Category Archives: People

Open Letter to Senator Tom Udall

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My dear Senator Udall,

You say, “I firmly believe that reproductive health care is a personal matter that should be left to individuals, their families, their doctors, and their religious counselors.” That sounds good, but in actuality it ignores the fact that a new life in already in this world, growing as we all do from day to day in this life.  Reproductive health care must begin with that new life in the womb, to nurture and provide a wholesome,supportive environment.  Your position, ignores each individual’s right to their own life.  Your position abandons your responsibility while giving to a doctor or a religious counselor a sacrosanct role. Mother, father, counselor, minister; none of these, has the authority to take a human life because tragic, untimely or inconvenient circumstances surround the new life coming into this world, and present in the womb.  It is not a question of choice.  We are not given the choice of taking another’s life.  When we choose to take a life, we kill what God has begun.  You do not have that authority, nor does a mother, father, doctor, priest or counselor.  Words do not change truth.  Truth is staring you in the face and your look the other way, when you support legislation that treats life as some material commodity rather than the holy gift of God that it is.
In closing, I refer you to Archbishop Chaput’s words:
“America is not a secular state. As historian Paul Johnson once said, America was ”born Protestant.” It has uniquely and deeply religious roots. Obviously it has no established Church, and it has non-sectarian public institutions. It also has plenty of room for both believers and non-believers. But the United States was never intended to be a ‘’secular” country in the radical modern sense. Nearly all the Founders were either Christian or at least religion-friendly. And all of our public institutions and all of our ideas about the human person are based in a religiously shaped vocabulary. So if we cut God out of our public life, we cut the foundation out from under our national ideals.”
“As Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George said recently, too many Americans have ”no recognition of the fact that children continue to be killed [by abortion], and we live therefore, in a country drenched in blood. This can’t be something you start playing off pragmatically against other issues.”

As Israel Goes, So Goes…….?

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“I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” (Genesis 12:2-3)

Growth in Israel is part and parcel of life.  Curtailing growth casts the shadow of death over any nation.  As Israel goes so goes those who are blessed by her:

Charles Krauthammer sees this with clarity and writes:

Obama the Humble declares there will be no more “dictating” to other countries. We should “forge partnerships as opposed to simply dictating solutions,” he told the G-20 summit. In Middle East negotiations, he told al-Arabiya, America will henceforth “start by listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating.”

An admirable sentiment. It applies to everyone — Iran, Russia, Cuba, Syria, even Venezuela. Except Israel. Israel is ordered to freeze all settlement activity. As Secretary of State Clinton imperiously explained the diktat: “a stop to settlements — not some settlements, not outposts, not natural-growth exceptions.”

What’s the issue? No “natural growth” means strangling to death the thriving towns close to the 1949 armistice line, many of them suburbs of Jerusalem, that every negotiation over the past decade has envisioned Israel retaining. It means no increase in population. Which means no babies. Or if you have babies, no housing for them — not even within the existing town boundaries. Which means for every child born, someone has to move out. No community can survive like that. The obvious objective is to undermine and destroy these towns — even before negotiations.

To what end? Over the last decade, the U.S. government has understood that any final peace treaty would involve Israel retaining some of the close-in settlements — and compensating the Palestinians accordingly with land from within Israel itself.

That was envisioned in the Clinton plan in the Camp David negotiations in 2000, and again at Taba in 2001. After all, why turn towns to rubble when, instead, Arabs and Jews can stay in their homes if the 1949 armistice line is shifted slightly into the Palestinian side to capture the major close-in Jewish settlements, and then shifted into Israeli territory to capture Israeli land to give to the Palestinians?

This idea is not only logical, not only accepted by both Democratic and Republican administrations for the last decade, but was agreed to in writing in the letters of understanding exchanged between Israel and the United States in 2004 — and subsequently overwhelmingly endorsed by a concurrent resolution of Congress.

Yet the Obama State Department has repeatedly refused to endorse these agreements or even say it will honor them. This from a president who piously insists that all parties to the conflict honor previous obligations.

The entire “natural growth” issue is a concoction. It’s farcical to suggest that the peace process is moribund because a teacher in the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem is making an addition to her house to accommodate new grandchildren — when Gaza is run by Hamas terrorists dedicated to permanent war with Israel and when Mahmoud Abbas, having turned down every one of Ehud Olmert’s peace offers, brazenly declares that he is in a waiting mode — waiting for Hamas to become moderate and for Israel to cave — before he’ll do anything to advance peace.

