jimmy’s life?
There was a tragedy in my friend’s life that forced him to turn to God, something we can nearly all relate to. But in the process of turning to God for help, he was forced by circumstances and the reading materials providentially placed in his path to admit he was ignorant of many of the most important tenets of the faith, and that he’d been far less than 100 percent committed to it. So Jimmy began reading and studying every classic Catholic resource he could get his hands on. (For those of you interested at this point, I would recommend any book, CD, or DVD from TAN Books and Ignatius Press — two sources that can always be trusted.)
As Jimmy learned and grew in the faith (a journey his wife made with him), he realized that all the childbearing years of his marriage were lived in mortal sin. Jimmy and his wife had immorally practiced the sexually perverse sin of using artificial contraception. He realized that they’d spent their entire married life seriously violating the fifth and sixth Commandments. Jimmy also realized that all those years of mortal sin required many years of reparation.
Now, let me digress here a moment. It’s important to point out that, due to the prevalent faulty catechesis of the 1960s and 1970s, Jimmy didn’t know he was committing mortal sin all those years. As the prisoners he works with will tell you, ignorance of the law is no excuse, but God is more gracious than that. Although he and his wife objectively committed mortal sin, they didn’t do so subjectively. In other words, God doesn’t hold anyone accountable for things they do out of ignorance.
But there still has to be reparation. Just because you aren’t aware of the damage you cause doesn’t mean you don’t have to pay for that damage. Reparation has to be made in this life or in the next in Purgatory. Since the pains of Purgatory are like Hell, but they lessen over time and end when the reparation is done, it just makes good sense to make reparation in this life.
So Jimmy made up his mind to make reparation to God by working in this prison apostolate. How it started I don’t know, but there are two things I do know.
First, Jimmy rightly surmised he had to make reparation, and God blessed his efforts as a result. He’s not only managed to build a stellar reputation with Texas prison authorities (in our last conversation I discovered he was helping one warden grow in his Catholic faith), but he’s been able to share the Catholic faith with men who desperately need it. Oh, and let’s not forget how he shares the Catholic faith with wardens and guards by way of shining example.
Second, in the course of making his reparation Jimmy has been able to perfectly fulfill one of the seven corporal works of mercy — an obligation all Catholics have, six of which are spelled out by Jesus Himself in the 25th chapter of Matthew.
All of us have committed grave sin in our lives. Many times we have committed those sins without realizing we’re doing it, due to our ignorance of Christ’s commands and the Church’s teachings. It was only after I became a Catholic that I realized I was required to make reparation for my sins, despite that the sins had all been forgiven. Some of the deliberate sins — things I knew were evil even before becoming Catholic — I’ve been making reparation for ever since my conversion. Some I’ll never stop doing penance for — like my friend Jimmy, who recognizes the immensity of the evil he committed.
Jimmy committed Texas size sins, and now he’s doing a Texas size penance.
Need more answers? Contact me at Joe@CantankerousCatholic.com to get them. And please begin listening to The Cantankerous Catholic podcast.

