Bloodthirsty Liberal

The Supreme Court hotline is temporarily experiencing heavier than usual call activity. Please wait on the line, and a Justice will be with you shortly. Your Constitutional challenge to the cluster-Fluke known as ObamaCare is important to us. Thank you for your patience:

Catholic archdioceses and institutions filed suit in federal district courts across the country Monday against the so-called contraception mandate, claiming their “fundamental rights hang in the balance.”

The plaintiffs include a host of schools and organizations, including the University of Notre Dame and the Archdiocese of New York. The lawsuits, though related, were filed individually.

The schools are objecting to the requirement from the federal health care overhaul that employers provide access to contraceptive care. The Obama administration several months back softened its position on the mandate, but some religious organizations complained the administration did not go far enough to ensure the rule would not compel them to violate their religious beliefs.

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We have tried negotiation with the Administration and legislation with the Congress – and we’ll keep at it – but there’s still no fix. Time is running out, and our valuable ministries and fundamental rights hang in the balance, so we have to resort to the courts now. … It is also a compelling display of the unity of the Church in defense of religious liberty. It’s also a great show of the diversity of the Church’s ministries that serve the common good and that are jeopardized by the mandate – ministries to the poor, the sick, and the uneducated, to people of any faith or no faith at all.

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This lawsuit is about one of America’s most cherished freedoms: the freedom to practice one’s religion without government interference. It is not about whether people have a right to abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraception. Those services are, and will continue to be, freely available in the United States, and nothing prevents the Government itself from making them more widely available. But the right to such services does not authorize the Government to force the University of Notre Dame (“Notre Dame”) to violate its own conscience by making it provide, pay for, and/or facilitate those services to others, contrary to itssincerely held religious beliefs. …

If the Government can force religious institutions to violate their beliefs in such a manner, there is no apparent limit to the Government’s power. Such an oppression of religious freedom violates Notre Dame’s clearly established constitutional and statutory rights.

The First Amendment also prohibits the Government from becoming excessively entangled in religious affairs and from interfering with a religious institution’s internal decisions concerning the organization’s religious structure, ministers, or doctrine. The U.S. Government Mandate tramples all of these rights.

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[I]f one Presidential Administration can override our religious purpose and use religious organizations to advance policies that undercut our values, then surely another Administration will do the same for another very different set of policies, each time invoking some concept of popular will or the public good, with the result these religious organizations become mere tools for the exercise of government power, morally subservient to the state, and not free from its infringements. If that happens, it will be the end of genuinely religious organizations in all but name.

The Church has the force of the Constitution behind it, for all that matters. Because, as Professor Obama—sorry, Senior Lecturer Obama—told us: many believe the Constitution is a document of “negative liberties” that is silent on what the government “must do on your behalf”. If a bunch of dead white men didn’t think to order the Roman Catholic Church to sanction and provide for abortions, that’s their problem, not Sandra Fluke’s.

Anyhow, “Obamacare: The Court Case” sounds like it will run longer than Cats!

As in Party Secretary.

Now, you don’t need to hear me say that Obama is a communist. We throw words like communist and fascist around too freely these days.

Besides, he says it himself:

The president of the U.S. Conference of Bishops is careful to show due respect for the president of the United States. “I was deeply honored that he would call me and discuss these things with me,” says the newly elevated Cardinal Timothy Dolan, archbishop of New York. But when Archbishop Dolan tells me his account of their discussions of the ObamaCare birth-control mandate, Barack Obama sounds imperious and deceitful to me.

Mr. Obama knew that the mandate would pose difficulties for the Catholic Church, so he invited Archbishop Dolan to the Oval Office last November, shortly before the bishops’ General Assembly in Baltimore. At the end of their 45-minute discussion, the archbishop summed up what he understood as the president’s message:

“I said, ‘I’ve heard you say, first of all, that you have immense regard for the work of the Catholic Church in the United States in health care, education and charity. . . . I have heard you say that you are not going to let the administration do anything to impede that work and . . . that you take the protection of the rights of conscience with the utmost seriousness. . . . Does that accurately sum up our conversation?’ [Mr. Obama] said, ‘You bet it does.’”

