Democrats in Charlotte removed any mention of God from their party platform. Caught in a very public political squeeze, they then voted three times whether to put God back in. Each time, the vote to reinstate God failed. Finally, the chair of the convention ignored the vote and declared that God is back. The same day, Barack Obama decided that the risk of a lightning strike is too high for him to speak on an outside stage. Smart fellow!
Jack Kervorkian assisted in untold numbers of self-murder over the decades. He fought God for much of his misguided adult life.
Last night, God won.
First, Standard & Poor's let fly Easter Week with a scathing warning of financial ruin.
Then God chipped in on Easter.
 |
| The Kingdom of Obama |
Finally, way later than one would wish, Catholic Bishops have spoken out on Obamacare.
They are blunt. It is "deeply disturbing," and the process being used by its Democrat enablers, including more than a few who call themselves Catholic, is equivalent to buying "a pig in a poke."
The Bishops point out that the offensive Senate changes are deliberate, leaving American bishops disappointed and puzzled over the bill's expansion of federal funding and the role of the federal government in the provision of abortion.
America's Catholic bishops have far more experience with the provision of health care than at least 520 of the 536 members of Congress and the President. When they turn their backs, it's bad.
They should have gone further and called for the excommunication of those politicians who hide behind their Catholicism on St. Patrick's Day but fashion nails for the cross of abortion in return for a few votes on election day.
I tuned to a political talk show a few weeks ago in time to hear a snippet that Newt Gingrich is converting to Catholicism. The on-air conversationalists listed a surprisingly long and lustrous list of other fairly prominent personalities who have recently joined the universal church, including the show's hostess. Not a huge deal, but interesting.
It turns out that 150,000 American adults are converting this year, most of them over Easter weekend. Here, courtesy of Deacon Greg Kandra of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs Church, is a description of the saints and sinners the new Catholics will join:
Describing the Catholic Church, James Joyce once said, “Here comes everybody.”
Yes. That says it.
Here comes Peter, the denier and Thomas the doubter, and the converted pagan Augustine. Here comes the soldier Ignatius, and the scholar Aquinas, and the tentmaker Paul. Here comes the outspoken Catherine of Sienna and the quiet Therese of Lisieux. Here comes Francis, preaching to the birds.
We are all that and more. We are monks who copied scripture onto parchment, and preserved God’s word during one of the darkest times in history. We are priests and nuns who could barely speak the language, but came to an unruly place called America and created the most extensive parochial school system on earth, passing on what they knew, and what they believed.
We are laborers from Italy and Poland and Germany who arrived in Brooklyn with nothing, and left behind towering temples of stone and glass in what we now call a City of Churches.
We are Chesterton and Merton and Hopkins. We are Bob Hope and Newt Gingrich, John Wayne and Oscar Wilde, Tony Blair and Fulton Sheen.
We are Oscar Romero and Bobby Kennedy and Caeser Chavez and Mother Angelica.
We are the soldier in Iraq praying the rosary, and the immigrant in the barrio with Our Lady of Guadalupe tattooed on his back.
We are Fr. Mike Dalton, in a jeep in Germany, hearing one last confession.
We are Rosa and Richard, about to be baptized here tonight. We are Amanda and Lydia and Ana and Justine and Carmen, about to be confirmed.
We are saints. We are sinners. We are everybody.
We are the Body of Christ. Bruised. Broken. But resurrected and given new life, new hope. Changed forever.
A few years ago, Msgr. Funaro gave an Easter Vigil homily and reminded us that we are “Easter People.” We are people who live in the resurrection. We are men and women and children who hold the light.
This Easter, keep the flame burning. Remember all who came before us, and all who are joining us today – by one count, some 150-thousand in the United States alone.
150-thousand more people to hold the candle, and to spread the light, and to proclaim not just the good news – but the greatest news in all human history:
“He has been raised.”
Alleluia!
This is a photograph of what Senator Obama just weeks ago labeled as a punishment.
It's an unretouched photograph of a baby within the mother's womb at age 20 weeks.
Dismembering this body is called a choice, a right. Some regard it as a duty.
Barack Obama goes further. According to Barack Obama, if this baby were to somehow survive dismemberment and withdrawal from the womb, the living, breathing, crying baby should then be left to die without medical assistance.
Barack Obama says he doesn't know whether or not this baby is a human being. He avoids taking a position that might offend some by saying the answer is above his pay grade. By saying that, Senator Obama enables the killing to go on. With that Senator Obama aligns himself with others throughout history who have had difficulty attaching a value to human life.
