What Happened to San Domenico School?
By American Phoenix | June 8, 2008
I’m tempted to answer this question: much the same as happened to Catholic education all over the United States. Nevertheless, it’s sad when one’s alma mater loses its Catholic identity. It inspires neither confidence nor donations, at least not from this alumna. San Domenico School is the oldest private school in California, having been founded in 1850 by the Dominican Sisters.
Over the past several years, I have been invited to attend “spirituality” conferences at San Domenico. But just what spirituality is San Domenico offering? This spirituality event has featured such speakers as:
- Carol Lee Flinders who is not, according to her own words, a member of any organized religion.
But you know, I’m not a member of an organized religion and probaably (sic) never would be. It wouldn’t be right for me to advise women who are and who love those faiths. But I do know a great many women who are drawing upon the methods of interior prayer and meditation they’ve learned outside their inherited faith to strengthen them in ways that make it possible for them to challenge church authorities . . . and I find this wonderfully interesting.
Allen, Kim, An Interview with Carol Lee Flinders, The 3rd Wave: Feminism for the New Millennium, 1998.
There’s nothing wrong with not being Catholic or a member of any religion. I find Flinders to be refreshingly honest about that. But it does appear that she is an advocate against organized religion and church authority. So why is she teaching at Santa Clara University and speaking at San Domenico, both Catholic educational institutions?
- Kathleen Norris, a Presbyterian preacher and poet who has spent two years in residence at St. John’s Abbey where, apparently, she received the Eucharist even though she is not a Catholic.
- Anne Lamott, who is both pro-abortion and pro-euthanasia. Gerald Augustinus has documented her outburst at a seminar at Creighton University Medical Center in 2006, quoting liberally from Anne Lamott’s own writing:
I wanted to express calmly, eloquently, that pro-choice people understand that there are two lives involved in an abortion — one born (the pregnant woman) and one not (the fetus) — but that the born person must be allowed to decide what is right. [Ed. note: Why? What is it about being born vs. unborn that makes abortion a moral act? The only difference is that it’s neither possible that an unborn baby could either become pregnant or make any decision about a pregnancy. Which leads to the conclusion that the only real difference is one human being’s power over another.]
…
But then I announced that I needed to speak out on behalf of the many women present in the crowd, including myself, who had had abortions, and the women whose daughters might need one in the not-too-distant future — people who must know that teenage girls will have abortions, whether in clinics or dirty backrooms. Women whose lives had been righted and redeemed by Roe vs. Wade. My answer was met with some applause but mostly a shocked silence. [Ed. note: “righted” and “redeemed”? It’s revealing how she equates children with sin.]
…
And somehow, as I was answering, I got louder and maybe even more emphatic than I actually felt, and said it was not a morally ambiguous issue for me at all. I said that fetuses are not babies yet; that there was actually a real difference between pro-abortion people, like me, and Klaus Barbie. [Ed. note: There it is - the denial of the unborn’s humanity. Lamott is obviously not a biologist. At what developmental stage would she draw the line between fetus and baby? What is the magical point at which rights attach? Either the fetus is human or it’s not. Either rights have to do with our innate humanity, or our rights exist at someone else’s whim.]
Then I said that a woman’s right to choose was nobody else’s goddamn business. [Ed. note: How then can a society make any law prohibiting the conduct of its members? Everything is always going to be someone else’s business.]
…
But as a Christian and a feminist, the most important message I can carry and fight for is the sacredness of each human life, and reproductive rights for all women is a crucial part of that: It is a moral necessity that we not be forced to bring children into the world for whom we cannot be responsible and adoring and present. We must not inflict life on children who will be resented; we must not inflict unwanted children on society. [Ed. note: Then let someone else be present, responsible and love your children, if you are so hard-hearted that you think you’re only option is to kill them. Someone else does want your children. Adoptive parents such as myself are waiting years and spending lots of hard earned money just to have the privilege of raising your children. Life is not a punishment to be inflicted. It is a joy and a gift to be lived and, it shouldn’t need to be said, is not yours to take.]
