Shameful Advice from the Pontifical Academy for Life on the Use of Vaccines Containing Aborted Tissue

The Pontifical Academy for Life advice on vaccines containing cells from murdered (aborted) babies is legalistic fudge - The Academy expressed the right of parents to use or abstain from aborted fetal vaccines “if it can be done without causing children, and indirectly the population as a whole, to undergo significant risks to their health. However, if the latter are exposed to considerable dangers to their health, vaccines with moral problems pertaining to them may also be used on a temporary basis.". The Academy expressed the right of parents to use or abstain from aborted fetal vaccines “if it can be done without causing children, and indirectly the population as a whole, to undergo significant risks to their health. However, if the latter are exposed to considerable dangers to their health, vaccines with moral problems pertaining to them may also be used on a temporary basis. The moral reason is that the duty to avoid passive material cooperation is not obligatory if there is grave inconvenience.”  (The central concern in their document was for pregnant women and the possible transmission of rubella to her unborn child.)

Let me explain my position by way of analogy.

In a wartime concentration camp run by military police, food is insufficient to keep the slave labour force (of whom there is no shortage) strong enough for work. No extra food can be imported from outside because of shortages.

The commandant decides that those prisoners who are unable to work will be killed and made into sausages, meat  pies, and soup, and fed to the prisoners still capable of work.

Amongst the prisoners is a Catholic Bishop, who, relies on the reasoning in this passage, dealing with vaccine containing cells from aborted babies, from the Pontifical Academy for Life:

 “The Academy expressed the right of parents to use or abstain from aborted foetal vaccines:

 “if it can be done without causing children, and indirectly the population as a whole, to undergo significant risks to their health. However, if the latter are exposed to considerable dangers to their health, vaccines with moral problems pertaining to them may also be used on a temporary basis. The moral reason is that the duty to avoid passive material cooperation is not obligatory if there is grave inconvenience.”

The Bishop states that the prisoners may eat the human flesh food products because:

Not to do so would cause them grave inconvenience, and

The work which they are doing, manufacturing sanitary equipment, e.g. lavatories, for hospitals, is vital for the health and welfare of the public. Its non-performance would cause the public grave inconvenience.

I would treat him, and his opinion, with the contempt they deserve and hope that, after the end of hostilities and the defeat of the nation whose camp it was, he would be dismissed the clerical state.

Murdered because of a trivial dispute between two trivial and worthless German thugs.

The following meditation on autumn was written by Bruno Schulz (July 12, 1892 – November 19, 1942). His tragic story can be found on Wikipedia. He was an author of stories, a lost novel, and poetry, a Catholic, of Jewish parentage, whose 'patron', the German-Austrian thug Felix Landau, murdered the Jewish dentist of another German thug,  Karl Günther, who, in revenge, murdered Bruno Schulz.

The autumn would not end. Like soap bubbles, days rose ever more beautiful and etherial, and each of them seemed so perfect that every moment of its duration was like a miracle extended beyond measure and almost painful. In the stillness of those deep and beautiful days, the consistence of leaves changed imperceptibly, until one day all the trees stood in the straw fire of completely demateralsed leaves, in a light redness like a coating of coloured confetti, magnificent peacocks and phoenixes; the slightest move or flutter would cause them to shed the splendour of their plumage - the light, moulted,superfluous leafy feathers.

Bruno Schulz: A Second Autumn”, from The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories, transl. Celina Wieniewska. 

Jesień, jesień, aleksandryjska epoka roku, gromadząca w swych ogromnych bibliotekach jałową mądrość 365 dni obiegu słonecznego. O, te poranki starcze, żółte jak pergamin, słodkie od mądrości jak późne wieczory! Te przedpołudnia uśmiechnięte chytrze jak mądre palimpsesty, wielowarstwowe jak stare pożółkłe księgi! Ach, dzień jesienny, ten stary filut-bibliotekarz, łażący w spełzłym szlafroku po drabinach i kosztujący z konfitur wszystkich wieków i kultur! Każdy krajobraz jest mu jak wstęp do starego romansu. Jakże się świetnie bawi, wypuszczając bohaterów dawnych powieści na spacer pod to zadymione i miodne niebo, w tę mętną i smutną, późną słodycz światła! Jakich nowych przygód dozna Donkiszot w Soplicowie? Jak ułoży się życie Robinsonowi po powrocie do rodzinnego Bolechowa?

