Brew City Brawler

Awesome bible verses: James 5: 1-8

From theNew Testament's Letter of James, the theological justification for modern Republicanism:

1] Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you.
[2] Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are motheaten.
[3] Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire. Ye have heaped treasure together for the last days.
[4] Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth: and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of sabaoth.
[5] Ye have lived in pleasure on the earth, and been wanton; ye have nourished your hearts, as in a day of slaughter.
[6] Ye have condemned and killed the just; and he doth not resist you.
[7] Be patient therefore, brethren, unto the coming of the Lord. Behold, the husbandman waiteth for the precious fruit of the earth, and hath long patience for it, until he receive the early and latter rain.
[8] Be ye also patient; stablish your hearts: for the coming of the Lord draweth nigh.

Written by Rev. Wright?

McIlheran: You can call my mother church a whore -- as long as you're a Republican!

When it came to light last year that some bloggers who worked for John Edwards had said some crude things about Catholicism, Patrick McIlheran could barely restrain himself.

Keeping them on was a clear signal to Catholics that Edwards held them in "vulgar contempt," McIlheran fulminated.

But now that John McCain, the GOP nominee for president, has actively sought -- and retained -- the endorsement of megachurch minister John Hagee, who has called the Catholic Church a "great whore" and an apostate religion, what do we hear from McIlheran?

Crickets. Quietism.

Shoot -- even the Catholic League is denouncing McCain and Hagee (no doubt because it recognizes the Dems are going to roll in November and wants to maintain a figleaf of nonpartisanship to retain its tax-exempt status).

No doubt McIlheran is holding his tongue because he wants McCain to win.

You know what's truly worthy of contempt? Picking and choosing which candidates to denounce for purported anti-Catholicism -- and make no mistake, McCain's sin is far greater here -- based on your partisan leanings.

Cross-posted at Whallah!

Catholics, Saul Alinsky and Patrick McIlheran

In a comment string to another blog post attacking Barack Obama, Patrick McIlheran disparages community organizing as a wayof getting in the way of somebody making a buck  and says:

New kind of politics? No. An old and detestable one.

Fortunately for working Catholics of the 1930s in Chicago, Catholic priests and higher-ups felt differently as they cooperated with Saul Alinsky, who founded the school of community organizing in which Obama participated.

From a 1972 Playboy interview with Saul Alinsky on how he organized the Back of the Yards community, the squalid slum depicted in Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, in the 1930s:

PLAYBOY: How did you go about organizing a community like Back of the Yards?

ALINSKY: Well, the first thing I did, the first thing I always do, is to move into the community as an observer, to talk with people and listen and learn their grievances and their attitudes. Then I look around at what I've got to work with, what levers I can use to pry closed doors open, what institutions or organizations already exist that can be useful. In the case of Back of the Yards, the area was 95 percent Roman Catholic, and I recognized that if I could win the support of the Church, we'd be off and running. Conversely, without the Church, or at least some elements of it, it was unlikely that we'd be able to make much of a dent in the community.

PLAYBOY: Wasn't the Catholic Church quite conservative in those days?

ALINSKY: Nationally it certainly was, which was why a little two-bit Hitler like Coughlin was never censured or silenced until the war. But Chicago in those days was a peculiar exception; under Cardinal Mundelein and Bishop Bernard Sheil, it was the most socially progressive archdiocese in the country. Sheil was a fine man, liberal and prolabor, and he was sympathetic to what I wanted to do in Back of the Yards, but the key thing was to win over the local priests; some of whom were much more conservative. Now, it's always been a cardinal principle of organizing for me never to appeal to people on.the basis of abstract values, as too many civil rights leaders do today. Suppose I walked into the office of the average religious leader of any denomination and said, "Look, I'm asking you to live up to your Christian principles, to, make Jesus' words about brotherhood and social justice realities." What do you think would happen? He'd shake my hand warmly, say, "God bless you, my son," and after I was gone he'd tell his secretary, "If that crackpot comes around again, tell him I'm out."

