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| Don |
From October 2021
Sunday, October 24,
2021
The appearance of U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene
of Georgia at an “America First” rally in Plainfield, Connecticut has given left
leaning state newspapers a new burst of energy.
Major newspapers prominently covering the event were: the
Hartford Courant, Anti-Biden furor on display at ‘America
First Rally’ featuring U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene in Plainfield; the Day, Marjorie
Taylor Greene headlines ‘America First’ rally in Plainfield THE DAY;
The Stamford Advocate, Georgia's
Marjorie Taylor Greene brings 'message of conservatism' to Connecticut,
among others.
Taylor Greene is
easy to cover because she has been exhaustively covered by leftist publications
such as The
Dot. Copy and paste journalism requires
little thought and less effort.
Tuesday, October 26, 2021
“Am I happy?” he laughs. “Perhaps happiness is a sinful hope, an unnatural expectation. And
people make too much of it, don’t they? It’s possible we are so made that we can
bear happiness only in small doses. Those who expect perpetual happiness are
fools, don’t you think? The whole of their lives will be shattered by
disappointment. That may be it! Happiness is to hope for everything, but to
expect nothing. It must come always as a surprise.”
From Camus’ Notebooks, 1951-1959 – “Truth is not a
virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.”
Published a piece on
Simone
Weil in CC. I don’t suppose it
will attract much public interest, although Andree liked it.
Thinking of Abdul
Raman (AKA Raymond Mandirola), my cousin from Medina who visited us here
some years ago.
“You’ve already
lost,” he said to me during a meal.
“How so?”
“Demography is king,
and we, in this one respect, are out-producing you. The replacement birthrate, demographers tell
us, is two and a half children per family. Italy falls well below the mark, other
European nations as well. Some years ago, the Pope encouraged Italians to have
more children. He was roundly derided in the press -- how un-modern! In the
United States, family production is going the way of the birthrate. That is not
true in Islamic countries.”
The current fertility
rate for Italy in 2021
is 1.310 births per woman, a 0.46% decline from 2020. In
the United States, the fertility rate has dropped from a post-World
War II high of 3.8 births per woman at the peak of the baby boom to 1.8, where
it has remained unchanged for nearly a decade.
Abdul himself had
two wives and many more than a handful of children.
Though we hadn’t
communicated in years, I liked him very much. Thoroughly acculturated, he had
been living in Medina for at least three decades, during which he was providing
access to Americans and others to Medina during the Haj, as well as providing water to American soldiers during the first Persian Gulf War.
“If you go to Medina
and ask for ‘the American’, you will be taken to me."
Abdul was always
honest, on good terms, I would say, with the truth. We formed a familial friendship
as young boys whenever he visited Windsor Locks, our fruitful Eden, and in this
respect I found him unchanged.
He hadn’t been in
Saudi Arabia long before he was arrested, on what charges he was not told.
Transported from one prison to another, he finally asked his jailers, most
courteously, whether he needed a lawyer.
No, he was told.
That will not be necessary – “because tomorrow you will be executed.”
That did not happen,
all praise to Allah.
As a graduate of
Columbia College, he was a primal Democrat, a bit rebellious, and the rich were
very much on his cultural radar. I asked him what was wrong with those in Saudi
Arabia who were running the country.
Oil had spoiled them,
he said, and the great wealth of the country, deposited in few hands, had
ruined it.
I did not ask him
what first had brought him to Saudi Arabia. I suspect it might have been a
combination of things: the Vietnam War was progressing fitfully at the time;
Islam and its doctrine of unquestioned obedience to a holy text, the Quran, were
alluring, as was, I suspect, a young girl very much present in Saudi Arabia and
his heart.
On his first visit
to us, he wanted to see the family residence on 1 Suffield Street in Windsor
Locks that he had visited frequently as a young boy. So, I took him there. The
empty house was in the process of being sold. The furniture, and any indications
that the Pescis had lived there were gone. We wandered through the wilderness
of empty rooms. Then he asked to visit my parents' graves. Once there, he bowed
before the cross that marked their enduring presence on his character and said
a silent prayer; I with him, and Andree too.
Memory —fleetfooted
memory – passed through us, making us brothers in heart and mind. And I
understood that for him the visit was a pilgrimage to a once revered site. He
wanted to touch, in memory that now had taken on flesh, the delights of his
youth.
Some emails passed
between us after his second visit. I joined him in the construction of a poem,
I recall. Then… time and space intervened and we “lost touch.” Losing touch is
a terrible doom. It places an abyss between those who once loved each other.
