1) T' Ignore or Not Ignore?,
2) When is it rational to conclude one is facing a conspiracy?
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Mark Shea Asking For the Commenter he Blocked
http://hglsfbwritings.blogspot.com/2014/03/mark-shea-asking-for-commenter-he.html
Mark Shea's Understanding of Scripture
http://greatbishopofgeneva.blogspot.com/2014/04/mark-sheas-understanding-of-scripture.html
Both of above links were sent to him. The latter mentions in passing that persons fulfilling a prophecy must not be doing it from manipulation by their parents at birth. Cyrus. Our Lord. And … as obviously … Antichrist. I gave two examples of people who could be fulfilling the prophecy by their name in ways that their parents could not in any possible way have foreseen. Obama and Bergoglio. For Obama I have not checked the exact gematria of the English translations of his three names. For Bergoglio it is last name in block letters according to ASCII code. Block letters of English alphabet are A – Z = 65 – 90 while 64 is just @ and first 0 – 31 (I e first thirtytwo starting from zero) are commands rather than signs. Minuscules are a – z = 97 – 122 and characters with extra strokes like “É” (201) or “é” (233) are outside this series. Or these two series.
Mark Shea in one way has responded, and in another way has not done so.
Over the Transom and into the Garbage
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/04/over-the-transom-and-into-the-garbage.html
go all emails that start like this:
How To Respond If Pope Francis Is the False Prophet
I did not send an email. This time. My message did not start like that either. But since it was posted less than 48, near certainly less than 24 hours, after my posting the link on his wall I think I can feel alluded to.
Even if the eventuality of “Pope Francis” being the guy was not at all the main point.
Since I am pretty certainly alluded to without being named, I find he has merited the reproach of “to ignore or not to ignore”. With such an attitude I suppose he finds me a sling or arrow of outrageous fortune, somehow.
But what if the above post by him were just a coincidence with my posting above link on his wall?
Well, then there is one other coincidence, as you would call it, which strains at least my credulity. The reason why he blocked (as it seems) emails from me was mainly my take on the creationist question.
Mark Shea Basically Calls Creationists Protestants
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.com/2012/12/this-is-somewhat-disingenious-mark-shea.html
Newspeak in Nineteen - Eighty ... er Sorry ... Ninety-Four
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2013/12/newspeak-in-nineteen-eighty-er-sorry.html
And guess what?
This same date of 4/IV there is on Catholic and Enjoying it another post by Shea:
Tee, as they say, Hee
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2014/04/tee-as-they-say-hee-2.html
One thing I am grateful for: Catholics at least don’t waste a lot of time on arguments about “scientific evidence for the the flood of Noah” and all that. … But I am highly skeptical the author of Genesis would find creationist (and atheist) fundamentalist quarrels about the historicity of the Flood narrative that interesting or pertinent to his central point.
In other words, because I am interested in evidence – both from tradition (Hebrew and near universal Pagan alike) and from Geology – for Flood of Noah having occurred, therefore I am not a Catholic.
He gives about the same slur in the other post:
I never thought I’d see that day when Real Catholics[TM] would see themselves invested by the Holy Spirit to defend the Faith from the Pope. I say “Faith” not Church, because these Reactionaries hate 99% of their fellow Catholics as much as they hate Francis. It has become and abstraction to them, a simplified ideology of a few moral teaching they happen to like, plus a vision of imaginary liturgical perfection and, on a occasion, a miasma of creepy interpretation of private revelation filtered through an apocalyptic imagination. But it no longer has, for authors of junk like the stuff above, hardly any relationship to the actual Catholic faith.It’s not going to end well for this crap. Avoid it like the plague and stick with your ordinary, workaday Catholic parish of slobs and sinners in union with the pope and working out their salvation like the average schlubs we are.
That is as close to an anathema as a non-bishop can get. One can of course state even as a layman “if you persist in such, may you be anathema”, but of course without the pretention to impose the excommunication as an ecclesiastical punishment. A kind of “I will not share the condemnation which I see you heading for.” But that might have been a bit too drastic for Mark Shea. “It’s not going to end well for this crap. Avoid it like the plague” … so much more moderate words, aren’t they? And analyses like this are of course not the least bearing judgement (that was sarcastic): “I never thought I’d see that day when Real Catholics[TM] would see themselves invested by the Holy Spirit to defend the Faith from the Pope. I say ‘Faith’ not Church, because these Reactionaries hate 99% of their fellow Catholics as much as they hate Francis.” And analyses like the following are obviously speaking about the interior of the neighbour and in that sense about the unknownable (that was not sarcastic): “It has become and abstraction to them, a simplified ideology of a few moral teaching they happen to like, plus a vision of imaginary liturgical perfection and, on a occasion, a miasma of creepy interpretation of private revelation filtered through an apocalyptic imagination. But it no longer has, for authors of junk like the stuff above, hardly any relationship to the actual Catholic faith.”
