Hudson Catholic parish considers taking in 21 Syrian refugees

Church leaders and members of St. Patrick Parish in Hudson have been praying overtime in the past couple of weeks as they decide whether to welcome five Syrian refugee families into their community next summer.

The Rev. John Gerritts promised to learn more about the refugee crisis and reach out to parish leadership after the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called earlier this fall to ask if his congregation would host the refugees, who are living in a camp in Turkey.

“This is something we’ve never done before,” said Gerritts, who is the church’s pastor. “It’s nothing we were looking to do. It’s not a part of our immediate mission.”

Parish trustee Claire Zajac said some churchgoers perceive the refugees as possibly dangerous to the community.

continue at TwinCities.com

This is a commendable undertaking to take in these displaced Christian families.... oh wait:

Church members are overwhelmingly supportive of the refugee work the Council of Churches does, Walen said. He receives a few letters a year from individuals who say they’re worried about new Muslim settlers in their communities, but most welcome the newcomers.

Ok... well if anyone is interested in also helping Syrian Christians as well, there are organizations out there to enable your charity.  I'm not necessarily against humanitarian efforts, but I hope Wisconsin Catholics can also support Christians in the process as well.

Stream readers know that Christians in the Middle East are the victims of the worst religious persecution on earth. As Jonathan Witt documented here, the UN’s failure to make refugee camps safe is allowing intolerant Sunni Muslims — who share a creed with ISIS — to violently “cleanse” such camps of Christians. These helpless, unarmed survivors of ISIS’s murder squads cannot even reach the “first safe” countries that could welcome them, and instead live in windblown tents and unheated metal storage containers in places like Mt. Sinjar, just miles away from ISIS-controlled territory. More than a million Christians were driven at gunpoint from Iraq during the U.S. occupation of that country, and now the Obama administration is banning Iraqi Christians from even visiting America, and explicitly excluding Christians as victims of ISIS’s genocide.

Zmirak: Cardinal George and the Denethor Option

The first part of Francis Cardinal George’s prophecy, or warning, or cautionary tale, has just come true. As some will recall,Cardinal George warned a group of priests that he expected that he would “die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”

That great and good man has indeed died in his bed. After many years of fearless, compassionate witness to the truth of Jesus Christ, and years of suffering with illness, Francis Cardinal George of Chicago has gone to his last reward. One of the brightest flowers to bloom during the long Catholic spring we enjoyed under popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, his words and deeds embodied the best of the Christian tradition, that inextricable tapestry of fidelity and freedom. Without fidelity to the fatherhood of God, freedom is a bleak and empty, sterile exercise, as shallow and adolescent as the cartoons of Charlie Hebdo. Without freedom, acts of fidelity are not one whit more pleasing to God than marches on May Day in Stalin’s Moscow.

Cardinal George was a stirring example of what English writer Evelyn Waugh foresaw as the “American moment” in the Catholic Church. He carried on the tradition of Charles Carroll, Orestes Brownson, John Courtenay Murray, and Fulton J. Sheen, who each in his own way despoiled the Egyptians—took for Christ’s Church the best and highest and purest that the secular world could offer. For these men, as for George, what they took were the political truths that inspired the founding of a deeply virtuous Republic, the United States of America, where the Church could live and thrive under much more wholesome conditions, with fewer degrading temptations, than under the so-called Christian monarchies that trammeled the Church with favors, which she too often was tempted to accept in place of her freedom. Here on these shores we were offered no mess of pottage, and so we could keep our birthright. That is now what we’ll have to fight for.

continue at Nomocracy in Politics

John Zmirak aka, the counterweight.

John Zmirak is now on Twitter, BTW.

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Amen I say to you, unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.

Post by SAT-7 Arabic.

HT Jimmy