By CHRISTOPHER MANION
The Dog Days of August are upon us, but the news keeps happening.
Steve Mosher tells The Wanderer that “The Sino-Vatican Agreement, under the terms of which the Vatican would collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) on the appointment of bishops, is up for renewal.” This is not good news, he says.
“The CCP has used the agreement as cover for extinguishing the Underground Church in China, while at the same time intensifying its control over the so-called Patriotic Church. And yet the Vatican, as a high-ranking prelate recently signaled, was prepared to extend the agreement for another year or two. Looking at the increasingly dismal situation on the ground in China for believers of all faiths, it is hard to know why.”
Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute and a noted China scholar, is referring to Argentine Bishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the scandal-ridden confidante of Pope Francis in Rome. Stay tuned.
Meanwhile the Vatican continues to highlight Global Warming, and the USCCB is joining in. Our cash-strapped bishops have closed hundreds of schools and threaten to close dozens more for lack of federal funding, but last month they announced that the Catholic Campaign for Human Development will fight Global Warming by approving a “$500,000 Strategic National Grant to put ‘Laudato Si’ in Action.”
While the bishops blame their cash crunch on the Wuhan Virus, they are silent on the devastating impact wrought on our healthcare system by Mexican sex, drug, and human-trafficking cartels. Latin American expert Todd Bensman reports that our border state hospitals have been inundated with Mexicans who cross the border to be treated by American practitioners, all of them funded by the taxpayer. Bensman suggests that authorities investigate the resulting “spikes in hospitalizations,” but border bishops are silent.
And Bishop Mark Brennan, the new ordinary of Wheeling, reports that his corrupt predecessor, Michael Bransfield, has flown the coop without accounting for the $21 million in diocesan funds that are still missing. Bransfield has also failed to pay back the diocese $800,000 demanded by Brennan at the Vatican’s behest. Also on the lam is “Uncle Ted” McCarrick, and there’s no McCarrick Report either.
It might well be time for federal charges, including a thorough investigation of those bishops who received “gifts” of dirty money from Bransfield and McCarrick. We pray that Baltimore Archbishop William Lori, one of Bransfield’s beneficiaries, would cooperate with investigators, rather than embarrassing the Church by claiming some sort of “Prelate Privilege.”
Pelosi Leaves Town, Nobody Misses Her
On the political front, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the House would stay in session until another virus relief bill passed. Then she went home anyway, and President Trump signed four executive orders with the bare bones assistance without Pelosi’s bailouts for corrupt states, municipalities, and marijuana dealers, daring Pelosi to challenge them.
Meanwhile, “Catholic Joe” Biden selected as his running mate California Sen. Kamala Harris, who began her political career as the mistress of powerful married Democrat Willie Brown. Bluntly put, without her notorious affair with Willie, Kamala would still a zero, not a hero.
Well, there goes the “ethics” vote. But Hillary says “no fair!” Any criticism of Kamala Harris will be “sexist” and “racist,” she advises her media lapdogs, still fawning after all these years.
Longtime feminine (= not feminist) leader Tammy Bruce has a better suggestion. Let’s just employ the same rabid attack-dog rules with Kamala that the media adopted when Sarah Palin was John McCain’s running mate.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden is hawking his Catholic faith as a central feature of his character. He knows our desperate bishops will keep their mouths shut, so what’s he got to lose?
Allow me to paraphrase an old-time theologian: “Being a Catholic does not make you more holy; it only makes you more guilty when you sin.”
And speaking of the election, you might want to brush up on the Electoral College. The returns on Election Day will not be final, given the perfidy of “mail-in ballots.” But there is another election day: by law Electors will cast their ballots nationwide on December 14. Until then, chaos will reign. And it might last well into 2021.
On to local politics. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has finally condemned the rioters who have been pillaging and wrecking Chicago businesses for weeks. To counter Lightfoot’s reprimand, Black Lives Matter leaders insisted that the millions of dollars’ worth of goods looted on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile were just a form of “reparations.”
Curiously, BLM leaders felt compelled to add a moral argument for their devastation. The businesses they looted or demolished were insured, they said, apparently absolved by a feature of the very capitalist system that they are bent on destroying.
And in New York, Gov. Mario Cuomo, blamed for thousands of deaths of coronavirus patients in nursing homes, refused to authorize an independent investigation because it would be “political.”
Well, that was easy!
Cuomo is taking his lead from longtime Bill Clinton apologist Paul Begala, whose approach to such accusations was simple: “Deny, Deny, Deny — Hey, so what??? That’s Old News!!!” Begala recently resurfaced mouthing some really old news — that Republicans are going to destroy Social Security and Medicare. Pray that he soon goes back into his hole.
The Master Mystery
Mary Mitchell, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, writes that “what was once a socially acceptable term used to describe a person’s dominance has come under scrutiny.”
Specifically, some Houston realtors now view the terms “master bedroom” and “master bathroom” as sexist and racist.
Our dependable Chicago provocateur-in-chief Joe Morris comments. “Let the record show that the same word has been used for millennia in Latin and English, and its cognates in other languages, to refer to the African (that is, Egyptian) masters of Israelite slaves, and Roman masters of Greek slaves, and Black African masters of Black African slaves — who, of course, were the masters who sold them to their subsequent Arab, Spanish, Portuguese, French, English, and other slavemasters.”
Morris goes on to observe that “the useful word ‘grandfather,’ when employed as a verb, means to allow a pre-existing right, privilege, or usage to continue notwithstanding subsequent changes in law under which the right, privilege, or usage is not granted to newcomers or in new cases.”
Even though that very precise definition has been embedded in the Common Law for centuries, Morris reports that “James Milkey, a justice of the Appeals Court of Massachusetts, now objects to the word and the associated phrase, ‘grandfather clause’ and, in a precious instance of judicial virtue signaling, insists that he shan’t use it again.
“The phrase ‘grandfather clause’ was once used by anti-Reconstruction politicians in the American South to describe provisions in election regulations that exempted voters (read White Democrat voters) whose ancestors had already been on voting rolls from meeting onerous tests imposed on new (read Black Republican) would-be voting registrants,” the justice wrote.
“You might think that if the word ‘grandfather’ is thus rendered so offensive,” Morris says, “the party label used for themselves by the politicians who imposed and perpetuated Jim Crow, and who before that had championed and defended slavery — ‘Democrats’ — should also be shunned by Ms. Mitchell and Justice Milkey,” says Morris. ”But somehow, I suspect, they’ll find a way to draw a line.”
In Orwell’s 1984, Syme was well on his way to reducing the number of words in the Newspeak Dictionary to some 500.
Of course, Syme was vaporized. Wouldn’t it be interesting to see “Democrat” vaporized too?
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