The archbishop asked for permission to relay the message to the other bishops. “You don’t have my permission, you’ve got my request,” the president replied.

“So you can imagine the chagrin,” Archbishop Dolan continues, “when he called me at the end of January to say that the mandates remain in place and that there would be no substantive change, and that the only thing that he could offer me was that we would have until August. . . . I said, ‘Mr. President, I appreciate the call. Are you saying now that we have until August to introduce to you continual concerns that might trigger a substantive mitigation in these mandates?’ He said, ‘No, the mandates remain. We’re more or less giving you this time to find out how you’re going to be able to comply.’ I said, ‘Well, sir, we don’t need the [extra time]. I can tell you now we’re unable to comply.’”

Come on, even you die-hard Obama supporters have to see how duplicitous and heavy handed that is. We haven’t heard talk like that since East Germany became eastern Germany.

But Obama wasn’t done talking (as if!):

The administration went ahead and announced the mandate. A public backlash ensued, and the archbishop got another call from the president on Feb. 10. “He said, ‘You will be happy to hear religious institutions do not have to pay for this, that the burden will be on insurers.’” Archbishop Dolan asked if the president was seeking his input and was told the modified policy was a fait accompli. The call came at 9:30 a.m. The president announced the purported accommodation at 12:15 p.m.

So, from eight months to “comply”, the archbishop had less than three hours.

There’s a lot more if you’re interested, but I want to make two points. One, no matter how I may wish the Catholic Church would lighten up on contraception (as do many Catholics, who use it routinely), we have a law against such compulsion. It’s called the First Amendment. There is no War on Women (as men are part of the contraception solution—or should be); there is a very real War on Religious Freedom.

But the other point is that the Catholic Church could just retreat, and stop offering the sort of services it provides to the community—get out of the charity business altogether. Then they would have no employees to be compelled to cover for abortifacients (what a word) and the like.

Archbishop Dolan answers:

“Some Catholics . . . are now saying, ‘Fine, we’ll get out of all that. It’s dragging us down anyway. Rather than be supporting 50 Catholic schools in the inner city where most of the kids are not Catholic, and using a big chunk of diocesan money to do that, we’ll just use it for the schools that have all Catholics, and it’ll serve us a lot better.’ . . .

“I find that, by the way, to be rather un-Catholic,” he continues. “I don’t know what that would say to the gospel mandate to be ‘light to the world’ and ‘salt of the earth.’ It’s part of our religion to be right out there in the forefront, right there in the nitty-gritty.”

An insular attitude, Archbishop Dolan suggests, plays into the hands of ideologues who favor an ever-more-powerful secular government: “I get this all the time: I would have some people say, ‘Cardinal Dolan, you need to go to Albany and say, “If we don’t get state aid by September, I’m going to close all my schools.”‘ I say to them, ‘You don’t think there’d be somersaults up and down the corridors?’”

Another story comes from the nation’s capital: “The Archdiocese of Washington, in a very courteous way, went to the City Council and said, ‘We just want to be upfront with you. If this goes through that we have to place children up for adoption with same-sex couples, we’ll have to get out of the adoption enterprise, which everybody admits we probably do better than anybody else. And one of the City Council members said, ‘Good. We’ve been trying to get you out of it forever. And besides, we’re paying you to do it. So get out!’”

The Church could close its schools and hospitals and make everyone happy, church and state. Everyone except those who need the Church’s services most, that is.

I don’t think it’s arguable (but maybe it is) that what the statist left seeks is the replacement of one religion (the Catholic Church—though perhaps Judeo-Christianity is more accurate) with another one: the Statist Left. It has its own tenets and its own Inquisition. And it even has its own pope: Barack I.

Woe betide you if you cross His Clean, Articulate Infallibility.