9

W duszne, nieruchome wieczory, złote od zórz, odczytywał nam ojciec wyjątki ze swego manuskryptu. Porywający lot idei pozwalał mu chwilami zapomnieć o groźnej obecności Adeli.

10

Przyszły ciepłe wiatry mołdawskie, nadciągnęła ta ogromna żółta monotonia, to słodkie, jałowe wianie z południa. Jesień nie chciała się skończyć. Jak bańki mydlane wstawały dni coraz piękniejsze i eteryczniejsze i każdy wydawał się tak do ostatnich granic wyszlachetniony, że każda chwila trwania była cudem przedłużonym nad miarę i niemal bolesnym.

11

W ciszy tych dni głębokich i pięknych zmieniała się niepostrzeżenie materia listowia, aż pewnego dnia stały drzewa w słomianym ogniu całkiem zdematerializowanych liści, w krasie lekkiej jak wykwit plewy, jak nalot kolorowych confetti — wspaniałe pawie i feniksy, które wstrząsnąć się tylko muszą i zatrzepotać, ażeby strącić to świetne, lżejsze od bibułki, wylinione i niepotrzebne już pierze.

— Bruno Schulz, “A Second Autumn”, from The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories

Polish Epiphany

Elbląg Epiphany Procession, Poland

06.01.2015

Roman Soldiers

Caesar or Herod 

Herod or Caesar 

A King 

A King 

Two Very Happy Angels (well, who wouldn't be happy?) 

I shall be there next Wednesday to take more photographs

A Discussion of Chesterton on Poland

http://youtu.be/Oq-Y2pdoOrA

Hi Mummy, it's me ... That's how I looked when ...

One of my Liceum former pupils published this on Facebook. I read it and choked on tears. The text below the picture is translated by me from the Polish.

You might wish to reblog, Tweet, or Facebook it.

Hi Mummy, it's me ... That's how I looked when ... You know, you said that you couldn't deal with it, not now ... and you bought the pills, which made me quietly die in you ... I'm a little sad because I wanted so much to love you and hug you tightly, I wanted you to be proud of me, so many things I wanted to do with you! Now it is no longer important ... I just wanted to say that I forgive you, and I still love you. Until we meet again Mummy, I'll be waiting for you!

On Hair Shirts and Journalists

Coleridge's famous "willing suspension of disbelief" comes to mind when thinking of journalists and some Catholic apologists (including Bishops), only here the more appropriate expression would be "willing suspension of intelligence", which faculty I assume them in some measure to possess.

W.H.Auden, a versifier for whom I have nothing but contempt, in his "Letter to Lord Byron", wrote, referring to the average poet, but his words could better be applied to the average journalist:

A slick and easy generalisation
Appeals too well to his imagination.

Most published stuff about the Catholic Church, whether in newspapers, magazines, radio and television, or on the internet, by its ignorance and lack of basic understanding of what it is talking about, produces, in me at least, such a state of nauseous rage, subsiding into helpless boredom,  erupting into by massive uncharity and Inquisitorial fantasising,  that I regard it as spiritually dangerous. 

If I comment on your blog, I don't mean you.

I used to follow about one hundred blogs, now about 30. I have no objection to egoism: we should all love ourself just a little, but egotism is another matter. Tell us all you like about your televised interviews with the fatuous and ill-informed, but expect to impress only the fatuous and ill-informed. Drop names and, if they are of interesting or good people, I will read on. Famous nobodies, however elegant, smooth, rich, or sartorially overpowering, are not interesting. Disagree with the Pope if your fully informed conscience so directs, and an important matter of principle is involved, but do not misrepresent what he has said or written. Knowingly to do so deserves the millstone.