Biblical Conference Ponders . . . Bringing The World To Someone It Doesn’t Know

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — Those who think that talks about theology must be as dry as books in an old monastery library may wish to turn a page in their thinking.
One of the speakers at the sixth annual Southwest Biblical Conference here on November 20 praised twentieth-century country-and-Western singer Marty Robbins and even played one of his recordings, while the other speaker raises and homeschools 10 children with his wife on a Tennessee homestead.
Sr. Johanna Paruch FSGM Ph.D., who teaches in the theology department of the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, said one reason she likes to come to Phoenix is that Robbins was from nearby Glendale, Ariz., and performed such hits as El Paso and also A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation.
The song set in Texas is about a hot-tempered cowboy willing to risk his life over his love for a cantina girl, while the other song is about a teenager disappointed over losing his date for the prom.
The songs “are very strongly Christian though they’re not ‘Christian’. . . . I can sing all four minutes and 27 seconds of El Paso,” Paruch said as she began the first of her two talks here.
Later in the morning, starting her second talk, the nun played one of Robbins’ songs, “just because I can’t resist it,” for listeners on the campus of St. Thomas the Apostle Church here, where the Institute of Catholic Theology, an evangelization program, is headquartered.
The day’s other speaker, Ryan Hanning, Ph.D., delivered one talk. He traveled to the Phoenix audience from the Hanning Homestead in Whites Creek, Tenn.
Despite that rural setting, Hanning has wide acquaintance with language, from fluency in English and Spanish to knowledge of Biblical and modern Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French and Polish.
At his website (www.ryanhanning.com), Hanning asks: “Why are we here? What is good? What is beautiful? What is truth? The good news is that these questions are not answered in isolation. Faith and reason, informed by both Revelation and nature, provide an exciting context in which to examine the fundamental truths as well as the practical realities of our life.”
Hanning reminded his listeners at the Biblical conference that people take for granted their witnessing and participating in miraculous surroundings.
Contrasting the purposes of some notable Church councils, Hanning said the Council of Trent dealt with the errors of “the Reformers” opposing the Catholic Church, while the Second Vatican Council aimed not to combat heresies “but to re-propose the truth to a world that has forgotten it.”
Making his points with slides, Hanning said Vatican II aimed to have the deposit of Christian doctrine guarded and taught more efficaciously, and to respond to a world that placed excessive confidence in technical progress and material prosperity — in other words, seeking comfort over meaning, and options over substance.
Paruch said an unfortunate result of Vatican II was “the mess that happened to catechetics after the council, not caused by the council, but by some people who could be considered heretics.”
An influential figure in the area, she said, was Gabriel Moran, who was a religious brother at the time and said Revelation didn’t exist.
If it doesn’t exist, Paruch said, “then there’s no content to hand on, and there’s no response necessary.”
The idea that Revelation comes from the Christian community is “another bit of a heresy out there” following Vatican II, Paruch said, adding: “Revelation does not come from the Christian community. It comes from God.”
Contrasting the truths of the Bible with creative fiction, Paruch said she loves The Lord of The Rings novel, but she wouldn’t die for that book.
She displayed a slide of what Christianity offers: “The forgiveness of sins, justice, sanctification, redemption, adoption as children of God, the inheritance of Heaven, kinship with the Son of God. What news is more beautiful than this? God on Earth and man in Heaven!”
“There’s so much crap out there . . . about ‘My truth.’ There’s no such thing,” Paruch said, adding that Jesus is the Truth.
The world “doesn’t even know where to look” to have its emptiness alleviated, she said. “It’s not that they know and they’ve rejected it. Right now they don’t know. That Jesus is Somebody who’s foreign to them. They don’t know who He is.”
She thinks St. Pope Paul VI was a white martyr — that is, one who didn’t actually have his blood shed — because “he certainly went through hell” over proclaiming the 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae against artificial manipulation of procreation.
“We owe him a great deal, and I’m so glad when he was canonized” in 2018, Paruch said.
Earlier in the day, during her first talk, Paruch said that calling upon the Word of God — who is a Person, not just letters on a page — strengthens people’s lives.
“You can put the whole Bible on your phone and read it that way. . . . The Gospels are that near to us,” she said.
Phoenix Bishop Thomas Olmsted “is outstanding” as a bishop, Paruch said, “but we have many in the Church, and it is my great honor to work for them and with them.”
This longtime teaching nun said she had wanted to be in health care as a nun, not a teacher, but “you know how God is” for having His own plans for people.