- Sister Joan Chittister, OSB, whose dissent I have documented previously; and
- John O’Donohue, who was an ordained Catholic priest who left the priesthood in the 1990s.
This year San Domenico School invited Mary Evelyn Tucker to speak at their 6th annual Spring Spirituality Event. Prof. Tucker is a professor of religion and ecology and holds dual posts at the Yale Divinity School and the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. The syllabus for Tucker’s Religion and Ecology course requires reading such authors as Hans Küng, who was stripped of his right to teach Catholic theology in 1979 due to doctrinal heterodoxy.
This extension of ethics outward represents a major transformation for the world’s religions from their theological and anthropological phase to their ecological and cosmological phase. …
The religions have already known we are contained in the center of vast mysteries – we dwell amidst intimate immensities as the French philosopher, Gaston Bachelard, suggested. Historically the religions have shown us how to orient our lives set between hearth and cosmos. It is then the task of the religions to recover and recreate a language - both ecological and ethical – which reroots us in the earth as our home.
… [T]he human heart is waiting to participate in dialogue with the Earth. The human soul is poised to recover the language of the sacred that brings us back into contact with the great rhythms of the natural world. The religious traditions can help to unlock this language of dialogue with the Earth and for the Earth.
Closing Comments of Mary Evelyn Tucker, Bucknell University, Forum on Religion and Ecology, February 23, 2002.
How do you write an entire speech about religion and ecology without once mentioning God? If the purpose of organized religion is to provide a structure that helps us to know and love God, then how can religion ever be completely centered in ecology/cosmology? Christianity does not believe that the created is God. “Dialogue with the Earth”? The Earth doesn’t talk back, although like any inanimate object it can be damaged if not treated with care.
Prof. Tucker has also spoken for the Call to Action National Conference and a tape of Tucker’s speech from that conference is available at Call to Action’s website. *
I recently received an email distribution from San Domenico notifying alumni that Lamott has been invited to speak at San Domenico school again in October 21, 2008 for the Fall Book Fair Luncheon. The email stated, “We are thrilled to announce our guest author at this year’s Book Fair Luncheon will be Anne Lamott.” Thrilled to have a pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia speaker? To be fair, the first time Anne Lamott was invited to speak at San Domenico was prior to her outburst at Creighton University. But how can San Domenico say that they don’t know now?
There has not been a single orthodox Catholic speaker at San Domenico’s spirituality conferences. Why not? Not one person has been chosen who will testify to the beauty of Catholic spirituality or Catholic teachings on any of a number of issues. Why not?
What happened to this wonderful - Catholic - school that I loved? That I still love, despite the path it seems to have chosen.
—–
* Members of Call to Action were excommunicated in 1996 by Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of the Diocese of Lincoln, Nebraska. The excommunications were affirmed by the Congregation for Bishops at the Vatican in 2006. The congregation’s secretary, Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, wrote to Bishop Bruskewitz that his action “was properly taken within your competence as pastor of that diocese.” Re also wrote that:
“The judgment of the Holy See is that the activities of ‘Call to Action’ in the course of these years are in contrast with the Catholic faith due to views and positions held which are unacceptable from a doctrinal and disciplinary standpoint…. Thus to be a member of this association or to support it is irreconcilable with a coherent living of the Catholic faith.”
Call to Action believes that the Catholic Church should “reevaluate its positions on issues like celibacy for priests, the male-only clergy, homosexuality, birth control” and supports female ordination.
Topics: Abortion, Adoption, California, Catechetics, Catholic, Culture of Death, Education, Family | No Comments »
Go, Pansies, Go!? Fight, Pansies, Fight!?
By American Phoenix | May 29, 2008
My husband is a University of Washington alumnus and today he got this package of seeds in the mail.
I guess they couldn’t send us a real husky, but why pansies?
Somehow, the connection between Huskies and pansies just doesn’t work for me.
I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for the marketing conversations surrounding this mailing. Imagine me grinning. Broadly.
