By DEXTER DUGGAN
Propaganda wars around the world seek victories by winning bystanders. Persuading spectators from afar to choose one side over the other can be as useful in a fight as battlefield victories.
“You cannot imagine the pleasure you get from cutting off a baby’s head,” said a startling headline at the anti-Islamist website Jihad Watch on September 14, which was picked up by the religion-news aggregator PewSit
ter.com.
The bloodthirsty comment was attributed to a fighter with the Islamic State who described what he’d do when bursting in upon rival Muslims — death to the grandmother, the wife, then the baby.
The description sounds credible these days in light of the Islamic State heavily publicizing its beheadings of bound captives, plus reports that women and children are being slaughtered.
Yet an online reader with an Arabic-style name replied that the item about the baby was just America making up “weird stories.”
At least no one, not even the Islamic State, says the beheadings of journalists are imaginary.
Nor does the Islamic State describe its appalling beheadings as “reproductive health care” or an example of “personal choice” under Obamacare.
Millions of dismemberings and other destruction of the innocent continue to take place right in the United States. And any person who dares to question these cruel deaths is denounced in terms every bit as strong as those used by an Islamic fighter decrying “infidels.”
This is massive permissive abortion, the most holy sacrament of the Planned Parenthood priesthood, which demands that the blood continue to flow in mighty rivers.
But this bloody priesthood and its many adherents in the communications media don’t want to make and publicize any videos of these shocking executions. It’s ghastly, and it’s fact, but it could be stopped. Limbs torn away, brains sucked out, heads twisted off, skulls crushed, poison poured in.
The priesthood says to keep these executions quiet, keep them hidden, keep the nation in darkness. The adherents in the media are fine with hiding these facts, lest a newly informed nation demand they be stopped.
What happens to the bodies? Who takes them away, and how? Where are they left? Routine daily maintenance questions that one would think don’t even exist.
Back in the days of human slavery in the U.S., slave owners didn’t pretend they were doing something else or hiding how it worked. The slave auctions were at public squares in daylight. The masters didn’t come up with terms like “reproductive health care” as a synonym for slavery, or, perhaps, “agricultural enhancement assistance” as a way to describe cultivating land with humans in bondage.
They did, however, say slaves weren’t fully human. “Not fully human,” like the victims of abortion. And today the nation’s abortionists continue to target and prey upon blacks every bit as much as slave owners did.
Meanwhile, some of the Islamic State fighters are said to have arrived in the Mideast from the Western world, including Britain and the U.S.
It seems unlikely that a beheader could go back to his Western home, proudly show off videos of his executing journalists, and still be welcomed publicly into his previous church on Sunday without expressing repentance. But when the face of evil grows familiar, strange things can happen to conscience.
Not just the conscience of the executioner, but also of the neighbors.
U.S. abortionists and the politicians and judges who protect them act as if they’re doing nothing more serious than playing a round of golf, even though they’re enabling tens of millions of deaths of innocents.
For year after year, pro-lifers have asked that the nation’s Catholic bishops merely enforce what is stated in canon 915, which includes this strong prohibition: Catholics “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.”
The pro-lifers aren’t asking that bishops snoop through locked records or peek through windows at midnight to see when a private citizen may stray from the path and thereby require sacramental Confession.
This is instead a case of well-known figures giving public scandal and misleading other people about right and wrong.
A familiar politician who says she’s Catholic, for instance, publicly, obstinately places herself against foundational Church moral teaching by repeatedly promoting permissive abortion, helping enforce it in the legal system, and leading others astray. Yet the politician continues to claim her fidelity to the Church and receives the Eucharist right in the center aisle.
Would a jihadist with an old Catholic cultural affinity be permitted to receive Communion while his face is in the news with the deadly knife? Maybe the answer would be yes if he persists and bishops prefer not to offend such assertive folks.
Michael Hichborn is the director of the Defend the Faith project at the Virginia-based American Life League. The Wanderer asked him about claims that denying the Eucharist to such public figures is an inflammatory issue. Hichborn replied on September 16:
“Denying Holy Communion to those who are obstinately persisting in grave, manifest sins is only inflammatory to those who either do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist or that souls go to Hell for sacrilegious Communions. Unfortunately, too many Catholics view the prescription of canon 915 as a punishment, and not the pastoral care for souls in grave danger.
“By sweeping the matter aside as an issue that’s in the past, a casual observer would be justified in wondering if St. Paul was not being serious when he said that those who receive Communion unworthily eat and drink judgment upon themselves,” he continued.
“The reality not being discussed when questions of denial of Communion are raised is simply this: A priest or bishop who denies Communion to one who has publicly persisted in grave sin is courageously barring that soul from calling the judgment of the Lord upon themselves,” Hichborn said.
Hichborn didn’t mention any names. However, on September 4 the recently created Crux website posted the second of three interview installments between Crux’s associate editor, John L. Allen Jr., and Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York.
Crux is a new journalistic endeavor “covering all things Catholic,” it says, birthed by the determinedly liberal Boston Globe.
This exchange occurred:
Allen: “Mid-term elections are close, and soon the 2016 race will heat up. Where are the American bishops today on the issue of Communion for pro-choice Catholic politicians?”
Dolan: “In a way, I like to think it’s an issue that served us well in forcing us to do a serious examination of conscience about how we can best teach our people about their political responsibilities, but by now that inflammatory issue is in the past.
“I don’t hear too many bishops saying it’s something that we need to debate nationally, or that we have to decide collegially. I think most bishops have said, ‘We trust individual bishops in individual cases.’ Most don’t think it’s something for which we have to go to the mat,” Dolan concluded.
One would “go to the mat” only for a serious issue, perhaps? Like cutting off a journalist’s head? As long as the head is a baby’s, let’s trust individual bishops to decide if this is very serious? Such questions are needed when a top U.S. Church official seems rather untroubled by the implications. He didn’t even correct Allen on using the phony term “pro-choice.”
Let’s imagine Allen had asked the cardinal: “Some churchgoing Catholics are very concerned about dangerous drug smugglers and gang members illegally flooding into the U.S. and hurting Americans. These Catholics have begun to shoot invaders on sight at the border. Where are the bishops on this issue?”
Who could envision the cardinal replying that the bishops’ consensus is to avoid “going to the mat” over the Catholic gunman issue?
Another Fishwrap?
The launch of Crux attracted the attention of former Wanderer columnist Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, among others. In a September 16 post at his blog, wdtprs.com, Zuhlsdorf wrote, “Crux is slick. They have had a big, splashy rollout. My jury is still out. My sense is, however, that Crux is poised to out-Herod Herod, or out-Fishwrap Fishwrap.”
Fishwrap is Zuhlsdorf’s name for journalist Allen’s former employer, the National Catholic Reporter, whose left-wing politics fortunately didn’t dominate Allen’s writing there.
And, in a September 8 interview with the National Catholic Register, Allen was quoted:
“I want people to think of Crux as neither left- nor right-wing. It is a place you can go to see what is going on without being told how to think about it. We will have columns strongly arguing both sides, and I will have my eyes on this to make sure it all evens out. Will there be any operating policy that a particular point of view not be included? We have talked about that, but I don’t think so.”
To which one reader of the Register article replied online: “Coverage evenly divided between attacks on Catholicism and defense of Catholicism is not my idea of a sound news source, but it would represent a big improvement for the Globe.”
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