Palin on Kennedy

Source

From the article:

Palin addresses at length John F. Kennedy's noted speech on religion during the 1960 campaign...

"I am not the Catholic candidate for president," Kennedy said at the time. "I am the Democratic Party's candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic."

Palin...realized that Kennedy "essentially declared religion to be such a private matter that it was irrelevant to the kind of country we are."

Palin is on the money: Kennedy was a sellout. He wasn't even a good politician either: he could get next to nothing done in Congress. His dance to appease anti-Catholic sentiment in the country only got him a bullet in the head.

So how should a Catholic conduct himself when he is running for office in a non-Catholic country?

I like the example of Old Thunder, Hilare Belloc. From 1906 to 1910 Belloc was a Liberal Party Member of Parliament for Salford South. During one campaign speech he was asked by a heckler if he was a "papist." Belloc took his Rosary from his pocket and said, "So far as possible I hear Mass each day and I go to my knees and tell these beads each night. If that offends you, then I pray God may spare me the indignity of representing you in Parliament."

Aside: Palin's mother is an ex-Catholic who had her daughter Baptized as an infant. Sarah has known only non-denominational Christianity all her life, but she did receive the Catholic Sacrament. She puts "practicing" Catholics like Biden and Pelosi to great shame.

Broken Coffee Pot

One of the office's coffee pots went belly up this week. This morning I applied the "Broken" warning sign, as shown here.

Work of the Blue Shirts?

My correspondence with the TSA and several airlines has largely been a one-way affair to day. The exception was this note to yours truly:

"Please understand we no longer perform searches at any of the airports we service and, therefore, have no control over the manner in which security screening is conducted and the use of Advanced Screening Imaging. The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) is conducting this procedure and we are required to comply with TSA directives."

My reply was essentially that they needed to quit passing the buck to TSA and start standing up for their customers.

On a happier note, the airport in Sanford, FL (Orlando) has decided to opt out of TSA involvement. Read the news for yourself here.

From the article:

* "You're going to get better service at a better price and more accountability and better customer service." - Larry Dale, Director of the Sanford Airport Authority

* "I think TSA is overstepping its bounds." - Congressman John Mica

* The airport will choose one of the five approved private screening companies to take over.

No word on criminal prosecution of TSA officials and agents. But Christmas is just around the corner.

Now, would you believe I'm flying Atlanta > Sanford next week to see my parents for Thanksgiving? When I pass through, I will make a point of finding airport officials so that I can both thank them and remind them to make sure the new security agency they use is an improvement. Too bad the change is supposed to take effect for 12 months.

Get Out of Yourself

"The center of the soul has an irrestrainable need which demands satisfaction. In reality, God alone can answer this need and the only solution is to immediately take the road leading to Him. The soul must converse with someone other than itself. Why? Because it is not its own last end; because its end is the living God, and it cannot rest entirely except in Him. As St. Augustine puts it, 'Our heart is restless, until it reposes in Thee.'"
- Taken from Three Ages of the Interior Life by Rev. Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P.

Any number of times I've spoken with, listened to, or read individuals who said that ours is an especially restless age compared to ages past. This is true only in a superficial way. The human soul is always restless because it is immortal and it can never be satisfied with finite, material things. In ages past men in Western society found their remedy by turning to the infitely true, good, and beautiful God, where they found unending joy for their soul. Men today, meanwhile, don't trouble with God; as a result they're trapped in a reality limited by their mundane appetites, blasé attitudes, and vapid imaginings, and they are obliged to fill their lives with frenetic activity to distract themselved from this sad fact.

A Refuser

Being someone who travels quite a bit with my my job, I've been able to enjoy more than one encounter with the invasive new "security" techniques being employed at various airports around the country. I've always refused the invasive, non-secure, and unreliable full body scans using the $200,000 x-ray devices.

Today I caught a snippet from a TSA spokesman who said that complaints have not gone up significantly with the new "security" techniques. Imagine people not so much as attempting to register formal complaints with an agency whose employees will threaten to suspend you from air travel for life if you don't shut up and do what you're told.

