What happened to those homilies about the prodigal son and rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s? Parishioners were surprised with this Sunday’s homily by Peoria Bishop Daniel Jenky comparing President Barack Obama’s health care policies to policies of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.
During the Sunday homily at St. Mary’s Cathedral Jenky noted that previous governments that “tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches . . . Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services and health care . . . In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro-abortion and extreme secularist agenda – now seems intent on following a similar path.”
Some have objected that the church should lose its tax exempt status over such advocacy. However, this is less political as hysterical. Churches are allowed to sermonize on public issues and condemn what they view as attacks on their faith.
What is more interesting is the response by Diocese Chancellor Patricia Gibson who insisted that Jenky had merely “offered historical context and comparisons as a means to prevent a repetition of historical attacks upon the Catholic Church and other religions.” A “repetition of historical attacks upon the Catholic Church”? That sounds like reaffirming this bizarre analogy. Gibson assured people, however, that “[w]e have currently not reached the same level of persecution. But Bishop Jenky would say that history teaches us to be cautious. … (He) is concerned that our government is truly treading on one of our most dear freedoms, which is religious freedom.” Well Jenky sure found his audience.
I would venture to suggest that there is a little distance between a squabble over health care and genocidal authoritarian regimes. But that is just me.
Source: Chicagoist
Let’s not all laugh ourselves silly, folks. What this bishop (and his obvious supporter) has done has been to follow a well-known path that DOES WORK and in fact DOES WORK ALMOST EVERY TIME to one degree or another. Check out the PROPAGANDA Exhibit at the Holocaust Museum in DC. You do not need to be logical, correct, honest, or anything else, to begin and nurture (and bring to murderous fruition) a “big lie” campaign that equates an unknown to a known evil. Most people in American have never read the Health Care bill and couldn’t understand how would work even if they did read it; furthermore, they have not read the insurance policies they have HAD and can’t understand THEM (and neither can most of the employees of those health insurance companies that use them!) either. The Bishop has, however, jumped over all the hurdles usually presented by FACTS and by debating FACTS. He has begun a trial by litany — which is always conducted INDEPENDENT of facts anyway. He has said, in language many if not most people understand: OBAMA IS HITLER IS STALIN, so OPPOSE HIM WITH YOUR LAST DROP OF BLOOD and you will go to Heaven, and otherwise, YOU WILL BE HURT.
Sounds dumb? Only because you’re smart. Defies a real understanding of the facts? Irrelevant. Flies in the face of logic and common sense? Not an issue at all. What we have hear is another use of a nearly unbeatable formula. WHO HE IS = WHAT YOU HATE = BAD, GET RID OF IT.
Stop laughing. The future is now.
Gene
“Mad Men” for mad men?
I wonder to which historical figures Bishop Lenky would compare the priests who sexually abused children????
I am becoming more ashamed that I raised my children to be catholic. Our family was mostly Jewish and for safe passage, my grandfather was forced to become a catholic.
“A new “call to arms” by a heroic warrior-Bishop of the Roman Catholic Church to fight the Administration of Barack Obama and equating his war against Catholics to the repression of Nazi Adolf Hitler and Communist Joseph Stalin may sway enough Catholics and people of faith to defeat Barack Obama, remove Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader, and make the U.S. House of Representatives a strong bastion for religious liberty. (full text of the homily at the end of this article).
This past Sunday’s homily at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois, while entitled “A Call to Catholic Men of Faith” is nonetheless a clarion call to all Christians and all men of faith, not just to come to the aid of fellow Christians under siege by the Administration of Barack Obama but to rise to the defense of religious liberty and indeed the very idea of a government constrained by the constitution and by the people.
Ever since the February “edict” – which they call a mandate – that ordered the Catholic Church to provide for and to pay for what it calls “infanticide” services despite its clear teaching that such conduct is sinful and wrong, the Catholic Church has been attempting to defend religious liberty and its very existence in the United States.
Now this text of Bishop Daniel R. Jenky is the clearest and most angry call to arms yet heard by any Catholic in America, and is clear and convincing enough I pray, that it will help cause a reversal of the Catholic vote that enabled Barack Obama to win the Presidency in 2008.” Red State
This guy needs to keep to his paperback Catechism and lay off the World Net Daily.
In Vietnam, I used to wonder about the etymology of the GI expression, “Kill them all, and let Gawd sort it out.” Decades later, I heard of GIs in Iraq and Afghanistan using a somewhat modified version: “Kill them all and let Allah sort it out.” I found the answer in a book about the Christian Crusades of the twelfth through fourteenth centuries entitled Dungeon, Fire, and Sword, by John J, Robinson:.
“A Roman Catholic knight had killed Peter of Castelnau, but that was not the way the murder was reported to the world. Innocent III blamed the Cathar heretics. In March of 1208 the pope issued a bull of anathema against the Cathars, condemning them all to death. At the same time he declared Peter of Castelnau to be a saint of the Catholic Church.
“A call to Crusade went out, promising identical spiritual rewards for going to Southern France as previous Crusaders had been promised for going to the Holy Land.The bloody robe of St Peter of Castelnau was taken from one town to another to rouse the people to join in the war of extermination.
“The murder of a Cistercian had been used to trigger the call to Crusade, and now Innocent III appointed another Cistercian as papal legate to lead it. He was Arnald-Amalric, the Cistercian general. Forty days was all the military service he required for any knight or commoner to earn the Crusader’s special place in heaven, although as it turned out it took years to accomplish the maniacal slaughter throughout such an extended area.