Edward Eagan writes
Adolf Hitler convinced himself and his subjects that Jews and homosexuals were other than human beings. Joseph Stalin did the same as regards Cossacks and Russian aristocrats. And this despite the fact that Hitler and his subjects had seen both Jews and homosexuals with their own eyes, and Stalin and his subjects had seen both Cossacks and Russian aristocrats with theirs. Happily, there are few today who would hesitate to condemn in the roundest terms the self-deceit of Hitler, Stalin or even their subjects to the extent that the subjects could have done something to end the madness and protect living, innocent human beings.Cardinal Eagan, the Archbishop of New York goes on to say what every Catholic prelate should say and every Catholic believer hear
One day, please God, when the stranglehold on public opinion in the United States has been released by the extremists for whom abortion is the center of their political and moral life, our nation will, in my judgment, look back on what we have been doing to innocent human beings within their mothers as a crime no less heinous than what was approved by the Supreme Court in the "Dred Scott Case" in the 19th century, and no less heinous than what was perpetrated by Hitler and Stalin in the 20th. There is nothing at all complicated about the utter wrongness of abortion, and making it all seem complicated mitigates that wrongness not at all. On the contrary, it intensifies it.Of course, if a few non-Catholics were also to hear the message and wonder at their own support of genocide and how they envision their answer to the Godly question, "How could you do this?," that would be redeeming.
In America, more babies die at the hands of their mothers and doctors each year than all the heart, cancer and accidental deaths in the nation together.How can we on the one hand fight cancer, heart disease and accidents so strenuously while turning away so easily from the holocaust within?
Whether politicians are Catholic or Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim or Mormon, Baptist or Anabaptist matters to me less than the number of days a week they practice their religion.
Selective faith, convenient faith, faith that minds the clock and the calendar is less than no faith at all.
Faith doesn't fit the person, the person attempts to fit the faith.
More politicians need to learn that the goal is not to claim God for one's own, but to claim one's own for God.
Labor bosses at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union have negotiated a new contract with Tyson Foods that makes Labor Day just another day on the workday calendar. For members of the union, Labor Day has been replaced by a holiday honoring the Muslim feast Eid al-Fitr, a movable day that falls at the end of Ramadan.
Pretty skookum negotiating there, guys, giving up a summer Monday for (this year) a fall Wednesday.
Just two months after pledging lasting loyalty to his pastor and friend and claiming ignorance about the beliefs taught at his church of 20 years, Senator Barack Obama has resigned from the Trinity Church after continuing concerns over its racist and Marxist teachings.
In March, just before videotapes surfaced of a number of Pastor Jeremiah Wright's sermons, Senator Obama commented
I don't think my church is actually particularly controversial.He earlier credited his attendance at the church with shaping his identity and political voice.
As one of the early trailblazers for the Rev Wright put it, greater love hath no man than to lay down his friends for his life. In among all the usual presidential ditching of inconvenient associations, I can't think of anything to compare with Obama's dumping of Trinity.And Peter Wehner observed
What Obama did today may have been politically necessary. It was certainly politically expedient. And it is yet one more blow to Obama’s image as a different kind of politician. In fact, as we’ve learned over the last few months, Obama appears to be a Chicago politician through and through. When he perceived a threat to his
self-interest, he cut his ties to first his pastor and then his church, both of which he had expressed familial love and fidelity. This whole episode is deeply unattractive, even as it is deeply revealing.
Benedict XVI named 23 new cardinals two weeks ago, including 
Cardinal Emmanuel III Delly, Iraq's first ever prince of the Roman Catholic Church.
The cardinal has returned to Baghdad and taken up his shepherd's staff to lead the faithful along the road to peace.
This morning, under tight security, Cardinal Delly presided over Mass at the Church of the Virgin Mary in mainly Shiite eastern Baghdad.
The cardinal's message was straightforward
We pray today for the sake of each other and to forgive each other, as well to be directed to do good deeds.In an important display of Iraqi unity, the cardinal was joined in celebration after Mass by Imam Jassim al-Jazari, who added his congratulations for the cardinal.
The Diocese of Superior will webcast live
the Rite of Installation of America's newest Roman Catholic Bishop, Peter F. Christensen, as Bishop of Superior.
The Installation will take place at the Cathedral of Christ the King, in Superior, Wisconsin on Sunday, September 23rd at 4:00 PM central time. The webcast will be archived for future viewing.
