Rod Dreher is not going back to Rome

Pope Francis has apparently not impressed him. Why an Orthodox Christian would consider the particular policies of a given Pope in terms of remaining in The Church escapes me. But in any event he is remaining Orthodox. His piece is something of an indictment of the problems of the post Vatican II Roman Church that even Fr. Z found compelling. But not surprisingly he has drawn sharp criticism from more than a few corners of the Catholic blogosphere and their attendant comboxes. For the record I am not offended by that kind of criticism. If you fire a full broadside at someone's church you can't cry foul if they shoot back, though some of the commentary was snarky and personal.

But while if you have serious problems with your church, that may or may not be a good reason for leaving (circumstances depending), I am somewhat confused by Rod’s decision to leave the Roman Church. Did he leave because it has become a nest of modernist liberals? Or was it because he became convinced the Roman Catholic Church is heretical in its teachings? The latter is a good reason for leaving, the former is more doubtful.

And then there is the question of why Orthodoxy? Whatever your reason for leaving your previous confession, you need to be “all in” when you join a Church (as opposed to ‘church’), that like Rome, claims to be The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church spoken of in the Creed. I am not getting this from his piece. One needs to be careful when judging or impugning the motives of others. But if he joined the Orthodox Church because he wanted the Catholic Church without all of the liberal crap, then he did so for the wrong reasons.

Obviously, I am Orthodox and a former Catholic. And while the over the top liberal craziness did not make my decision to leave any harder, in the end I left the Roman Church because I became convinced over time that it was wrong on a number of important doctrinal points. Orthodoxy’s initial attraction was its magnificent liturgical rites and sound moral teachings. But I did not enter until I became convinced of the truths of Holy Orthodoxy.

I would have felt a little better if I had gotten that message from Rod. In the end though all we can do is to try and do right as God gives the light to discern right from wrong. Beyond that, we are all under that Great Mercy that none of us deserves, and without which we are all doomed.

HT: Ordo Antiquus

Rethinking Neville Chamberlain

Seventy-five years ago, on Sept. 30, 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Pact, handing portions of Czechoslovakia to Adolf Hitler's Germany. Chamberlain returned to Britain to popular acclaim, declaring that he had secured "peace for our time." Today the prime minister is generally portrayed as a foolish man who was wrong to try to "appease" Hitler—a cautionary tale for any leader silly enough to prefer negotiation to confrontation.

But among historians, that view changed in the late 1950s, when the British government began making Chamberlain-era records available to researchers. "The result of this was the discovery of all sorts of factors that narrowed the options of the British government in general and narrowed the options of Neville Chamberlain in particular," explains David Dutton, a British historian who wrote a recent biography of the prime minister. "The evidence was so overwhelming," he says, that many historians came to believe that Chamberlain "couldn't do anything other than what he did" at Munich. Over time, Dutton says, "the weight of the historiography began to shift to a much more sympathetic appreciation" of Chamberlain.

Very interesting... read the rest here.

Send in the clowns

Multiple sources are reporting that Piero Marini is about to be named as head of the Vatican's Congregation for Divine Worship (CDW). This is the department that is supposed to handle all things liturgical. For those of you who don't know who Marini is, just take my word that this is really bad news for the Catholic Church.

World Yawns at New Wave of Christian Martyrdom

Hiding the Christian name on his ID with his thumb, Joshua Hakim approached the gunmen and showed them the plastic card. “They told me to go. Then an Indian man came forward, and they said, ‘What is the name of Muhammad’s mother?’ When he couldn’t answer they just shot him.”

That’s the way it went inside the Westgate Premier Shopping Mall in Nairobi last Saturday. If you said when asked that you were Muslim, you were let go. If you answered no, you stayed. And maybe died.

Read the rest here.

Decades after Holocaust, Germany asks what it owes Jews

KOBLENZ, Germany —Sixty-eight years after the end of the Holocaust, Germany is asking itself what it still owes its Jews.

The answer, as measured by a vote in this small southwestern city, is very little.

Read the rest here.

A Rosie the Riveter original, still on the job at 93

LONG BEACH, Calif. -- Remember that cliche 'Age is just a number?'  Meet Elinor Otto, 93, who gets up at 4 a.m. each morning and drives to the Boeing plant in Long Beach, Calif., where she inserts rivets into the wing sections of C-17 cargo planes.  It's a job she's been doing at various aircraft assembly plants since 1942.

That's right -- Otto was one of the original "Rosie the Riveter" girls, celebrated in the popular song of the same name, who supported the war effort by filling tens of thousands of jobs because able-bodied men had joined the fighting overseas.