That’s the most repellant aspect of this story:

So you almost have to admire the absurdity of the new plan President Obama floated yesterday: The government will now write a rule that says the best things in life are “free,” including contraception. Thus a political mandate will be compounded by an uneconomic one—in other words, behold the soul of ObamaCare.

Under the original Health and Human Services regulation, all religious institutions except for houses of worship would be required to cover birth control, including hospitals, schools and charities. Under the new rule, which the White House stresses is “an accommodation” and not a compromise, nonprofit religious organizations won’t have to directly cover birth control and can opt out. But the insurers they hire to cover their employees can’t opt out. If that sounds like a distinction without a difference, odds are you’re a rational person.

Before we go on, I think abortion is evil. But it is a necessary evil. Just as unborn babies have rights, so do the women who carry them. Neither side should ignore the rights of the other. That abortion has existed for millennia, that it would continue even if outlawed, are lesser arguments, though still valid. It seems to me that any settlement of this issue would involve each side recognizing the “inalienable” right of the other.

But for today, anyway, that’s not what’s got my knickers in a twist:

On a conference call with reporters yesterday, a senior Administration official not known for his policy chops claimed that the new plan was “our intention all along” and that the furor is nothing more than partisan opportunism. Hmmm.

We couldn’t recall any spirit of conciliation when the birth-control mandate was finalized in January, so we went back and checked the transcript of that call with senior Administration officials. Sure enough, back then they said that the rule “reflects careful consideration of the rights of religious organizations” and that a one-year grace period “really just gives those organizations some additional time to sort out how they will be adjusting their plans.”

A journalist asked, “Just to be clear, so it’s giving them a year to comply rather than giving them a year to in any way change how they feel or the Administration to change how it feels.” Another senior official: “That is correct. It gives them a year to comply.”

Democrats in Congress wrote a law they couldn’t read (or didn’t at any rate) that gives “the Secretary” (or her boss, of course) freedom to make the law in her (his) own image. When Pelosi said we’d have to pass the bill to find out what’s in it, she was, strictly speaking, correct. The law is whatever Obama says it is on a given day. It has no existence independent of his whim or fancy.

Way back in high school civics, I learned that the legislative branch passes the laws, the executive enforces them, and the judicial interprets them. Obama has just usurped the other two functions of government. The law means what he says it means.

With apologies to pregnant teens and their unborn babies, their futures hanging in the balance, this is what disturbs me today.

You know the ACLU—defender of the little guy, champion of the underdog, bulwark against abuses of the state.

You must mean a different ACLU:

The American Civil Liberty Union announced today that President Obama’s decision to mandate coverage for birth control does not violate religious liberty.

The ACLU’s Alicia Gay warns that the “powerful lobbying arm of the Catholic Church” mistakenly claims that the HHS contraception mandate violates their religious liberty.

Individuals who choose not to pay for employees’ contraceptives, the ACLU counters, are forcing their beliefs on their employees.

“The fundamental promise of religious liberty in this country doesn’t create a right to impose those views on others, including ignoring civil rights laws or denying critical health care,” Gay insists.

Just to be clear: Catholic employers don’t object to their employees getting abortions (maybe they do, but they can’t); they object to paying for them. Which is their right under the First Amendment.

Unless the ACLU says it isn’t:

At issue, however, is that under the HHS mandate, Catholic individuals and institutions are forced to violate their religious beliefs to pay for birth control, sterilizations, and abortifacients.

Gay also criticized the bishops — who oversee the operations of 600 hospitals and 1,400 other health facilities in the United States — for failing to talk about “women’s health.”

“We know that the vast majority of women will use birth control in their lifetimes,” Gay writes, “And we know health care matters for women– be she a scientist at Norte Dame or a janitor working at St. Vincent’s Hospital – access to affordable birth control is essential for women and their families.”

Again, to be clear: no one is denying anyone their “right” to the medical care they seek. They just don’t want to have to pay for acts of “medicine” that destroy life.