Topics: Education, Humor, Sports | No Comments »
Our First Marxist President?
By American Phoenix | May 28, 2008
That Obama may be the first African American candidate - or perhaps even President - doesn’t really interest me. If he were Maggie Thatcher, Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams, I would vote for him. But he isn’t. Far more alarming is the fact that Obama may become our first Marxist president. The connection between the black liberation theology of Obama’s former pastor, the liberation theology of Latin America and Marxism has been all too clear to me. The American Thinker has an excellent article today by Kyle-Anne Shiver which connects the dots.
It wasn’t the sermon that caught me off guard; I was prepared for that. I had watched video of Wright, giving five of his fiery sermons.
The thing that really got me to thinking, reading and searching for answers was the church bookstore.
Having been a practicing Christian for more than 40 years now, and a practicing Catholic for 26 of those years, I have visited perhaps 100 various Christian bookstores, both Protestant and Catholic. In all of those places, one thing tied together the books for sale: Christianity.
Not so in Obama’s church bookstore.
I spent more than an hour perusing available books, and found as many claiming to represent Muslim thought as those representing Christian thought. Black Muslim thought, to be specific.
And the books claiming to support Christianity were surprisingly of a more political than religious nature. The books by James H. Cone, Wright’s own mentor, were prominent and numerous.
Now that I have read a number of the books that presumably Wright’s congregants (including Barack Obama) have also read, I can only conclude that the thing tying these volumes together is not Christianity, nor any real religion, but the political philosophy of Karl Marx.
…
If Marxism can be summed up in only a couple of phrases, now familiar to nearly every modern person, they would be “class struggle” and “oppressed vs. oppressors.”
James H. Cone, the unquestioned modern-day mentor of all the black power preachers, claims to have created a new theology, uniting the Muslim black power tenets of Malcolm X and the Christian foundations of Martin Luther King, Jr.
All he has really done, in my opinion, is take original liberation theology from Latin America, developed in the early 1960s by Catholic priests, and painted it black.
…
Understanding that black liberation theology is Marxism dressed up to look like Christianity helps explain why there is no conflict between Cone’s “Christianity” and Farrakhan’s “Nation of Islam.” They are two prophets in the same philosophical (Marxist) pod, merely using different religions as backdrops for their black-power aims.
As Cone himself writes in his 1997 preface to a new edition of his 1969 book, Black Theology and Black Power:
“As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God’s reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts. As Malcolm X put it: ‘I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won’t let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion’.” (p. xii; emphases mine)
And, to drive his Marxist emphasis even further, Cone again quotes Malcolm X:
“The point that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the overall international (class) struggle.” (p. xiii)
…
It is this subjugation of genuine Christianity to the supremacy of the Marxist class struggle, which marks the true delineation between traditional Christianity and black liberation theology, as Pope Benedict XVI (writing in 1984 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) sums up thusly:
“For the marxist, the truth is a truth of class: there is no truth but the truth in the struggle of the revolutionary class.”
Which is precisely why Cone and his disciples are able to boldly proclaim that if the Jesus of traditional Christianity is not united with them in the Marxist class struggle, then he is a “white Jesus,” and they must “kill him.” (Cone; A Black Theology of Liberation; p. 111)
And Cone brings it all the way home with this proclamation of liberation from traditional Christianity itself:
“The appearance of black theology means that the black community is now ready to do something about the white Jesus, so that he cannot get in the way of our revolution.”
Shiver, Kyle-Anne, Obama, Black Liberation Theology, and Karl Marx, The American Thinker, May 28, 2008
The entire piece is well worth reading. It echoes my own concerns about the connections between liberation theology and Marxism mentioned in previous posts.
Topics: Catholic, Christianity, Culture of Death, Politics, Religion | No Comments »
The Law is a Great Teacher
By American Phoenix | May 27, 2008
Paul “just this guy, you know” over at Thoughts of a Regular Guy has an excellent post quoting Frank Turek’s review David Blankenhorn’s book The Future of Marriage over at TownHall.com where you can read the whole thing. Apparently, a pro-gay liberal Democrat, concludes that homosexual marriage is not in the best interests of children or society.
