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Reader says This is a full court press against Trump and his plans to protect American citizens

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The BF principal sent out via email a letter with a similar message, and some of the same tone and specific language, under his own signature. The deacon in the local Roman Catholic parish went “political” on this issue this past Sunday morning during the homily of the mass, with a predictable message (take in all who wish to come here, don’t you dare say no to anyone). The new archbishop of the Newark Archdiocese, now of Cardinal rank, was given space in the weekly printed missalette of the local parish (and presumably all other parishes), which he used to spread a similar highly politicized message, pushing the discredited “walls are bad” message of the elite globalists. This is a full court press against Trump and his plans to protect American citizens.

12 thoughts on “Reader says This is a full court press against Trump and his plans to protect American citizens

  1. When you realize all the people at the institutions you respect disagree with you, maybe you should rethink your position?

  2. I voted for Trump but acting like a steamroller won’t help him win people over.

    We learned how to work with people back in kindergarten….

  3. Find a new church. Or join Westboro Baptist. They are looking to flood their gene pool.

  4. 9:48, that is a fair observation, but you may not be aware of the myriad reasons why thoughtful laypeople in this country are perfectly justified in maintaining a tough hide of skepticism when it comes to pronouncements of this sort coming from prominant American Catholic prelates. One can, for example, take for granted that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops will find a way to suppress any and all pro-life projects devised from the ground up by the Catholic laity that are or have the prospect of becoming both effective and persuasive to the larger domestic society. Other examples abound. On the other hand, so many progressive liberal causes originated and promoted by slimy secular organizations over the decades last century have slipped (intentionally?) through the Bishops’ filters and over time have become impossible to dislodge from the USCCB’s now dubious national agenda. Sad to say, but serious moral and political corruption is rife, and traditional Catholic stoicism, defensive silence, and other head-in-the-sand-type behaviors are no longer acceptable among the ordinary faithful in America.

  5. @10.02. I totally agree. Not only it won’t help win people over but may lose the soft core supporters.

  6. The loudmouths just suffered a stunning defeat and yet have learnt nothing. They continue to abuse their authority to push partisan BS. I do not go to church to get political sermons. I do not send my kids to school to be politically indoctrinated.

    I will not spend my busy life fighting these miserable partisans. But I – and many like me – vote. And the look on the faces of these partisans when they took for granted doesn’t happen, is priceless.

  7. Btw the school district that these people preside over is – in the words of their progressive brethren – a white racist establishment that structural denies access to minorities.

    I wish they would put their money where their mouths are, and move to ‘progressive and diverse’ Newark/Paterson/Jersey City instead of continuing to reap the fruits of white supremacy sitting here in Ridgewood.

  8. Politics don’t belong in the church or school.
    Especially the nut job liberal progressive politics of “inclusion” Keith Ellison for DNC Chair please!

