“I’ve been through MERS, SARS, Ebola, the first Gulf war and the second, and I don’t recall anything like this. There’s unnecessary, exaggerated panic. We have to calm people down…. [E]everybody is whipping everybody else up into panic — the leaders, via the media, and the wider public — who then in turn start to stress out the leaders. We’ve entered some kind of vicious cycle.”  - Dr. Jihad Bishara, Israeli virologist 
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Editor’s Note: I realize many good people are frightened by what’s going on just now.  I also realize that families in Europe and China especially have been terribly impacted by the Coronavirus, which has claimed lives—real people’s lives, living in the real world. We pray for them and we resolve not to let them die in vain by failing to take ordinary precautions here in the United States that will prevent what happened to them from happening to us. That said, we must also put the crisis in its proper perspective. This will keep panic at bay, which in turn will dramatically reduce the threat caused by hoarding of everything from medical supplies to toilet paper to food. 

Never Let a Good Coronavirus Go to Waste.

First it was the Russian Collusion Hoax, based upon nothing but a phony dossier paid for by Hillary Clinton and the DNC in order to promote the media-fueled fever dream that Trump “colluded with Russia” to steal the election of 2016.

Then it was the Ukrainian Quid Pro Quo Hoax, based upon a phone call between Trump and the President of Ukraine, leaked by a phony “whistleblower” and his phony informant, both of whom were carefully shielded from all scrutiny by the Democrat-Media Complex (DMC). The hoax was exposed when the transcript of the call showed no quid pro quo whatsoever.

Pete Buttigieg, whose campaign for the Democrat Party’s nomination to oppose Trump in November has just ended, is an apostate Catholic who pretends he has married a man, whom he made a big show of kissing onstage at various stops during his campaign (the links are redirects to avoid a direct viewing of the disgusting spectacle). At one campaign stop he molested a little boy by bringing him onstage to advise him before the cameras about how, at the age of 9, he should “come out” as a “gay,” meaning embrace the abominable vice of sodomy.  Not to be to be outdone by Satan, Buttigieg has cited Sacred Scripture to defend his sexual deviancy, his sodomitical mockery of the Sixth Commandment, and the brutal murder of nascent children even at the moment their heads are exiting the birth canal.

“Mayor Pete” is, of course, a monster—but a monster who looks in the mirror and sees only a model of civic virtue for our time.  “I’m faithful to my husband,” Buttigieg declared, as if it were an admirable commitment to the institution of marriage to confine one’s sodomy to a single partner, at least until the “gay” divorce or separation.

THE POST-SYNODAL “apostolic exhortation” Querida Amazonia (Beloved Amazon) (QA) has finally appeared.  QA says a great deal about very little. It is largely composed of blathering about four “dreams” to be realized (social, cultural, ecological and ecclesial), the obsessive theme of “inculturation,” and the glories of the Amazon, along with assorted ecological observations having no relation to papal authority, including references to the Amazon’s “dazzling diversity of woodlands” which “serves as a great filter of carbon dioxide, which helps avoid the warming of the earth.” And let not the faithful not forget that “the good functioning of ecosystems also requires fungi, algae, worms, insects, reptiles and an innumerable variety of microorganisms…” There are also a number of ludicrous quotations from poetic paeans to the Amazon jungle, including this gem:

Weigel on “the New Evangelization”

Mike Matt has called my attention to a video clip of George Weigel expatiating in his usual mode of World’s Greatest Authority on Catholicism. The mise en scène is a couple of stools in front of a green screen on which fake bookshelves are projected as Weigel favors EWTN’s Doug Keck with a token of his panoptic comprehension of the Faith and its relation to culture.  With a curiously inappropriate, smugly professorial tone—as if he were pleased with his own dire assessment—Weigel tells Keck that not even Catholic Poland will escape the civilizational apostasy that has spread throughout the Catholic world over the past sixty years:

I just spent a month in Poland, where I teach every July, and the Polish church is really wrestling with the fact that, as I have put it to senior Polish churchmen, forty years from now Poles are not going to answer the question “Why are you a Catholic?” by saying “Because I’m Polish.”

That just does not work under these 21^st century cultural conditions. So that’s why it’s so important that—what John II called ‘the New Evangelization’—the Church has rediscovered the fact that everyone is a missionary, each of us, and everywhere is mission territory, including the places that look really Catholic.  Quebec looked really Catholic sixty years ago. Quebec is the most religiously arid place on the face of the earth between the North Pole and Tierra del Fuego.

Weigel seems not to notice his implicit admission that in the aftermath of the very Council that was supposed to renew the Church and make the Faith appealing, at long last, to the “modern world,” the whole of what was once Christendom is suddenly mission territory again and the very idea of a Catholic country “does not work under these 21^st century cultural conditions.”  Which is to say that not only has the Council failed to win over the world, but that, following the Council, it is the world that has won over the Church.

ON JUNE 2, 1951, in his encyclical Evangelii Praecones, Ven. Pope Pius XII warned that “the whole human race is today allowing itself to be driven into two opposing camps, for Christ or against Christ. The human race is involved today in a supreme crisis, which will issue in its salvation by Christ, or in its dire destruction.”

Francis is Pope for life. But Jorge Mario Bergoglio the politician can and must be voted out of office.

Enough, already!

An ABC News headline back in 2014 inadvertently exposed the core at the meltdown of the papacy provoked by the current holder of the office: “Pope Francis Renews Passport as Jorge Mario Bergoglio.”  Above the name Jorge Mario Bergoglio on the  passport’s first page is a photo of Bergoglio wearing his white papal cassock as if it were merely the suit he had worn for a photo taken in the Vatican rather than a sign of the august office—Vicar of Christ—to which he, like any Pope, must be prepared to subsume his personal identity and peculiar ideas.  Hence the apostolic tradition of adopting a papal name. 

As any fool could see, the stage-play entitled “Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon Region,” with a ludicrous “noble savage” theme complete with pagan idols, was a production mounted for the purpose of pretending that married priests and women “deacons” are the latest dictate of “the voice of the Spirit” rather than simply what Bergoglio wants and will get by hook or crook. The hook-or-crook includes a post-synodal reactivation, with new members, of Bergoglio’s semi-secret commission on women deacons whose previous iteration reportedly did not tell him what he wanted to hear, but rather concluded that there is no evidence that women deacons as such ever existed in the Church. Which explains why the commission’s probable majority conclusion remains a semi-secret. Like the rest of the Third Secret of Fatima, the commission’s findings will be kept under lock and key.

After President Trump ordered a pullout of some 50-100 US troops from the flashpoint of the endless Kurdish-Turkish conflict on Syria’s northeast border, a chorus of indignation resounded throughout the entire mediatic complex, both political parties, and the whole of Imperial Washington: “Trump has abandoned the Kurds!” 

A Review of Ross Douthat’s To Change the Church: Pope Francis and the Future of Catholicism

Pity the public intellectual, especially a Catholic writing or speaking on Catholic Church affairs.  Even if fully cognizant of the truth of the matter on which he expatiates, often in best-selling books, the Catholic public intellectual is a prisoner of nuance.  Not the nuance necessary to present his subject carefully, but nuance employed to avoid a simple statement of position that risks fully exposing a view outside the circle of acceptable (or at least tolerable) public opinion.  Nuance, that is, for the sake of nuance.