So in order to involve the Catholic priests in Back of the Yards, I didn't give them any stuff about Christian ethics, I just appealed to their self-interest. I'd say, "Look, you're telling your people to stay out of the Communist-dominated unions and action groups, right?" He'd nod. So I'd go on: "And what do they do? They say, 'Yes, Father,' and walk out of the church and join the C.I.O. Why? Because it's their bread and butter, because the C.I.O. is doing something about their problems while you're sitting here on your tail in the sacristy." That stirred 'em up, which is just what I wanted to do, and then I'd say, "Look, if you go on like that you're gonna alienate your parishioners, turn them from the Church, maybe drive them into the arms of the Reds. Your only hope is to move first, to beat the Communists at their own game, to show the people you're more interested in their living conditions than the contents of your collection plate. And not only will you get them back again by supporting their struggle, but when they win they'll be more prosperous and your donations will go up and the welfare of the Church will be enhanced." Now I'm talking their language and we can sit down and hammer out a deal. That was what happened in Back of the Yards, and within a few months the overwhelming majority of the parish priests were backing us, and we were holding our organizational meetings in their churches. To fuck your enemies, you've first got to seduce your allies.

Yes, Alinsky was no saint and his language and tactics could be rough -- sometimes too rough. But he realized something McIlheran doesn't: sometimes building a community requires confrontation. Wasn't that Jesus guy confrontational, after all?

Dolan's unfortunate laugh

Mike Gousha's show on Sunday featured a ginger questioning of Archbishop Timothy Dolan on the archidocese sex abuse scandal.

The televised interview was largely a snoozer. Indeed, it's the extended online interview that features the toughest question of the interview. And Dolan -- who, let's give him credit, is an accomplished answer-giver -- blows it.

Gousha asks the archbishop his opinion on the victims' lawyers' claim that the reason other diocese have filed for bankruptcy was not to protect assets but to protect secrets of abuse.

And Dolan laughs it off, saying "If  we got secrets, we're doing a bad job of hiding them."

Ha ha ha.

Actually, the archdiocese has quite a few secrets at this point.

From a recent Milwaukee Journal Sentinel editorial:

The archdiocese has acknowledged that it knows of more than 40 priests who have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct. But it has refused to release clergy personnel files, leaving open the question: If the Becker files are so damning, what's in the other files?

The natural follow up from Gousha would have addressed this issue. But it didn't come.

Dolan talks a good game about how the church is doing a penance, a contrition, etc. But the Brawler recalls from his first confession -- admittedly some time ago -- that if you don't come clean about all the big stuff, all your confessing is for naught.

And Dolan, who wants to have us to believe he's upfront, is committed to hiding wrongdoing by priests from public view. And, of course, he's also opposed to a law that would temporarily drop the statute of limitations against sexually abusive priests -- which would invite more lawsuits.

In testimony opposing the law he says, essentially, that the church shouldn't pay a price for past crimes (and why does the eternal church keep saying these actions happened decades ago? why does that matter if the victims are very much with us?) because of the damage it would do to the poor. "It will kneecap or even eliminate our ministries to vulnerable and needy people," he says.

Is Dolan, who was sporting a nice-looking pair of cufflinks, really going to stop the church's ministry to the poor if the archdiocese is forced to pay up to atone for past sins? Conservatives -- who have no problem demanding the rollback of public services or public school systems that help the poor -- make the same argument. The Brawler, truth be told,  is not unsympathetic.

But a great harm was done -- and some price must be paid. Some penance must be performed. So the Brawler suspects the Church will have to find new, more creative ways of cutting costs -- just as businesses and the public sector have. The Brawler also suggests Dolan use his considerable communication skills to hit up some local Catholic executives to gauge the true depth of their faith. Briggs & Stratton CEO John Shiely made a nice haul next year. Maybe he's willing to open his checkbook -- wide.

Whatever happened to Cardinal Bernard Law?

Grumbling about how the Archdiocese of Milwaukee is going to have to pay millions for enabling pedophile priests, Patrick McIlheran wrote:

Personally, I think bishops who protected the abusers ought to spend their golden years in silence on their knees in a monastery somewhere, repenting, but those aren’t the usual terms of lawsuits or settlements. Big  money is.