Entertainers Joke About Abortion . . . But Americans Don’t Think It’s Funny

By JONATHON VAN MAREN

(LifeSiteNews) — Abortion activists have been trying to make feticide funny for a long time. There was the 2014 film Obvious Child, billed as a daring attempt to produce an “abortion comedy” in which a comedienne has a one-night stand, finds herself pregnant, and gets an abortion. It flopped. There was last year’s HBO production Unpregnant, a slapstick demonization of the pro-life movement that featured two girls on a road trip to procure an abortion, and Sacha Baron Cohen’s mockumentary in which the Borat character’s daughter goes to a crisis pregnancy center to mock a pro-life pastor.
As I’ve noted before, the entertainment industry has done a very effective job at making evil funny over the past several decades. If you can make people laugh at sin, you neutralize the moral weight of what is being done. From promiscuity to porn, TV sitcoms have made sin a punchline for generations of Westerners, and the result has been a moral deadening.
The entertainment elites have had the toughest time making abortion funny because the vast majority of Americans — even “pro-choice” people — find abortion to be a tragedy. When alleged comedienne Michelle Wolf joked about Mike Pence’s belief that abortion is murder at the 2018 White House Correspondents Dinner (“Don’t knock it ’til you try it — and when you do try it, really knock it…you’ve got to get that baby out of there”), she got groans in response rather than laughter. When comedians like Dave Chappelle and Louis C.K. have tackled the issue, they have done so in a way that emphasizes the seriousness of abortion rather than undermines it — even while supporting it.
But with recent pro-life victories across the United States, entertainers aren’t giving up on the idea that they can persuade audiences to see abortion as a punchline. Saturday Night Live star Cecily Strong, who worked for the corporate office of Planned Parenthood in Chicago for years because she is “passionate” about abortion, recently appeared alongside Colin Jost in a comedy sketch on Texas’ Heartbeat Bill. Dressed as “Goober the Clown,” Strong was introduced as a clown who had an abortion at age 23.
“I had an abortion the day before my 23rd birthday!” Strong announced to laughter. “Well, actually, I really don’t [want to talk about it]. But people keep bringing it up, so I gotta keep talking about freaking abortion. But it’s a rough subject, so we’re gonna do fun clown stuff to make it more palatable. Whee! Hey, who wants a balloon animal? You want a giraffe?…And I wish I didn’t have to do this because the abortion I had at 23 is my personal clown business. But that’s what some people in this country wanna discuss all the time, even though clown abortion was legalized in Clown v. Wade in 1973.”
Strong then shoehorned a series of “pro-choice” talking points into the sketch: “Did you know that one in three clowns will have an abortion in her lifetime? You don’t, because they don’t tell you. They don’t even know how to talk to other clowns about it, because when they do talk about it, if you were a clown who wasn’t the victim of something sad like clown-cest, they think your clown abortion wasn’t a ‘righteous clown abortion’…Laugh! I need it! I need you to laugh so hard, like the way I laughed when the doctor asked if I got pregnant on my way over to the clinic because I wasn’t very far along. Not like a funny-haha joke, but like, in a funny, you’re not an awful person and your life isn’t over joke. A-honka honka!”
She then goes on to say that she owes her career to having aborted her baby: “Here’s my truth. I know I wouldn’t be a clown on TV here today if it weren’t for the abortion I had the day before my 23rd birthday. Clowns have been helping each other end their pregnancies since the caves. It’s gonna happen so it oughta be safe, legal, and accessible. We will not go back to the alley. I mean, the last thing anyone wants is a bunch of dead clowns in a dark alley.”
Despite glowing mainstream media reviews predictably dubbing the sketch as brilliant, I have serious doubts that this sort of thing will work as effectively in neutralizing moral discomfort with abortion as it did for other moral issues. As Tricia Bruce noted in her fascinating Notre Dame study on American attitudes about abortion:
“None of the Americans we interviewed talked about abortion as a desirable good. Views range in terms of abortion’s preferred availability, justification, or need, but Americans do not uphold abortion as a happy event, or something they want more of. From restrictive to ambivalent to permissive, we instead heard about the desire to prevent, reduce, and eliminate potentially difficult or unexpected circumstances that predicate abortion decisions (whether of relationships, failed contraception, lack of education, financial hardship, or the like). Even those most supportive of abortion’s legality nonetheless talk about it as ‘hard,’ ‘serious,’ not ‘happy,’ or benign at best.”
Abortion isn’t funny, and Americans do not see it as funny — not even those who support it being legal. The entertainment industry can try its best, but at the end of the day, dead babies are no joke — and their audiences understand that.

A Beacon Of Light . . . Journeying Through All The Sacraments

By FR. RICHARD D. BRETON JR.

(Editor’s Note: Fr. Richard D. Breton Jr. is a priest of the Diocese of Norwich, Conn. He received his BA in religious studies and his MA in dogmatic theology from Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Conn.)

• + + This week we continue our journey through the Catechism’s chapter on, “The Sacramental Celebration of the Paschal Mystery.” This incorporates the celebration of all the sacraments.
  Last week we answered the questions, who celebrates the liturgy and how is it done. This week we will move another step further into our understanding by asking: When is the liturgy celebrated?
  There is often a misconception that the liturgy is only celebrated on Sundays. For most of the faithful, this is understandable considering that most participate in the liturgy on Sundays. By asking our question of when is the liturgy celebrated, you might be surprised by the answer because it isn’t as simple as you might think.
  Answering the “when” includes the liturgical seasons, the Lord’s Day, the liturgical calendar, and the Liturgy of the Hours. Each of these are part of “when” the liturgy is celebrated. Since the liturgy is alive, as the living memorial of salvation, its celebration can never be reduced to a specific time frame. So really, in asking when the liturgy is celebrated, we are actually asking, when is it not!
  Holy Mother Church, in her great wisdom, has provided that the “living character” of the liturgy be celebrated throughout the year. This is accomplished through liturgical seasons.

