Biden Skips the Funeral

For John, BLUF:  This Morning you asked about President Biden not attending Pope Benedict's funeral.  This is the best explanation I can find.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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We’re 0-For-2 For Catholic Presidents Attending Papal Funerals

From Howie Carr Radio Network, by Digital Managing Editor Emma Foley, 6 January 2023.

Here is the lede plus one:

They say high school never ends. You can be long gone, and the invite list to your funeral will still stir up drama.

President Biden was not invited to Pope Benedict XVI’s funeral yesterday. Though unconfirmed, it can be easily deduced America’s second-ever baptized Catholic President was barred from attending.

The Vatican kept its explanation for his no-show vague:  “simplicity.”  Any photo from St. Peter’s Square this morning debunks the event was anything but “simple”—with estimates of 50,000 in attendance—and for good reason.

Maybe the Vatican was using “simple” rather than the more blunt word: “straightforward.”  As in, we’re telling the abortion-promoting, religious-freedom-inhibiting, self-proclaimed “devout Catholic” to stay far away.

And there you are.  President Biden is more like a Progressive than like a Roomsn Catholic.  He is willing to shave his Catholic beliefs in order to fit in with his Progressive friends. 

For example, in the wake oof the US Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health decision, reversing Roe v Wade, President Joe Biden signed an executive order aimed at protecting access to avortion.  From CNN we hve this report:

The executive order attempts to safeguard access to medication abortion and emergency contraception, protect patient privacy, launch public education efforts as well as bolster the security of and the legal options available to those seeking and providing abortion services.

“President Biden has made clear that the only way to secure a woman’s right to choose is for Congress to restore the protections of Roe as federal law. Until then, he has committed to doing everything in his power to defend reproductive rights and protect access to safe and legal abortion,” the White House said in a statement on Friday.

There is no action the President can take to restore the nationwide right to an abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling. Biden has acknowledged publicly his options to expand abortion access remain limited, and has called on the American people to elect more members of Congress in November’s midterm elections who will support federal legislation protecting abortion access.

The actions of President Biden suggest not a person who sees abortion as morally wrong, althoough favoored by many in this nation, but as a full fledged right, to be provided everywhere, regardless of local concerns.

President Biden is not executing his duties as though he had [a Catholic] informed conscience, aware of the humanity of a fetus.  I am not shocked that he was not invited to the Requim Mass for the late Pope Benedict.

Regards  —  Cliff

Former Cardinal Indicted

For John, BLUF:  This is an embarrassment to me as a Roman Catholic, yet we should not hide from it  Sin abounds.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Ex-Cardinal McCarrick charged with sexually assaulting teen

Here is the sub-headline:

Disgraced former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick has been charged with sexually assaulting a teenage boy during a wedding reception in Massachusetts in 1974

From ABC News, by Reporter Alanna Durkin Richer, 29 July 2021.

Here is the lede plus one:

Former Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was defrocked after a Vatican investigation confirmed he had sexually molested adults as well as children, has been charged with sexually assaulting a teenage boy during a wedding reception in Massachusetts in 1974, court records show.

McCarrick is the first cardinal in the U.S. to ever be criminally charged with a sexual crime against a minor, according to Mitchell Garabedian, a well-known lawyer for church sexual abuse victims who is representing the man alleging the abuse by McCarrick.

This says to me that we need to listen to those who say they have been molested in some way.  Not that all allegations are true, but we should not be dismissing them out of hand.

On the other hand, to go back to 1974 raises a question in my mind.  Is there a chance that he has repented and changed his actions over time?  Conversely, what do the mental sciences tell us about the ability of people to reform themselves?  I accept that perhaps someone who is a pedophile is a pedophile for ever, sad as that may be to consider.  However, if not, then what is the law and the reform of the individual for?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Never Forget

For John, BLUF:  I am glad to see the Trump Administation joining with the Holy See to remind us of that terrible evil, the Holocaust.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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‘Never Again: Confronting the Global Rise of Anti-Semitism’– US Embassy to Holy See & Holy See Join Forces

Here is the sub-headline:

Cardinal Parolin:  ‘The Holy See Condemns All Forms of Anti-Semitism, Recalling That Such Acts Are Neither Christian Nor Human’

From Zenit, by Reporter Deborah Castellano Lubov, 24 November 2020.