“The Crusade began with the public confession and humiliation of the count of Toulouse, who swore to obey the Church in all things and pledged himself and his vassals to eliminating the Cathars. He took his knights from Toulouse to join the growing Crusader army at Montpellier.
“Their first target was the walled city of Béziers, whose citizens, sympathetic to the gentle Cathars among them, would not open their gates. It was well known that the Cathars constituted only a small minority of the population of Béziers, and they looked exactly like their Catholic neighbors. How were the Crusaders to know which ones to kill? They put the question to Arnald-Amalric. The papal legate’s remarks rank as one of the most memorable quotations in military and religious history. ‘Kill them all,’ he said. ‘God will recognize his own.'”
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church — in any country — has a lot of damn gall lecturing to anyone else about “the lessons of history,” especially those dealing with persecution of others for their religious or non-religious views. No religious institution in the history of the world has a longer or worse record when it comes to stamping out individual freedom of belief and conscience. As Galileo said to the pope who threatened him with unspeakable torture if the scientist did not publicly recant his observations: “You care nothing for the truth. You only care about your authority.”
If Hitler and Stalin got their ideas about persecution from anywhere, they got them from the history of the Catholic Church.
Now, I have it on good authority that both Hitler and Stalin occasionally shut down their concious mind so their bodies could “repair” themselves, and now the President of the United States is rumored to engage in the same act.
Coincidence?
Fit this in here some where:
“WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin says he’s unsure whether he’ll vote for his party’s leader, President Barack Obama, or the likely Republican nominee Mitt Romney.”
http://washington.cbslocal.com/2012/04/20/dem-senator-doesnt-know-if-he-will-vote-for-obama/
Well, he ought to know about Hitler:
“There is general agreement that the Concordat increased substantially the prestige of Hitler’s regime around the world. As Cardinal Faulhaber put it in a sermon delivered in 1937: “At a time when the heads of the major nations in the world faced the new Germany with cool reserve and considerable suspicion, the Catholic Church, the greatest moral power on earth, through the Concordat expressed its confidence in the new German government. This was a deed of immeasurable significance for the reputation of the new government abroad.”
Given the Catholic Church’s history the Bishop must be an Obama supporter.
I am done. I have had enough. I am no longer catholic. These last few years have been too unchristian for me.
When will the IRS revoke the tax exempt status of this arm of the Republican party? As to “religious leaders” the Catholic church hasn’t been religious for hundreds and hundreds of years. Christ would not be welcome in the Church. He would be branded a heretic– too much compassion for the sick the poor and the oppressed. The fact they the Church attacks Obama for trying to provide health care to the people is a badge of honor.
This guy? Come on, Blouise. His parent organization has apparently hired Don Draper & Co. to do their PR. (To be fair, I’ve never seen “MadMen”, I’ve just read it’s full of womanizing boozehound PR types.)
The hierarchy of the Catholic Church in America can use the word “celibate” without a blush of shame only because they define “sexual relations” as those which occur between a man and a woman. Those that occur between a Catholic priest and a boy, on the other hand, will remain undefined and therefore outside the realm of discussion.
This guy needs a better PR spokesperson.
I don’t often agree with Sullivan, Smom, but I think he got that one right.
Daily Beast
18 Apr 2012 11:04 AM
Hewitt Award Nominee
“In the late 19th century, Bismark [sic] waged his “Kulturkamf,” [sic], a culture war against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down every Catholic school and hospital, convent and monastery in Imperial Germany. Clemenceau, nicknamed “the priest eater,” tried the same thing in France in the first decade of the 20th Century. Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care. In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path,” – Bishop Daniel Jenky.
Words fail. It is not encouraging when a reference to nineteenth century Germany cannot get the spelling of Bismarck or Kulturkampf right. But this is the current hierarchy. They weren’t selected for their intelligence, which, after all, could be a liability. They were selected for their subservience to their superiors.
And the good, if intellectually challenged, Bishop is comparing a deliberate policy of minority Catholic persecution in Germany in the nineteenth century, when thousands of Catholics were thrown in jail, with a tiny provision in the first universal healthcare law in America (a longstanding Catholic goal) that would include contraception in health insurance paid for by the insurance company. No woman would be forced to use it. And yet 98 percent of Catholic women still consult their consciences and do. The Vatican’s own commission on the subject came to the same conclusion as these Catholic women – only to be vetoed by one celibate man, Pope Paul VI. If this is a totalitarian attack on religious freedom, then I am a proud heterosexual.
What it actually is is a dyspeptic eruption from an all-male “celibate” hierarchy about the loss of its power over its employees, Catholic and non-Catholic. And it is a terribly depressing sign that the Catholic hierarchy, like much of the evangelical leadership, is now in danger of becoming a front for one political party.
Andrew Sullivan
“I would venture to suggest that there is a little distance between a squabble over health care and genocidal authoritarian regimes. But that is just me.”
Only about a parsec and it’s not just you.
*************************
Dear Bishop Jenky,
Hyperbole works better when you don’t stretch it to the point of absurdity and/or incredulity.
Your cooperation on these matters is greatly appreciated.
There maybe some distance at this time….. But at present we don’t have a chancellor….. Or do we…..