A FEW DAYS ago, on Sunday, I was driving on a highway about an hour away when I passed by one of those mega-sized Protestant temples, a mammoth structure surrounded by acres of parking. It was one of those places where the sanctuary is filled with seats like they have in movie theaters and on the stage there’s a screen with a large image of a cross.

Almost immediately afterwards, I passed two billboards. One was for bariatric surgery. That’s the procedure whereby doctors mutilate the intestines to try to save the patient from gluttony. The other was an enormous billboard for chicken wings. It was a vivid image of chicken wings, somewhat like the one above but even more vivid.

It occurred to me then, as I thought of that temple filled with people who believe Lenten fasting is unnecessary and even decadent because once you believe in Jesus Christ you are SAVED no matter what you do, no matter how many chicken wings you cram down your throat, that Protestantism leads to a culture of obesity. People who are so large that they must travel the aisles of Walmart in scooters are the victims of a theological hoax. They have not been told the truth about gluttony and salvation and have probably never been encouraged to fast not to lose weight but to please God.

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SJF writes:

THE VAST majority of people in our world have retained some kind of conviction, however shadowy, in the immortality of the soul. “Well, wherever he is now, I’m sure he’s happy,” people might say at a funeral (or a “celebration of life,” as they call funerals today). This conviction is the legacy of centuries of a Christian social order that no longer exists. Very few Westerners believe in reincarnation or total oblivion.

However, most also believe that it is only just and fair that someone who was basically decent should be happy in the afterlife. By basically decent, I mean someone who fulfilled many duties to family and friends, never broke the law, had minor defects but was good-hearted. It greatly offends modern sensibilities to think that this kind of niceness and decency is not rewarded by God or that it is even punished.

The problem with this view is it’s not what God has revealed about eternity. It substitutes human judgment for divine reason.

It also doesn’t make sense.

Heaven is not earth. It is a supernatural state. In order to pass from the natural into the supernatural sphere, we must acquire supernatural virtues. In order to qualify for the Olympic Games, to use one analogy, one must meet certain athletic qualifications. The belief that someone can get to Heaven because they have been generally decent and good is similar to the belief that someone who is a great software engineer should be able to compete in the decathlon.

To take another analogy, in order to live on Mars, we need oxygen. In order to live in heaven, we need spiritual oxygen, which is a supernatural gift — a gift from God which we can refuse or accept — and involves not just works but faith.

As Thomas Nelson writes in his introduction to Liberalism Is a Sin, by Fr. Felix Sarda Y Salvany:

Heaven … is a supernatural state, an end or objective above man and beyond his ability to again, a goal which man on his own cannot achieve. It is the presence of God. It is the eternal vision of God and an eternal sharing in the life of God Himself. But this is not something within the nature of man to achieve or possess. It is rather a special, supernatural gift from God, an unwarranted (on man’s part), gratuitous GIFT OF GOD. We do not deserve it. We can only attain it but the special, supernatural assistance which God has given us through the knowledge of the “faith of God” (Rom. 3:3) and the help of the Sacraments of the Catholic Church, the divinely revealed religion. These Sacraments were given by Jesus Christ, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, to the Church and are supernatural means to give us supernatural assistance to save our souls and attain Heaven, a supernatural end.

The sad fact is, we can be pretty sure that many “good people” are in hell. Of course, we never know who those people are and we certainly should never presume to conclude that anyone we meet or know will meet this end. Unfortunately, when these common sense points are made the person making them is often accused of somehow relishing the idea that good people are damned. This is a monstrous accusation. It is a form of rhetorical aggression, meant to deflect attention away from the meat of the matter. As Frank Sheed wrote in his book Theology and Sanity:

The gulf between non-living and living is not so great as the gulf between natural life and supernatural. The purpose of this supernatural life … is that in Heaven we may see God direct. But we do not wait until then to receive the supernatural life. It is given to man in this life. Everything else is incidental, on the fringe, of no permanent importance. When we come to die we are judged by the answer to one question — whether we have the supernatural life in our soul. If we have, then go to Heaven we shall surely go, for the supernatural life is the power to live the life of Heaven. If we have not, then we cannot possibly go to Heaven, for we could not live there when we got there. Grasp clearly that the supernatural life, which we call also sanctifying grace, is not simply a passport to Heave: it is the power to live in Heaven. (Fulton Sheed, Theology and Sanity; Sheed and Ward, New York, 1946; p.151) (more…)

SOME PEOPLE maintain that “Pope” Francis is dumb. He is not an articulate man, but he is most certainly not stupid.

Take, for example, his visit to a prison in Naples today in which he will reportedly meet with 90 prisoners, ten of whom are transsexuals. (more…)

PARENTS and friends scaled the school walls to provide students in India with cheat sheets.

JEANETTE V. writes: Look at the photos of the art recently installed in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. It's hideous. It looks like toothpaste squeezed from a tube.

HANS BADER writes about the Office of Civil Rights and its blatant encouragement of civil rights violations at colleges:

Thanks partly to OCR stacking the deck, it can be much cheaper for a college to expel a possibly innocent student than to find him not guilty. Even before OCR’s recent rules changes, colleges had massive incentives to suspend or expel students who might be guilty of sexual assault or harassment. (more…)

KARL D. writes:

It appears even the dead are not safe from the Eco-Warriors. A disgusting idea has been born called the “Urban death project.” It proposes erecting a giant, tower-type structure that will essentially be used in an industrialized system to turn your dead loved ones into mulch to replenish the earth. The grief-stricken can be given a small box of human mulch!! (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Larry Elder — that rarity in post-America: a native Angeleno who still lives in LA, and a man I would call a black realist — calls out former National Security Adviser, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of State Colin Powell for telling George Stefanopoulos on ABC’s This Week he still thinks there is a “dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the Republican Party on race,” a claim Powell first made years ago and appears fond of repeating. (more…)

GUILAIN writes in response to this previous discussion:

A woman’s looks are definitely a priority for most men when it comes to finding a girlfriend or a wife. But I think a man living on a desert island would have different priorities. If such a man could choose a single woman to share his life, her looks would not matter as much as they do in human societies.

