Mass Incarceration in the US

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Prison (HBO)

Natalie Grant - Burn Bright (You Were Made To Shine) (Official Music Video)

His Star is Rising- to the North, North Star

Celebrity culture hails individuals for all the wrong reasons often but there is one YouTube celebrity that is hailed for the right ones: Father James Martin, SJ (Jesuit Priest) is fastly becoming more famous than Stephen Colbert whom he pastored in the now dormant Colbert Report. With the expansion of America magazine into America Media, he flips the script and mike to become not the interviewee but the interviewer of spiritually interesting significant people as the Jesuits answer to Oprah.



    His star rises like the North Star- not just because he is in the NorthEast (son of the Boston province from Philadelphia originally now in Manhattan), but because like the North Star everything he does brightly beams a spotlight on JESUS.



  James Martin is the author of "Jesus: A Pilgrimage" and about a hundred (exaggeration) other best selling books, some hilariously funny as he strove to put humor back in the oft morose spirituality of the limping saved.



   He is what you hope a true christian is-- for his Lenten message he talked about not so much giving up something (my mother always gave up watermelon which was never in season) but about affirmatively doing something concrete along the carnal acts of mercy lines- echoing Pope Francis' mandate to pay attention to the Matthew 25 demands.  His lenten message was simply titled "Be Kind" which would be a good description for him all around.



   Father Martin started his career in finance as a Wharton grad working at GE. He decided to enter the prieshood after the business world which he says is a great career for some but just not for him as he heard the call. He is incredibly witty, smart, and imminently wise. Once in a while he goes on book tours and you can catch him and get him to sign a book.  He will be appearing March 1 at Fordham Prep in NYC in an event open to the public with blogger/author Andrew Sullivan and a Fordham theology professor to sign more books. If you are lucky enough to be in NYC go. I love this guy.



 

ENYA - JOURNEY OF THE ANGELS with lyrics on video FULL HD

Winter Song - Sara Bareilles/Ingrid Michaelson- Music Video

Denial is not a River in Egypt

France My Beloved

   I love most things about France. Its Anti-Semitism is not one of them. There is a serious problem in France regarding their attitudes about Jewish people. There are huge numbers of Jewish people now migrating to Israel for that reason. Their history during WWII witnessing an occupation of Nazis and deportation of massive numbers of Jewish children is shocking. And it didn't end there.

   Recently there has been a wave of violence and desecrations against Jewish synagogues and business establishments. A viral YouTube is going around of a Jewish man who is merely walking down the street with a yamulka on receiving harassment and provocations.

  It is so bad that a French Minister took to their equivalent of Parliament and loudly denounced the sentiment all too prevalent. The Anti-Defamation league picked it up and wants everyone to see it- so watch.
IT HERE.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=10152766267563717&fref=nf

 

Spare Me Please

Cardinal-Speak For Yourself.

     There are mounds of psychological studies on the difference between men and women. 

The church made of all male decision makers gets one thing insistently wrong stemming from the difference between men and women. Men are constantly thinking of sex. It is a psychological function stemming from biological function. It has been posited that this is because their male organs are outside them visible and observed every time they go to the bathroom and they can be 'aroused' by merely looking at something. Women's sex organs are hidden inside them, they don't see them-out of sight out of mind. Women psychologically crave affection, warmth, and emotional security. These also are born of biological functions because they are necessary to nurture children. Men crave sex. So men clergy often engage in classic "projection" where they think male female relations are complicated by a sex urge on the woman's part, imputing impurity in women because they suffer from it. Women crave children. Accusations of impurity from male priests are nothing more than projection. Its in their imagination because they assume women are like them in that regard. This causes a lot of heaved abuse on women.Women want children more than sex. They want not to be wasted. They want not to have to freeze their eggs because men are too immature to know how to conduct relationships until their 40s and 50s. Women do not look at their sex organs on a daily basis with wild imagination. 

So when men want to lecture women on purity, chastity or sexual continence, women want to lecture men on growing the F up. 

Corporal Acts of Mercy

Jobs.

  Not Steve, the kind you get a paycheck for.

There is a lot of discussion about the acts of mercy one should do around Lent. All the Matthew 25 heavenly litmus tests:  feeding the poor, clothing the naked, visiting those in prison, tending to the sick, etc.
    There is a way to undermine all the suffering occasioned by the needs of Matthew 25. Give someone a job or teach them how to create them. If people had "legal" work in exchange for the fruits of their labor they could buy their own clothes, feed themselves and tend to their medical care and stay out of prison.

  The Protestant world might focus more on Jobs and Enterprise and Business for that reason and the catholic world on straight 'Charity.' Catholic Charities is the greatest provider of emergency support along the corporal acts of mercy lines outside any government.

