AmericanPapist Comments
The press is overwhelmingly Democrat and pro-abortion. What would one expect? But there are Catholics who post here who are perfectly fine with their Church being slandered by their fellow-travellers. Tom
Jesus said: "if they hate you, realize they hated me first." I have seen cartoons like this in the Houston Chronicle as well, although directed at Christians in general. One showed McCain and Palin throwing two lions labelled "Liberals" and "Media" to the Christians. It showed the Christians as an angry mob. A clear attack with a slight of hand.
This newspaper has lost so much readership, they have contemplated becoming an on-line paper only. I will not mourn the death of it.
Bloggers can do something besides protest. Hit them in the pocket book. It always works.
How about drawing a cartoon parody of the cartoonist drawing this cartoon?...
The press is in more need of reform than Washington D.C.
It will be up to Americans to fix the problem, however. Government can and should do nothing.
The appropriate counter-cartoon should be titled: The Ass (donkey) in the newsroom.
Call it a victory. A statement by a local Catholic bishop should- in fact, must- trigger this reaction. There may be a direct relationship between a paper's support of infanticide and the red ink spilling from its ledgers. The Church will remain strong in the next five years? Will this paper even continue to publish? Count it all joy.
atheling, you are right. I cancelled by "Newspaper" 5 years ago. I don't
provide financial support to people with who mock my values. Tom
I cannot WAIT to see you guys come together against civilian war casualties and torture once abortion is illegal!
I cannot WAIT to see you guys come together against civilian war casualties and torture once abortion is illegal!
When we get candidates that actually run on a platform of deliberately killing civilians and torturing people, we will.
Aelric, someone REALLY needs to draw that! Very clever.
Thom does not live in reality. For some strange reason, he thinks that war can be as clean as the games kids play on their X-box.
Civilian casualties are inescapable during wartime. Over centuries, those who actually cared (i.e., the West) have made efforts to minimize civilian casualties (smart bombs, precision targeting, etc...) by employing advances in technology and tactics.
People like Thom don't know the difference between accidental and deliberate action when it comes to war because he lives in a cocoon of ignorance of human nature and history.
Now, let's hold hands and sing kumbaya.
Is Thom a refugee from moveon.org? Tom
My main objection is the whole "you guys" thing. Many of us were up in arms over the potential nomination of torture-em'-all Guilaini. And I think most Catholics, even those icky conservative ones, have stricter rules of engagement than most. I refuse to play this scripted I-only-care-about-abortion-and-free-trade role as mindless, willess Strawman #2 so that self-absorbed stars can come knock me down.
Atheling, you live up to your namesake. A nobleman you are. You crack me up. Keep standing the straw up Thom. The prince will keep knocking you down.
fh in Houston:
Thanks, but just for the record, I'm a woman!
And my moniker is the word from which my surname derives - that's all. I'm just an ordinary American - and proud to be part of the "dirty unwashed" class!
OK, then it is noble lady and princess! Yes we are all "dirty, unwashed", but if we stay on track and run the good race, we are promised a crown. Hence, you deserve the title.
Just a good ole boy here.
Maybe this is part of Scranton's tourist bureau trying to make the town look as full of inconsiderate jerks as "The Office" portrays on TV.
I emailed the Mark Brumley to my friends and family, many of them Catholics to provide perspective. One of my Catholic friends, raised Catholic her whole life, writes back "Well, that's certainly an interesting perspective" as if it were just one dude's opinion. I wrote back "Well, it's more than that, though, it's the teaching of the Church."
The relativism is out of whack.
Couldn't agree more with every word of the post.
I'll bet you'd have certain Muslims rioting if a cartoon attacked them. Oh wait...
fh:
I am honored. *Curtsy*
Shock, horror!
Politics in a political cartoon! How could this be!?
Given that I'd almost bet a limb that you have banged on about political correctness destroying the contemporary world, I find it pretty funny and hypocritical that you get so hot under the collar about something that YOU don't like. Like this cartoon, or videos of your magic wafer on YouTube.
I mean, it's not like you had links to a website that sells t-shirts asking "When exactly does the next Crusade begin?".
http://www.betterinlatin.com/
Oh, wait. You did. But that's fine and dandy, right?
Carbon, what was wrong with the Crusades (at least the intent, anyway)?