He [Blankenhorn] writes, “Across history and cultures . . . marriage’s single most fundamental idea is that every child needs a mother and a father. Changing marriage to accommodate same-sex couples would nullify this principle in culture and in law.”
How so?
The law is a great teacher, and same sex marriage will teach future generations that marriage is not about children but about coupling. When marriage becomes nothing more than coupling, fewer people will get married to have children.
So what?
People will still have children, of course, but many more of them out-of wedlock. That’s a disaster for everyone. Children will be hurt because illegitimate parents (there are no illegitimate children) often never form a family, and those that “shack up” break up at a rate two to three times that of married parents. Society will be hurt because illegitimacy starts a chain of negative effects that fall like dominoes—illegitimacy leads to poverty, crime, and higher welfare costs which lead to bigger government, higher taxes, and a slower economy.
Are these just the hysterical cries of an alarmist? No. We can see the connection between same-sex marriage and illegitimacy in Scandinavian countries. Norway, for example, has had de-facto same-sex marriage since the early nineties. In Nordland, the most liberal county of Norway, where they fly “gay” rainbow flags over their churches, out-of-wedlock births have soared—more than 80 percent of women giving birth for the first time, and nearly 70 percent of all children, are born out of wedlock! Across all of Norway, illegitimacy rose from 39 percent to 50 percent in the first decade of same-sex marriage.
Blankenhorn concludes:
“One can believe in same-sex marriage. One can believe that every child deserves a mother and a father. One cannot believe both.”
Blankenhorn is amazed how indifferent homosexual activists are about the negative effects of same-sex marriage on children. Many of them, he documents, say that marriage isn’t about children.
How many millions of children will be hurt on account of this political quest for social reengineering?
Topics: Culture of Death, Family, Homosexuality, Law, Politics | 1 Comment »
Fallout and Implications: Homosexual Marriage
By American Phoenix | May 19, 2008
Several excellent articles have been written on the implications and fallout from the California Supreme Court’s decision on gay marriage:
The American Thinker has posted an excellent and humorous article on the potential for more legal mischief:
The court goes on, with a great deal of verbal sleight-of-hand and gobbledygook, to justify gay marriage, i.e. the elevation of the union of two males or two females, who engage in mutual sexual activity, to the full status of marriage. The first thing we notice about this argument is the superfluity of the word “two”. True, the words “two adults” and “couple” do appear in the decision, but only by way of example and not of restriction. No argument is given for the magical uniqueness of “two” and no argument presented thereafter is not equally applicable to three or four or more gay men or lesbian women. It is my fond hope that, even as we speak, some gay trio or quartet in San Francisco is planning to apply for a marriage license. And I would defy the California Supreme Court, with the present decision in place, to devise a way to stop them within the boundaries of its own principles.
The author then goes on to analyze why, under the Court’s decision, polygamy - whether homo- or heterosexual, must be legally permitted and concludes:
But the fun doesn’t stop there. Even the ingenious wordsmiths of CSC would be hard pressed to justify specific sexual acts as requirements for full marital status. Accepting the arguments used for granting marital status to gay couples and trios, we must admit that there would be no honest reason for denying the same status to other cohabiting couples such as brothers and/or sisters, cousins, or just friends.
Consider, for example, two old friends of mine, Felix and Oscar, who have shared an apartment for decades. Their friendship has no homoerotic overtones; they are in fact persistently if unsuccessfully heterosexual. The legalization of gay marriages wouldn’t help them a bit. But if they were to claim to be gay partners, they would, under the present CSC decision, be eligible for all the advantages of a gay marriage. If that isn’t “discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation”, please tell me what is. Therefore, in all fairness, the CSC must extend its permission to them and their ilk.