Tell the truth, if you can. If you don't know what it is, shut up!

I see no point in wasting time on what makes us uncomfortable and at the same time leads us into confusion and sin.

The Press? Better a hair shirt.

Can they still be bought?

Lenten Relief: Polish Giant Palm Competition

Lent here is a pretty serious business. When the Parish Priest makes his ceremonious Kolęda call to your house after Christmas, after giving his blessing, he hands you a card with instructions for Lent: no dancing, alcohol, parties, or loud music.

However, most Parishes hold a competition for the best, tallest, and most beautiful Palm. They bear no resemblance to English Palms. I photographed this one today in a beautiful brick Gothic Church at Tolkmicko.

It reached the roof and was about 30 feet tall. I have no idea whether it won a prize.

Bigotry! Bigotry! Quackety Quack!

You won’t like this – not at all!

How often, if you speak out against homosexualism (no, not homosexuality) or any other pressure-group, do you hear the duckspeak: Some of my best friends are……….

No! No! No!

I have no friends whom I know to be actively homosexual;.

whom I know to be rich. I am poorish, and do not like the rich;

whom I know to be deep ecologists. They are mad;

whom I know to be in favour of abortion – need I explain why?

I have no friends whom I know to be religious Jews, only because religious Jews choose their friends from among their co-religionists. Does that make them bigots, speaking duckspeakfully? I think not.

I had a friend, who was a Jew and I think privately a Chasidic Jew, though he dressed like an Englishman. We were in business together and every week he would invite me and a couple of other Catholics to a debating society which met weekly in the Bloomsbury Hotel. It sounded very boring, and too much like school, so I always pleaded the need to go home to my family. Later it emerged that the society was Jewish and seeking converts. Had I known I would certainly have gone for the chance to learn, question, and argue. I approve totally of missionary activity.

I guess he was a bigot, too, because he was devoutly religious, a family man, and would never have accepted that the Messiah has already come. His reasons were, for him, rational.

I had a number of Muslim Arab friends when I worked in the End of London. One, the chef at my favourite restaurant, was called Ossama. They were witty (in English, too. I know no Arabic), clever, well educated, and knew far more about European history that the average English person. They also were out, sometimes very subtly, sometimes openly, to bring in converts. Good for them! I did my best to present Catholicism to them, but without success.

One of them told me that Allah would forgive me if I killed my father, mother, brother, or sister, but not if I continued to say that He had a Son. Very bigoted, but for him, rational.

I am choosy about my friends – and enemies, for I, too, am duckspeakingly a bigot.

A bigot is someone who knows or thinks he has the truth. He then acts in accordance with it.

To be Catholic is to believe that only Christ saves, and that he does so through His Church, whether the person to be saved is Catholic or not. That is what I understand to be the truth of “no Salvation outside the Church”.

Unacceptable bigotry!

Quack! Quack!

An Uneasy Silence

At a dinner party years ago, someone, not I, half seriously proposed a campaign for the Beatification of General Franco.

There was an uneasy silence. It is not done to talk politics or religion at English dinner parties.

I think that if I were young and living in England, some form of Catholic fascism might well appeal to me, as it did to Roy Campbell.

Epitaph on a Would-Be Catholic Controversialist

The person I had in mind is not yet dead. There are no prizes for guessing who it is.

He never engaged the foe. An easier thrill
Was to dismiss them with a pitying sneer.
Unable to prove them wrong, he called them “shrill”.
Why? Who knows – I'd guess laziness and fear..

Sonnet: To An Unknown Muslim

I guess you'd kill me if you got the chance
As I would you, yet love you like a brother.
You're more my kin than that benighted other,
The limp Liberal, with his icy tolerance.
Over the centuries, a deadly dance
We've stepped, Crescent and Cross, and for a while
In Spain you conquered, stayed -  Cordoban glazed tile
Speaks of your conquest, which stopped short of France.