Israel brought growth and fruitfulness to a land long neglected.  The money that poured into the hands of Hamas and Fatah after the Oslo accords was used to wage war and build a terror machine that continues to impoverish the people of the region under Palestinian control.  What would the situation be now, if instead of terror, these funds actuality funded schools, roads,  courthouses, hospitals, and charitable institutions that truly relieve the suffering of their people.  No nation, no one, can help the Palestinians until they set aside hatred to love their own people.

Krauthammer writes:

Blaming Israel and picking a fight over “natural growth” may curry favor with the Muslim “street.” But it will only induce the Arab states to do like Abbas: sit and wait for America to deliver Israel on a platter. Which makes the Obama strategy not just dishonorable but self-defeating.

Krauthammer – Walks on Water Metaphorically

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Charles Krauthammer is my hero in these days of twitter and inanity.  He actually refutes, and argues with more than emotion.  He thinks, reasons, remembers and researches before he writes. So it is disturbing to see him belittled in any way especially be a A Small Man as John Podhoretz counters Joe Klein’s assessment.

AllahPundit writes dismissing in disbelief at the apparent diss by Joe Klein:

“He became Ground Zero among the neo-cons, but he’s vastly smarter than most of them,” said Time’s Joe Klein, an admirer and critic who praised Krauthammer’s “writing skills and polemical skills” as “so far above almost anybody writing columns today.”

“There’s something tragic about him too,” Klein said, referring to Krauthammer’s confinement to a wheelchair, the result of a diving accident during his first year of medical school. “His work would have a lot more nuance if he were able to see the situations he’s writing about.”

“My writing speaks for itself,” Krauthammer responded in a curt email.

From  John Podhoretz counter: A Small Man

He won’t like me saying it, but Charles Krauthammer, who is more than a friendly acquaintance, is far from a tragic figure. He is a miraculous figure. He has, through a combination of raw will and a sagacious mind and a rigorous temperament that, were it possible, he should leave to science so that it can be studied and bottled and sold, lived a life both triumphantly important and triumphantly ordinary. (Although his wife, Robbie, is far from ordinary. For one thing, she is from Tasmania. For another, she is an artist of great skill. For a third, she has the dirtiest and liveliest mouth in either her forsaken hemisphere or her present one.) If you are his friend, in a fashion that I can’t quite explain, you come to have no sense whatever that he is in that chair. He may be right about what he argues (obviously, I think so, most of the time). He may be wrong. But whatever he is or is not, to argue that Charles’s views are restricted by the restrictions on his physical form is do violence to the most basic notions of civil discussion. “Klein” means small in German. Trollope could not have come up with a more apt name for a character.

Podhoretz contends:

Is it conceivable that Joe Klein is saying a man in a wheelchair is incapable of understanding the nuances of Iraq and the war on terror because he can’t get on a plane and go there like Joe Klein can? Is it possible, in this day and age, for someone seriously to argue such a thing? We cannot go back in time and visit the battlefields of the Civil War, or Agincourt, or the Peloponnese—are we therefore incapable of seeing their nuances? FDR was in a wheelchair and did not visit the battlefields of World War II-—were its nuances beyond him as well?

Pope Patient Facing Misunderstanding,Prejudice

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Pope Benedict XVI is a man of patience and hope. God gave the Catholic Church one more giant in the face of mediocrity and meanness from those who look for reasons to find fault where there is none.  Rather than build for a future that supports true peace between men called to live as children of the One God of Abraham, some chose nitpicking.

Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, director of the Vatican press office, responded to criticism in the Israeli press that in part misrepresented the Pope’s obligatory enrollment in the Hitler Youth during the war (clarified by the Pope in his book “Salt of the Earth”and also for using the word “killed” in his address at Yad Vashem instead of “murdered” and  the word “millions” (of Jews) instead of “six million.” The Pope had already referred to “six million Jews” in an earlier address on his arrival that day.

Zenit reports that Fr. Lombardi pointed out that the speech was not a treatise on the Holocaust and noted other discourses where the Pope has mentioned Germany and his past, and Nazism.

“Moreover in the morning, he had already said that six million Jews died and that we can’t forget, and that there is still anti-Semitism,” the spokesman said, referring to the Holy Father’s first address in Israel at the Tel Aviv airport, delivered just hours before his visit to the Yad Vashem.

Father Lombardi commented that Benedict XVI does not get offended when the press alters or takes issue with his words.

