The Vatican Space Program

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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Scott Walker: How Pro-Life is He?

Did you remember to mark Ronald Reagan’s birthday? I did, by taking another look at his landmark Abortion and the Conscience of a Nation — the first time a sitting president published a book on such a crucial moral issue. The book was a brave and principled assertion of the rights of unborn children, by the president who brought pro-lifers in from the cold.

I also remembered, ruefully, how Reagan wasted a “gimme” open Supreme Court appointment on the pro-choice mediocrity Sandra Day O’Connor — a slot which came up in 1981, while Republicans still ran the U.S. Senate and could easily have confirmed a brilliant constitutional purist such as Robert Bork. That decision, few now remember, was the result of a hasty campaign promise Reagan had made to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court.

Pro-Life President, Pro-Choice Staffers

Who was it that, behind the scenes, convinced Ronald Reagan to make such a politically useless promise? Who conned him into picking O’Connor, instead of a solidly pro-life woman jurist?

We will never know which suited shark from K Street whispered in Reagan’s ear, but we do know one thing: O’Connor was and remained a deciding vote in favor of keeping the killing of unborn children legal. And she made it to the court because someone convinced Ronald Reagan that she was pro-life, when she wasn’t.

I had started volunteering for candidate Reagan in 1976, when I was just 12 years old, and he was still just a California governor. I had already been ringing doorbells for New York’s once vibrant Right to Life Party, and it filled me with hope that a serious contender for the Republican nomination was challenging the party’s dominant pro-choice establishment.

continue at The Stream

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America's Gandalf

I went back to Tolkien for inspiration, to an old catechism for answers, and employed some real skepticism at last. I saw that my newly cultivated doubts were cheap excuses, blasé retorts to the ultimate questions, graffiti sprayed across the Sistine ceiling. As once I'd read The Silmarillion to explicate The Hobbit, now I delved into the Catholic Encyclopedia, delighting in the real complexity, the exquisite depths and heights and breadth of God's love and truth, His works and world. I found my very own Gandalf in Rev. John Hardon, S.J., who graciously let me sit in on his college classes.

 read the whole article over at Bad Catholic Bingo Hall

Our Gandalf has fallen into Shadow(earthly death), but perhaps through his canonization God might reveal to us our Gandalf the White. 

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In defense of Chesterton

John Zmirak is amazing.  In an article defending Chesterton against an Episcopalian who basically calls GKC shallow, Zmirak writes the following:

Those of us who love the Faith in its incarnate form, Christendom, see the pre-history of the Church not just in Israel but also in Greece and Rome. We teach the works and ways of our forefathers in Reason as lovingly as we do those of our Jewish ancestors in Faith. Together, they form a picture of the embryonic Church that we treasure like the first ultrasound of one's firstborn baby.

InsideCatholic

What a profound and beautiful image.  Read the whole article, it's worth it.