You slew for Allah, as we for our Lord.
You bomb still to impose submission
To Islam, and your bloody mission
Is to end filthy decadence with the sword.
If we had your conviction, will of steel,
We'd change the world. We lack only the zeal.

In Which Your Pedantic Blogger Poses Divers Questions And Makes Some Observations

Thanks to Carol McKinley, of the Tenth Crusade - http://throwthebumsoutin2010.blogspot.com/ for this:


"The Rainbow Ministry of Saint Cecilia Parish invites all friends and supporters of the LGBT community to a Mass in celebration of Boston’s Pride Month. The liturgy will take place on Sunday evening, June 19, at six o’clock, with a reception following. The theme of the liturgy, “All Are Welcome,” honors Christ’s message of hope and salvation to all people. We will also celebrate the diverse community that finds its home at Saint Cecilia and ac­knowledge, in a special way, the generous and warm welcome extended to the members of the Jesuit Urban Center in 2007. The Mass will be celebrated by Father John Unni and concel­ebrated by several of the priests who faithfully ministered at the Jesuit Urban Center for so many years. Please plan to attend this special liturgy and support the diversity that makes Saint Cecilia such a special place."

I make no comment on this beyond the expressions printed (by me) in bold:

Rainbow: does this signify in some way the end of a flood? If so, can someone enlighten us as to how and why?

Community: an interesting word, often used to create what does not exist. Do all heterosexuals belong to the heterosexexual community? Do beer-drinkers belong to the beer-drinking community? What about an elderly men community, or a red-headed community, or a community for the bad-tempered?

Celebration: Is there not something paradoxical in celebrating an inclination which the Church has pronounced disordered?

Pride: A deadly sin, I thought.

Diverse, diversity: very funny words. In my last job in London, a visiting charity big gun congratulated me on my 'diversity'. I don't think it was because I was heterosexual, red-haired, or a Catholic, but because I was at least 20 years older than any other employee, a 'diversity' I could have done without.

In a special way: a curious phrase often used to refer to the Real Presence, or Transubstantiation.

Such a special place: because of its diversity, and nothing to do with its being a Catholic Church?

I have no further comment to make.

POLAND AND RUSSIA - 2 - RESPECT AND PRAYER FOR THE DEAD

Two more stories, which I cannot guarantee as true, but I know and trust the people who told me.

1.
The grandfather of a friend who was in the A.K. (Armia Krajowa - Home Army) in the last war, fighting the Germans, was, naturally enough, arrested by the Soviets in 1945, convicted of being a 'fascist bandit' , and sent to a Russian gułag in 1946.

When the trainload of hungry, tired prisoners arrived at the nearest town to the gułag, they found the station platform lined with local Russian people, carrying parcels of bread, sausage, whatever they had. They, too, were starving, but had been told that a train-load of bandits, fascists, and agents-provocateurs was coming, saw through the lies, and wanted to give.

2.
A group of Polish workers were, voluntarily and paid, working in Russia in 1980, laying an oil pipe-line. They were housed in huts near the site.

When it was dark, stealthy Russian locals would come with gifts of vodka, cigarettes, bread, and sausages. They thought the Poles were slave labour and hungry. The Poles explained that they were being paid far more that the local Soviet wages, but the visits and gifts continued.

One night, A Russian took a group of Poles to a piece of waste ground nearby, where lamps were burning, as on a grave. The Russian said that when he was a boy, he remembered the sound of shooting, going on for hours, and afterwards it was seen that the ground had been disturbed. He explained that it was rumoured that the site was a mass grave of Poles murdered by the Soviets, and that the local Orthodox came at night to pray for the souls of the Polish Catholics, and light a znicz - a traditional grave light.

HOLY NUISANCE

I've just read, and posted a comment on, Richard Collins's powerful post "What Do We Expect of a Bishop?" http://linenonthehedgerow.blogspot.com/2010/12/what-do-we-expect-of-bishop.html.