Here is the lede plus one:

Condemning any form of anti-Semitism is fundamental … As we see its resurgence, we must say ‘Never Again!’

This was at the forefront of a Nov. 19 virtual Symposium organized by U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See, Callista Gingrich, and her embassy in Rome, titled “Never Again:  Confronting the Global Rise of Anti-Semitism.”

As we move further in time from the Eugenics thinking that led to "The Holocaust" it is important to remind ourselves that "Never Again" is still an important watchword.

Awareness is important.  From a Wikipedia article on the Holocaust we have:

In September 2018 an online CNN–ComRes poll of 7,092 adults in seven European countries—Austria, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Poland, and Sweden—found that one in 20 had never heard of the Holocaust. The figure included one in five people in France aged 18–34.  Four in 10 Austrians said they knew "just a little" about it; 12 percent of young people there said they had never heard of it.  A 2018 survey in the United States found that 22 percent of 1,350 adults said they had never heard of it, while 41 percent of Americans and 66 percent of millennials did not know what Auschwitz was.  In 2019 a survey of 1,100 Canadians found that 49 percent could not name any of the concentration camps

Those aare, to me, very disturbing numbers.

Where are the History teachers?  Where are our school systems?

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Seat 12

For John, BLUF:  The Russiagate investigations only serve to hobble the Government, by hobbling the President and making his opponents think he will soon be gone.  On the other hand, Rep A Ocasio-Cortez has assured us “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change.”  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Back in 1968 or '69, I caught a performance of The Deputy in London, in a theater just South of Piccadilly Circle.  The play, originally in German, as Der Stellvertreter. Ein christliches Trauerspiel (The Deputy, a Christian tragedy), was written by Herr Rolf Hochhuth and published in 1963.

The play condemns Pope Pius XII as having failed to take action or speak out against the Holocaust.  The play was controversial when I saw it.  It also was not, to me, convincing.

Interestingly, there was later an allegation that the play was based on a Russian (Soviet) disinformation effort, known as Seat 12. This play came to mind a day ago and I immediately connected it in my mind with the ongoing efforts to discredit President Donald Trump.

Of course, with regard to President Trump, the real question is, if he is under the sway of President Putin, why has no one done something serious to remove him from office?♠  I judge this to be a disinformation effort on the part of the Hillary Clinton Campaign to justify her loss.  The tragedy is the damage to our Nation as a while.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  If President Trump was really a stooge of President Putin then another hour in office would be 59 minutes too long.

The UN Preaches

For John, BLUF:  Hypocrites at Turtle Bay.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Over at The Instapundit is a link to a Wall Street Journal article by Ms Claudia Rosett, and this extract of the key point.♠

That’s rich coming from the U.N., which has still not solved its own festering problems of peacekeeper sex abuse, including the rape of minors.  Exposing abusers and holding them to account is a great idea.  The Vatican has spent years addressing the scandal of its own past handling of such cases.  But the U.N. hardly engages in the transparency it is now promoting.

The U.N. releases only generic statistics on violations committed by personnel working under its flag.  The U.N. doesn’t share with the public such basic information as the names of the accused or the details of what they did to people the U.N. dispatched them to protect.  Blue berets accused of sex crimes are simply sent back to their home countries, where in the majority of cases they drop off the radar.

Though the U.N. has been recording a drop in sex-abuse cases since it began releasing numbers in 2007, the number of alleged instances of rape and exploitation each year still runs into the dozens.  (This may understate the realities, given the hurdles to victims coming forward, often in societies in tumult or at war.)  From 2007-13, the U.N. reported more than 600 allegations of rape or sexual exploitation, with 354 substantiated—many of them involving minors. The numbers do not convey how ugly some of these cases get.  Details can occasionally be gleaned when an incident seeps past the U.N. wall of omerta and makes it into the news, as with the peacekeeper gang rape in 2011 of a Haitian teenager, whose agony was caught on video.

As Professor Reynolds says, "If it weren’t for double standards, the U.N. would have no standards at all."

Or, as Saint Matthew says (7:4):

Or how sayest thou to thy brother:  Let me cast the mote out of thy eye; and behold a beam is in thy own eye?

Hat tip to the Instapundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  This is about the United Nations trying to take the Vatican to the woodshed over child abuse.