  9. By Deal W. Hudson
    Monday, 06 Feb 2017
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    During the 2016 election, I watched with disbelief, as all but a few Catholic bishops said nothing — in complicit silence — as Hillary Clinton, aggressively pro-abortion, ran for president. All the bishops did was attack Donald Trump on immigration and his promise to build a wall on the Mexican border.
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    Catholic voters repudiated the bishops’ view of the election, voting 52 to 45 percent for Trump-Pence. As an election issue, immigration was “trumped” by national security, ISIS terrorism, jobs, NAFTA, abortion, religious liberty, but most of all, by patriotism. Most Catholic voters had finally had enough of Obama’s America-bashing, and saw Hillary as continuing to blame America for the world’s ills.
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    There was no group of leaders more shocked by the election outcome than the U.S. bishops and their primary supporters on the Catholic left, including Catholic colleges and universities, most women and men’s religious orders, liberal Catholic media, Catholic Democrats in Congress, and Soros-funded groups such as Catholics In Alliance With the Common Good.
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    But post-election, it appears the Catholic bishops have taken no lesson from the election results. They have virtually ignored the fact that President Trump wasted no time in keeping his pro-life promises: re-affirming the Mexico City Policy, banning the use of federal funds for abortions overseas, nominating an ostensibly pro-life judge for the open SCOTUS seat, and encouraging Congress to bring a bill defunding Planned Parenthood to his desk for signing.
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    Instead, the bishops continue bashing Trump, now POTUS, over immigration. As prominent theologian and journalist Thomas Williams wrote a few days ago about Chicago Cardinal Blaise Cupich:
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    “Saying this is a ‘dark moment in U.S. history’ . . . undermines the moral authority of the episcopate that should know better than to issue careless statements of the sort. Catholics, and indeed all citizens, deserve better.”
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    Cardinal Cupich, along with San Diego Bishop, Robert McElroy, have emerged as the leaders of the Catholic Left among the bishops. It was Bishop McElroy who took the pains to point out how Catholic voters would be justified to ignore Hillary Clinton’s pro-abortion stance. Those who focus on “intrinsic evil,” he wrote are “simplistic” and “misleading.”
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    At the time, I missed the irony that McElroy’s column was published only days after the canonization of St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Given that St. Mother Teresa is considered by Americans the “most admired person” of the 20th century, Bishop McElroy’s attempt to scoff at pro-lifers not only failed but has also contributed to the bishop’s loss of moral authority.
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    When bishops as popular as Archbishop Chaput of Philadelphia and Cardinal Dolan of New York City continue to pound on President Trump about immigration, ignoring his pro-life achievements, just as in the election, the bishops will be the loser.

