Taking the Church Down – A Story of Disception

The secular agenda has at its core a hatred for the Catholic Church.  The Church speaks with the authority of its God-given mandate and the Enemy uses his peons in the world to strike at its heel in anticipation of the moment that its Founder will crush his head.  Until then, no holds are barred in this open aggression. A world under the influence of sin and license falls easy prey to the secular media, a favorite arm for deception and bias.

George Weigel writing for First Things: Scoundrel Time(s)

The sexual and physical abuse of children and young people is a global plague; its manifestations run the gamut from fondling by teachers to rape by uncles to kidnapping-and-sex-trafficking. In the United States alone, there are reportedly some 39 million victims of childhood sexual abuse. Forty to sixty percent were abused by family members, including stepfathers and live-in boyfriends of a child’s mother—thus suggesting that abused children are the principal victims of the sexual revolution, the breakdown of marriage, and the hook-up culture. Hofstra University professor Charol Shakeshaft reports that 6-10 percent of public school students have been molested in recent years—some 290,000 between 1991 and 2000. According to other recent studies, 2 percent of sex abuse offenders were Catholic priests—a phenomenon that spiked between the mid-1960s and the mid-1980s but seems to have virtually disappeared (six credible cases of clerical sexual abuse in 2009 were reported in the U.S. bishops’ annual audit, in a Church of some 65,000,000 members).

Yet in a pattern exemplifying the dog’s behavior in Proverbs 26:11, the sexual abuse story in the global media is almost entirely a Catholic story, in which the Catholic Church is portrayed as the epicenter of the sexual abuse of the young, with hints of an ecclesiastical criminal conspiracy involving sexual predators whose predations continue today. That the vast majority of the abuse cases in the United States took place decades ago is of no consequence to this story line. For the narrative that has been constructed is often less about the protection of the young (for whom the Catholic Church is, by empirical measure, the safest environment for young people in America today) than it is about taking the Church down—and, eventually, out, both financially and as a credible voice in the public debate over public policy. For if the Church is a global criminal conspiracy of sexual abusers and their protectors, then the Catholic Church has no claim to a place at the table of public moral argument.

Read the rest here.

Liberal View / Moral Monster

Pope Benedict XVI must be doing something right because the press is crucifying him again.  Monsignor Raun writes, “On his way to Africa, the Pope was asked what the Church thought of AIDS and condoms.  Our Holy Father answered that the real answer was sexual morality, not pieces of plastic.  The press dubbed him ‘a moral monster’.”

The liberalized world and press avoid the Truth, especially on issues of life.  They prefer to propagandize, for the furtherance of liberal, secular, “progressive” agenda’s, which leave God out of such deliberations.  As if an investigation without Truth could be substantive.

“I suspect every abortion, every “compassionate” bit of euthanasia has the evil one stamping his foot in triumphant glee.” says the Anchoress.  In speaking of God’s influence and grace in the world, she submits that such grace is “subdued in  the world” when those “enthusiastic about subduing new life – of judging how much life there should be, and of what quality” play God.

Monsignor Raun makes a few points of his own:

1. Ten to twenty percent of the time, condoms don’t
work. For argument’s sake, let’s say they don’t
work 1 percent of the time. Would anyone say it
was moral to do something that there was a one-ina-
hundred chance of giving someone a deadly illness?
Would any sane person take such a chance
with their own life? (If there was a one-in-a hundred
chance that holy water could give you
AIDS, would any of you put your fingers in the
fount, or allow your children to do so?)
2. And the sad fact is that some people think they are
“invulnerable” if they wear a condom, and so they
are all the more promiscuous – all the more spreading
the possibilities of infecting others with the disease.
Condoms are the answer to AIDS for those people who
are only willing to do what it takes to stop this horrible
disease as long as sexual freedom is preserved – which
for liberal society has become the ultimate good in life.
If you don’t want to get sexually-transmitted AIDS, be
faithful to your spouse or live a chaste single life. This
and this alone, is guaranteed to be 100% effective. It is
also the moral teaching of Christ and His Church –
which is the Holy Father’s duty to teach. To teach anything
else is cruel, and to gamble with peoples lives.

And, from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, we have this:

To achieve the maximum protective effect, condoms must be used both consistently and correctly. Inconsistent use can lead to STD acquisition because transmission can occur with a single act of intercourse with an infected partner. Similarly, if condoms are not used correctly, the protective effect may be diminished even when they are used consistently. The most reliable ways to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), are to abstain from sexual activity or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected partner. However, many infected persons may be unaware of their infections because STDs are often asymptomatic or unrecognized.

The above report sounds like Russian Roulette to me.  Chastity is still the best policy, even according to disease control scientific and statistical reports.