Also, if you have a point to make, that is fine, but don't demean the Body of Christ when doing it (this article is not about the Eucharist). The fact is, like Thomas said, no other major religious group would be mocked in a public paper like this, so if they do not wish to mock other religions, then don't mock Catholicism. Also, defending those who cannot speak for themselves is not politics, it is our obligation!
How can Cole expect anyone to take him seriously when he totally got the liturgical colors wrong. ;)
Are you falsely accused, or loaded with insults? All the better! It is a good sign; don't worry about it. You are on the road which leads to Heaven. If you are afraid of other people's opinion, you should not have become a Christian.
Actually, it's anti-Catholic bigotry in a "political" cartoon. If there's one thing I would expect CBLF to recognize, it's anti-Catholic bigotry.
I like how CBLF originally appeared in the comboxes on the issue of global warming and claimed to be arguing the "Catholic" position. Months later, mocking the Eucharist, he shows his true stripes.
Huh!? I think you're imagining things.
When did I claim to argue "the Catholic position?" I am not a Catholic. I'm an atheist. Perhaps I'd argue the small c catholic position, but certainly not the big C one.
The point remains: you seem to reserve the right to offend, but when someone slays YOUR sacred cows, you wail like a banshee.
As for the other poster and what's wrong with the Crusades, in intent and practice, consult any good history text. They were a particularly bloody part of a rather unpleasant epoch. They had as much to do with the geopolitics of the Schism as anything else, at least in the case of the initial Crusade.
The Catholic position on abortion pre-dates the republican party by roughly 18 centuries, so calling the bishops fronts for the republicans is a little ignorant of history. Much the same as CBLF's assessment of the Crusades.
Much the same as CBLF's assessment of the Crusades.
Oh yeah?
Please, enlighten us then.
What's the historically accurate assessment?
Much the same as CBLF's assessment of the Crusades.
Oh yeah?
Please, enlighten us then.
What's the historically accurate assessment of the Crusades?
Sorry, double post.
from ewtn.com:
Thousands of pilgrims every year traveled to Palestine to visit the holy places of Jerusalem, a movement that had long been permitted by the Islamic Fatimid caliphate, which controlled the cities of the Holy Land, because of the generally tolerant nature of the government and the money that pilgrims brought into their domains. The normal pilgrim trails extended across Europe into the Balkans, through the Byzantine Empire, over Asia Minor, and into Palestine. This activity, despite the longtime antipathy of Christians and Muslims, had continued for centuries when, suddenly, in the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks swept into Asia Minor and, at the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, smashed the Byzantines and seized whole stretches of Anatolia. Devout Muslims, the Turks were opposed to pilgrims wandering over their land and so launched a program of harassment. Word spread of deaths and oppression, reaching Europe over the next years. Antagonism toward the Muslims grew in the West so that when the Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenos sent an appeal for aid to Pope Urban II, the pontiff found all of Christendom willing to listen. In 1095, at the Council of Clermont, he called upon all Christians to take up arms and to go on a crusade. The cry of the age as expressed by Pope Urban was “Deus vult!” (“God wills!”). The response was overwhelming as the common folk willingly pledged themselves with the knights and other soldiers.
The pope thus did not lie about the crisis. Rather, he organized a crusade to march on the Holy Land to keep the sacred places safe for Christians. Had the Seljuk Turks not threatened the pilgrim trails (and hence the Byzantine Empire), it is unlikely that the Crusades would have happened.
The crusades were ultimately near total failures in the military sense throughout the two centuries in which they were waged. Their importance, though, lay not in the campaigns of conquest but in the opportunities they presented in terms of commerce, trade, and culture. For the Church, they offered the means to introduce to the Holy Land the first representatives of the papacy in centuries and to make contact with Christians long cut off from the Western Church, such as the Maronites of Lebanon. The campaigns also made possible the accelerated process of bringing translations of long-lost writings by Aristotle to the West, a development that had the most far-reaching consequences for the future of Christian thought.
also read:
The Building of Christendom (A History of Christendom, Vol. 2) and The Glory of Christendom (History of Christendom Series : Vol. 3) by Warren H. Carroll
The Crusades: The World's Debate by Hilaire Belloc
A History of the Crusades by Steven Runciman
The Oxford Illustrated History of the Crusades by Jonathan Riley-Smith
What Were the Crusades? by Jonathan Riley-Smith
_____________________________________-
The Crusades is starting to be a rabbit hole in this original post so sorry American Papist for going off topic with this!