But love, we hope, is an athlete that leaps over such distances and sustains us
until we die. Even then, both Abdul and I believe, love in some form continues,
even though life itself has become an empty room.
Friday, October 29, 2021
President Joe Biden,
a Catholic, met today in Rome with Pope Francis, also a Catholic.
To put the matter as
mildly as possible, it is obvious to all – and not merely Catholics – that the
Pope and the President are not sitting in the same pew on the matter of
abortion. The Pope believes, along with Popes stretching back to Peter, the
rock upon which the Catholic Church was founded, that abortion is a serious
sin. The modern church calls sin a “disorder.” Of course, in sin, as in the
law, there are degrees of culpability. First degree murder is not manslaughter.
Punishments are affixed according to the severity of the sin.
The Christian Church
condemned abortion very early in the 2nd century BC in a document
called the Didache (literal translation: “Teaching”) written sometime after 100 AD: “You shall
not kill the embryo by abortion, and shall not cause the newborn to perish.” Since
the sixteenth century, Canon
Law (1398) has stipulated, “A person
who actually procures an abortion incurs automatic excommunication"
Before his audience
with Francis, Biden had received an absolution of sorts from the Washington
Post. In an October 4th
story, the Post noted, “A top Vatican cardinal says President Biden should not
be denied Communion amid a push by U.S. Catholic bishops to withhold the
sacrament from the president because of his support for abortion rights… Cardinal
Peter Turkson, [the head of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral
Human Development], who works closely with Pope Francis, said the sacrament,
also known as the Eucharist, should ‘not in any way become a weapon,’ and denying
it [the Eucharist] should only occur in ‘extreme cases.’”
In an interview with
Axios, Turkson remarked, “If you say somebody cannot receive Communion, you are
basically doing a judgment that you are in a state of sin.” Asked specifically during
his interview whether “state of sin” applied to Biden, Turkson replied, “No,”
according to Axios.
Axios noted in its
story, “U.S. bishops are scheduled to meet next month and discuss whether to
deny Communion to Biden and other Catholic politicians, such as House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), over their support for abortion rights.
“In June, the bishops
voted 168 to 55 to draft a ‘teaching document’ [Didache] on the Eucharist, and
conservatives hope that the final document can provide the justification for
withholding Communion from Biden.”
A reliable textual
account of the Axios interview with Turkson may be found in America
Magazine: A Jesuit Review.
The meeting between the Pope and Biden, according to the
most recent Associated Press story, was
somewhat awkward.
“The Vatican on Thursday,” the AP reported, “abruptly
canceled the planned live broadcast of U.S. President Joe Biden meeting Pope
Francis, the latest restriction to media coverage of the Holy See that sparked
complaints from White House- and Vatican-accredited journalists.
“The live broadcast of Biden’s Friday visit was trimmed to
cover just the arrival of the president's motorcade in the courtyard of the
Apostolic Palace. Vatican spokesman Matteo Bruni said the revised plan
reflected the “normal procedure” established during the coronavirus pandemic
for all visiting heads of state or government.”
Missing in the story
were other more theologically precise quotes from other Catholic Church
leaders.
The following
italicized material, data compiled by the British Broadcasting Company, not a
Vatican source, is, or should be, widely available to reporters both Catholic
and non-Catholic:
BBC
Abortion
Last updated 2009-08-03
Catholic - current
position
Pope John Paul II's
view
Pope John Paul II took
a very strong line on abortion, describing it as murder.
During a trip to Poland in August 2002 he
reiterated his opposition to abortion:
Frequently man lives as if God did not exist,
and even puts himself in God's place... He claims for himself the Creator's right
to interfere in the mystery of human life. Rejecting divine law and moral
principles, he openly attacks the family.
Pope John Paul II,
2002
In 1995, Pope John Paul II wrote an
encyclical (a teaching letter to the whole Catholic Church) called Evangelium Vitae ('The Gospel of
Life').
He stated the fundamental position of the
Church:
I confirm that the direct and voluntary
killing of an innocent human being is always gravely immoral.
Pope John Paul II,
Evangelium Vitae, 1995
In this he was directly referring to
abortion, euthanasia and the destruction of human embryos in medical research.
On abortion specifically the Pope wrote:
I declare that direct abortion, that is,
abortion willed as an end or as a means, always constitutes a grave moral
disorder, since it is the deliberate killing of an innocent human being.
