The Dispatch: More from CWR...

Extra, extra! News and views for December 14, 2022

Here are some articles, essays, and editorials that caught our attention this past week or so.*

(us.fotolia.com/TTstudio)

An Embarrassment – “As a father and as a Catholic intellectual, I’m really concerned about what the Pontifical Academy for Life is and the picture of the Church that it’s portraying to the world,” said Fulvio Di Blasi. Catholic academic blasts Vatican’s Academy for Life as ’embarrassing’ (Crux)

Gender Identity Struggle  – “It is precisely to express Christ’s love that the Catholic Church has so many caring ministries: for the sick, for women in crisis pregnancies, for migrants, for the poor, and for others on the margins—including transgender-identifying people.” The Catholic Church Must Be Allowed to Serve the Victims of Gender Ideology (The Public Discourse)

Technology, Science, Faith, Latin, Conversion – “For too long Christians have been on the defensive in the sciences and I get great joy and pleasure and am energised by conversations with people who assume if you are scientific you can’t be religious. Science is the language of nature and nature is of course in my opinion the single most compelling example of the fact that God exists.” UK Catholic Leaders of Today 2022: Ilyas Khan (Catholic Herald)

Our Human Future – “What will our future look like? For in discussing the topic of human sexuality, we are, bottom line, discussing the future.” Humanae Vitae and the Brave New World (Church Life Journal)

No COVID Shot – Doctors at Duke University, where Yulia has been awaiting a kidney transplant, have told her parents they will not give her a new kidney unless she is vaccinated against Covid. Duke University surgeons are refusing a 14-year-old girl a kidney transplant because she has not received the Covid shot (Unreported Truth)

Transgender Children – Some audience members at the  American Academy of Pediatrics’s annual conference were shocked when Dr. Morissa Ladinsky, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, lauded a transgender teenager for committing suicide. The Hijacking of Pediatric Medicine (The Free Press)

Coming Home – “The deal that freed Griner ends a long and fraught odyssey for the basketball star. It also comes with controversy.” Brittney Griner is headed home. So is a convicted Russian arms smuggler. And Paul Whelan is still in a Russian jail. (Grid)

Conversion Therapy Fraud – Bald-headed perv scientist’s lurid account of Christian abuse was a story too good for the press to check. Sam Brinton, A Fraud Our Media Helped Create (The American Conservative)

Euthanasia in Canada – “Anyone who ever thought that the compassionate response to extreme human suffering is a society that helps people find permanent release from their pain may want to look at some of the horror stories coming out of Canada recently.” America, be very afraid: astonishingly, Canada is now euthanizing 10,000 of its citizens a year – and some of the horrific stories of its ultra-permissive policy will horrify you… Special report by TOM LEONARD (Daily Mail)

The Trends Blacklist – “and so the descent begins for in the very fabric of the weasel wordsmithy of the twitter village center lay the evil that would spread to encompass the realm for ‘bad faith’ is a subjective pejorative.” mainstreaming free and fair expression (bad cattitude)

Our Christian Consciousness – “Pascal, for his part, does not flatter us; instead, he confronts us in an incisive and urgent way with a proposition for life that has been worn down by familiarity over time and that we now longer know what to do with—that is, the Christian form of life” The God Question: A conversation (City Journal)

Patriarch of Moscow – “In his new anti-evangelical ‘theology of war,’ Moscow Patriarch Kirill Gundyaev reaches a new low. Each time he issues a statement or gives a sermon, it seems that there is nowhere lower to go”.  “Orthodox Shahidism” and Moscow Patriarch Kirill’s neo-pagan theology of war (Orthodox Times)

Rapid-Fire Content – “Catholic media, like their secular counterpart, is facing a day of reckoning caused by the rapid switch from print to digital media, as well as financial challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic and other factors.” Loss of print media – posing challenges to Church communications (Herald Malaysia)

(*The posting of any particular news item or essay is not an endorsement of the content and perspective of said news item or essay.)


