Albacete Nails It

Albacete says NOTHING. Where does he outline or describe this "mystery of christ" or the church?

Give me a break - Rachel Maddow has honestly stated that she is gay - the church describes her as "intrinsically disordered" based upon a very old formulation of both natural law and sexuality.

Who really doesn't understand the "mystery of Christ" - Ms. Maddow or the bishops who continue to trumpet their cultural war issues while neglecting to even comment on both Turkson's statement or at the Nov. USCCB meeting, saying anything about the most current crisis in the US - jobs and the economy.

Your support of Albacete is disingenous at best.

Emphasizing a thread that binds is coming dangerously close to supporting the idea of Christendom, where being a Christian is reduced to being a member of a secret lodge that acts in the interest of the Church without claiming to.

Except for the fact that it might alienate Catholic voters, I am surprised that none of the Catholic's in Democratic governance and politics doesn't read the bishops the riot act about subverting American democracy or laying out some of the flaws in the Church's teaching on such matters as gay marriage, stem cell research/birth control, what the government can and can't do constitutionally about abortion and the attempts by some bishops to subvert American process in a way that borders on sedition.

These comments also ignore the extent to which there are those in Catholic Health and Catholic Charities who ARE in the inner circle of this White House and who do bring in a knowledge of the relatedness between salvation and charity.

Albacete is and has been consistently brilliant as long as I have been reading his commentaries in the early 90s.

The split between faith and life, faith and reason, is the herd of elephants in our country. As long as you keep the split alive, no o one has to change, Catholics can be political first... Keep it all in little boxes, refuse to integrate faith and life, and do whatever is expedient, just as American individualism teaches us; don't care about your neighbor (common good) but donate thousands to 'charity' -it looks good on your resume.

You can't take it with you; only the good that you do, unselfish good, matters in the long run.

The rest, as they say, is fool's gold.

Integration is good for people on the spiritual and psychological levels.

And a guilty conscience, not a faux conscience, or the one everybody makes fun of in popular culture, can kill you, suck the life out of you, because that inner voice cannot be silenced forever.

If you are unhappy, look to that split between faith and life, faith and reason.

I pray our Catholics in government will open their hearts to grace.

While the president "is surrounded by Catholics" he is the president of all Americans, and not just Catholics. Such a simple fact, but one overlooked so frequently.

Peace and blessings.

Michael,
That fullness of the teaching is exactly what is so frightening.

We have been seeing it for the past thirty years, ever since JPII hooked up with the GOP And brought us Reagan and the party of war(against communism in Poland, Communism in the Latin nations=Iran-Contra and the likes of Pinochet etc, up-coming war with Iran) profit, endless greed and endless hatred and the targeting of us liberals who raise issues, also the targeting of both legal(Richard Pombo, Phyllis Schlafly, Jeb Bush, Ken Blackwell, etc) and illegal immigrants (Phyllis Schlafly and Pombo) and the endless disenfranchisement of totally legal voters like me and at least a great many thousands possibly millions of other voters here in Ohio and in Florida(Jeb Bush, Kathryn Harris and Choice Point Corp) is all over the Internet, along with their threats and hatred.

Meanwhile, the party of god(their god gets a small g)the laws of God(Ten Commandment) are near totally ignored, as are the teachings of Christ(peace, love, tolerance and "Do unto others...) Secularism, consumerism, militarism, "welfare queens", Civil War States Rights, greed is good, Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan,et.al are now worshiped by ALL Republicans, not just the usual run of Protestant Republicans who think Calvinism(the poor shall always be with us) but Catholic Republicans who actually believe in the popes beliefs in: 'the natural order of things' and 'maintaining the civic and social order' means just the Super Rich few and the RRs are to inherit the earth. Meanwhile the rest of us are relegated to being tossed on the trash heap of life and/or used as cannon fodder for THEIR wars for oil, profit and for Catholic/Christian theology.

So sorry for that way-far overly complex paragraph/sentence. But thanks to the papal Catholic teachings, America is now in very deep trouble and going deeper into the abyss of Religious Republicanism. We have absolutely no way to stop any of it!!!

I would say to beware of any Republicans, as they're all wild west cowboys. But especially beware of Gingrich and Jeb Bush. Though all of them will gin-up the case for war and greed and the Super Rich, those two are intelligent enough and sufficiently bereft of both Catholic guilt and any true sense of responsibility that they are capable of anything. Like Satan, they will be able to make it all appear very completely rational.

Is there a conspiracy going on? Ya betcha, there is. It is between the papacy and the GOP. The pope cannot raise armies in Europe anymore. The Europeans know what the papacy is all about as a result of the Crusades and WWII. Self-survival, no matter the cost to the world. Somehow, there is just something very wrong with that scenario. That scenario is very little different from the sex abuse and financial abuse scandals and their resultant covers-up.

Michael, you and I and all of the rest of us, including the Republican voters are mere pawns in their worldwide machinations. And, very likely, they will get away with it. Satan seems to be able to do that by manipulating the minds of supremacists. Even Obama will not be able to stop them. He will be concerned about not being soft on terrorism.

I wonder if Msgr. Albacete is looking at the big picture?