Greed and the Sin of Idolatry

Gordon “greed is good” Gekko

Greed or covetousness in the New Testament is simple enough to define: “one eager to have more, especially what belongs to others” (Thayer’s Greek lexicon). The tenth Commandment of the Decalogue prohibiting it is straightforward:

You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, his male or female slave, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor (Exodus 20:17).

Sexual Sins and ‘Angelism’

After decades of revelations of clerical sex abuse, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke finally concluded that for the Church it was “possibly the worst crisis that it’s ever experienced”:

Our Lady warned us at Fatima about an apostasy from the faith. …I believe there’s been a practical apostasy from the faith with regard to all questions involving human sexuality. …Let’s be honest: we’re dealing here with the gravest of sins and ecclesiastical crimes.

The position of Pope Francis regarding these “gravest of sins” is quite the opposite, asserting in an interview with French sociologist Dominique Wolton* that sexual sins are of lesser importance:

Flash-Mob Theft and the Era of the Grey Wolf

A novel crime has recently surfaced in America: a large mob of criminals storm a retail store and ransack shelves, smash glass counters, assault employees, and mostly get away with it. In Walnut Creek, California a mob of 80-90 people recently stormed the high-end department store, Nordstroms:

#Breaking About 25 cars just blocked the street and rushed into the Walnut Creek Nordstrom making off with goods before getting in cars snd speeding away. At least two people arrested at gunpoint. pic.twitter.com/AG3R94M9L3

— Jodi Hernandez (@JodiHernandezTV) November 21, 2021

St. Hildegard Warns Against Compromising Church Authority

During the twelfth century St. Hildegard had known a number of German Kings. She especially detested Frederick I Barbarossa (“Redbeard”) for his determination to usurp the authority of the pope in ecclesiastical appointments. Hildegard had received a gracious letter from the king, in which he referred to her as “beloved lady”, requesting her prayers. Not uncharacteristically, she responded with insults:

“…[I]n a mystic vision I see you like a little boy or some madman living before Living Eyes. Yet you still have time for ruling over worldly matters. Beware, therefore, that the almighty King does not lay you low because of the blindness of your eyes, which fail to see correctly how to hold the rod of proper governance in your hand. See to it that you do not act in such a way that you lose the grace of God”.*

Lukewarm Affections and Nominal Catholics

Laodicea ruins

The book of Revelation begins with messages from Jesus directed to seven churches in Asia (a Roman Province in the region of modern Turkey). He praises two of them for their faithfulness, the churches in Smyrna and Philadelphia. Four others are both praised and admonished. One, the church in Laodicea, is harshly censured. The letters were also addressed to the Church as a whole; each of them concludes with the following:

Joe Biden’s America: Inmates in Re-education Camps

Nobel laureate Saul Bellow once lamented that when attending dinner parties he would often be cornered and questioned about politically sensitive issues. His standard answer: “Trust me, I’m for all the good policies and against all the bad ones”. Even in the 1980s, avoiding politically labeling had become an art.

The problem facing progressives today, now that they have gained almost full control of the cultural, educational, media, and tech platforms, and now political institutions, is that they promote only lies. Some boys are really girls and girls might really be boys; people of the same gender can marry; statues of nice people like Abe Lincoln and Father Junipero Serra deserve to be vandalized, police are evil, white people are naturally inclined toward racial supremacy, etc.

Angelo Codevilla recently pointed out that statue defacing is just the beginning:

Is this an Occasion of Divine Punishment?

Cardinal Bassetti

It’s certainly a fair question; plagues as a means of God’s judgement are well attested in scripture. When asked, however, many of our leaders in the Church have categorically denied that the pandemic is a punishment. How do they know? Apparently, it’s because God no longer punishes. Some examples:

An Era of Confrontations and Strife

Joe Biden plans to unite the country and heal the nation. But under one condition, as long as the 70 million plus who voted for Trump prostrate themselves to the radical left, whose accumulation of power in the democratic party suggests that during the Biden administration the divide will only deepen. A look at recent history reveals that this is inevitable.

St. Hildegard’s Curious Illuminations

Illumination from the Rupertsberg Manuscript

One of the interesting things about the illuminations that accompany the Rupertsberg manuscript of Scivias (late 12th-century), the book in which Hildegard recorded her visions, is that much of the artwork appears to contradict the text. For example, the ‘Yellow Lion’ is painted red and the ‘Pale Horse’ is kind of a brownish-green. In later manuscripts produced after her death this is not the case.

Now’s the Time to Reevaluate Catholic Prophetic Literature

A poll taken in the U.K. showed that more people believe in ghosts and UFOs than in God. While there’s a natural curiosity in the possibility of the existence of the supernatural, hence the popularity of movies like The Exorcist, it doesn’t necessarily lead people to God. St. Paul explains this curious phenomenon:

Now the natural person does not accept what pertains to the Spirit of God, for to him it is foolishness, and he cannot understand it, because it is judged spiritually. The spiritual person, however, can judge everything… (1 Cor. 2:12-15).