Author: Sal

Rev. John B. Ardis will give an invocation later this week at the DNC. He’s director of the Paulist Center, a progressive Catholic church and outreach center that focuses largely on social justice income redistribution and hugs. Eric posted about the center recently, commenting on a piece by Jonathan V. Last. The Paulist Center is John Kerry’s home parish faith community.

Father Ardis on pro-aborts receiving communion:

…it is “contrary to the meaning of the Eucharist to use it as an instrument of division and as a weapon in political battles” and that it would be a “misuse of our authority” to do so.

Father, I reply respectfully that the Eucharist is not a metaphor, it is a Person. The Eucharist is not only a shared meal; it is the sacrifice of Christ who gives Himself freely in atonement for our sins. Christ came to free us from sin, a freedom we find tangibly in the Sacraments. But freedom from sin is not free. We cannot accept so great a gift without an understanding of its demands and implications. We must accept those demands in we are to received Our Lord worthily. Otherwise we eat and drink judgement on ourselves.

I agree with Eric that the Center knows precisely what it is doing. “Woe to those who lead the little ones astray! Better they had died in their mothers’ wombs than to walk the earth to destroy souls.”

Here’s a scuplture of a dead tree and a man hanging from the ceiling and the mission statement of the Paulist Center.

The mission statement reads: “Attentive to the Holy Spirit, we are a Catholic community that welcomes all, liberates the voice of each, and goes forth to live the Gospel of Jesus Christ.” Liberates the voice of each? As I said, the freedom from captivity that Christ preaches in the Gospel is freedom from sin, not freedom from or of conscience. Freedom of conscience at present means license to do whatever one wants, and this leads to the very enslavement Christ wishes to liberate us from.

Are the Paulist Fathers are getting many vocations these days? No, their order is contracepting vocations with this perversion of the Gospel. They squander and profane our greatest treasure, Chirst in the Eucharist. Where are the post-concilliar reformers as there were after Trent?

Bill Bennet gives the Democrats some excellent advice. One can’t help but think they won’t take any of it. Here are some excerpts.

As you continue your efforts to defeat President Bush, I hope you will not abandon your legacy nor President Clinton’s remorse. Today we are learning about the CIA’s failures to get the facts right about Iraq’s WMD program. But those failures do not belong to President Bush alone — and before you allow the various reports coming out to become your next platform of attack, take a moment and ask yourselves why former Kerry advisor Sandy Berger said the following in 1998: “He [Hussein] will use those weapons of mass destruction again, as he has ten times since 1983.” Ask yourselves why Kerry adviser Madeleine Albright said the following at the same forum: “Iraq is a long way from Ohio, but what happens there matters a great deal here. For the risks that the leaders of a rogue state will use nuclear, chemical or biological weapons against us or our allies is the greatest security threat we face.” Ask yourselves why President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act in 1998 that made it our foreign policy to change the regime in Iraq.
The liberation of Iraq was a positive good, with or without WMDs — a haven for terrorists is now a genesis of democracy; the mass graves where tens of thousands were buried are being emptied rather than filled; one of the worst human-rights violators in the world is now out of power — no longer able to torture, no longer able to invade neighbors, no longer able to threaten the world’s oil supply, no longer able to subsidize homicide bombers in Israel.