Catholics work hard at blogging. They, we, inform, encourage, support, tweet, and sometimes criticise each other. Some are learned and informative, some are prayerful, some, like me, are just angry.

I have a few slight talents, but an immense capacity for anger when I hear or read of a 'shiten shepherd' leading astray his 'clene shepe' (I like Chaucer, too) with misleading statements on matters of Faith, or feeding obscenities to their children (see the excellent John Smeaton, passim) through immoral sex-intruction teaching materials, or putting the favour of malignant megalomaniac over-paid windbags - the "great and the good" above the call to preach the Gospel.

I know I am not alone in my anger.

So would it be worth making a bigger nuisance of ourselves to weak, cowardly, place-seeking, empire buiding, anti-Papal (the list could go on and on) members of the hierarchy, if only to smoke them out?

In a Yorkshire parish, everyone sang 'ee bah gum!' instead of 'kumbayah'. The 'hymn' was dropped.

We could refuse to sing heretical nonsense at Mass.

We could stop giving money to the C.E.S and helping to pay for Greg Pope, and the scandal of unCatholic, obscene, and immoral sex-instruction in Catholic schools.

Ditto Cafod until it toes the line on 'reproductive health'.

Ditto red-nose day.

We could keep the Ecclestone Square bureaucrats busy with heavy dumps of mail after some dubious, idiotic, or plainly heretical pronouncement by a cleric or circular magician.

And we could be a bigger nuisance to government when it promotes or enforces by legislation, anti-Catholic practices.

Fancy being a Holy Nuisance?

I do.

HURRAH ME SOUL, SAYS I. ME SHILLELAGH I LET FLY

Over at The Catholic Whistle, Paul Mallinder's excellent and ever-interesting blog, he speculates about why the Tatchells of this world direct their spleen against the Catholic Church, but say little or nothing about Islam, or Mohammedanism, as we used to call it.

His answer - and I think the right one - is fear.

I prefer 'cowardice'.

Muslims strike back. Catholics don't any more. Why not?

Is this non-violence of Christ and so truly Christian, or Catholic? If it were, I would have to admire it. But I suggest that it is not always from Jesus. He, too, could be violent, as witness the apisode when He drove the money-changers from the Temple.

In fact, most soi-disant liberal Catholics, who are flipsy-flopsy on abortion and contraception, are hard-line against violence whether to people or animals. They don't fight, they don't hunt, but they vociferously support the killing of the unborn.

Why? Because they have married the liberal, sentimental spirit of the age and, as someone said, will soon, thank God, be widowed. They haven't the guts to stand up for the Truth. The approval of liberal windbags is enough for them.

Catholic Europe survived because of people who thought differently. To protect what they loved and believed, they went to war.

Victory at Lepanto, at the Battle of Vienna, on the Vistula in 1920, and in the Second World War was not brought about by passive resistance, but by people who fought, killed, died, and won.

I'm glad that we had Churchill, not Gandhi.

We still, some of us, as Catholics, celebrate Lepanto. But would we follow its example?

OK, MAYBE I'M THICK, BUT I REALLY WANT TO KNOW

1 Is it a truth that, as we pray, so we believe (lex orendi lex credendi)?

2 If it isn't true, why did those early, headstrong, bigoted, un-nuancing, bloody-minded Christians choose death rather than burn a pinch of incense on Caesar's altar?

3 If it is true, how would Archbishop Nichols explain, or nuance, the flowers he laid on a Hindu altar in Willesden?

4 Is the Pope infallible when he speaks ex cathedra on matters of Faith and morals?

4 If he isn't infallible, and the doctrines and dogmas of the Catholic Church are a bit, shall we say, dodgy in places, will I still get to Heaven (if there is one) if I start my own church of Diogenes (no, not the Saint) and retire to a sunny barrel somewhere? (Yes, I know what he did in the barrel)

5 If he is, Why don't you rejecters of infallible Papal teaching go and...found you own church of saint Diogenes and.....?

6 I know there are groups for Catholic homosexuals, homosexualists, leathermen (in San Francisco, apparently ok'd by the Jesuits), for Catholics supporting female ordination, and so on.