"We were part of this big thing," Otto said. "We hoped we'd win the war. We worked hard as women, and were proud to have that job."

Read the rest here.

The GOP’s fork in the road

When the John Birchers had to be kicked out of the Republican Party, William F. Buckley Jr. effectively excommunicated them from the GOP. When the “smoking gun” Watergate tape came out, it was the late Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) who urged Richard Nixon to resign. And when Pat Buchannan’s views could no longer be called anything but anti-Semitic, it was Buckley who called him out.

If the GOP has one big problem now it is that there is no Goldwater, no Buckley to tell Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and his ilk that enough is enough. The Republicans interested in governance are now participants in the political scrum. The biggest of the conservative magazines, whose editors should know better, are too timid. They poke and prod here and there, but really stand up to the destructive right wing? No. They fear a full throttle debunking would put at risk their place in the conservative cosmos. They mistakenly believe that their role is to rebuke only liberals.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page or a conservative eminence like George Will or Charles Krauthammer can call the tune of charlatans, but the Cruz crowd dismisses even them as pawns in the Great GOP Sell-out. They are thought leaders, but, by definition, influence only those who prize rationality. These days that is but one faction of the conservative movement.

Read the rest here.

Shutdown grows more likely as House digs in

Top House Republican leaders Thursday rejected the short-term spending plan expected to be passed by the Senate in coming days, increasing the possibility of a government shutdown next week.

Asked if the House would pass the bill unchanged once it is sent from the Senate, Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) replied: “I do not see that happening.”

Read the rest here.

It is a cardinal rule...

...of blogging to never post while drunk. You might accidentally put up something as silly as this.

Traveling

No blogging for a few days.

California Gives Expanded Rights to Noncitizens

LOS ANGELES — California is challenging the historic status of American citizenship with measures to permit noncitizens to sit on juries and monitor polls for elections in which they cannot vote and to open the practice of law even to those here illegally. It is the leading edge of a national trend that includes granting drivers’ licenses and in-state tuition to illegal immigrants in some states and that suggests legal residency could evolve into an appealing option should immigration legislation fail to produce a path to citizenship.

With 3.5 million noncitizens who are legal permanent residents in California, some view the changes as an acknowledgment of who is living here and the need to require some public service of them. But the new laws raise profound questions about which rights and responsibilities rightly belong to citizens over residents.

Read the rest here.

This is a very bad idea.

Here we go again...

WASHINGTON — House Republicans muscled through a stopgap bill Friday that would fund the government only if all spending for President Obama’s health care law is eliminated. Senate Democrats and President Obama quickly made it clear they had no intention of going along, putting the government on a course toward a shutdown unless one side relents. 

The 230-to-189 party-line vote in a bitterly divided House set in motion a fiscal confrontation with significant implications — politically and economically — but with an uncertain ending. Without a resolution, large parts of the government could shut down Oct. 1, and a first-ever default on federal debt could follow weeks later. 

Read the rest here.

This is what a politically damaged White House has been praying for. Some people are just lousy at history. That, or they are politically dumber than a box of rocks. In these kinds of battles the President ALWAYS wins and he will win again in this fight. Why?  Because he knows that the House GOP can't keep the government shutdown forever, (and yes, they are the ones doing this), nor can they allow the US to default on its debt. (Though I concede that there really are some who are so extreme in their views that they would like to see this.)

Memo to the GOP... never take hostages unless you are prepared to shoot them.

When isolationism ruled the land

In January 1938, Rep. Louis Ludlow, an Indiana Democrat, proposed a constitutional amendment strongly supported by the public: “Except in the event of an invasion of the United States or its territorial possessions and attack upon its citizens residing therein, the authority of Congress to declare war shall not become effective until confirmed by a majority of all votes cast thereon in a Nation-wide referendum.” Although narrowly defeated, 209 to 188, it might have passed without President Franklin Roosevelt’s last-minute opposition.

During Barack Obama’s, shall we say, sinuous progress toward a Syria policy, he has suggested, without using the word, that isolationism is among his afflictions. During his news conference-cum-soliloquy in Russia, he said:

“These kinds of interventions . . . are always unpopular because they seem distant and removed. . . . I’m not drawing an analogy to World War II other than to say, when London was getting bombed, it was profoundly unpopular both in Congress and around the country to help the British.”