The Season Of Advent

Each year, we the faithful participate in seasons that enable us to experience the history of salvation in our lives. Each year we celebrate the Season of Advent as a time of waiting, in anticipation of the moment of the Incarnation, when our lives would be changed forever.
In this season we are called to prepare ourselves, not only for the coming of Christ at Christmas, but even more important to be prepared for His Second Coming. The Christmas season is a time to rejoice at the birth of our salvation. For Christ’s birth was to set us free! The Christmas season forces us to reflect on how humanity was forever changed by the birth of our Redeemer.
The season of Lent is quite different, however, because it is a season that requires us to look deep within. Lent is a season of evaluation and penance. During Lent we are invited to look deep into ourselves and examine our faults, with the intention of undergoing a conversion of heart. The Easter Season is a time of great rejoicing!
For through the Passion, death, and Resurrection, along with His Ascension into Heaven, we have been redeemed and promised a share in everlasting life. Ordinary Time introduces us to the working of Jesus’ public ministry. Each encounter during this time reveals a lesson for us to follow in our own lives.
Another way the liturgy is celebrated is on Sundays. Sundays have a preeminent place in the lives of the faithful. The Catechism reminds us of this when it says:
“By a tradition handed down from the apostles which took its origin from the very day of Christ’s Resurrection, the Church celebrates the Paschal mystery every seventh day, which day is appropriately called the Lord’s Day or Sunday.”
“The day of Christ’s Resurrection is both the first day of the week, the memorial of the first day of creation, and the ‘eighth day,’ on which Christ after His ‘rest’ on the great Sabbath inaugurates the ‘day that the Lord has made,’ the ‘day that knows no evening.’ The Lord’s Supper is its center, for there the whole community of the faithful encounter the risen Lord who invites them to his banquet” (CCC, n. 1166).
In this way the “living character” of the liturgy is maintained so that the faithful may participate each Sunday, commemorating the Lord’s Day.
In the same way that the liturgical seasons help us to celebrate the liturgy, the liturgical calendar also assists us. The calendar puts into perspective the celebrations of the church’s seasons. During the course of the year we celebrate the entirety of the life of Christ. This is accomplished through the sequential placement of solemnities, feasts, memorials, and ferial days.
We know that each celebration completes the work of the paschal mystery, but the arrangement assists us in our ability to remain focused on the mystery of our salvation. The Catechism explains this by placing special significance around the celebration of Easter.
Easter is the purpose for which Christ came, to release us from sin and death, and to establish for us the means for our salvation. All of the other celebrations revolve around the Resurrection.
In the same way, the solemnity of Christmas, the birth of the Savior, links us to the Passion, death, and Resurrection celebrated at Easter.

The Role Of Mary

There is, however, another who also plays a pre-eminent role and participated in the plan of salvation; this person is Mary. The solemnities of Mary, like the Annunciation, are connected to the Incarnation. Mary’s fiat paved the way for the birth of Christ and became an example to us of how to interact with the Lord. The feasts of martyrs and saints offer us an example to follow in commemorating their holy lives. In the same way, they become for us models of holiness to follow on our path to everlasting life.
Lastly, the liturgy is always alive when the Church is at prayer. In this way, the Liturgy of the Hours plays a great role in maintaining the living character of the liturgy. Imagine, every day throughout the whole world the Liturgy of the Hours is prayed as an extension of the Eucharistic Liturgy. In this way the entire Church participates in the responsibility of making the liturgy alive. Each person participates, however, in different ways.
Priests are participating by their promise of devotion to prayer and word, by their pastoral ministry. Religious are participating by their charism of religious life. The faithful are invited, as much as possible, to also pray the hours:
“Pastors of souls should see to it that the principal hours, especially Vespers, are celebrated in common in church on Sundays and on the more solemn feasts. The laity, too, are encouraged to recite the divine office, either with the priests, or among themselves, or even individually” (CCC, n. 1175).

At All Times

So, as we have seen, the liturgy is not an event that exists for a particular moment in time. The liturgy is the living and breathing aspect of the Church where she finds her life. The liturgy, celebrated everywhere at all times, is the portal through which the Church is constantly connected to the Divine, the divine liturgy of Heaven.
This is why so much debate has gone on regarding liturgical styles. For some there is a preference for the Traditional Latin Mass, as allowed in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, where there exists a more tangible and visible element of the sacred. For others, the Novus Ordo, or Ordinary Form of the Mass, may resonate more.
Both are, however, living, breathing occasions for the faithful to unite themselves more perfectly to the Lord and His Church.
So when we are asked the question: When is the liturgy celebrated? Our answer should be . . . at all times!
Every time any aspect of the liturgical life of the Church is celebrated whether in the liturgical seasons, the yearly calendar of solemnities, feasts, memorials, the Lord’s Day on Sunday, and even in the praying of the Liturgy of the Hours; the liturgy continues and gives glory to God.
All of us are participants of this and have a role in maintaining the life of the Church.

Border Life With Illegals And Smugglers

By BARBARA SIMPSON

(Editor’s Note: This commentary was first published by WorldNetDaily on November 19, 2021.)