But not only do they have to pay for them, they have to pay every red cent:

THE PRESIDENT: … No longer can insurance companies discriminate against women just because you guys are the ones who have to give birth. (Laughter.)

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Darn right!

THE PRESIDENT: Darn tooting. (Laughter.) They have to cover things like mammograms and contraception as preventive care, no more out-of-pocket costs.

I have to pay out of pocket to get my kids’ zits looked at! What’s so wrong about about copays for women?! Where’s my free prostrate exam—not that I want one! (Especially if you get what you pay for.)

This is just the lowest form of pandering. If the ACLU would just join NOW and admit that “women’s rights” mean abortion—nothing more, and certainly nothing less—at least we’d have the benefit of an honest discussion.

Liberalism has become the state religion, and I want protection of my civil liberties!

PS: As Ross Kaminsky notes, the Catholic Church is about the only institution NOT granted a waiver under ObamaCare.

They’ll change the law after the election, not before

White House spokesman Jay Carney today hinted that the Obama administration might compromise on its Jan. 20 directive requiring religious groups to comply with federal sex-related health insurance mandates.

Obama’s policy will require religious groups to pay fines if they decline to comply with the president’s ethical preferences regarding health insurance and contraception beginning in 2013.

“We will continue to have discussions about ways that the implementation can be done that might address some of these [constitutional and religious] concerns,” Carney said when questioned by several skeptical journalists, including Eleanor Clift, a liberal columnist.

But Carney’s repetition of the administration’s talking points obscured any outline of a compromise. The growing scandal threatens to further weaken Obama’s electability in the critical swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Even as Carney touted the Obamacare mandate, he also tried to distance Obama himself from the controversy, passing the blame to Health and Human Services secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

“I want to make clear that the president’s — or, the secretary’s — decision, and the president concurs with it, is that this [contraception] coverage needs to be available to all American women,” Carney said.

- Aggie

The Catholic Left is not happy

…Now, suddenly, we have headlines about the president’s “war on the Catholic Church.” Mostly they stem from a Health and Human Services mandate that forces every employer to provide employees with health coverage that not only covers birth control and sterilization, but makes them free. Predictably, the move has drawn fire from the Catholic bishops.

An HHS mandate requires employers to provide health coverage that covers birth control.

Less predictable—and far more interesting—has been the heat from the Catholic left, including many who have in the past given the president vital cover. In a post for the left-leaning National Catholic Reporter, Michael Sean Winter minces few words. Under the headline “J’ACCUSE,” he rightly takes the president to the woodshed for the politics of the decision, for the substance, and for how “shamefully” it treats “those Catholics who went out on a limb” for him.

The message Mr. Obama is sending, says Mr. Winters, is “that there is no room in this great country of ours for the institutions our Church has built over the years to be Catholic in ways that are important to us.”

Mr. Winters is not alone. The liberal Cardinal Roger Mahony, archbishop emeritus of Los Angeles, blogged that he “cannot imagine a more direct and frontal attack on freedom of conscience”—and he urged people to fight it. Another liberal favorite, Bishop Robert Lynch of St. Petersburg, Fla., has raised the specter of “civil disobedience” and vowed that he will drop coverage for diocesan workers rather than comply. They are joined in their expressions of discontent by the leaders of Catholic Relief Services and Catholic Charities, which alone employs 70,000 people.

I find this fascinating. They were behind him even after the Jew hatred at Reverend Wright’s church was exposed. They were cool with scapegoating all sorts of people at various times – bankers, Republicans, doctors (who would amputate a foot rather than handing out the red pill), the city of Las Vegas, typical white people, to mention the ones that come to mind – and while this was going on they covered his back. If he was willing to associate himself with various haters, and even to create new categories of people to hate, why should he respect their institutions or beliefs? What were they thinking?

A few years ago Father Jenkins took enormous grief when he invited President Obama to speak at a Notre Dame commencement; now Father Jenkins finds himself publicly disapproving of an “unnecessary government intervention” that puts many organizations such as his in an “untenable position.”

