WHEN Jorge Bergoglio uttered his famous phrase, “Who am I to judge?” last year, many Catholics refused to believe that he was saying what he was saying. They made copious excuses. They complained of the deviousness of the media. They said his message of mercy had value. Even as he was lavished by awards and praise by homosexual organizations and publications, they claimed Bergoglio was being misinterpreted. Now perhaps those who were in denial can recognize the truth: Bergoglio does not consider sodomy gravely sinful and believes that homosexuals should be publicly welcomed into the Church. The recent midterm report by the “Extraordinary Synod of the Bishops on Family” goes much farther than Bergoglio’s seemingly off-the-cuff statement in a plane interview. The report was introduced and read in front of Francis, who has not repudiated it.

Would it ever occur to you to say that thieves have good qualities? Thieves and even murderers do have good qualities. But if someone said to you, “Thieves and murderers have much to offer the Christian community,” you would probably find that offensive because a thief cannot offer anything good to a Christian community until he first stops being a thief or the Christian community first stops being Christian. 

The following statement in the synod report is entirely predicated on the idea that homosexual activity is not wrong and that those engaged in the sin of sodomy can be members in good standing of the Catholic Church:

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JANE writes:

My reaction to the photo in the entry “States Forced to Abandon Marriage Laws” was a question. Doesn’t anyone ever dress up anymore? Is it shallow that I don’t think someone should wear a T-shirt to their own wedding?

Really, it’s not about the clothes. But I do think appearance can reflect values. We used to dress up for things that mattered — church, ceremonies, weddings. This haphazard gathering reflects the lack of seriousness with which our culture regards marriage.

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  COMMENTS have been added to the entry about Brittany Maynard, the subject of an orchestrated media blitz in favor of assisted suicide. There are so many distortions in her story it's hard to get to them all. One of the main lies is that laws are somehow preventing people from committing suicide. The goal of the organization Compassion and Choices, formerly the Hemlock Society, is to make suicide publicly affirmed and aided. As one commenter points out, there can be great financial incentives for the living to support suicide of the old. Brittany Maynard is not old, and that's why the choice of her as a symbol of the beauty of suicide is so clever and obviously calculated.

  THE inactivity rate is the proportion of the population not in the labor force. Source.

A READER writes:

The Synod’s report this week is punditry, not theology; it is intended for public consumption, loaded with liberal clichés and buzzwords. The entire world has already concluded on the basis of the midterm report alone that the Catholic Church has fully embraced the sexual revolution. Whatever comes next is practically irrelevant.

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JORGE BERGOGLIO and his Extraordinary Synod of Bishops on the Family dropped a heavy load of incendiaries yesterday with the synod’s mid-way report, Relatio post disceptationem, which urges the Catholic world to see positive elements in the sins of divorce, cohabitation, homosexuality, same-sex unions and even polygamy and arranged marriages. The smoke is still rising above the debris. Vatican II’s adulteration of Catholic worship, with rock masses and Holy Communion in the hand, leads inevitably to the adulteration of Catholic doctrine — and now to the ultimate project of trashing the Catholic family. Confirming all the worst fears regarding its revolutionary intentions, the Synod report, written by Cardinal Péter Erdő, affirmed the need to proclaim the “Gospel of the Family” with “profound conviction” and then proceeded to bury it in an avalanche of cultural relativism and psychotherapeutic talk of “fragility” and “dialogue:”

Anthropological and cultural change today influences all aspects of life and requires an analytic and diversified approach, able to discern the positive forms of individual freedom.

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  I WASN'T able to read or post e-mails yesterday. I was preoccupied with the illness of a relative. I hope to get to comments shortly. A belated Happy Columbus Day!

  DAN R. writes: I'd guess many of your readers have already seen this, but in case not, here's a country duo, Lewis & Lewis, putting the homosexual "marriage" debate in its most basic and truthful terms.

FROM DailyKenn.com:

DailyKenn.com is pleased to announce the first ‘Hug-A-Thug Sunday.’

The initiative is designed to bring peace and harmony to Ferguson, Missouri and surrounding black neighborhoods where gentle giant black teens en route from choir practice to enroll in college are shot dead by racist white police.

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AS laws enacted by democratic means have been effectively overturned in numerous states by the wizened ecclesiastics of the U.S. Supreme Court, there has never been more justification for secession. This week’s events reveal the naked, absolutist power of our federal government like nothing else. Those who have harbored unrealistic hopes are perhaps now enlightened. Today is the beginning of a brighter tomorrow if more people realize what this all means. This is not primarily about homosexual “marriage.” It’s about the cult of freedom. It’s about the worship of the state. It’s about serious defects in the very principles upon which America was founded. It’s about the triumph of money and the failure of community. America is dissolving before our eyes.

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BRITTANY MAYNARD is the latest poster child for the pro-suicide movement. Diagnosed with brain cancer not long ago, Maynard, 29, has decided she will kill herself on November 1 to avoid acute suffering. Compassion and Choices, the former Hemlock Society and a leading advocate of laws legalizing assisted suicide, has produced an artful video of Brittany that has gone viral with more than five million views. I was visiting a relative in a nursing home the other day, surrounded by the sick and disabled, when I heard on a nearby screen this self-absorbed woman being interviewed. The media can’t go wrong with a story like this. It rends emotions and stirs controversy. Organized suicide is great for the news business. I wondered how many people in how many nursing homes and hospitals around the country were watching this willful, painfully superficial woman explain how pointless suffering is.

Maynard believes she is entitled to a life of health and adventure. Deprived of that, she has chosen to plan her own suicide, and, while she is at it, promote the idea for others. Some who also have terminal illnesses, understandably agitated by her story, have begged her to reconsider. Little do they know they are playing the part of useful fools to the propaganda machine at “Compassion and Choices.”