  To truly be 'charitable' the church would not settle for people with stripped dignity getting hand-outs, but would be actively teaching people job skills in prisons. There should be church run business schools in every prison. The Jesuits have a world class business school at Georgetown. They could launch a program of business and enterprise to take to prisons across the country. Someone steal my idea. I won't press charges.
 

Be Kind

SANTA BERNADETTE SOUBIROUS (ITALIANO)

Moving to DC?

   I don't often do this and am not in the real estate biz but I have a friend who is selling an awesome Condo in the cool, hip 14th St. corridor of DC, ten minutes from the Columbia Heights metro in a renovated classic building. He has had it for about a  decade and wants to move on to the important next phase of his life.

His MLS listing is http://matrixreports.mris.com/MatrixReportOutput/ReportOutput/97626/Full_Listing4364.PDF

We are all Immortal Diamonds in the Rough

    What Is An Honorable Man.

   Jealousy is of the devil, it is the work not of God but division can be demonically inspired to destroy Love. When you destroy authentic Love you destroy God because there is no greater tautology. God is Love. Love is God.

     http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/02/09/pope_francis_the_devil_is_the_root_of_jealousy,_war/1122281. http://en.radiovaticana.va/news/2015/02/09/pope_francis_the_devil_is_the_root_of_jealousy,_war/1122281

  Priests should be allowed to marry ONE woman, not three,  or ten in polymorphous pagan confusion and exploitation. ONE. If Priests married ONE many manipulated women wouldn't suffer delusion for years. Everyone would know if someone was seriously honorable or not.

Do you know who the women in your church really are? The Pope has said that the devil is behind Jealousy- sometimes it is occasioned by the seriously miserable lives of women who bond inappropriately with a handsome priest and get possessive of him like he is their boyfriend- sometimes priests encourage it wittingly or not. Married priest options would tell people whether or not the priest was actually really interested honorably or whether they are being delusional (for years in some cases). There is needless suffering and persecution inside the church by jealous women :

These are real women who I met at a catholic church-they all have their dramas and sagas. There is the one with the miserable marriage who lives her life at the parish house never missing a meeting, an event, or an opportunity to volunteer, wiggling her way for sheer default of anyone else with the time, to top catechist, reader, and is the meanest woman you ever met outside a prison. Run children run Mean. Then there is the woman who fancies herself hostess of the parish house, actually thinks she lives there and can control who comes and goes because she is on parish council, also attends daily mass. She is a widow, and wants you to know she is in charge standing guard at the door ready to spout something spiteful if she doesn't like you. Don't mention the two gay sons she had or their gay wedding she went to or why she has no grandchildren. She puts together the prayer list and will strike you from it. Then there is the twice divorced woman who absolutely knows she is the belle of the ball because her mother was a model and she lived in Paris where everyone was just after her for sex. She dresses for seduction. Her husband was a sex fiend, she loudly announces to the priest, and tells people her third husband will be that priest because now she is a third order Carmelite. She gets people she doesn't like kicked out with wild lies and crazy histrionics. She tells everyone he wants her to be his very personal assistant.The priest encourages her and makes her Miss Hospitality Queen which she relishes by ordering people around hospitality events like she invented food. I call them the UnHoly Trinity. These are the top women running things at one church. Is it any wonder that the priest takes off for an entire Month of summer vacation and a few weeks after Christmas? That triumvirate would land anyone at the St. Luke's Institute. When i hear the word "Lapsed Catholic" i think they possibly grew up with a mess like that and who would blame them for finding more Jesus outside the church?

"Get a room already" is not something you want said about your priest. 

If you must be dogmatic

Be Dogmatic About This:

"I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person's life. God is in everyone's life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else - God is in this person's life. You can - you must - try to seek God in every human life."  Pope Francis

The Age of Women

Let Them Eat Wedding Cake-


     Yesterday at Mass the usual cycle of reading came around and presented that troublesome verse that make priests uncomfortable. You know the one- Jesus was brought to the house of Simon-Peter whose MOTHER IN LAW was sick with fever, Jesus cures her and she gets up and serves him. Wait, What?

   The first Mass I went to indicated that Peter Had a Mother in Law, ergo Peter was a Widower. Reductio Ad Absurdum, non sequitor. Why did this priest think that-aside from the convenient justification of the absurd policy forbidding wives of roman catholic priests you may wonder. He was taught that because nowhere is Peter's wife mentioned anywhere in scripture she must not have been alive during his travels. He couldn't divorce her-that wouldn't fit the narrative- and the apostles had to be a sort of band of brothers, so ditch the wife. Kill her off before the show begins. Magdelene who?