Here’s just part of what he means by “untenable”: Were Notre Dame to drop coverage for its 5,229 employees, the HHS penalty alone would amount to $10 million each year.

The irony, of course, is that the ruling is being imposed by a Catholic Health and Human Services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, working in an administration with a Catholic vice president, Joe Biden. A few years back the voluble Mr. Biden famously threatened to “shove my rosary beads” down the throat of those who dared suggest that his party’s positions on social issues put it at odds with people of faith. Does he now mean to include Mr. Winters, Cardinal Mahony and Father Jenkins?

Looks like Biden will need to stuff his rosary beads down his own throat.

- Aggie

I came across this a day or two ago, but didn’t get around to watching it, much less posting it. But then I saw an episode of Father Barron’s 10-part series on Catholicism—specifically the role of Mary in the church. Compelling viewing—thoughtful, intellectual, informative. And this from someone who tends more to the Hitchens side than the Barron side.

See what you think of his argument. I’m going to post some of the comments below the video:

A profoundly moral man? I hardly believe what I’m hearing. Those who burn with a passion for justice can be totally wrong about the object of justice, or how to go about accomplishing that goal. That makes them profoundly immoral men.

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Fr Barron is way off as usual.

Hitchens said Mother Theresa was a whore and a demogogue…. He screamed in Fr Rutler’s face calling him every name in hell. And yet he was a profoundly moral man?

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Fr. Barron almost always chooses to point out the goodness in people, rather than their faults. This is a very PROFOUNDLY Catholic thing, as St. Paul and others did this even with paganism. It is right and good to point out what is right in people and dismiss the bad, as Fr. Barron does time and time again.

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All of you religious tards are living in delusion and I laugh everytime I see one of you ignorant children. You’re so pampered and full of entitlement that you can’t handle when someone challenges your mythology. I’d tell all of you to go to hell, but rational people like myself don’t believe in fairy tales.

Yes, you’ve got the rational prize all wrapped up.

Look, he’s right that Hitchens was drawn to the subject, obsessively so. But I think he’s being, shall we say, charitable to the extreme. The first comment is right: the pursuit of “justice” is by no means an excuse for some of Hitch’s targets (Mother Theresa, circumcision) and sympathetic portrayals (“Palestinians”), much less for his behavior on occasion.

But Barron still has a point. Hitchens raged against a God he didn’t quite understand. He was an incomparable debater, and hated losing arguments (if he ever did). No wonder an omniscient God infuriated him so.

Move over, Egyptian clerics, Catholic Bishops demand to be heard!

Archbishop Gilbert was reported to have made the remarks during a Jubilee Mass held October 24 at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Roman Catholic Church in San Fernando to celebrate the 225th anniversary of the Roman Catholic mission there.

“The Jews were compassionate and caring for their own, they were compassionate and caring to the people of their nation, to the people of their race, to the people of their ethnic communities. However, that wasn’t enough for Jesus. Jesus took that teaching and universalized it,” he told his congregation, according to a news report.

“In many cases in this country, there are people who love one another, who are compassionate, but they have the mindset of the original Jewish people. They are good to their own … but they have not universalized the concept of love.”

Abraham H. Foxman, ADL’s national director, said the archbishop’s statements as reported were “a disturbing repackaging of ancient anti-Jewish canards and supersessionist beliefs.”

“Archbishop Gilbert devalues Judaism over and against Christianity, said Foxman. “The false notion that Jews only care about themselves and don’t care enough about others is one of the major pillars of classical anti-Semitism.”

Why, so it is:

Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories is tantamount to apartheid, Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja said Wednesday, warning time was running out for a two-state solution.

“If you are occupying areas inhabited by… Palestinians who do not have the same rights as the Israelis in Israel, that is apartheid and that is not sustainable,” he told reporters.

Yeah, well, see, that’s because Jews haven’t universalized the concept of love. Yet. Once they get the hang of that, everything will be peachy.