Which made the Brawler wonder: whatever happened to Cardinal Bernard Law? You remember: The Boston Cardinal, the most powerful Catholic in the United States, who covered up for sexual predator priests and now is an officer in the Vatican?

According to the National Catholic Reporter, he's not doing too badly:

Law receives the standard Roman cardinal’s stipend of roughly 4,000 Euro a month (about $5,800 at current exchange rates), and lives in a modest two-story apartment in the basilica that also houses his private secretary and a small community of nuns from Mexico who run his household.

And while his influence pales to that he once enjoyed, he's still an active guy:

Taking stock of the five years since Law’s Dec. 13, 2002, resignation -- coincidentally, the day happened to be Friday the 13th -- he seems to have carved out four roles in Rome:

• Leader of one of the most storied and beautiful basilicas in the Christian world, and a member of a tightly knit community at St. Mary Major. Law’s bond with the priests who live at the basilica, known as the “chapter,” allows him to live something resembling the Benedictine spirituality he has long admired;
• A point of reference for Americans and other English-speakers visiting Rome, celebrating Masses for various delegations and providing hospitality;
• A valued member of an unusually large number of offices in the Roman Curia, the central bureaucracy of the Catholic church, even if he rarely plays the role of “swing vote” or “kingmaker”;
• An informal voice in ecumenical dialogue. When Anglican Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury visited Rome in 2006, for example, he asked for a private session with Law, and afterward told members of his party he was impressed. Around the same time, Law received a delegation of Methodists and, according to those present, charmed them with appreciative comments about John and Charles Wesley, founders of the Methodist movement.

If any American cleric deserved to spend his golden years on his knees, in silence, it was Bernard Law.

The fact that he's not calls into question how McIlheran -- or Archbishop Dolan for that matter -- can expect to be taken seriously when they bemoan how the church is on hook for big money. Or does McIlheran believe justice should wait for the next world?

Are environmentalists atheists?

Yes, asserts John McMahonMcAdams, a one-man wrecking crew to MU's reputation, in yet another risible post:

The key thing here is that environmentalists, and indeed the left generally, are secular. They don’t believe in God, and don’t like religion.

But not believing in God doesn’t change the fact that people have a deep desire to feel righteous, to feel clean and redeemed and right with God -- or with something equivalent to God.

Environmentalists fulfil this need with environmentalism, and like the least tolerant religious people want to cleanse the world of unrighteousness. They want heresy stifled. They want goodness and virtue to prevail -- by force if necessary.

For an example of wanting to feel "right with God -- or with something equivalent to God," the Brawler points you to these paragraphs (Brawler's bold).

Equally worrying is the ecological question which accompanies the problem of consumerism and which is closely connected to it. In his desire to have and to enjoy rather than to be and to grow, man consumes the resources of the earth and his own life in an excessive and disordered way. At the root of the senseless destruction of the natural environment lies an anthropological error, which unfortunately is widespread in our day. Man, who discovers his capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through his own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of the things that are. Man thinks that he can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to his will, as though it did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which man can indeed develop but must not betray. Instead of carrying out his role as a co-operator with God in the work of creation, man sets himself up in place of God and thus ends up provoking a rebellion on the part of nature, which is more tyrannized than governed by him.⁷⁶

In all this, one notes first the poverty or narrowness of man's outlook, motivated as he is by a desire to possess things rather than to relate them to the truth, and lacking that disinterested, unselfish and aesthetic attitude that is born of wonder in the presence of being and of the beauty which enables one to see in visible things the message of the invisible God who created them. In this regard, humanity today must be conscious of its duties and obligations towards future generations.

Were these words taken from Sierra Club agitprop or the Unabomber manifesto?

Actually, they're the words of Pope John Paul II, from the  Centesimus Annus, a papal encyclical that McAdamsMcMahon has namechecked but apparently never read.

Not for the first time, McMahonMcAdams, who apparently believes he has telepathic powers, demonstrates a knack for fatuous projection rather than thought.

The Brawler adopted some of the above verbiage from his comrade in anonymity Illusory Tenant, who also makes sport of Herr Doktor McAdams.