Now, a chap might still want to file a formal report. In fact I did so, at the TSA web site. Here's the message I left:

"Your full body scanners are invasive and inappropriate, and your full body pat-downs are insulting techniques that turn people into cattle. When someone refuses the scanner and you have a team of TSA agents all shouting, 'WE HAVE A REFUSAL!' you are clearly trying to embarrass people into complying. You don't make airports safer; all you're doing is dehumanizing innocent citizens."

In a more enlightened age TSA gropers would be shouted down by an angry mob for what they do to innocent travelers.

About a Year

It's been about a year since the terrorist gunman in Ft. Hood murdered and injured dozens of innocent people.

I haven't met Francisco, but his parents and sisters are good friends. The terrorist put a gun on him, pulled the trigger -- and missed. And then after the cops dropped the murderer, Francisco treated him too.

"None of my patients died," Francisco said. "I’m really glad for that."

http://www.kansascity.com/2010/11/05/2399496/kansan-awarded-medal-earned-in.html

Dies Irae, Dies Illa

Here is a recording of the monks of the Abbey of St Maurice and St. Maur in Clervaux, Luxembourg chanting the hauntingly beautiful Dies Irae, Dies Illa.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpvLPmv2FeY

I like the commentary from the chap who posted the video on YouTube:

The monks sing the seqeuence of the Dies Irae, which is traditionally said or sung for a Requiem Mass between the Epistle and gradual and before the reading of the Holy Gospel in the Traditional Catholic Mass of all ages. This beautiful sequence was removed from the Requiem Mass after the disaster which was Vatican II 1964 - 1968.

Our chap got the years of the disaster wrong (1962-1965), but his heart is in the right place.

Praying for the Deceased

All Souls' Day

When the days of the old covenant between Almighty God and His chosen people had been fulfilled, Christ defeated sin and death and so made it possible for men to enter Heaven through union with His mystical body, the Catholic Church. Those who are united with the soul of Christ’s Church share in the Communion of Saints, a locution describing:
* The faithful on earth (the Church Militant) who are fighting the temporal crusade for the Kingdom of God,
* The souls in Purgatory (the Church Suffering) who are making atonement in the place of purification, and
* The blessed in Heaven (the Church Triumphant) who are rejoicing in their eternal reward.

With our Lord as its head, this unity forms the Mystical Body of Christ, and benefits from a plenary exchange of grace and vitality between its members. Thus, through charity and obedience the members of the Church Militant participate in the same faith, sacraments, worship, and government, and aid one another through holy examples, constant prayers, and satisfactory works. These faithful also assist the suffering souls in Purgatory by prayers and sacrifices. The saints in Heaven, meanwhile, intercede with God on behalf of those who have not yet attained the Beatific Vision. The whole is vivified by life-giving activity of the Holy Ghost.

On November 2 Catholics unite in prayer for all the souls detained in Purgatory. The faithful who, during the period of eight days from All Saints Day, visit a cemetery and pray for the dead may gain a plenary indulgence, under the usual conditions, on each day of the Octave, applicable only to the dead. Also, between noon of November 1 and midnight of November 2, a person who has been to confession and Communion within the octave can gain a plenary indulgence, under the usual conditions, for the poor souls each time he visits a church or public oratory and recites the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Glory be to the Father six times.

Praying for the deceased is Biblical, after all. Consider: "It is a holy and wholesome thing to pray for the dead, that they maybe loosed from their sins." - 2 Macabees 12:46

If the reference to the book of Macabees gives you pause, consider that it was in the Scriptures that Christ Himself used.

The theological basis for the feast is the doctrine that the souls which, on departing from the body, are not perfectly cleansed from venial sins, or have not fully atoned for past transgressions, are debarred for a time from the Beatific Vision, and that the faithful on earth can help them by prayers, almsdeeds and especially by the sacrifice of the Mass.

The historical foundation is there too: Christians prayed for the dead from the earliest days of the Church.

"Of all prayers, the most meritorious, the most acceptable to God are prayers for the dead, because they imply all the works of charity, both corporal and spiritual."
- St.Thomas Aquinas