BTW, what is the logic of someone from Finland commenting on Israeli/Arab relations? When was the last time an Avigdor Lieberman commented on civil liberties for reindeer?

Aggie frequently reminds us that antisemitism is as old as the Catholic Church, and that that’s no coincidence:

Ahead of an annual interfaith meeting later this wek in Assisi, Italy, hosted by Pope Benedict XVI, the World Jewish Congress (WJC) urged the Vatican to forcefully oppose attempts to blame Jews collectively for the death of Jesus.

Last week, British Bishop Richard Williamson – who in 2009 publicly denied the existence of gas chambers in Nazi death camps and was convicted by a German court earlier this year of Holocaust denial – wrote on his web blog: “Only the Jews (leaders and people) were the prime agents of the deicide” [of Jesus Christ], and not Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate. Williamson also alleged “a continuity amongst Jews down the centuries,” indirectly blaming today’s Jews for Jesus’ death.

World Jewish Congress Deputy Secretary-General Maram Stern, who is in charge of inter-religious dialogue, declared: “Last week, Catholics were treated to another despicable tractate by Bishop Richard Williamson whose point was to derail Catholic-Jewish reconciliation and to revive age-old anti-Semitic canards such as that of Jewish deicide. This was a timely reminder that there are still many clerics out there who vehemently oppose and actively undermine dialogue and reconciliation between Catholics and Jews.”

“Unfortunately, some Catholic splinter groups such as Williamson’s Society of St. Pius X continue to defend and propagate medieval anti-Jewish teachings. It is therefore important not to jeopardize the enormous achievements made in Catholic-Jewish dialogue over the past decades by allowing preachers of hate in again through the back door. Certainly, notorious anti-Semites such as Bishop Williamson must not be granted a place in the Catholic Church,” Stern declared.

Maram Stern, who will represent the World Jewish Congress at the Assisi gathering, said Jews around the world valued that Pope Benedict XVI, like his predecessor John Paul II, “is sincerely committed to strengthening inter-faith dialogue.”

Stern urged the Pope to reiterate statements he made earlier this year in his book on Jesus and turn them into an article of faith of the Church.

Look, I wasn’t there, but it seems to me that a two-millennia grudge against an occupied people by a colonial superpower is pathological. Maybe some Jews did have it in for Jesus—he was kind of a know-it-all, even if he was a know-It-all—but to say that you hold a little old tailor named Shmuel more responsible for the death of the Lord than the Roman Prefect and all his centurions is demented. Which would explain the rest of Bishop Williamson’s beliefs, as well.

If nothing else, this sad episode teach us us that true evil can occupy even the most chaste of pursuits.

We want you to be religious, just not too religious:

The U.S. ambassador to Malta has upset the State Department by devoting so much time to writing and speaking about faith-related issues, according to a report from the department’s inspector general released last week.

The ambassador, Douglas Kmiec, was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009 after Kmiec helped spearhead Obama’s outreach to Catholic voters in the 2008 presidential campaign.

“Based on a belief that he was given a special mandate to promote President Obama’s interfaith initiatives, he has devoted considerable time to writing articles for publication in the United States as well as in Malta,” the State Department’s Inspector General’s Office said of Kmiec in an inspection report on the Maltese embassy released Thursday.

“His approach has required Department principals, as well as some embassy staff, to spend an inordinate amount of time reviewing his writings, speeches and other initiatives,” the report continued.

“His official schedule has been uncharacteristically light for an ambassador at a post of this size,” it said, “and on average he spends several hours of each workday in the residence, much of which appears to be devoted to his nonofficial writings.”

The State Department report did not cite specific instances of Kmiec’s faith-related writings and appearances, but said that “his unconventional approach to his role as ambassador has created friction with principal officials in Washington, especially over his reluctance to accept their guidance and instructions.”