• + + As I scroll through the news on the Internet as well as in local newspapers, I’m struck that the reports concerning illegal aliens crossing our southern border tend to focus on numbers — the increase of border crossers over the month or year.
  We’re told the border is wide open, that the Biden administration has done no more than eliminate Donald Trump’s programs to control illegal border crossings. The result has been that there is virtually nothing to stem the illegal crossings, which, we are told, have increased more than 130 percent over last year.
  These millions of people are gathering again under that infamous Texas bridge while hundreds are being flown at government expense into the interior of this country and just dropped into cities and towns with no notice to local governments.
  Thomas Feeley, who spent 25 years with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, just retired as ICE director in New York State. In an interview with the New York Post as well as with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, Feeley was to the point and blunt. He said he left the federal agency out of frustration over how the Biden administration’s border policies were jeopardizing national security — adding, “We’re pretty much screwed as a country.”
  He said he is more than concerned about the lack of attention from Washington concerning the border and “what the good men and women of ICE are not being allowed to do.”
  In other words, ICE is being told by the administration not to follow the laws passed by Congress — with the result being mass illegal immigration into this country. These people are not being checked for criminal backgrounds; there are no health examinations, and many are infected with COVID. The effect of this on Americans is being ignored by the feds.
  Feeley noted, “As a member of the Senior Executive Service, a service entrusted by the public to ensure whatever administration is in charge follow the law, we currently are not. To fight and argue every day about not arresting or releasing horrible criminals to the street, quite frankly is disgusting.”
  I don’t know about you, but I am proud there are honorable men like Feeley in government and distressed that they leave because of administration politics.
  Another aspect of the border issue concerns the people, U.S. citizens, who own land along the border and have to contend on a daily basis with the illegal aliens crossing their property.
  It seems that national news outlets aren’t interested in their problems, but if you check with local news coverage or publications dealing with ranch issues, you will find out what is going on.
  And it isn’t good.
  A front-page story in the October 28 Western AG Reporter is headlined, “A Lifestyle Sadly Disrupted.”
  The article describes the incidents on the border ranch of Erica Valdez and her family. Erica Valdez was speaking to the October meeting of the South Dakota Women In AG. She and her husband raise cattle and registered quarter horses on their ranch in Animas, N.M., in the very southwest corner of the state. They have a homeschooled 15-year-old daughter.
  She said that over time, they mostly traded labor with three or four area families, of which there are few.
  She also said illegals from Mexico have long been a presence on their ranch — mostly families looking for food, water, and work. But now, she says, “that population has changed.”
  This is what she told the audience: “Heavily armed men in camouflage have replaced families, with most carrying 50-pound bales of drugs.
  “Some of them are human smugglers bringing people in and out of the U.S.”
  Valdez told of one occasion when she was on horseback and encountered four men in camouflage and black masks watching her. She rode past with no incident, and when the area was checked the next day it was revealed to be a spotters’ camp on a slope, manned by someone with high-tech optics and radio to stay in touch with drug dealers.
  There have been many such incidents. The first was in 2010, when a rancher checking on such issues radioed the Border Patrol to say there was an illegal alien in distress. He said he would check on it. Nothing was heard from him; the next morning his body and that of his dog were discovered. The shooter was tracked to Mexico and never apprehended.
  Another incident was in 2015, when a man was kidnapped from his home by illegals who filled his truck with drugs and drove him to Willcox, Ariz., leaving him there. A public meeting was held. More than 1,200 attended, but nothing came of it.
  A third incident was in March of this year and involved a family with three daughters, ages 12, 8, and 6.
  The six-year-old was kidnapped from the kitchen, and no one heard a sound. Fortunately, the Border Patrol found her six hours later, wandering down a road.
  Beyond the danger to humans, Ms. Valdez told of the physical damages — fences cut, drained water lines, stolen vehicles, attacks on livestock, and break-ins to houses and outbuildings.
  The New Mexico border is 181 miles long; the Trump wall covered 103 miles, but Biden has taken down most of that. According to Valdez, landowners are responsible for 100 percent of the repairs or breaks in their own fencing.
  Bottom line: What is needed is more manpower on the border, and that will not happen until Joseph Biden is honest with the American people as to what is happening on the border, what he intends to do about it, and what it will mean to our freedom.

No Room In Inn For “Comfort And Joy”. . . Wisconsin Makes More National News, While Writer OKs Biden Defiance