…
But let us look on the bright side. The CSC decision could lead to the restoration of clans or tribes — a concept that has often had a strong stabilizing effect on society. Eventually, whole communities or cities might be joined in matrimony. Ultimately the whole population of California might become one big happy family, filing a single enormous tax return and referring to the governor (by then hereditary) as “big daddy” or big mama”. And in such an intimate family-state, there would be no need for a supreme court.
Shlichta, Paul, Some Logical Corollaries of California’s Gay Marriage Decision, American Thinker, May 19, 2008.
I’m sure Shlichta must have had his tongue firmly planted in his cheek when he spoke about the “strong stabilizing effect on society” of clans or tribes. Just look at the stability of the societies in the Middle East and Africa. It should be no surprise then, when the lawsuits advocating the legalization of polygamy begin to be filed in California. I predicted this two years ago.
The Reluctant Penitent believes, as do I, that this decision will be used to stigmatize - and ultimately worse - people who think that homosexual marriage is not in society’s best interests:
The real effect of the decision is to marginalize people who have a certain view on human sexuality. It also happens that such a view is taught by the Catholic Church, by conservative Protestant denominations, by Muslims, and by and by traditional Jews. Thus the law gives people who disagree with these religious groups the right to control and stigmatize them in some quite dramatic ways.
The rabbi, priest, and minister who choose to speak about sexuality with their congregations may be surprised to learn that, in the eyes of the State of California, they are doing something as morally reprehensible as the neo-Nazi seething to his fellow hatemongers about the vices of the black and Jewish races. Right now, in the state of California, anyone, religious or not, who thinks that human sexual activity should be restricted to the heterosexual marital relationship is as marginal as a racist or a Holocaust denier.
Sure, they can continue to communicate on the fringes of society, and on dodgy internet sites. But in any mainstream context they can be denied the right to communicate their ideas, on the grounds that they are arbitrary, intolerant, and dangerous.
The real aim of the California Supreme Court decision, The Reluctant Penitent, May 16, 2008
I happen to agree with Reluctant Penitent’s assessment. People who think homosexual marriage is wrong, both because of reason and faith, will be marginalized, stigmatized and pushed to the fringes of society. Our businesses will not be our own to manage as we please. Wedding photographers will be forced to work for homosexual couples. Landlords will be forced to rent to homosexual couples. We will be forced into a “polite” silence at dinner parties. Judges who refused to preside over homosexual marriages will be, and already have been, summarily fired. Churches will, and already have had, their tax free status revoked for refusing to recognize homosexual marriages. Religious schools, whether they be Christian, Muslim or Jewish, will not be allowed to hire teachers/staff or admit students who conduct themselves in accord with the principles that those religious schools are attempting to teach. Students at public schools will be indoctrinated with the state’s ideology that homosexual marriage is as good as heterosexual marriage, and ultimately that there is no justification for banning polygamy either. Public school students will therefore conclude that marriage is utterly meaningless. Just as they have already done in several northern European countries.
Regardless of what it is called, legal sanctioning of homosexual relationships creates a host of unintended consequences and constitutes a serious threat to religious liberty.
Consider what happened in Massachusetts in 2004: Justices of the peace who refused to preside over same-sex unions due to moral or religious objections were summarily fired. Since same-sex unions were entitled to be treated the same as traditional marriages, this refusal was discrimination and a firing offense.
What about a priest or minister who similarly refuses to preside at such ceremonies? Obviously the state can’t fire such people, but it is easy to foresee other sanctions — such as loss of tax benefits — being imposed on churches.
…
Just last year, two women filed a complaint in New Jersey because they were denied use of a pavilion for their civil union ceremony. The pavilion was owned by a Methodist ministry. It had been rented out for marriages, but the ministry refused to rent it for civil unions because it is a religious structure, and civil unions are not recognized in the United Methodist Church Book of Discipline.
Due to the ministry’s refusal to rent it for the lesbian ceremony, New Jersey revoked its tax-free status.
