Sideways

I rely on the Catholic Church to hold the moral center. On this occasion they've lost their way. That's a big problem: if they don't mark the center, how do others who have wandered find their way back?

The British are different from us, for reasons we remember this week. They are subjects of the Queen, and I suppose there is some sense in which subjects might be ordered to yield up their child's life on the orders of the state. Sure, they had the money to pursue their child's last hopes without anyone else being inconvenienced. But the state said the child should die, so the parents are subject to obedience. Pit and gallows, that sort of thing. All subjects are subject to being disposed of at the state's decision.

Should an American court issue a similar order on me, to command me to stand by while they killed a child of mine mauger my head, I would take it to be my duty to wage war upon them until I or they were stricken from the earth.

11 comments:

james said...

I'm not Catholic, but I am not joking when I say that one of the strongest arguments I see for the primacy of Peter is the fact that all four gospels record him denying Jesus--only someone who knows how far they can fall can be trusted with moral authority.

And history shows that Christians of all flavors are often all too ready to conform to the pressures of the world. I judge it one of the signs that God is in His church that there's always been a remnant, and that the church has survived despite its leaders. And its followers.

Grim said...

You say well. Jesus said that his kingdom was not of this world. All the same, if there was a place where the church ought to defy the state, surely it is when the state orders the death of innocent children and forbids anyone to try to stop it.

Anonymous said...

Truly baffling, maddening, and heartbreaking. This is what happens when those with (moral) authority refuse to speak with the clarity the situation demands. I cannot comprehend how the Vatican would not stand up for the right of the parents to decide how to treat their child and rather defer to a court system that is usurping their role. The third from the last paragraph in the article says it best: "But such a decision, one way or the other, is not the prerogative of the British government, or anyone other than the man and woman who gave Charlie life and wish only to let him keep it." The Church, at one point, would have resoundingly endorsed this position. I'm sorry to see they are failing to do so in this case.

May God have mercy upon all involved.

Ymar Sakar said...

The Vatican being the center of anything, is pretty hopeless ideology. Peter was never the Pope. The Pope was just the Bishop of Rome, and the Greek patriarchs disagreed that the Bishop of Rome had any authority over the other patriarchs.

The authority of the apostles was never passed down, because they died. Deacons and bishops and evangelist positions could be passed down, as in Ephesians 4. Bishop=pastor

The only incident recorded in the bible when the apostles could replace one of their member, was the replacement of Judas' seat, which required all of the apostles to be together. Thus if Peter created the Roman Catholics, that wouldn't nullify the authority of the other apostles to create churches which the Romans declared heretical and destroyed them through fire and war.

Anonymous said...

Yes, they lost there way completely on this issue.
We Catholics have come to expect this with Pope Francis

Grim, did you read dad29 commentary on the ongoing Catholic Civil War?
This is just the latest issue to raise its putrid head

http://dad29.blogspot.com/search?q=catholic+civil+war&max-results=20&by-date=true

- Mississippi


Ymar Sakar said...

I would take it to be my duty to wage war upon them until I or they were stricken from the earth.

The Catholic belief in the Vicar of Christ, is going to be exposed for the deception it always was. That may or may not create a catholic civil war.

As for your line, Grim, I don't remember that response being given to me, when I first talked about Civil War 2 being inevitable here. I believe your initial response was that war is terrible, and having experienced it in Iraq, you felt I should stop talking about it.

Now you're the one talking about it, heh. You can chase out and ignore the Ymars, but not when you become the ymar.

Dad29 said...

There are some very strange communications coming from Rome lately.

Eric Blair said...

He's an anti-pope!

Cassandra said...

I'm Catholic Light (Episcopalian) but I have trouble seeing the Catholic church as holding the moral center, especially under this Pope :p

The Anglican church has a huge schism between the side that are just openly socialist and left wing and the side that are essentially conservative in their values.

Grim said...

I meant something specific by that claim about holding the center, which I didn't lay out explicitly. The Catholic Church, in its ethics, politics, and theology holds the last position that was generally satisfying to most everyone in the West. It's been a long time ago that this position ceased to be satisfying -- we divide the Modern age from the Medieval period by the point at which people began to depart from that position.

There were many reasons why people began to depart, some good (such as the realization that the Aristotelian physics that underlay the Aristotelian metaphysics weren't solid, which called into question many theological/metaphysical assumptions) and some not so good (e.g., Henry VIII's desire for more wives). Some of these explorations were really worth doing, and others were chiefly political; still others combined those qualities.

But you can think of the Church as a kind of bookmark, holding the place from which all these departures occurred. If, in the course of a set of explorations, you find that the line of inquiry turns out badly, you can always withdraw back to that center and try again. You don't even have to give up your initial objection to Catholic theology; but if the answer your Protestant or agnostic or atheistic/materialist line of inquiry leads to turns out to be monstrous, you can go back and try to solve that objection in a different way.

That depends on someone still remembering and teaching what the old way was, though. Those who hold the center make it easy for us to return, even if it is only to start out again on another inquiry. It's an invaluable service to our civilization, and thus it is worrisome to see them turning their back on it.

Anonymous said...

The tradition of parents grasping at any available straw on behalf of their children extends at least to the story of the Centurion's Daughter in the New Testament. Parents have certainly been driving medical research in recent times, for example the first use of the rabies vaccine. I have an example in my own family, where the parents of a child with a seizure disorder did their own research, found a cure and had to persuade the doctors to use it. I don't know the details. They said it was like Lorenzo's Oil.

Here the parents are asking to use funds they raised themselves to pay for an unlikely medical treatment, and the British Foreign Secretary feels entitled to weigh in on it.

This is unacceptable.

I am well aware of the bureaucratic concern here: the courts and the "doctors" are all worried that the treatment will work, yielding a crippled child, and that the State will have to pay for continued medical care for the child's extended lifetime.

We saw the same issue play out when Sarah Palin got so much vile criticism for failing to kill her child, Trig, in utero.

This is why we must not have single-payor or government-run medical insurance in this country: it will lead to murderous decisions by self-entitled bureaucrats, quickly.

I have friends who are being all SJW lately, claiming that "health care is a human right". I do not disagree with the essence of their position, but the system they think they are defending has death panels.

Valerie