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6 Comments

  1. @An Embarrassment. Editor Olson’s selection of the dramatic, seeming omen St Peter’s lightning strike sets the current tone for Church and world. First thought, I mistakenly pulled up Crux, not a mistake John Allen an honest broker rare among the libertine.
    As to Di Blasio’s embarrassment by the Pontifical Academy of Life [under new enlightened management by devotee of homoerotic, homosexual murals, former ‘backward’ participants scourged] little if anything proposed is not. Attorney ethicist Di Blasio perceives a providential permission for evil that good might result in the Dicastery’s publication of Etica teologica della Vita: Scrittua, tradizione, sfide, pratiche, a publication that [at least] proposes for consideration any variation of sexual expression, the immoral mirror of a morally lost culture. This assessment by the publication’s Academy authors is based on contemporary anthropological science, secularist, atheistic, that has nothing in common with revelation and Apostolic tradition.
    Di Blasio tells Crux the purpose of the publication, “It’s a strategy, step-by-step, they want to reach a goal, and the goal is to make these things morally good”, referring to contraception, artificial reproduction, and homosexuality. “Homosexual sex, which is really ugly. I say ‘ugly’ because in classical ethics, good and beautiful go together, so there is an attraction to what is good” (Di Blasio to Elise Ann Allen Crux).
    There’s really nothing new in this Crux interview with Di Blasio. What it does reveal is a growing recognition, at least to address the reality of the sacrosanct unthinkable. Evident in George Weigel’s unusual candor regarding Francis, “Pope Francis bears a heavy burden in seeking a resolution of the German crisis that is true to the reality and binding authority of divine revelation. If such a resolution is not achieved, however, it will raise the gravest doubts about the entire project of ‘synodality’ central to his pontificate” (The German Crisis, the World Church, and Pope Francis).

  2. Re #9 Euthanasia in Canada – Yes, Canada has become an embarrassment.
    OTOH, Canada’s Euthanasia Prevention Coalition is the leader in the fight against euthanasia/assisted suicide.

  3. “Loss of print media”
    In 1973, when I was 13 years old, on the farm in a rural area, my neighbor, a Catholic lady with an altar boy son, told me there were massive numbers of Priests molesting children and the Bishops were covering it up by moving predator Priests from one parish to another. I had my doubts about my neighbor ladies story, because I was taught to believe that Catholic Bishops were Holy and would never do such a horrible evil thing. We were taught to blindly believe that our Pope and Bishops were Holy men and it was an enormous Catholic taboo to question their actions. Back in the day, the Catholic printed press seemed to greatly obey this unspoken Catholic taboo. When I hear Pope Francis tell us, ‘EWTN is Satan!’, I can tell Pope Francis really misses the old days.

    The internet certainly empowers Freedom of Speech for everyone, not just Popes, Bishops and Liberal Catholic college professors.

  4. “An Embarrassment” (item #1): Very good news: “…Di Blasi said he and conference organizer Jane Adolphe, a lawyer and professor of Law at Ave Maria School of Law with experience within the Holy See, are planning to publish the contents of this week’s ICJF conference [International Catholic Jurists Forum, Dec. 8-10] as “a response” and “a counter-document” to Etica Teologica della Vita.

    As if Humanae Vitae and Veritatis Splendor actually exist, despite the bubble-world book burning of Cardinal Paglia and his conspirators. A different picture than the “embarr-ass-ment” of Paglia’s homoerotic cathedral mural: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/leading-vatican-archbishop-featured-in-homoerotic-painting-he-commissioned

  5. Regarding Duke University’s withholding of life-saving treatment:

    They want to withhold a known life-saving treatment which is, in fact, necessary to save her life, because she has not agreed to the reception of an injection of medicine that does not provide immunity from COVID-19, nor stop the spread of COVID 19, and for which a risk/benefit study has not been performed? They should lose their license for withholding a known life-saving treatment, while coercing the mandating of an unknown medical treatment.

