From the Santa Fe New Mexican
ALBUQUERQUE – A Catholic watchdog group is complaining about sex education at St. Pius X High School, saying it uses teaching of a “highly graphic and sexual nature.”
Archbishop Michael Sheehan said the complaints of Los Pequenos de Cristo were a “mixture of half-truths and gossip.”
“This is from a group that is very right-wing … more Catholic than the pope,” he said Wednesday.
Don’t you just hate it when sex education is of a sexual nature?
was named in honor of Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Sebastián Vizcaíno on this date in 1602, her feast day.
In 310, Emperor Maximus ordered Catherine broken on the wheel for being a Christian, but she touched the wheel and it was destroyed. She was beheaded, and her body whisked away by angels.
According to The Catholic Community Forum, Saint Catherine is the patron saint of “apologists, craftsmen who work with a wheel (potters, spinners, etc.), archivists, attornies, barristers, dying people, educators, girls, jurists, knife grinders, knife sharpeners, lawyers, librarians, libraries, maidens, mechanics, millers, nurses, old maids, philosophers, potters, preachers, scholars, schoolchildren, scribes, secretaries spinners, spinsters, stenographers, students, tanners, teachers, theologians, turners, unmarried girls, wheelwrights.”
From The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press
Opposition to gay marriage has increased since the summer and a narrow majority of Americans also oppose allowing gays and lesbians to enter legal agreements that fall short of marriage. Moreover, despite the overall rise in tolerance toward gays since the 1980s, many Americans remain highly critical of homosexuals and religious belief is a major factor in these attitudes.
A 55% majority believes it is a sin to engage in homosexual behavior, and that view is much more prevalent among those who have a high level of religious commitment (76%). About half of all Americans have an unfavorable opinion of gay men (50%) and lesbians (48%), but highly religious people are much more likely to hold negative views.
Religiosity is clearly a factor in the recent rise in opposition to gay marriage. Overall, nearly six-in-ten Americans (59%) oppose gay marriage, up from 53% in July. But those with a high level of religious commitment now oppose gay marriage by more than six-to-one (80%-12%), a significant shift since July (71%-21%). The public is somewhat more supportive of legal agreements for gays that provide many of the same benefits of marriage; still, a 51% majority also opposes this step….
The clergy in evangelical churches focus considerably more attention on homosexuality and address it far more negatively than do ministers and priests in other denominations. Two-thirds of evangelical Protestants who attend church services at least once a month say their ministers speak out on homosexual issues, compared with only about half of Catholics (49%) and just a third of mainline Protestants (33%). And compared with others who attend services where homosexuality is discussed, substantially more evangelicals (86%) say the message they are receiving is that homosexuality should be discouraged, not accepted.
“Why, as well, is the Christian right maintaining that a 5,000-pound hunk of stone has anything to do with God, faith, or higher purpose? If you’ve got to look at a hunk of stone in order to believe, then you don’t believe.”
Read the whole item.
He’d Do It Again, Says the ‘Ten Commandments Judge’
What ever happened to “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12.17, Matthew 22.21 and Luke 20.25)?
Slate: Make room for a Matthew Shepard hate monument in a town square near you.
The Rev. Fred Phelps is a walking migraine for Casper, Wyo. When native son Matthew Shepard was beaten to death five years ago by homophobes, Phelps picketed his funeral, screaming, “God hates fags!” as Shepard’s grieving parents entered the church. Now the Kansas reverend wants to put up a 6-foot-tall monument in Casper’s Central Park that you can view here. A bronze plaque on the monument would read:
Matthew Shepard Entered Hell October 12, 1998, at age 21 in Defiance of God’s Warning: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.” Leviticus 18:22
A new documentary suggests that Jesus might not have been celibate after all: “Was Jesus married?”
From the Catholic Encyclopedia: All Saints’ Day:
Solemnity celebrated on the first of November. It is instituted to honour all the saints, known and unknown, and, according to Urban IV, to supply any deficiencies in the faithful’s celebration of saints’ feasts during the year.
