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Mark Silk at RNS on the President speech about terrorism, and about the need for groups like CAIR - and others - to wrestle with the complicity of regimes like that in Saudi Arabia, that may be our strategic allies but who have sowed the ideology that drives ISIS, and keeps pace with the terror group when it comes to denial of religious freedom and beheadings of those it deems enemies.
Poor Fr. Zuhlsdorf can't believe that St. Peter's facade will be used tonight as a kind of projection screen for illuminations on the themes of Laudato Si'. He calls it propaganda. One assumed he has read the encyclical and knows that it is based on our Christian faith, not on the kind of ideology that would warrant the word propaganda. I suppose one man's catechesis is another man's propaganda. What really frustrates me is that the Holy Father made clear that our Catholic commitment to life is involved in the issue of environmental degradation. Innocent people, alas not in utero, are killed by toxic wastes and many more will be killed if climate change is not addressed. But, alas, saying this does not align with current GOP talking points and when push comes to shove, Zuhlsdorf is a Republican first and a Catholic second or third.
At the Nation, a (mostly) thoughtful article by Barbara Ehrenreich, on the white working class, and how the deconstruction of racism, combined with bad economic tidings, has created the situation in which someone like Donald Trump can become a champion for the people whose grandfathers brought us FDR. The money quote:
All of this means that the maintenance of white privilege, especially among the least privileged whites, has become more difficult and so, for some, more urgent than ever. Poor whites always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating.
On this Feast of the Immaculate Conception, patroness of the United States, Britten's Hymn to the Virgin:
