Abby Johnson, the former Planned Parenthood director who became a “pro-life” superstar, has quite a history of racist rants on Twitter, as my friend Mary Pezzulo documents on her blog. Back in September, she used the words “thug” and “stain” to describe Bishop Talbert Swan, who happens to be black, and then proceeded to lecture him about how he was a disgrace to his own community. (AJ, in case you did not know, is white. A white woman telling a black man he’s a disgrace to the black community. “Let me tell you about real racism,” white woman tells black man. You are “an enemy to your own people.” Very lovely.) [Read more.]
Catholic News Agency reports that the Austrian bishops are agitating for the Church to give a “formal, liturgical blessing” to “homosexual couples.” (It never ends. The answer is no, but it never ends.) Their committee on the liturgy asked for a book to be written explaining how such a thing may be done. The title of the book is The Benediction of Same-Sex Partnerships. CNA does not say whether the book limits blessings to “partners” who are celibate. It does not matter, in any case, because the Church has ruled it out and there’s no room to wiggle.
Atheists sometimes have the same obsession with biblical literalism that Fundamentalists do. One such atheist is Tim Sledge. Mr. Sledge used to be a Baptist pastor. He now has two books out. Goodbye Jesus is his deconversion story. The follow-up is called Four Disturbing Questions With One Simple Answer, and even Dr. David Madson, whose Ph.D. is in biblical studies, thinks it’s a slam-dunk against Christianity. The book is full of dumb questions like Why didn’t Jesus tell us about germs? But apparently people with Ph.D.‘s in biblical studies take the poor guy seriously.
TurretinFan is back! We’ve missed him. Longtime readers will remember this crack, Reformed theologian who, because of his anonymity, is known here as Mr. X. I thought his blog was dying a protracted death. There would be long silences; then, he would flicker up again for a post or two; then, slump into another doze. Perhaps he thinks I have forgotten him and he can now resume his raison d’être: plowing wild and unhinged and desperate through the Bible and Church Fathers for evidence of Protestant doctrine.
Fr. Bill McCormick asks the question in connection with a discussion that arose after two articles by Massimo Faggioli in La Croix International. Michael Sean Winters had a response at the National Catholic Reporter and Pedro Gabriel at Where Peter Is. That’s just the background; Dr. Faggioli is a Facebook friend of mine, thinks the America article misrepresents his argument, and I don’t wish to wade into that dispute. My purpose is just to add a few footnotes where I think Fr. McCormick gets the answer to his question exactly right.
Yesterday at the Rome Life Forum, Cardinal Raymond Burke, a most vociferous critic of the pope, gave a long presentation entitled “Fatima: Heaven’s Answer to a World in Crisis.” And here I sit, thinking that Christ was the answer. Burke’s talk was 5,166 words long, and about half of it had to do with Fatima, the evils of China, and the importance of consecrating Russia: red meat for the Catholic hard right. In the process he also managed to promote discredited conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 pandemic and misstate Church teaching on a number of points.
It would probably be a bad idea if someone at the Vatican were to fix Pope Francis with a device that gave him a small little shock every time he used the word “justification,” or maybe squirted him with a water gun. It might condition him against saying it, but I don’t think you can do that. Maybe someone has a more ethical idea. A few years back, the pope said that Catholics and Lutherans agree on justification now; we’re all copacetic. He said Luther “did not err.” It was one of the few times you’ve heard me criticize the poor man. Theological chaos occurs any time justification comes up with Frank.
I did not want to write about Steve Ray again after yesterday’s post. But by chance I noticed that he has a brand, spanking new article today that once again peddles the myth of 33,000 Protestant denominations. And because I refuted the number four years ago for the National Catholic Register, I decided I probably needed to revisit the topic. Mr. Ray knows the number is fiction, for he has been told many times. But he weirdly insists upon it; he’ll use the expression “the myth of 33,000 denominations” but put scare quotes around the word “myth.” It’s as though he thinks it’s a truth divinely revealed.
Says Newman: “A man is converted to the Catholic Church from his admiration of its religious system, and his disgust with Protestantism. That admiration remains; but, after a time, he leaves his new faith, perhaps returns to his old. The reason, if we may conjecture, may sometimes be this: he has never believed in the Church’s infallibility; in her doctrinal truth he has believed, but in her infallibility, no. He was asked, before he was received, whether he held all that the Church taught, he replied he did; but he understood the question to mean, whether he held those particular doctrines “which at that time the Church in matter of fact formally taught,” whereas it really meant whatever the Church then or at any future time should teach.”
Steve Ray is a Baptist convert to Catholicism who likes to wear a bush hat and call himself “Jerusalem Jones” because he’s gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, by his count, “almost 200 times.” He leads tours. But he’s really worried that Pope Francis is changing the deposit of faith; and sad to say, such a worry contains its own contradiction. (I’ll get there.) Back in the day, when he was a newly-minted convert, Mr. Ray wrote a book entitled Upon This Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome. Converts seem always to be rushing out and writing books in a fervor of having Found Truth.
You have a Culture of Life when you act and talk as though every life is of equal value and equally worth caring for and saving. And part of how you do that, when you have a pandemic like COVID-19, is by wearing a face mask. Wearing a face mask is not about the person doing the wearing, it’s about everyone else you might infect. It’s about the 80-year-old Rosary-praying grandmother you pass in the supermarket, and it’s also about the homeless diabetic you ignore on your way there.
I don’t know anything about Fr. Greg Bramlage other than that he’s the chairman of something called Missionaries of the New Evangelization and he’s prone to say wild things on Facebook that now and then make their way into my News Feed. Once he called the United Nations “the right arm of Freemasonry.” Another time he said that the very future of Christianity depends upon Donald Trump. Now he wants to excommunicate Melinda Gates; I’m not sure why. The title of the article he shares is “‘Really good quality sex education starts very, very early’: Melinda Gates.” Is that why? Bramlage thinks this warrants another Exsurge Domine? 
Self-described pro-lifers have a jealousy issue about abortion. Propose the existence of other pro-life issues and they get exasperated. Where does it end? Is the kitchen sink a pro-life issue too? More than one pro-life issue “waters down” opposition to abortion, they say. They’re like the child who fears a new baby in the family means mom and dad will start to love them less. Should we limit families to one child to be genuinely pro-life? Pope St. John Paul II saw it differently; he writes in Evangelium Vitae 29 that the world is faced with “countless grave threats to life.”