[The vigil of this feast is popularly called “Hallowe’en” or “Halloween”.]
Christopher Hitchens hits hard on Mother Teresa, “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.”
“More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.”
Patron Saints Index — another site with information on Saint Aidan including links and images.
From the Catholic Encyclopedia:
An Irish monk who had studied under St. Senan, at Iniscathay (Scattery Island). He is placed as Bishop of Clogher by Ware and Lynch, but he resigned that see and became a monk at Iona about 630. His virtues, however, shone so resplendantly that he was selected (635) as first Bishop of Lindisfarne, and in time became apostle of Northumbria. St. Bede is lavish in praise of the episcopal rule of St. Aidan, and of his Irish co-workers in the ministry. Oswald, king of Northumbria, who had studied in Ireland, was a firm friend of St. Aidan, and did all he could for the Irish missioners until his sad death at Maserfield near Oswestry, 5 August, 642. St. Aidan died at Bamborough on the last day of August, 651, and his remains were borne to Lindisfarne. Bede tells us that “he was a pontiff inspired with a passionate love of virtue, but at the same time full of a surpassing mildness and gentleness.” His feast is celebrated 31 August.
Mother Teresa is on the verge of canonization. The Spectator on why the Pope John Paul II is eager to create new saints.
Bill Maher: “Yesterday was the first day of school at Harvey Milk High, the first gay high school in the country, that is if you don’t count the one in Fame. There were about a dozen protestors demonstrating in front of the school, yelling out good, Christian things like ‘God hates fags.’ To which the gay kids replied, ‘God hates your outfit.’ Personally, I’m against gay high schools; good-intentioned segregation is still segregation, and it’s wrong. But you have to wonder at the mental health of someone who would fly all the way from Topeka just to scream insults at a bunch of vulnerable kids.”
Didn’t the Israelites leave Egypt before Moses received the “Ten” Commandments? How could the alleged theft from Egypt be an issue? It wasn’t a sin yet.
The Ten Commandments are found twice in the Old Testament: Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5.
According to the Catholic Encyclopedia the Commandments were, “Written by the finger of God on two tables of stone, this Divine code was received from the Almighty by Moses amid the thunders of Mount Sinai, and by him made the ground-work of the Mosaic Law.”
There is some difference regarding the numbering — neither source in the Old Testament numbers the Commandments.
The Catholic version resulted from Saint Augustine’s interpretation of the Hebrew text in the fifth century. Augustine combined the two Commandments concerning false worship and false gods into a single precept. This made taking the Lord’s name in vain second and so on ending, however, one short. To keep the Decalogue whole, the stricture against coveting was divided into not coveting flesh and not coveting goods.
Protestant faiths usually keep the first two Commandments separate and combine the last.
In other words, there could just as easily have been nine commandments or eleven.
The text is from Deuteronomy 5. The numbering is mine, based on the punctuation in this translation. Sorry Augustine.
I am the LORD thy God, which brought thee out of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
Bill Maher noted on Real Time that only two of the Commandments would seem to apply in the court house: Thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal. He missed not bearing false witness.
George Carlin has gotten ten down to two.
I give you my revised list of the two commandments:
Thou shalt always be honest and faithful to the provider of thy nookie and Thou shalt try real hard not to kill anyone, unless of course they pray to a different invisible man than you.Two is all you need; Moses could have carried them down the hill in his fuckin’ pocket. I wouldn’t mind those folks in Alabama posting them on the courthouse wall, as long as they provided one additional commandment:
Thou shalt keep thy religion to thyself.
Today, August 15, is the Feast of the Assumption, the principal feast of the Blessed Virgin. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the feast celebrates both the “happy departure of Mary from this life” and the “assumption of her body into heaven.” That she “was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, when her earthly life was over, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things” is a principle of Catholic dogma.
It is one of six Holy Days of Obligation. Catholics are obliged to attend mass today.