   When I went on Pilgrimmage to Rome I asked where the statue of Mrs Peter Pope was at the Vatican.
This shocked and horrified the mother of the priest who led the pilgrimmage as if i had asked where Saint Peter's brothel was in the roman baths, such was her association with Priest and Wife. Very Silly but true. Can you say oedipal?  The tour guide said in hushed tones that its rumored throughout Rome that she was crucified upside down as was Peter, next to him, and she is buried with him in the tomb of Saint Peter in Rome, because of course. Wives were buried with their husbands. Has anyone done any DNA on the bones in the Tomb of Saint Peter to see if there is only one person in there?

   The fact of lack of mention of a wife would be normal if she were as ubiquitous a backdrop as the wallpaper. If she was always there you wouldn't need to mention her as her presence would be and is assumed, i.e. and then Peter went home and had his back rubbed by his wife to put his troubled mind to sleep - or whatever. You wouldn't write in the gospel of Matthew, then Peter's wife washed the clothes and laid them on Peter's bed before he went fishing. Women didn't rank much then and their works wouldn't make the narrative. Peter's wife might just have been the reason for the bed he found made, the clothes he found washed, the bread he found baked and the soup he found hot and the folded fishing line in the back of the shed. That's not what the story is about however. If I am writing an engineering book about NASAs first flight I don't need to mention that the wife of the astronaut makes great lasagna.  I don't need to kill off the wife however narratively to demonstrate what superb mission the NASA flight is. Its just a non-mention.

   I wanted to see how the Jesuits treated the passage so off to Holy Trinity whereupon the same reading is read. If you don't already know anywhere in any catholic church in the world the same New Testament gospel reading is read the same day-they do it in cycles. Here is how they treated it: they didn't. The Cardinal ordered all churches apparently to pump the Cardinal's appeal and ask for money, so after the reading the Pastor pre-empted this broadcast for a message from your sponsorship. Convenient dodge? A segway from "and she got up and served them?" I choose to think that the Pastor had more sense than to peddle the -ergo Simon Peter was a Widower line. That's why I like Jesuits-they don't pretend.

  This nixing of wives from holy men's biographies strikes me as fundamentally at the root of some of the deeper malaise plaguing the catholic church creating pathologies that are legendary. The debate over whether the catholic church should come into the realization of the worth, value, and intrinsic equality of women surprisingly has people actually debating whether girls can even be altar servers in some areas of the modern world. In which cycle is the passage "there is not male nor female in Christ as all are one in the Lord…" because we don't hear it enough or it doesn't sink in. There are women Deacons mentioned by name in the scripture. If you ask a Dominican how to explain that one away they will say the office of 'deacon' didn't mean the same thing then as today. That's because we now define it to only mean-the stuff people who are not quite male celibate priests do. Clearly the women who are significant in the Bible have been footnoted into minimal importance in modern times but we still know they were hugely significant then. I want to know more about them. Why can't you find a bible class in a catholic church on Women in Scripture. There was a judge named Deborah-who was she for example. There was a saavy business woman named Lydia, who appeared not to fund things with just her husband's money.

   It is highly disturbing to me that churches overtly want to put women in the church 'in their place' and some even are required to have classes on the 'proper role of women' in the church- as if to say-don't you dare fall in love with a priest or we will deem you unfit to sit in the pews. This of course should offend the entire Christian world as much as it grieves the Holy Spirit and God who is Love.
It appears that tempting a priest to marriage is akin to a temptation worthy of a whore house because the  emotional lives of women have been so theologically demeaned or misunderstood that Woman as temptress Eve is the predominant view.

  The maligning of women, the petty persecutions of women, the caddy gossipy perverse bullying of women that goes on in catholic churches where there is a woman in love with a priest is a form of emotional distress that scandalizes God.

   I puzzled how to title this. I almost titled it "the Miseducation of Monsignor," or "the Writing -Off  of Peter's Wife" or  "the Murder of Mrs. Pope."

   But that didn't say enough. Because if you understand how profound this negation of the wife of Peter plays into theological bastardizations and perversions of the life of catholic church communities, you will understand better why women get beaten, abused, dismissed, demeaned, disgraced and emotionally destroyed by men who consider themselves "Holy" or at least justified. You will also understand better how men can justify pederasty as an occupational hazard because going the temptation to women route would be utterly more damnable.

  Its time to put a statue of Mrs. Peter Pope in the Vatican, somewhere next to her husband, where she likely was all her life.  When Jesus told people that those who left behind wives, children, brothers, sisters, etc. for the kingdom would receive multifold more in this life and the life to come, he did not mean ditch, castigate out those also following me. That verse is a twin to the one telling people that mother will be against daughter, son against father, brother against brother, etc….because some would follow him and some not. It is not a command to leave your wife. You don't leave people on the same mission.

   I settled on the aspirational title 'The Age of Women' because its time. It must be time. It is a call of the Holy Spirit to get real and get right with half the human race.

Because a Heart is a terrible thing to waste.