Bishop Christensen was ordained at the Cathedral of St. Paul on September 14, 2007 before 3,000 faithful. The bishop will succeed Bishop Raphael Fliss, who is retiring. The diocese of Superior encompasses approximately 86,000 Catholics among more than 80 parishes in 16 counties of northwestern Wisconsin. Bishop Christensen will be the tenth Bishop of Superior.
Superior recently celebrated the 340th anniversary of the arrival of Catholicism in the Upper Midwest.
To watch the installation, click here
To learn more about the Diocese of Superior, click here.
To learn more about Bishop Christensen, click here.
RELATED LINKS: His Imminent Excellency, Bishop Peter F. Christensen
Superior Catholic Herald
Build communities, build men.
Bishop-elect Peter F. Christensen will be ordained in the Cathedral of Saint Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota this Friday at 2 PM. The Mass of Ordination will be officiated by Archbishop Harry Flynn of St. Paul and Minneapolis and Archbishop Timothy Dolan of Milwaukee.
Bishop Christensen will then leave his parish, Nativity of Our Lord in St. Paul, to travel to Superior, Wisconsin for his installation next week as the tenth Bishop of Superior. He may be especially welcome in Wisconsin given he is a distant relative of former Packers coach Verne Lewellen.
Superior traces its Catholic roots to 1661, when Rene Menard, a French Jesuit, arrived in the area from Ottawa. His associate, Fr. Claude Jean Allouez built the Mission of the Holy Spirit in 1665 at the location of present day La Pointe. The Mission was the first Catholic church north of New Mexico and west of the Great Lakes. Today approximately 20% of the population is Catholic.
The newest American bishop originally trained as a commercial artist but at age 28 remembered a much earlier call from, and promise to, God. He entered the seminary and at age 32 was ordained a priest in the same cathedral in which he will now become bishop.
Bishop Christensen, whose original family name is Brophy, is especially proud of his Celtic roots and visits Ireland whenever presented with an opportunity to do so.
Go n-éirí an bothar leat, always, Irisher.
RELATED LINKS: Soon to be: His Eminence, Bishop Peter F. Christensen
LINKS: New bishop says he seeks to do the Lord's will
Peter F. Christensen, Wikipedia
Pope Benedict XVI 
has just nominated a new American bishop, one of five from around the world. He is Reverend Peter F. Christensen, presently Pastor at Nativity of Our Lord parish in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Fr. Christensen was born in 1952, fourth in what became a family of eight children. He graduated from St. Thomas University in Saint Paul, MN and became a commercial artist. He attended the Saint Paul Seminary and was ordained a priest in 1985. In 1992 he became Rector at Saint John Vianney Seminary, on the campus of St. Thomas University, where he built enrollment from less than 30 to more than 100, making it the largest college seminary in the United States.
The new Bishop's first assignment will be to guide the Diocese of Superior, Wisconsin, and its 82,000 Catholics.
Peter Christensen is a builder of churches and of men.
Way to go, Pete!
RELATED LINK: His Imminent Excellency, Bishop Peter F. Christensen
UPDATE: The Pioneer Press adds a well-written article
UPDATE II: For those who prefer original sourcing, here is the announcement from the Vatican:Il Santo Padre Benedetto XVI ha accettato la rinuncia al governo pastorale della diocesi di Superior (U.S.A.), presentata da S.E. Mons. Raphael M. Fliss, in conformità al can. 401 § 1 del Codice di Diritto Canonico.
H/T to Amy Wellborn at Open Book
Il Papa ha nominato Vescovo di Superior (U.S.A.) il Rev.do Sacerdote Peter F. Christensen, del clero dell’arcidiocesi di Saint Paul and Minneapolis, Parroco della Parrocchia "The Nativity of Our Lord" in Saint Paul.
UPDATE III: American Papist calls it, "Superior Gets an Upgrade: Peter Christensen"
UPDATE IV: The Superior Catholic Herald has a first interview with the nominee. Amongst several interesting points, the reporter captured thisLeaving the press conference and serious issues aside, the personable Christensen socialized with Fliss and the chancery staff at a reception. Fresh from an Alaskan vacation -- a cruise up the coast from Vancouver, B.C. to Anchorage, he had driven to Superior for the day with his elder sister, Joan Johnson, a resident of Excelsior, Minn.
UPDATE V: The Catholics in the area are having a field day with the announcement, including a well-written and lengthy tribute from a friend at Abbey Roads 2
Another very well-written and researched article about Bishop Christensen's departure from his parish of recent years is at The Catholic Spirit