What I want to know is: is there a group for lazy Catholics like me who don't want to have to go to Mass and all that boring stuff?

7 If not, isn't it time I started one? Isn't it time, that the Church, as Tony Blair said, caught up with what the people in the pew really believe?

8 If there is such a group, what does Vincent Nichols have to say about it.

71 YEARS AGO TODAY

Today the new semester starts in Polish schools, and in the little town where I live and teach, we started with Mass at the church, the local state schools too, followed by a ceremony at the communist era social-realism war memorial.

The mayor, who is everyone's friend, spoke movingly of the cruelty and barbarity of the occupation by Germany, during which 6 million Poles, half of them Jews, were murdered. He thanked God that Poland survived and is now free.

Among the people present were two of the parish priests, old soldiers in their spledid uniforms, the police, the fire brigade, teachers, school pupils, and ordinary citizens.

At 11 o'clock, the air-raid sirens sounded. A memory of my childhood in wartime London, when I had to listen for the siren, as my grandmother was stone-deaf.

Then each of the groups present laid flowers at the memorial and bowed. A little dog following one group to the memorial stretched out its front paws and, believe it or not, bowed too, not comic but moving.

We sang the Polish National Anthem and went our ways.

Thank God here piety and honour are still very much alive.

Religious Intolerance - HUH!

(Thanks to Love in the Ruins for the lead to this story.)

So Dorota Rabczewska, a young Polish singer, will be prosecuted in Poland for insulting religious feeling. Please note, 'religious feeling', and not 'the Catholic Church'.

She said, silly girl, that the Bible was written by drunks and people who liked herbal cigarettes.

If this is not insulting, what is?

If I chose, as a resident in Poland, to insult the religious feelings of Catholics, Jews, Muslims (Tatars have been here for over 600 years) or Protestants, I would, rightly, face the same treatment.

I am a Catholic. If someone came into my house and insulted my God, my Church, my Saints, or my Scriptures, I would, as my strength permitted, ....you can use your imagination.

Have a nice day!

Decency Is Not Enough

A German woman told me, some 40 years ago, that before the war, her parents who were teachers living in Berlin, witnessed a riot during which a policeman had his eye deliberately gouged out by a communist. As soon as it was safe to leave their flat, they went to the local Nazi party offices and enrolled.

As someone said, “No one is more dangerous than a decent person with a sense of outrage”.

I smell danger now. England long ago ceased to be a religious country, but most of its population, until fairly recently, retained ideas of decency. As Harold Macmillan famously said, “Without religion, there is only decency. Decency is good, but it is not enough.”

Decency is vulnerable to the false idea of “fair play”.Think of the noble stupidity of the English allowing the heathen Danes to cross the causeway at Maldon. Think of the legislation since 1967 which has so undermined morals and decency: it has all appealed to that same decency.

Ending “back street” abortions – what decent person wants a woman to die in a botched abortion?

Legalising homosexual acts – what decent person wants otherwise law-abiding people subjected to blackmail, arrest, shame, and so on?

Lowering the age of homosexual consent to 16 – what decent person (well I for one) wants to deny anyone over that age of consent the right to be truly himself/herself? (or deny the right of elderly homosexual roués to enjoy sex with teenagers?)

Outlawing “hate speech” – no decent person would speak hatefully of another.

God forbid!

Err…Who?

So, the appeal to decency has resulted in:

Horrible and painful death for the unborn,

Aggressive homosexualism, and the teaching even in Catholic schools that homosexual acts are “acceptable”,

The corruption of minds and hearts,

The curtailment of free speech, so that religions are barred from stating their conscientious opposition to certain types of behaviour,

A vigorous and lucrative sex industry.

We can either go along with this, as the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales and their Education Service seem to be doing, or we, too, can get aggressive and draw lines in the sand.

Civil disobedience is preferable to outright violence, and certainly preferable to a new Hitler, riding on the backs of the outraged.