The ambassador, a former dean of Catholic University of America’s law school …

Wait a minute. He was a dean at Catholic University, did outreach to potential Catholic voters, and was sent to Malta (98% Roman Catholic, says Wikipedia), and they’re annoyed because he’s obsessed with his faith?

What else is there for him to do in Malta but be Catholic?

The article does give a clue to the origin of the displeasure:

Kmiec has given many interviews to Malta-based media in which he has emphasized his belief that faith can be a key part of international diplomacy and has stated his disagreement with Obama’s support for abortion rights.

“President Obama is not pro-life,” Kmiec told the Malta Independent in 2009, “and we disagreed from the first time we met.”

Kmiec served as a top lawyer in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush but endorsed Obama in 2008, largely because he said Obama was willing to explore opportunities for common ground with conservatives on divisive issues like abortion.

I guess not. Well, he wouldn’t be the first so-called conservative snookered by Obama’s sweet talk. Would he, David Brooks?

Well, not me (at least not half of me), them:

A senior Vatican delegation reaffirmed the “chosen” status of the Jews on Thursday, at the end of an annual meeting with representatives of the Chief Rabbinate in Jerusalem.

The Bilateral Commission of the delegations of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel and the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews concluded the three-day meeting Thursday, the theme of which was the challenges of faith and religious leadership in secular society.

The Catholic delegation, led by Cardinal Jorge Maria Mejìa, “took the opportunity to reiterate the historic teaching of the Second Vatican Council’s declaration Nostra Aetate (No. 4) regarding the Divine Covenant with the Jewish People that “the Jews still remain most dear to God because of their Fathers, for He does not repent of the gifts He makes, nor of the calls He issues (cf. Romans 11:28- 29),” the commission’s joint statement said.

Deal with that! With apologies to Native Americans and people from Wales, God does is not an Indian-giver and does not Welsh on a bet.

Of course, the above opinion is not infallible:

At the end of the Vatican Synod on the Middle East in October, Melkite Catholic Archbishop Cyril Salim Bustros, who headed the commission that drafted the synod’s final statement, raised a storm when he said that “we Christians cannot speak about the promised land for the Jewish people. There is no longer a chosen people.”

If Bustros’ name sounds familiar (it did to me):

“We Christians cannot speak about the promised land for the Jewish people. There is no longer a chosen people. All men and women of all countries have become the chosen people.

“The concept of the promised land cannot be used as a base for the justification of the return of Jews to Israel and the displacement of Palestinians,” he added. “The justification of Israel’s occupation of the land of Palestine cannot be based on sacred scriptures.”

So. I guess that whole Old Testament thing is just so much bird cage liner to you, huh Cyril.

Pretty much:

US Archbishop Salim Bustros wrote the final message of the synod, claiming that the Jewish Promised Land had been “nullified by Christ,” thus reviving the infamous replacement theology that played a great role in the Holocaust.

Thanks for the kind words, Rome, but if it’s all the same to you, deal with your own [bleep] first before passing judgement on others. The Jews don’t need to hear their status reaffirmed by you, when they’ve already heard it from The Guy Upstairs.

But that’s ok. Because if a Nobel Laureate and winner of the Transparency Award wants to kill Libyan civilians with taxpayer money, who are we to object? I’m sure the Vatican will rethink its impulsive comments.

ROME – At least 40 civilians have been killed in airstrikes by Western forces on Tripoli, the top Vatican official in the Libyan capital told a Catholic news agency on Thursday citing witnesses.

“The so-called humanitarian raids have killed dozens of civilian victims in some neighborhoods of Tripoli,” said Giovanni Innocenzo Martinelli, the Apostolic Vicar of Tripoli.

Now, in the 1960′s, when Libya expelled her entire remaining Jewish population, (those they hadn’t already expelled or murdered) stealing all property, down to wedding rings and clothing, killing, rampaging, burning, and doubtlessly partying and handing out candies, most of those Jews fled to Italy. So that Vatican knows a thing or two about what can happen to Libyan civilians.

- Aggie