Dave Andrusko writes:

Maynard’s case is what groups like Compassion & Choices live for. A beautiful young woman apparently about to be cut down in the prime of her life. It matters not that such cases—terminal illnesses—are always the opening wedge after which, once the principal is established, the “right” to be “assisted” expands to a whole panoply of reasons none of which are about terminal illnesses.

The principles of Compassion and Choices are perfectly consistent with assisted suicide for those who are not terminally ill but are experiencing unhappiness and chronic illness of some kind. Legal suicide, much farther ahead in Europe, has already gone in that direction in Belgium, and it will likely go in that direction in the United States too.

The ironic thing about Maynard’s case is that the art and science of relieving pain are highly developed and she apparently has family and friends willing to care for her. But she sees no point in living a little longer unless she can have it her way. She is planning to continue to travel and have fun after her death too. Sadly, it seems to never have occurred to Maynard that she may experience intense suffering after her death.

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MICROSOFT CEO Satya Nadella is a clueless man. He had the naiveté to suggest to a gathering of women in computing that hard work matters most in connection with earnings.

It’s not really about asking for the raise,” Nadella said, “but knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along,” according to a transcript of the event provided by Microsoft.

In the long term, Mr. Nadella said, good workers will be rewarded and recognized for their efforts.

This is offensive to The Powers That Be, and Nadella was quickly beat up on social media. His statement implies that women are not victims — whether of male prejudice or of what Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg of Lean In fame says is their own failure to ask for more money. Fortunately, Nadella has apologized and gotten back on script by promising to close the pay gap, admitting to male bias against women in a typical expression of opportunistic male self-hatred.

By the way, readers have probably often seen the figures on how little women make relative to men. Statistics on how much of total family income men provide are rarely reported. Among married fathers, men still make about 65 percent of household income and spend more than 50 percent more hours in paid employment than married mothers. Men don’t have the choice, as women so often do, to take lesser paying work or part-time jobs.

The pay gap is another one of those issues in which there is open deception. Male deference used to entail defending and protecting women. Now it demands coddling them with lies.

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  CLAIRE writes: I just became aware today that Jorge Bergoglio has had a new book published, The Joy of the Gospel. I did a brief Google search of images of all of his book covers and the book covers of previous popes, and my suspicions seemed to be confirmed. No other pope has ever put his smiling visage on the cover more than Bergoglio. And even if other they did, there was always a sense of gravity to the picture. Not so with Francis. His face reminds me of another book's cover that was recently published. As a matter of fact, the authors are practically interchangeable. Behold, the Osteen:

  MRS. Sunshine Thiry writes: I thought I should alert you that October is National Pizza Month. We industrious housewives strive to make dinners enjoyable and fun, so I am sure your readers will want to try out some of the pizza products and recipes you have highlighted over the years; my personal favorite was the Thanksgiving Pizza Stuffing. But it can be difficult to find new and innovative ways of serving pizza, so I am including a photo of a pizza dish which I am sure we are all eager to try - Pizza Fondue! The recipe can be found here.

  FROM Kevin Williamson at National Review: Home-schooling isn’t for everybody, but every home-school student, like every firearm in private hands, is a quiet little declaration of independence. It’s no accident that the people who want to seize your guns are also the ones who want to seize your children. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s desire to imprison people who hold the wrong views on climate change and Harry Reid’s plot to gut the Bill of Rights are not aberrations in an otherwise genuinely liberal agenda; the Left desires to put every aspect of every human life under political discipline, from which history books your children read to what kind of cheese you eat.

FROM Christ or Chaos:

Pope Leo XIII explained that we must find in the Rosary the sure remedy to the social ills that beset the world. His words are as true now as when they were written in 1893:

5. We deplore — and those who judge of all things merely by the light and according to the standard of nature join with Us in deploring-that society is threatened with a serious danger in the growing contempt of those homely duties and virtues which make up the beauty of humble life. (more…)

DON VINCENZO writes:

On this day, the Church celebrates the Day of the Rosary, a day of prayer proclaimed in 1571 by the Pope Pius V  after one of the decisive naval battles in history: Lepanto, fought in the Ionian Sea near today’s Greek city of Naupaktos, which adjoins both the Gulfs of Corinth and Patras.

On October 7, 1571, the boy shepherd, Michele Ghislieri, who would become Pope Pius V, recognizing the serious threat of Islamic expansion in the Mediterranean, and the boast of the Sultan Selim II that he “would stable his horses in St. Peter’s,” single handedly organized the Holy League, receiving no help from Germany, France or England, in which the naval forces of the Holy See, Venice and Spain were deployed against the much larger Turkish fleet. The pope attributed that victory by an outnumbered fleet the result of the presence of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the saying of the Rosary; hence, he called that day Our Lady of Victory, which was later changed to the Feast of the Rosary by Pope Clement XIII. (more…)

America’s Quasi-Totalitarian News Media

by Lawrence Auster

It is well known that, when one side only of a story is heard and often repeated, the human mind becomes impressed with it insensibly.

— George Washington, on the pro-Jacobin press of the 1790s

A major force in the demoralizing of America is the electronic news media. Unfortunately, like most conservative complaints about liberalism, the constant right-wing gripes about “media bias” tend to be superficial and ineffective.  Ineffective, because they can be refuted by many trivial examples of the media’s “balanced” treatment of an issue; and superficial, because the problem of liberal media control is far deeper than the term “bias” suggests.  What conservatives call “bias” is not just an unfair tilt in favor of liberals and against conservatives.  Rather, it is the systematic construction of an alienist version of reality, and the suppression of all facts and opinions that contradict it.  This process of mass indoctrination has become so pervasive that no one, even conservatives, clearly sees it as such.

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