The Des Moines Human Rights Commission found the local Young Men’s Christian Association in violation of public accommodation laws because it refused to extend “family membership” privileges to a lesbian couple that had entered a civil union in Vermont.
Accordingly, the city forced the YMCA to recognize gay and lesbian unions as “families” for membership purposes, or lose over $100,000 in government support.
Perhaps the most notorious example of a state forcing its view on a church agency comes from Massachusetts, where Boston Catholic Charities ran an adoption agency that had been placing children with families for over 100 years.
In 2006, Archbishop Sean P. O’Malley announced that the agency would abandon its founding mission rather than submit to a state law requiring it to place children with homosexual couples. (A Vatican document from 2003 described gay adoptions as ”gravely immoral.”)
…
Bishop Fred Henry of Calgary, Canada, was investigated by the Alberta Human Rights Commission for doing little more than writing about this teaching in a newspaper column. Åke Green, pastor of a Pentecostalist church in Sweden, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to a month in prison for a sermon that insulted homosexuals.
It may seem that legal recognition of civil unions or gay marriages is a trivial matter and one that respects the basic dignity of gay people. The unintended legal consequences that flow from such recognition, however, present a serious threat to religious liberty.
Courts and legislatures need to consider these consequences before committing the nation to a policy with so many potential pitfalls.
Rychlak, Ronald J., The Unintended Consequences of ‘Same Sex Marriage’, Catholic Online, May 2, 2008
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a professor at Emory University, foresaw these consequences before her death in 2007:
Many Americans, who come to see same-sex marriage as just another step in marriage’s evolution, will accept the public pronouncements that they are doing no more than supporting “fairness” by extending some valuable benefits to people of the same sex who happen to love each other and wish to live together without shame or stigma. What could be more innocuous? But for the hardcore activists, the real goal is the destruction of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. They aim to discredit all forms of authority — especially God and nature — that dare to tell people how to lead their lives. In the view of queer activists, desire, like love in Carmen’s “Habenera,” knows no law — nor should any be imposed upon it.
In the current climate, the appeal of their position is not hard to understand, especially since most of those who accept it do not begin to understand its implications. If anything, the defense of same-sex marriage looks like yet another logical step in the gradual increase in freedom for all members of society. And since activists, the courts, and the media overwhelmingly encourage this deception, we may readily understand that many people may come to see same-sex marriage as another blow against outmoded and illegitimate forms of authority — a blow for freedom and equality. Buying into this view, however, they will remain blind to the ways in which they are playing into the hands of vast governmental and economic powers. The freedom for gays and lesbians to marry will decisively contribute to disaggregating all of the remaining social institutions that provide the foundations for any collective resistance against political and economic domination.
Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, Marriage On Trial, excerpted from Marriage: The Dream That Refuses to Die, National Review Online, May 16, 2008
Will this court decision stand? Insight Scoop reports that it is up to the voters to decide. 1.1 million California voters signed petitions to put a constitutional amendment that protects marriage on the November 2008 ballot. California voters may have the last word and protect democracy from judicial fiat. Then again, they may not. The California Log Cabin Republicans (a homosexual activist organization) suggests that the people are no longer allowed to amend the Constitution:
As noted in McFadden v. Jordan (1948) 32 Cal.2d 330, 333: “The initiative power reserved by the people by amendment to the Constitution in 1911 (art. IV, s 1) applies only to the proposing and the adopting or rejecting of ‘laws and amendments to the Constitution’ and does not purport to extend to a constitutional revision.”
The ideologues want nothing less than to destroy democracy in California and in the United States of America. They have complete disregard for the will of the people - to the point that Californians might not even be allowed to rectify this Constitutional mess solely because of the semantic difference between the meanings of the words “amendment” and “revision.”
Those California Supreme Court justices who have such disregard for our votes should also be removed from the Court. California voters have done this before when Rose Bird was removed from the Court. It can and should be done again.
Topics: Adoption, California, Catholic, Christianity, Culture of Death, Family, Homosexuality, Law, Politics, Polygamy, Religion | 10 Comments »
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