He wisely disavowed (while insinuating) this analogy, lest Americans wonder which is more implausible, casting Bashar al-Assad as Hitler or himself as Roosevelt. But the term “isolationism” is being bandied as an epithet, not to serve as an argument for U.S. military interventions but as a substitute for an argument. To understand the debate that roiled America before World War II is to understand why today’s reservations about interventionism are not a recrudescence of isolationism.

Read the rest here.

Nazareth... Jewish now and forever

NAZARETH ILLIT, Israel — This hilltop city has placid parks, broad avenues, low crime, a fancy mall and trash collection three times a week — all very nice and neat, and by design, slightly dull.

But not these days.

Over the past few years, well-to-do Arab Israelis, both Muslim and Christian, drove their minivans 10 minutes up the hill from the ancient, overcrowded nearly all-Arab city of Nazareth and snapped up some sweet but pricey five-bedroom, four-bath houses.

Many of the homes are worth a half-million dollars or more, and Arab citizens of Israel now count for 18 percent of the 50,000 residents in “Upper Nazareth,” as it is translated in English.

They are welcome here, says the mayor, as long as they remember one very important rule.

“This is a Jewish city,” said Shimon Gafsou of his adopted home town, “now and forever.”

To be more specific: “I would rather cut off my right arm than build an Arab school,” the mayor said in an interview on his terrace at city hall.

Ditto mosques. “No, no, no. No mosques, ever,” said Gafsou. Nor churches. Or Ramadan lanterns or manger scenes. “And no Christmas trees,” said the mayor of a town that abuts the largest Arab city in Israel, celebrated as the childhood home of Jesus.

Read the rest here.

Russia Seizes Greenpeace Ship for Investigation

MOSCOW — Russia’s Federal Security Service announced on Friday that it had seized a Greenpeace International ship and its crew after a series of protests at an offshore oil rig in the Arctic Ocean and would tow the ship to port in Murmansk to conduct an investigation.

The seizure of the ship on Thursday night, which was carried out by armed border guards dropped by helicopter, threatened to escalate into a diplomatic confrontation, since the crew includes citizens of several countries, including the United States. Russia’s Foreign Ministry had already issued a protest to the Dutch ambassador, since the ship, the Arctic Sunrise, is registered in the Netherlands and Greenpeace International is based there.

Read the rest here.

Pope Francis Criticizes Emphasis on Doctrinal Orthodoxy and Morals

Pope Francis, in the first extensive interview of his six-month-old papacy, said that the Roman Catholic church had grown “obsessed” with preaching about abortion, gay marriage and contraception, and that he has chosen not to speak of those issues despite recriminations from some critics.

In remarkably blunt language, Francis sought to set a new tone for the church, saying it should be a “home for all” and not a “small chapel” focused on doctrine, orthodoxy and a limited agenda of moral teachings.

“It is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time,” the pope told the Rev. Antonio Spadaro, a fellow Jesuit and editor in chief of La Civiltà Cattolica, the Italian Jesuit journal whose content is routinely approved by the Vatican. “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently.

“We have to find a new balance,” the pope continued, “otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel.”

Read the rest here.

Oh my... this is going to cause a serious firestorm in the blogosphere. And yes, I do find this disturbing. I really hope the Pope has been grossly and maliciously misquoted. Please take a deep breath before commenting.

P.S. For the record, the full interview can be read here. The NY Times, not surprisingly, is focusing on a very small part.

Tom Delay's Conviction is Overturned

A Texas appellate court has overturned the conviction of former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) for allegedly scheming to influence Texas state elections with corporate money, his attorney told several news organizations early Thursday.

A three-judge panel voted 2-1 to overturn the conviction, calling the evidence "legally insufficient," according to the majority ruling. The decision formally acquits DeLay of all charges, but could still be appealed by the government.

Read the rest here.

Did the FED dodge a bullet?

The American economy has shed 347,000 jobs over the past two months, roughly comparable with the rate of loss seen during the Great Recession. It is remarkable that the US Federal Reserve should even have been thinking of phasing out life-support in such circumstances. 

 Read the rest here.

CBO issues new long-term budget and debt forecasts

It makes for some pretty grim reading.
HT: MCJ

House GOP launches attack on Obamacare

House Republican leaders announced Wednesday morning that they would take a risky double-barreled attack on President Obama’s health-care law, making it the cornerstone fight over government funding due to expire Sept. 30 and the effort to lift the Treasury’s borrowing authority.

Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), flanked by his leadership team, told reporters that the stopgap government funding bill that they will advance Friday would yield to conservative demands of including a rider to block funding for the law commonly known as Obamacare.

Read the rest here.