Pope John Paul II,
Evangelium Vitae, 1995
In October 1996 the Catholic Bishops of
England and Wales published a document called The Common Good in which they said that all human rights
flow from one fundamental right: the right to life.
This followed a 1980 document in which the
seven Catholic Archbishops of Great Britain (England, Wales and Scotland)
issued a document called 'Abortion and the Right to Live'.
This emphasized that the Church's opposition
to abortion stemmed from recognition of the basic rights of all individuals,
including the unborn (who have their own intrinsic value.)
The Catechism of the Catholic Church
reiterates this too. The 1992 version quotes from the document Donum Vitae ('the gift of life')
from the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the department
that deals with matters of faith and morals). It says:
The inalienable rights of the person must be
recognized and respected by civil society and the political authority.
These human rights depend neither on single
individuals nor on parents; nor do they represent a concession made by the
society and the state; they belong to human nature and are inherent in the
persons by virtue of the creative act from which the person took his origin.
Among such fundamental rights one should
mention in this regard every human being's right to life ... from the moment of
conception until death.
Catechism of the
Catholic Church
Implications
For many modern Catholic theologians the
Church's position on abortion has very clear social and political implications.
Cardinal Bernardin wrote:
If one contends, as we do, that the right of
every fetus to be born should be protected by civil law and supported by civil
consensus, then our moral, political, and economic responsibilities do not stop
at the moment of birth.
Those who defend the right to life of the
weakest among us must be equally visible in support of the quality of life of
the powerless among us: the old and the young, the hungry and the homeless, the
undocumented immigrant and the unemployed worker.
Such a quality of life posture translates
into specific political and economic positions on tax policy, employment
generation, welfare policy, nutrition and feeding programs, and health care.
Consistency means we cannot have it both
ways. We cannot urge a compassionate society and vigorous public policy to
protect the rights of the unborn and then argue that compassion and significant
public programs on behalf of the needy undermine the moral fiber of the society
or are beyond the proper scope of governmental responsibility.
Cardinal Bernardin
The BBC’s account of the traditional Catholic
view of abortion, even critics of Catholic theology inside and outside the Church may be forced to
admit, is fair, faithful and accurate. Of course, news accounts written by
reporters whose views on abortion run in the rut of far left abortion providers
such as Planned Parenthood need not be fair or comprehensive. Rarely do such
political partisans admit to bias. Still less are they willing to point to
“scientific” inconsistencies in views that wink at partial birth abortion.
The Hartford
Courant, the day after Biden’s meeting with Pope Francis, closed in large part
to the media, did not mention that the President’s visit was extraordinary in
this respect, as recounted in the above AP report.
But the Hartford
paper, the longest continually published paper in the United States, more
slender every day and more costly – the Saturday Hartford Courant charges $5 at
newsstands – did feature a story on Connecticut Republican’s annual Prescott
Bush Dinner, featuring U.S. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, that was closed
to the press. Apparently the closure was at the request of Kennedy.
State Democrat
Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo chided Republicans in the story, No Press at GOP keynote Address: “When Nancy Pelosi was the keynote at the
last Bailey Dinner, we welcomed the press. But the party of free speech banned
reporters from its fundraising dinner and keynote address. It does make you
wonder, what is it the Republicans don’t want you to know.”
Indeed, and government
by caucus has always been closed to Connecticut’s media, without so much a whimper
issuing from the state’s media, now indignant that an annual dinner has been closed to them.
Republican Party
Chairman Ben Pronto responded that DiNardo had best concern herself with more
important questions: “God Bless Nancy DiNardo if that’s all she’s got to worry
about, while she has legislators who are being arrested by the federal
government for stealing from taxpayers…”
The Courant reporter
explained the reference: “Pronto was referring to the recent arrest of State Rep.
Michael DiMassa, a West Haven Democrat who is accused by the FBI of stealing
more than $600,000 in federal COVID relief money that had been earmarked for West Haven…”
Then too, during the
administration of current Governor Ned Lamont and his Democrat predecessor,
Dannel Malloy, Republicans in the General Assembly had been all but shut out of
state budget negotiations, most of which occurred in Democrat General Assembly
caucuses closed to the press.
So it goes in
Connecticut. No one mentioned that the Bailey Dinner was once called the Jefferson,
Jackson, Bailey Dinner, both Jackson and Jefferson’s names having been excised
from the Democrat’s annual money grab because both owned slaves, and Jackson
was primarily responsible for moving the Plains Indians from their homelands onto
reservations.
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