By DEXTER DUGGAN

The last thing fun-seeking Wisconsin families would have thought of as they headed to a local Christmas parade the Sunday before Thanksgiving was destruction and death. But that’s the wild milieu of an unrestrained society that left-wing radicals have set loose around the world, including in some recent Christmas seasons.
A maroon SUV driver raced down the street where the Waukesha, Wis., parade was in progress on the late afternoon of November 21, injuring dozens of adults and children, some critically. By November 23, a total of six died, including an eight-year-old boy. Police said the driver’s maneuvers showed he intended to hit people, then fled the scene.
The Waukesha Chamber of Commerce had posted a page online to promote attending the “58th Annual Christmas Parade” with the words “Comfort and Joy.”
The New York Post reported on November 23 that a prosecutor at the suspect’s bail hearing said, “Everything was done to get him to stop, and he just simply continued down the roadway causing death and destruction in his path.”
It turned out he was a black career criminal currently out on bail of only $1,000 for a domestic-violence charge. His race was notable simply because some dominant media were slow or reluctant to disclose that — although the race of an unknown white offender would have leapt to the top of their coverage, as it definitely did for teenager Kyle Rittenhouse in a separate Wisconsin case.
Facts about race, like many other facts, routinely are manipulated in “news” coverage these days by agenda-obsessed media determined to dictate a preferred narrative.
If a hypothetical white offender in Waukesha had been a proclaimed Donald Trump fan, that would have dominated headlines. However, some conservative media including the New York Post, UK Daily Mail, and UK Sun reported that actual suspect Darrell Brooks Jr. left just the opposite sort of trail, with vile attacks in rapper lyrics against Trump and police.
Rittenhouse had been acquitted of serious charges including homicide in a jury verdict delivered only two days earlier, on November 19, in another southeast Wisconsin location, Kenosha, for shooting three white men, two of whom died, during riots there in August 2020.
Was Brooks upset over the Rittenhouse acquittal and took his anger out on the parade? His motive had not been disclosed as of when this article was written overnight on November 23-24.
Although all three of Rittenhouse’s assailants were white, many in dominant media still played the teenager as a white racist because, as they told the story, he fired his rifle during a “racial-justice protest,” or similar words to that effect, instead of using an accurate description of rioting, looting, and arson.
Indeed, many who heard of the case confessed that, based on the coverage they saw, they thought Rittenhouse shot black people. He had been described recklessly as a vigilante on the prowl to kill protesters advocating racial justice.
The facts were that Rittenhouse helped clean graffiti off a wall earlier in the day of August 25, 2020, gave medical assistance, and had been asked to help protect a used-car lot from attack. He carried a rifle for protection.
He wore plastic gloves for the medical role, leading some vacuous critics to claim he was trying to hide his fingerprints. However, Rittenhouse’s unmasked face was plain for any person or camera to see at a time when many phones busily recorded events. Little ridges on his fingertips mattered less for evidence when he chose to go without the concealment of a commonly used mask.
As was often the case across the U.S., politicians either told police to stand down against violence by left-wing attackers, or else there was so much violence that police forces were stretched too thin to deal with it effectively. Rittenhouse actually was in a heroic role trying to serve others amid intentional left-wing chaos.
A 17-year-old son having to carry a rifle in volatile surroundings probably would worry many parents. But it wasn’t the first time 17-year-olds had done so in U.S. or world history, and when authorities for public safety won’t act or are overwhelmed, even young citizens may have to assume the responsibility.
It didn’t help Rittenhouse’s reputation, of course, that dementia-ridden presidential candidate Joe Biden in 2020 quickly suggested he was part of a racist militia. “Allegedly he’s part of a militia coming out in the state of Illinois,” Biden said. “Have you ever heard the president [Trump] say one negative thing about white supremacists? Have you ever heard it?”
After the teenager’s acquittal, Fox News reported on November 23 that White House press secretary Jen Psaki declined to back down from Biden’s 2020 comment. Indeed, after the acquittal, bleary Biden said he was “angry and concerned” about it — without his justifying why he was angry with the jury’s decision after more than three days of deliberation.
On November 22 pundit Bill O’Reilly told his “morning update” radio audience that although he’d been willing to give Biden a chance as his presidential term began, his subsequent performance has been frightening.
“Another three years of him will bring tragedy to this nation,” O’Reilly said. “Bank on it.”
However, cognitively impaired Biden often is absolved of responsibility for his failures by powerful defenders, which relieves him of feeling any pressure to shape up and act like the real president of the United States.
Indeed, two days before Thanksgiving, “middle-class Joe” flew off on November 23 for yet another prolonged holiday, this time to stay at a financier’s estate reportedly worth $30 million at luxurious Nantucket, Mass. Psaki said Biden had no plan on his schedule to visit grieving Waukesha.