    The question is, did the manufacturers of the vaccine know that targeting the furin receptor on the spike protein of Covid 19 for an unknown period of time could result in hepcidin deregulation, resulting in iron deregulation in certain susceptible individuals causing harm? If not, what could possibly preclude the manufacturers of the vaccine from ”revisiting iron metabolism and iron disorders in the hepcidin era”?
    “The secreted peptide hormone hepcidin regulates systemic and local iron homeostasis through degradation of the iron exporter ferroportin. Dysregulation of hepcidin leads to altered iron homeostasis and development of pathological disorders including hemochromatosis, and iron loading and iron restrictive anemias.”
    pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26669208/
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7012465/

    “Furin converts various proproteins to mature proteins,. It plays a role in post-translational modification of hepcidin, a liver peptide hormone that regulates systemic iron homeostasis. Increased hepcidin synthesis limits intestinal iron absorption, whereas hepcidin deficiency promotes iron absorption. “ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214750015000062 Effect of iron overload on furin expression in wild-type and …
    https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=furin+and+hepcidin
    “Furin converts various proproteins to mature proteins,. It plays a role in post-translational modification of hepcidin, a liver peptide hormone that regulates systemic iron homeostasis. Increased hepcidin synthesis limits intestinal iron absorption, whereas hepcidin deficiency promotes iron absorption. “ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214750015000062 Effect of iron overload on furin expression in wild-type and …
    https://search.yahoo.com/search?p=furin+and+hepcidin
    Or that:
    “Hepcidin is potential regulator for renin activity | PLOS ONE”
    https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0267343
    And:
    Role of hepcidin as a biomarker for iron status and its effect on anemia management in patients with chronic kidney disease (stage II-Iv) after HCV treatment | QJM: An International Journal of Medicine | Oxford Academic
    https://academic.oup.com/qjmed/article/114/Supplement_1/hcab100.128/6379940
    Therapeutic inhibition of furin, page21
    “Even if selective inhibition of individual PCSKs can be achieved, systemic long‐term inhibition will most likely have detrimental effects, as PCSKs are required for the activation of hundreds of cellular substrates. Thus, local applications such as targeted treatment of tumors or topical treatment of bacterial and viral infections may be more feasible than systemic therapy. Finally, the ability of tumor cells or pathogens to evolve resistance or evasion mutations remains poorly investigated. For example, several substrates such as dengue virus prM harbour suboptimal furin target sequences and may optimise their cleavage sites upon therapy to enable sufficient cleavage in the presence of inhibitors.”
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6682551/
    See -Therapeutic inhibition of FURIN

  6. @ Our Human Future
    “If there is no ‘there’ there in sexual identity, then there is nothing wrong with replacing the personal character of procreation with technological, artificial reproduction and there is actually something desirable about it. ‘O brave new world!’ to quote Miranda from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, ironically banned in Huxley’s utopia. ‘O brave new world’. It is brave but is it human? That is what these texts invite us to ponder. We have seen that thinking about the connection between sex and procreation is the same as thinking about the shape of society of the future” (John Cavadini).
    Cavadini referencing Catholic philosopher and historian Sr Prudence Allen “shows that this idea of masculine feminine as complementarity, far from being an ancient conservative, sexist, and outmoded way of thinking, is actually a hard-won philosophical and cultural achievement protecting the concept of woman in particular, but also of man”.
    Cavadini notes that Aquinas says, what is definitive is the ordering of behavior whether man or woman toward the good. That primarily means as the Magisterium teaches procreation. Although seemingly narrow, ‘ordered toward the good’ has wide scope insofar as what’s perceived as the good. What’s affirmed in Cavadini’s essay is the affirmation of the role of masculine feminine insofar as bringing life into the world. What should be explored is the inherent spiritual dimension that underlies man’s masculinity, a woman’s femininity.
    Take for example the Velazquez, Las Meninas portrait of a manly Spaniard in the background featuring two very feminine little girls. Is it rational to assume it’s men who taught little girls how to be feminine? As is femininity then a masculine invention, that, as [seemingly] preposterous as girls [women] teaching men how to be men. Insofar as the latter I can vouch there nevertheless seems something true there. And as it is frequently evidently so there must be some inner knowledge, perhaps prescient, made manifest when what is absent in someone is perceived by the opposite sex.
    Spiritual nature in man, male and female, is wide as well as complex. It goes to a reasoned order that specifying behavior that enhances beauty and the good in man and woman is inherent, put there by the finger of God.
    My final [and frequently cited evidence] is the absolutely beautiful feminine appearances to us in this world of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

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