8 responses to “Bless who?”

1. 

   Melissa said on October 20, 2003 at 11:39 pm

   I’ve been mightily peeved ever since the Church disenfranchised St. Patrick and St. Christopher. But now Mother Teresa (“Miracle-in-a-Minute”) is handed Speedy Beatification and Sudden Sainthood?

   If Hitchens is Hell-bound on the express bus, I’m going to be sitting right there alongside him.

   297 chars

2. 

   danno said on October 21, 2003 at 12:15 pm

   Catholics are becoming more and more like aliens visiting the planet earth.

   75 chars

3. 

   Dan McAfee said on October 21, 2003 at 9:51 pm

   The same people who see Catholics as out of touch and want them to become more secular, are the first to believe other cultures should be, and should have been protected. Do you believe it was wrong for the white man to force the American Indians into white schools? Do you believe it was wrong for the Spanish to open missions all over the world and wipe out the native cultures?

   But it’s fine to ridicule the culture of the Catholic faith and do your best to rid the world of such backwardness.

   501 chars

4. 

   Nance said on October 22, 2003 at 7:37 am

   Someone put a burr under your saddle, that’s for sure.

   As a (born and raised, but non-practicing) Catholic, I know that the road to sainthood is generally saved for people who’ve been dead for longer than six years, so that their living P.R. staff is no longer a factor. I also know that, historically, an argument is made against sainthood by a Vatican official charged with being the “devil’s advocate.” JPII is suspending rules right and left, and in this case it really stinks. Hitchens’ worst point is that MT was a “fundamentalist” Catholic — you could hardly expect a candidate for sainthood in JPII’s era to be anthing else. But why aren’t these other things raising red flags — the money taken from Keating and Duvalier (in exchange for lavish praise on a world stage), the scorning of palliative medications and the simplest comfort practices for dying people?

   Amy Welborn had a thread on MT a few weeks ago, and the comments had some shocking assertions. MT’s “nurses” — poor girls from Calcutta with a couple of weeks first-aid training — injecting patients over and over with the same needle is the one that sticks in my head.

   If nothing else, I think a smart news media would bring these things up, and not participate in the collective hysteria that MT was an angel who walked among us. That it has to be left to a bitter Englishman doesn’t reflect well on us.

   1390 chars

5. 

   Dan McAfee said on October 22, 2003 at 8:53 am

   >> Someone put a burr under your saddle

   45 chars

6. 

   Nance said on October 22, 2003 at 9:51 am

   Well, that poses an interesting question. Say legal abortion is the law of the land, and you have a Catholic judicial nominee who’s made it plain he considers this an immoral law, and he plans to use his powers as a judge to nullify or overturn it. (Not that any judicial nominee would ever make that plain, but we’re talking hypothetical here.) If someone opposes this nominee, are they discriminating on the basis of his religion? Or are they simply exercising choice in political preferences?

   495 chars

7. 

   Dan McAfee said on October 22, 2003 at 11:38 am

   Didn’t John Kennedy shoot down this straw man forty years ago?

   As you say, no judicial nominee would every say she is going to overturn Roe the next chance she gets; it would get her sidelined like Scalia is now sidelined on the pledge case. Of course there’s no sidelining those who make it clear that the right to choose is settled law…

   It seems clear that if a nominee says, as several have recently, that Roe is settled law and they are shot down because of their moral, Catholic belief in spite of their words — that’s discimination.

   548 chars

8. 

   alex said on October 22, 2003 at 1:47 pm

   Consider this–

   Ronald Reagan thought he was tossing the far right a huge bone when he made C. Everett Koop, a minister from a fundamentalist protestant sect, the surgeon general.

   No one expected this man to use the office as a pulpit for encouraging sex education, birth control, needle exchanges and so on. It is indeed possible to be an adherent of a faith and a pragmatist when it comes to dealing with social problems.

   Plenty of Catholic nuns who work in the trenches would tell you that the pope is fucked in the head for his pronouncements on birth control and abortion. They see the social problems firsthand while he gets pampered by a vast entourage of servants in the Vatican and never sees how anyone else lives, let alone the other side.

   There was kind of a glibfest over Big Bush when it came to light he’d never seen a scanner in a grocery store. But that little detail is pretty telling, if you ask me. Wealth, like faith, also has the potential to color the way a public official will decide public policy.

   1038 chars