An Embarrassing Article

A different and strange defense of Biden was posted on November 21 at the “Intelligencer” column of New York magazine by its left-wing political reporter Ed Kilgore. The embarrassing article was headlined, “Excluding Catholics from Communion was once the norm.”
Veteran Democratic activist Kilgore decided he was able to explicate Catholic Church doctrine in order to absolve the Democratic Party’s pro-abortion fanatics like Biden and Nancy Pelosi from having to obey well-established Church law — and thereby let them continue their convenient double lives of “good Catholic” and good pro-abortion Democrat.
Confusing the words “Communion” and “excommunication,” Kilgore declared that a practice known as “self-excommunication” means not receiving Communion when one is morally unworthy.
Trying to build a case by seeing some of the same letters in two different words could as well make a person declare that the midday meal must be eaten at sea, or at the International Space Station, because of the words “lunch” and “launch.”
A person declining to receive the Eucharist because he’s aware of a serious sin that first must be confessed is not in a state of excommunication according to any accurate definition. A trip to the confessional for a worthy absolution brings the problem to an end.
Intentionally missed a Sunday Mass once without a serious reason? That’s seriously wrong, but it’s not of the same order as intentionally killing, or helping someone else to kill, a completely innocent preborn person. Or millions of them.
Kilgore tries to tell us that the Church interferes with Catholics’ alleged right to Communion by putting any restriction on Eucharistic reception. Well, try this comparison. A husband and wife are in line for Communion when the hair-trigger husband pauses to brutally beat the wife bloody, then he steps right up for the Eucharist.
Is the priest interfering with the man’s “right” to consume the sacrament by withholding it until the man atones for this vicious public attack — not only with his wife, but also with God over there in the confessional? Is the Church being a bully or a meddler by saying such a plain wrong precludes Communion until there’s sincere repentance?
And if beating his wife in public requires redress, what about an abortion clinic manager, or the politician who sends tax funds to the clinic to mangle and dismember countless preborn babies? Abortion certainly isn’t the only very serious sin that brings excommunication, but it’s certainly one of them. Not “self-excommunication,” but real excommunication.
Kilgore is correct that for quite a while many Catholics declined to receive Communion regularly because of an excessive sense of unworthiness. But misplaced unworthiness isn’t the same as actual unworthiness.
And nowhere does Kilgore mention that more than a century ago a very “conservative” Pope, Pius X, actively encouraged the blessed reform of more frequent reception of the Eucharist. Either Kilgore simply is ignorant of this important fact or he omits it because that ruins his presentation about a new age of blessedness that supposedly burst forth with Vatican II and/or Pope Francis.
After detours through the brambles about topics including the interdiction of nations and penitence expressed as abstinence from marital sex, the desperate Democrat Kilgore says that Communion must not be just “a reward for exemplary behavior or rigorous obedience to Church teachings.” But this is just a Kilgore straw man.
He concludes that clerics must not regard “Communion as a church-owned property to bestow and withhold. They are not worthy recipients of this power.”
The “conservative” bishops that Kilgore berates ask nothing more than any practicing Catholics should expect.
People in the pews rightfully would be surprised if any Catholic politician who regularly advocated machine-gunning every illegal immigrant at the border was treated with deference in the Communion line, as if such a public posture should have no effect on his spiritual standing, and that the Church has no right to pass selfish judgment against him.

Full Throttle

A news release from Catholic League president Bill Donohue, headlined “Biden’s war on religious liberty spikes,” enumerates direct attacks on the Church and society at large to continue imposing and expanding the Biden administration’s embrace of the Culture of Death and Depravity, including bringing Catholic institutions to heel on abortion and transgenderism.
Donohue said: “The evidence shows that transgender rights and abortion rights are being pursued full throttle. Their success depends on the destruction of religious liberty exemptions put in place by the courts, lawmakers, and administrative agencies. More than any other entity, it is Catholic institutions that are under the most severe attack.”

Where’s The Outrage?

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Bob Dole’s challenge during the last days of the 1996 presidential campaign echoes in the public memory. After rattling off a brief selection of the multitude of crimes committed by Bill and Hillary Clinton, he asked 100 million viewers of the last televised debate, “Can you imagine former President Bush doing one of those things? And you never imagine Bob Dole doing one of those things, either. So where’s the outrage?”
To add another quarter-century of perspective to the question of the Senior Senator from Kansas, we turn to his predecessor as Senate Majority Leader, Tennessee’s Howard Baker, who famously quipped, “That door doesn’t swing both ways.”
This past week Wisconsin has seen two classic illustrations of the Bob Dole Dilemma.
In Kenosha Friday, November 19 the jury in the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse found that the 17-year-old was legally defending himself when he shot three criminal attackers. These criminals were taking part in a violent riot that engulfed much of the city in flames. For over a year, the usual suspects in the media and the Glitterati Gang piled on. MSNBC host Tiffany Cross, only one of thousands of screamers, called Rittenhouse “a little murderous white supremacist.”
All three of Rittenhouse’s attackers in Kenosha were Caucasian.
“There’s nothing more frightening in America today than an angry white man,” fumed CNN’s John Blake. Blake and his colleagues routinely fail to report at all the thousands of murders of blacks that occur every year in Democrat-run cities, but undoubtedly that’s because this quiet holocaust arouses no outrage.

