Category Archives: War and Peace

Feast of Our Mother of Sorrows

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Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy writes:
Gandhi once said, “to the extent that the Gospel is made universally applicable, we will make it universally acceptable.”  
That is what this little 9 minute video tries to do. It reveals the universal unity of Mary and Jesus in the Gospel with all mothers and their children and how their love—at every moment of time and at every longitude and latitude of space is turned into hell on earth by the local political, economic military and religious power-seekers. Please do think, pray and ponder what is presented here—and what the Gospel response to it is.
 
Finally, this is probably the last time you will see this video because it is now continuously being removed from Google and YouTube, which is why you are receiving this late on this Feast Day of The Mother of Sorrows. It has been on Google and YouTube for about five years with no problem. Make a copy, if you wish or can. Put it in your Facebook as a video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB7ZPVWLTpU

Snubbed

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I guess I’m on a Pope Benedict XV kick.  Check out this interesting article, “Snubbed: Pope Benedict XV and Cardinal James Gibbons.”

“Cardinal Gibbons never made it for the papal conclave in which Giacomo della Chiesa became Pope Benedict XV. Arriving just hours late, he did become the first to have an audience with the new pope. Yet on his return from the trip, he began immediately a course of politics that, while publicly deferential to Benedict, was in opposition to the pope.”

Get this!

“As April of 1917 and the U.S. entrance into the war drew near, Gibbons stepped up his  campaign to be a public voice on behalf of President Wilson. Despite criticism, he endorsed a plan for universal military service. (It is significant here that in September of 1917 Benedict lobbied for a ‘general boycott in sanction against any nation that might attempt to reestablish obligatory military service.’) Gibbons also publicly backed, in the New York Times, Wilson’s ‘preparedness campaign”’of military build-up. And so, even a day before the formal declaration of war on Germany came, Gibbons was ready with a prepared statement. The statement, of course, made no mention of Benedict’s condemnation of the proliferation of the war. Yet he didn’t need to make mention of this; it was clear how Gibbons expected Catholics of American stripe to proceed during this time of national crisis. Far from obedience to the words of the pontiff, who had taught in Ad beatissimi that “[t]here is no need of adding any qualifying terms to the profession of Catholicism,” Gibbons had other instructions for U.S. Catholics. “The primary duty of a citizen,” Gibbons taught, “is loyalty to country. It is exhibited by an absolute and unreserved obedience to his country’s call.”

Alright, Gibbons, sorry but reading about your militaristic antics has just landed you on my new “Catholics For Militarism” Pinterest board (alongside Gemelli)!

William Pfaff has died.

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From his obituary in the New York Times:

—“He rejected the messianic illusions of successive American administrations,” said a longtime friend, John Rielly, president emeritus of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “Although many American pundits consider him a liberal, he was in many respects a classic Christian conservative — one who was skeptical about liberal notions of inevitable progress and always aware of the limitations of human activity.”

—Over time he became more pessimistic, his wife, the former Carolyn Cleary, said. “He lashed out at America because he loved it, but he became sadder and sadder about the nation that was so great, yet was belittling itself. He wanted America to stay home and fix its own country.”

Visit his website and please say a prayer for him:

Eternal rest grant unto him, O Lord, and let thy perpetual light shine upon him. May the souls of the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.

IMAGINE

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“Instead of a world living in peace because it is without religion, why not imagine a world without nation states?… Every major war in the last 300 years has been fought by nation states, not by the Church… The state apparatus for investigating civilians now is far more extensive than anything dreamed up by the Spanish Inquisition, although both were created to serve the same purpose: to preserve a government’s public ideology and control of society, whether based on religion or on modern constitutional order.

“…The point is that the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making ‘laws’ beyond its competence.

“Few there are, however, who would venture to ask if there might be a better way for humanity to organize itself for the sake of the common good. Few, that is, beyond a prophetic voice like that of Dorothy Day, speaking acerbically about ‘Holy Mother the State,’ or the ecclesiastical voice that calls the world, from generation to generation, to live at peace in the kingdom of God.”

Francis Cardinal George, “The Wrong Side of History“

I like Francis Cardinal George’s take on this idea more than John Lennon’s, but it’s such a beautiful song, one must admit:

The Man Who Saved The World (2014)

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A film about Stanislov Petrov, a hero from the Soviet Union who saved the world with a decision he made one night in 1983.

Here is a link to the official homepage. Here is a trailer narrated by Kevin Costner.man saved

In the trailer he says he never wanted to go into the military. He says his parents pushed him into it.

An article about the documentary in Commonweal. Here is an article about Petrov in The Atlantic.

I hope it is coming soon to a theater near me!