“He does not react superficially or immediately,” the spokesman said. “He is very patient and is ready to listen to the others — everyone can voice their ideas. It’s true, he feels that he has not been understood, and I feel the same, but we know how the world is and how attitudes are. There is not always a willingness to understand well; sometimes there are prejudices and not everyone is open to an attitude of readiness to listen.

Volition – the Act of Choice

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Hope grows as we are willing to let in the Light.

I haven’t be able to embed this short film by the Doorpost Film Project but it well worth the click it takes to get to it.

Volition (n)- The act of making a choice. Sometimes the choice of inaction has consequences stronger than we could ever imagine. Throughout history, men have been faced with difficult choices in a world that makes it easy for them to conform. This film explores the hope that lies behind every decision made in the face of adversity; the hope that is buried in the heart of those that look beyond themselves and see something bigger worth fighting for.

This is the movie trailer:

Musing on Spengler Unmasked and Interesting

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Spengler unmasks and allows a peek at the inner workings that he wrapped in the pseudonym.  It’s all very interesting and I’m just beginning to digest it.  At first read, I respond to the klunk on my musing surface to a piece of Spengler’s journey to open identity.

Spengler writes of his time in a cult, “The question, of course, is what were a group of young Jews doing in the company of a cult leader with a paranoid view of the world and a thinly disguised anti-Semitic streak.” In part, he answers, “There existed a science of mind, LaRouche claimed, that would enable the adept to reach the right conclusion.” and more, Larouche claimed to trace a tradition of secret knowledge across the ages, from Plato and Plotinus, through the Renaissance, and down to the German scientists and philosophers of the nineteenth century. Of course, that raises a question: If there exists this kind of knowledge, then why isn’t it universally shared? The reverse side of the gnostic page is paranoia: There must be a cabal of evil people who prevent the dissemination of the truth.”

It reads like gripping fiction, reminding me, with my fully accepted Judeo-Christian underpinnings of Gen 3: 4-5, “You certainly will not die!  No  God knows well that the  moment you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods who know what is good and what is bad.”

I would tend to run afraid for my soul.  The scenario would rouse a voice that speaks to me, that I know would say, “At first blush, you will blush and then you will no longer blush, as headlong you pursue a dream or call it temptation.  With heady glee, forbidden pleasure will be recast for the ‘good’ it promises. Soon you will become like gods in your private reveries or privy little worlds; not only knowing what is good and what is bad, but you will have known good and bad in that intimate way of knowing that spoils the good like food gone bad.  Throwing your whole self into pursuit of what might be tasty and alluring, knowledge itself will be your cavorting and you ravenous.  You will run after experience so as to judge by your own proclivities what delights, what titillates and what requires more of your self than you can give or share.  What a god, indeed!

Have I gone too far? I tend to jump to conclusions and without input, I get stuck there.  I’m still listening and will dive in again. “Confessions of a Coward” by Davis P. Goldman is a must read.

It touches me because for three years I trained at Mt. Sinai Hospital School of Nursing and it was formation ground for me.  My friends during those years were all Jewish.  Their Jewishness was different from my Catholicism.  An encounter with Thomas Merton’s “the Seven Storey Mountain,” began me on the life long practice of daily Mass and prayer.  That set me in a direction in which I continue still today.

The Jewishness of my friends was expressed with more subtlety. There identity as Jews was perceptible, solid and unwavering.  It raised a sense of admiration in me. I, however, can’t recall a single religious conversation.

Even today, in my prayers for them, I don’t know how to pray.  Their faith is precious to me.  I want to see it lived to the full.  I guess I know they are a peculiar people whom God, not only cherishes, but for whom He plans providentially a future full of hope and abundant blessing. There seems to be in me a sense that God planted this seed, continues to water it and will bring it to marvelous fruition in His time. I pray for them wordlessly.

As for Spengler, my favorite part is:

Around 1985, the ugly awareness that I had spent almost a decade in a gnostic cult coincided with a dark time in my personal life. Deeply depressed, I sat at the piano one night, playing through the score of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, and came to the chorale that reads: “Commend your ways and what ails your heart to the faithful care of Him who directs the heavens, who gives course and aim to the clouds, air and wind. He will also find a path that your foot can tread.” For the first time in my life, I prayed, and in that moment, I knew that my prayer was heard. That was a first step of teshuva—of return.

The truth is that I did not think my way into praying. I prayed my way into thinking.