Revolution? Or The Rule Of Law? We’ll See

When the jury foreman announced Kyle’s “Not Guilty” verdict, the predictable rage-rousers hit the streets. Even Jesse Jackson chimed in; the always-dependable grifter and shakedown artist led a protest that stopped traffic in downtown Chicago as his companions chanted, “No Fascist USA, Organize Now For Real Revolution.”
Revolution? What does that have to do with Rittenhouse? Well, perhaps the Left has recognized him as a symbol of the outrage of America’s Deplorable Millions at the anarchist Left’s rioting, looting, and destruction throughout the country that the media dutifully ignored in 2020. That outrage might also explain the strong and widespread national support for Rittenhouse — so pervasive that the Left has resorted to calling an incident that had no racial dimension a searing example of “white supremacy.”
On that note, Joe Biden sided with the revolutionaries. The White House released his rather curious statement following the verdict. “While the verdict in Kenosha will leave many Americans feeling angry and concerned, myself included,” it read, “we must acknowledge that the jury has spoken.”
“Acknowledge”? Even Joe can’t bring himself to affirm the American principle of the Rule of Law. But there might be a good reason.
Since the verdict, Rittenhouse has publicly accused Biden of defamation. During the 2020 presidential campaign, candidate Biden released an ad calling Rittenhouse a “white supremacist.” Will Rittenhouse sue Biden, who was a private citizen at the time? We recall how another 17-year-old, Nick Sandmann, won quick settlements from CNN and The Washington Post, who had called him a “racist” for his calm demeanor when harassed by a fake Vietnam veteran during the 2019 March for Life.
In fact, Sandmann has suggested that Rittenhouse sue Biden for defamation. And when he does, Joe might have to resort to CNN’s pathetic claim made to the court that the term “racist” was so meaningless that it couldn’t be construed as defamation.
But that didn’t last long. The network folded and settled the Sandmann defamation case. So did The Washington Post. And Sandmann says Rittenhouse should consider suing them all.
Back to Biden. His statement continued, “I ran on a promise to bring Americans together, because I believe that what unites us is far greater than what divides us. I know that we’re not going to heal our country’s wounds overnight, but I remain steadfast in my commitment to do everything in my power to ensure that every American is treated equally, with fairness and dignity, under the law.”
Another event in Wisconsin two days later demonstrated that Joe Biden and his champions in America’s Oligarchy have no intention of honoring that “steadfast commitment” — not at all.
The Revolutionaries’ Rittenhouse Rage will go on for years. He brought into focus — for anyone willing to see it — what Judge Schroeder allowed Kyle’s attorneys to call “rioting, pillaging, and looting.” Thousands of criminal rioters wrought that destruction not only in Kenosha, but throughout the country last year.
And the media ignored it.

Rage Turned Upside Down

Two days after the Rittenhouse verdict, and fifty miles up the road, a terrorist mowed down dozens of innocent Christmas revelers, killing six, four of them grandmothers, one octogenarian, and a six-year-old boy. He also injured two Catholic priests, 17 schoolchildren, and dozens of others.
No outrage.
Now admittedly, Majority Leader Howard Baker’s “swinging door” would have slammed pretty danged hard if some of the Waukesha circumstances had been, shall we say, reversed. If the driver had been a Caucasian Catholic super-trad, and if the marchers had been black members of Reverend Robinson’s Christ Kingdom Ministry at Waukesha’s First Baptist Church, the outrage would go worldwide and golden casket factory production lines would start working around the clock.
But in Waukesha, it was the other way around. So, no outrage.
That door swings only one way.
From the start, the front page of The Washington Post quickly diluted the Waukesha massacre by calling it the “latest among deadly car-ramming incidents.” It demeans the celebration’s religious character by repeatedly referring to it as a “holiday” parade. The Post’s front page even had the gall to shove Waukesha aside to resurrect once more the false “white supremacists in Charlottesville” narrative that it has been relentlessly peddled since 2017.
“The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize,” said Vladimir Lenin.
Remember the Tunisian Jihadist who hijacked a truck and drove it through Berlin’s Kristkindlmarkt five years ago, killing twelve and maiming dozens more? He was correctly identified as a terrorist.
Yet, although the marchers and other celebrants in Waukesha were indeed terrorized, you’ll never hear the media refer to the massacre as a “terrorist incident.”
Nor will you ever hear the Waukesha mass murderer called a “terrorist.” That is a forbidden word on this occasion.
No, that title will be conferred only on Kyle Rittenhouse.
But not here. Because Darrell Brooks, the Waukesha murderer, was a career criminal. His rap sheet is surprisingly similar to those of Kyle Rittenhouse’s attackers an hour down the road in Kenosha. Brooks is a serial felon, a registered sex offender.
After the carnage, Brooks fled the scene but was soon apprehended by police. According to the criminal complaint filed against him, “he was driving 25 miles an hour and ‘had no emotion on his face’ as he accelerated. He could have made a right turn out of the parade route but instead began to ‘rapidly accelerate’ into the crowd of parade participants, the complaint says. The officer believed ‘this was an intentional act to strike and hurt as many people as possible. . . . He observed the vehicle appeared to be intentionally moving side to side, striking multiple people, and bodies and objects were flying from the area of the vehicle’.” [Text acquired by Heavy.com]
In coming weeks, more facts will emerge about the Waukesha terrorist massacre. Yes, the media and the Biden administration will ignore them, even as they continue their assault on “white supremacism.” It’s our job to make them remember.