Many men want their wives or girlfriends to look good in order to see other men gazing at them with envy. It gives men a feeling of superiority. That’s why they like exhibiting their “beautiful” women in crowded (and ugly) areas such as the streets of a big city. They’re not that much interested in romantic walks in the beautiful (but quiet) countryside. The same phenomenon exists with sports cars, or expensive clothes. You would think that Ferrari owners would want to drive their cars on empty roads, where they can actually use the engine’s power. But actually they often prefer being blocked in the traffic jams of trendy town centers because there they can show the world how important they are. (more…)

THOUGH the establishment of public, secular education was historically one of the key goals of the secret, anti-Christian movement known as Freemasonry, which claims as its own such important figures as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, it is interesting to note that public school children are taught almost nothing about this powerful cult and its influence on the founding of America. How many students learn about the Great Seal and its symbolism on the dollar bill? I never was taught anything about it. But then that’s the way it is supposed to work. Building the New World Order, or the Novus Ordo Seclorum, as it is called on the dollar bill — an order in which true religion is abolished and all nations are combined in universal brotherhood under Masonic principles, an order in which feast days for heroes of holiness such as St. Joseph are distant memories — requires secrecy. And so almost every day, the Great Seal passes through our hands and we are oblivious to its sinister meaning. Masons like to call anyone who does see this meaning a “conspiracy theorist” — a very effective rebuke as good-natured, sociable Americans do not want to be seen as kooks.

From Insider.org:

The symbols of the Great Seal, which are featured on the dollar bill, are clearly intended to embody the beliefs of those who founded the United States of America. The current design of the Great Seal was approved by Congress on 20 June 1782, and the seal was introduced to the dollar bill in 1935. The continued official use of Masonic symbols today indicates that these beliefs remain at the heart of the U.S. establishment.

What were the beliefs of the founders of America? (more…)

IN the Middle Ages, there were dozens of feast days during the course of the year, days in which almost all refrained from work of any kind, participated in solemn liturgies and celebrated. The atmosphere of the saints’ days was permeated, one imagines, with love and honor for a particular hero of holiness. One of those feast days was the Feast of St. Joseph, which is celebrated today in America with private observance here and there, especially in the South. There is no public acclaim for this holy man who participated in the greatest drama in history. Almost no one takes the day off. It’s just not considered that important. But then to most Americans, the saints don’t exist. The greatest friends a person could have are invisible.

From Dom Gueranger’s The Liturgical Year:

Who can imagine or worthily describe the sentiments which filled the heart of this man, whom the Gospel describes to us in one word, when it calls him the just man (St. Matth. i. 19.)? (more…)

DON VINCENZO writes:

Recently, I wrote about the passing of Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, who presided over the University of Notre Dame for thirty five years (1952-87), and under whose tutelage this once Catholic university morphed into a secular one, although his successors forcefully persist in claiming that nothing has changed, which, given the current state of affairs at the university, assures me that they are in a state of serious denial, which is not a river in Egypt. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

There are hopeful developments in the Mikey Weinstein v. Christians in Uniform story I forwarded last week.  Someone in the U.S. Air Force has found his spine, and Mr. Weinstein has run into resistance.  Something unusual for him in recent years, I’m sure. (more…)

BILL writes:

I have no idea how you can say the current pope is not Catholic, as it logically leads to certain contradictions. By what authority do you declare yourself Catholic and the pope not Catholic? And how does this not make you a Protestant?

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FROM a letter to The Wall Street Journal by Em. Prof. Gordon E. Finley of Florida Intl. University, Miami:

In the U.S. today, the only citizens who can be imprisoned for debt are fathers in arrears for child support. The parent-to-prison pathway generally goes something like this: Fall behind in child support, and the state takes away all professional and drivers’ licenses. This makes it impossible for fathers to generate income, and so the arrears increase, the father goes to debtors prison, and with a prison record it becomes exceedingly difficult to impossible to ever get a job in the aboveground economy. The future prospects of the children of imprisoned fathers are uniformly bleak, especially when compounded with the well-established findings that children from single-mother families have the worst developmental outcomes of all family forms. (more…)

IN ALL the public bemoaning of the obesity epidemic in childhood and adolescence, the elephant in the room  is almost always ignored. The problem mushroomed with the mass entry of women into the workforce. From a 2014 article by Katherine Bauer analyzing a study that shows a link between maternal employment and poor dietary habits in teens: Indulging in a bit of wishful thinking, the researchers argue that “efforts such as engaging all family members in meal preparation to alleviate burden on working women could contribute to improvements in family food environments on a population level.” A less fanciful interpretation of the findings would indicate that Americans should be looking for ways to get back to what they once had—homemaking mothers.  It is hard to imagine a healthy nutritional future for the nation’s teens without many more such mothers.

P. G. writes in response to the previous post:

Education has become a form of incarceration, confining innocents to terms from 12-25 years for the so-called knowledge it apportions out in carefully rationed amounts in order to consume one third of the average person’s life span. That an institution can hold your life hostage for what Tom Bertonneau called “justification in advance” is a testimony to the power of propaganda. If it’s considered unethical for parents to chose medical treatment for their children, why is it okay to make children go somewhere they likely don’t want to go – for twelve years.

The average family now starts its income accumulation nearly thirteen years later than it would have historically, creating the conditions where they must use school as a form of warehousing to recover enough income to make up for the lost time.  (more…)