  10. Is there a “morality gap” in the way Pope Francis presents his favorite themes?
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    By Dr. Jeff Mirus
    Feb 07, 2017
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    I find myself wondering whether Pope Francis does not sometimes undermine his own favorite themes, such as Divine mercy and Christian unity, by his obvious reluctance to articulate their significant moral character. I consider this an important question because the Pope’s key themes are strikingly beautiful, yet without adverting clearly to the moral demands of new life in Christ, Catholic solidarity can be reduced to lip service.
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    Let me refer to two of yesterday’s news stories to explain what I mean. In the first, we find Francis preaching once again against a “rigid” focus on the Commandments. It is possible, we know, to engage in an external observance of the Commandments without being motivated by love. Such “rigidity” can seriously interfere with both receiving and offering mercy. Unfortunately, the terms “rigid” and “rigidity” carry a great deal of cultural baggage. Over the past generation or two, these terms have been used as slurs by Modernists to dismiss both the value of orthodoxy and the seriousness of sin.
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    In the sort of barren spirituality that arises from true rigidity, a person falls into the trap of fulfilling the letter of the law as if mere punctiliousness is an adequate foundation for a vibrant relationship with God. It is not, but I would add that in our time this would seem to be the least of our worries. In the first half of the twentieth century, before Western culture was largely dissolved by the sexual revolution, there was a good deal more of what we call living the Faith “prescriptively”, which is closely connected to the problem of rigidity. This was at least partially triggered by cultural pressure. American culture, for example, expected outward adherence to most of the moral requirements of Christianity, and it was easy for this veneer of Christian respectability to become a spiritual stopping point.
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    Perhaps the most common spiritual question raised during this period was this: What outward behavior do I have to follow to be an acceptable Catholic? Or, to put it in terms altogether too common in the Church of the 1950s (and here I raise my own hand), “What do I have to do to make it to purgatory?” While not universal, neither is this a caricature of the spiritual weakness of the Church before 1960. It goes far to explain why changes in rubrics and rules triggered a nearly instantaneous and wholesale abandonment of Catholic piety, just as soon as the larger culture no longer cared.
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    This problem actually lies quite close to rigidity, which typically shows a greater awareness of religious law and then condemns those who do not maintain the same outward signs of superior devotion. But things have changed a great deal since then. Modern culture has divorced itself from Christian mores in nearly every respect. By those outside of the Church (and sometimes by people within the Church who should know better), Catholics are constantly urged to stop judging behaviors which were formerly understood to be seriously immoral. The question is no longer, “How do I conform to what is expected of me?” but instead, “How do I find the moral strength to live as a sign of contradiction?” Even in rare instances where rigidity exists today among Catholics, it will nearly always be in this counter-cultural context.
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    We must understand that it takes both perception and courage just to frame this new question. This means it is rarely asked unless a person has a legitimate and powerful motive for doing so. But where there is no socio-cultural incentive, by far the most common motive must necessarily be love of God. Clearly, the real problem of “rigidity” is now primarily found in the dominant culture’s insistence that those who question contemporary secular moral values must be psychologically ill. Indeed, this is a fairly clear case of a psychological defense mechanism called “projection”. Those who rigidly adhere to the cultural code of acceptability project onto others what they suffer from themselves: Thus they insist that all those who choose the harder path of resistance suffer from “rigidity”.
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    Ecumenism
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    Elsewhere in the news yesterday, we found Pope Francis urging us to use the anniversary of the Protestant Reformation as an opportunity to take a further step toward Christian unity. Once again, we see a certain truth here for, indeed, everything that reminds us of Christian divisions ought to spur us to greater efforts toward Christian unity. At the same time, however, Pope Francis has apparently chosen not to address the ever-widening moral gap between Catholics and other Christian groups.
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    Christian unity is not possible except among those who take Our Lord’s invitation to new life seriously, and the first visible sign of this new life, as well as the strongest proof of spiritual growth, is the willingness to conform ourselves to God’s will. It is necessary always to recall Our Lord’s very specific teaching on this point, perhaps expressed most clearly in the seventh chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel. I recommend the entire chapter, but please consider at least this excerpted sequence of instructions:
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    Enter by the narrow gate…for the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life…. Beware of false prophets…. You will know them by their fruits…. Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven…. And then I will declare to them, “I never knew you; depart from me, you evildoers.” Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house upon the rock…. And when Jesus finished these sayings, the crowds were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as their scribes.
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    Now, because of the tremendous power of secular culture over the minds of those who have not really opened themselves to the grace of Jesus Christ, one “Christian” group after another has been busy changing its moral teachings to accommodate contraception, divorce, extra-marital sex, homosexuality, gender ideology, gay marriage, abortion, euthanasia and many other gross violations of the Divine Law. Our culture tells us these things are not nearly as important as, for example, a failure to assist the poor. But in fact these are seriously selfish behaviors through which we reject our Creator, strike at the very heart of what it means to be human, undermine the family, and destroy the social order.
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    In our day, these are very clearly the signs of Mammon or the Beast. They are certainly not the signs of Jesus Christ and His Church. Our refusal to acknowledge God’s will in such things renders Christian unity, or any form of solidarity with others, absurd. We find ourselves joining hands and saying “Lord, Lord” without attending at all to the strongly counter-cultural behavior which is demanded—yes, I use the term advisedly, demanded—of the children of God. God’s mercy consists not in abrogating the moral law but in inviting us into an ever larger share of His own life so that we become a new creation, victorious in Christ over sin and death.
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    An unacceptable moral gap
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    There is no question that some may find themselves trapped in sin at least partly because they do not recognize, or have never experienced, Divine love. In these situations, mercy is the key to unlocking the heart. Certainly, if in our ecumenical efforts and in our merciful attitude toward sinners, we encounter the sort of genuine commitment to God’s will that expresses itself through the tears and renewed efforts which accompany every moral lapse, then no objection ought to be made to our joyful collaboration with these brothers and sisters in Christ.
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    But if we run up against an unwillingness to go beyond saying “Lord, Lord” in order to begin to “do the will of my Father in heaven”—and if we do not find in this or that group of men and women any tendency, with respect to the sins praised by our particular culture, to submit themselves to anything beyond the rules of fashion, then our grandiose proclamations of mercy, welcome and unity will prove in the event to be a betrayal of Christ and the Church.
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    In such a case, we are in a sense living prescriptively again. We are paying mere lip service to a cultural expectation. We may confess with our lips that Jesus is Lord, but we refuse to believe in our hearts that God has raised him from the dead (Rm 10:9). We remain closed to mercy because we refuse to admit the power of God. It is just this that creates the astonishing moral gap in too many facile statements about rigidity, and about mercy, and about Christian unity. But this gap cannot be ignored if we are truly struggling to please God.
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    Counter-cultural morality is the first measure of true commitment. Its normal cause is not rigidity but a desire to respond to the inner promptings of the Holy Spirit. Yes, it is true that spiritual progress is proved by love. But love is proved only by incurring serious moral costs—and paying them with joy.
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    Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. See full bio.