The pope thus did not lie about the crisis. Rather, he organized a crusade to march on the Holy Land to keep the sacred places safe for Christians.
That's a pretty naive piece of Whig history.
There was much more at play than just keeping the path safe for pilgrims. The testy relationship between the Byzantines and the West, as I have said, was also a crucial element.
No one of serious historical repute denies this.
How about naming those of "serious historical repute", instead of blustering about them?
Intellectual arrogance does not equate to intellectual honesty, and frankly, CBLF, you lack the latter, which makes your POV quite irrelevant.
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
How about naming those of "serious historical repute", instead of blustering about them?
Are you saying there was NO geopolitical element to the Crusades? That it was entirely an affair of piety and duty?
Do you even have the first clue what you're talking about?
Crusade theory is largely framed by two poles: on one extreme, the Runciman view, on the other side the Madden view. Occam's razor would suggest that the truth lies somewhere between the furthest points.
It is intellectually juvenile to ignore the interplay between the Byzantine Empire and the Western church as having a definite influencing factor in Urban II's call for the First Crusade. The medieval popes were hardly non-political actors. How the hell is that an intellectually dishonest statement!?
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
If there was no concept of God or gods, there were would be no atheists.
Fixed that for you.
If there was no concept of God or gods, there were would be no atheists.
If there were no God, we would all not be.
CBLF:
Why should anyone believe what you say?
First of all, atheists are intellectually dishonest. You go ahead and refute Aquinas' Five Proofs and then get back to us. The rest of your blathering is just that.
Second, your "geopolitical" POV is worthless. Atheistic governments have been respoinsible for the worst human rights violations and mass murders in the history of humanity. Your buddies in the USSR and Communist China have been a blight of the 20th century. Good company you keep. Your opinion means nothing and should be ignored, like your blowhard rhetoric
Third, your arrogance, which is par for the course for you atheists, is simply a cover up for mental inadequacies.
Last, you want to talk guff? Go talk it to the devil, you bombastic turd.
Why should anyone believe what you say?
That medieval popes were heavily involved in secular affairs?
This is hardly a controversial point. Anyone sensible, Catholic or otherwise, acknowledges this.
Your buddies in the USSR and Communist China have been a blight of the 20th century. Good company you keep.
If you want to be so idiotically reductivist, then I can point you towards Franco's Spain. And Mussolini's Italy.
Go talk it to the devil, you bombastic turd.
Oh, will you please get a grip on yourself?
You are sounding like a raving lunatic. Anyone who was being the least bit objective while observing what has been said here would realise that your histrionic fits are pathetic.
Grow up, will you? And give the bulging veins in your forehead a rest.
This peek into your insane world view is pretty illuminating.
Proud of yourself?
Nice praeteritio, Thomas.
Carbon,
You equated the editorial cartoon of a mainstream city newspaper with a link to a novelty tee shirt. What if the paper had published the Crusades "cartoon" and a progressive blog had linked to a site which sold a product (among many other non-offensive items) that had a mocking image of a bishop? Would you be so indignant?
Your premise of equivalency is completely unjustified.
The image in question is supposed to be amusing because it's overtly unPC. Are you really so concerned about the armed conflicts of centuries ago? Or is it just something to throw at the acceptable Other of our time?
Your bigotry is neither amusing, nor skilled, nor courageous, nor particularly advantageous to society.
What if the paper had published the Crusades "cartoon" and a progressive blog had linked to a site which sold a product (among many other non-offensive items) that had a mocking image of a bishop? Would you be so indignant?
It's not MY indignance that's at issue. Personally, I'd rather that people be able to publish what they want. And also that people be able to fulminate about it - like our esteemed blogster - if they want.
The thing is, that fulmination seems very, very one way.
As I've said, I'm pointing out that when one of Peters' sacred cows or wafers is slaughtered, the teeth-gnashing is immense. Yet he seems oblivious to his own efforts. Of course, we're all like that to an extent, but Junior is very much so.
You equated the editorial cartoon of a mainstream city newspaper with a link to a novelty tee shirt.
Would you be so insouciant if the t-shirt said something like "Time to Chase Them Back Into Priest-Holes"?
Are you really so concerned about the armed conflicts of centuries ago?
Current attitudes to past events tells an enormous amount about the mindset of the proclaimer.
Your bigotry is neither amusing, nor skilled, nor courageous, nor particularly advantageous to society.
Bigotry? Pointing out that medieval popes had enormous secular significance? How could I!?
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