  11. The 2/7 Mirus article perfectly articulates the position of faithful lay Catholics who, by virtue of the fact that their traditional positions on private and public morality are not changing along with the times, have unintentionally become a part of the American counterculture.

  12. A Pro-Life Priest Faces Possible Sanctions by His Archdiocese
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    Posted by Jason Kippen | Feb 8, 2017
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    Sometimes you just have to say enough is enough. This is the case with Father Peter West, a priest in the Archdiocese of Newark, who is being pillared in the media for his conservative beliefs he shares on his social media accounts. In the age of “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” one should not be surprised that the social progressives and leftists would so easily get their feelings hurt but this witch-hunt is a different situation altogether.
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    A reporter by the name of Mark Mueller for NJ.com decided to be the arbitrator of what political views a Priest can and cannot express to people on his Facebook and Twitter pages and penned a story that characterized Father West as an “internet flamethrower.” This is tantamount to the thought police controlling the nature of discourse in our society. How dare Father West think differently than the progressives in the Roman Catholic Church who have put on par the killing of unborn children with climate change and immigration policy? How dare Father West offend the liberal orthodoxy that Mr. Mueller and his fellow liberals in the media hold so dear?
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    What is even more troublesome is that it appears the Archdiocese of Newark is going to look into ways to clamp down on Father West to stop his freedom of speech. Diocesan spokesperson Jim Goodness said, “[W]e are concerned about Father West’s comments and actions, and will be addressing them according to the protocols of the Church.” This is disturbing because of the clear political tone his new boss Cardinal Tobin and others have taken against Trump and his supporters.
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    Cardinal Tobin and others in the Catholic hierarchy are constantly telling us that having a practical and coherent border policy is sinful. This is just disingenuous and bad theology. At the same time, they ignore the plight of our unborn sisters and brothers in the hopes they can keep their places of honor in our degraded culture.
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    Let me clue you into what I think is the real reason why Father West is being called on the carpet: He is a pro-life activist and a former Vice President of Missions at Human Life International. Cardinal Tobin and other prelates like his fellow conferee Cardinal Cupich are not hospitable to the pro-life cause and would rather cherry pick the easy issues like climate change and global warming to be popular with the opinion makers at the New York Times and Chicago Tribune.
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    The political left also knows that all the levers of power have been taken away after this last election and look to the Church, which has swung left under the pontificate of Pope Francis to be their mouthpiece. Sadly, the left has found common cause with our Pope and the progressive churchmen he surrounds himself within the chanceries of the United States and the Eternal City.
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    Father West and his views do not fit into the liberal, progressive worldview so he must be silenced. It is a very sad day in this nation which once respected dissent and differing views but has turned into this Orwellian nightmare where the only free speech should be the speech the political Left likes. Our Founders certainly did not have this in mind when they approved the First Amendment.
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    This article about Father West raises the question whether or not the speech of a Catholic priest is subject to a different set of rules. A priest does not lose his citizenship by virtue of his ordination. But does a priest somehow give up the right to free speech, particularly in the political sphere? Is a Catholic priest allowed to speak as an individual citizen in the public square?
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    I would ask you to pray for Father West and make your voice heard in the Archdiocese with a polite call or email in support of him.
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    Feel free to contact: Jim Goodness, Director of Communications, 973-497-4186, goodneja@rcan.org.

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