One reader found it funny to add a comment about holy candles being all that works during the three dark days. A good point per se. Unfortunately for him, I think he meant it in a sarcastic way. Hope he does have a staple of such anyway, “just in case”.
a miasma of creepy interpretation of private revelation filtered through an apocalyptic imagination.
Just a bit linguistical here: miasma is a Greek word. It does not mean "swamp". It means "stain". A miasma of guilt is what we are rid of through Baptism and through Penance if receiving them correctly. It is also what Our Lord and Our Lady never had for a moment in their lives. The Latin for it is "macula". But let us return to the description:
a miasma of creepy interpretation of private revelation filtered through an apocalyptic imagination.
A bit like the people who St Matthew describes as “waiting for the Messiah” perhaps? I mean Anna and Simeon in the Temple did have a checklist including a passage of Micah. And they did have a private revelation about this visit to the Temple being the right one. Mark Shea gives a recommendation:
stick with your ordinary, workaday Catholic parish of slobs and sinners in union with the pope and working out their salvation like the average schlubs we are.
I see some relation to the assertion:
these Reactionaries hate 99% of their fellow Catholics
Perhaps he found it hateful when, trying to illustrate the concept of words changing meaning I took the example of “sad” not originally meaning “sorrowful” but “full of food after a meal” – and used him as an example of that meaning. I meant it as friendly banter. However, it may also be seen as describing him as a slob or a schlub. And in his case, I am not sure I would add “average” to it.
He does not feel any interest in testimony or physical evidence for the Flood. Ergo, average slobs in Catholic parishes do not. Especially as there is Mark Shea to tell them so. He feels sure the author of Genesis would not have cared one way or the other:
My own inclination is to think that there is some kind of primordial traumatic flood at the back of the story, given the ubiquity of flood narratives in global culture. … As far as [the author of Genesis] is concerned, his little corner of planet earth is “the world”. The main thing he cares about the is the meaning of the story.
And:
- a) it is of course Highly Irrelevant to the meaning if the world meant the world or “his little corner of the planet”?
- b) a Holy Author is of course not the least over patronised by this approach? The author of Genesis, unlike in Catholic Tradition (and Hebrew, if you like pre-Christian and pre-Jewish, Tradition before it) is not named as Moses, and he is not supposed to agree with St Peter, the first Pope, whom Kent Hovind is quoting more often than “Pope Francis” is?
- c) and this is of course also a very rational and coherent explanation of why there are flood stories all over the globe?
No, I do not hate 99% of all Catholics. But I do grudge at least a Catholic who talks and takes the tone of the kind of Modernist Lutherans I was once escaping from (they took similar approaches to questions related to Sacraments), and who uses the attention he has from people to get attention away, presumably from my writing (hardly a very nice attitude between writers at the best of times, even without a Theological quarrel in it) without having the courage to name me. Precisely as he both asserts “the author of Genesis” took “his corner of the planet” for “the world” (meaning it was a local flood) and that he was uniquely interested in “the meaning” of his story as if fact had nothing zilch or nada to do with meaning. This sloppy approach to a question is hardly what I excuse in a writer who is read by thousands and by thousands of thousands. Whatever my attitude to an average Catholic proferring it – if average Catholics are so sharing it.
The friend due to whom I started out, soon after my conversion, on the Traditionalist adventure had a teacher in "French as native language" (in Sweden, "hemspråk franska"), and she was a parishioner of St Thomas Aquinas parish in Lund (Sweden, and Scania was Swedish since 1660, previously Danish) before he and I were. He told me she used to complain “on ne prêche plus la parousie”. It means: “they are no longer preaching the second coming”.
This is evidence that to her (and she is far more of an average, pope faithful, working out her salvation than either I or Mark Shea are – or was if on the meantime she has died*) there was a time not very long ago when a Catholic Priest would tell people that Christ will come again, there will happen terrible things before that, the times of Noah were so to speak a foretaste of it. To her Padre Pio of Pietrelcina with the marks of the wounds of Our Lord and the three dark days were not a joke.
Neither were they so to a pro-lifer I met in Rome in 1986. Tom Zimmer. Read his Hope 84, to Honour Our Lady’s Assumption, if you can get hold of it. It has the three dark days.** It has more than one reference to Padre Pio. It has a proposal for Liturgic Peace before that was fashionable (and he was Novus Ordo insofar as he went to parishes were Communion was in both kinds, but against abuses, like hand communion which he considered diabolic). It has more than one very apt observation on the evil of Abortion. And the man was a bum in Rome, nearly as Saint Benedict Joseph Labre before him. An American of German Irish descent.
Hans-Georg Lundahl
Nanterre University Library
St Isidor of Hispalis
4-IV-2014
* Oh frabjous joy, she hasn't. My friend just told me. One year older than the man he calls "the previous Pope" - and she too no doubt. ** It also has a saying about Our Lord's tenderness. "His Sacred Heart is so tender he cannot bear to see one eat the meat of a slaughtered animal the day when He died on a Cross. Never eat meat on Friday." I do not know where it comes from, I try to avoid eating meat on Fridays anyway. But I recalled it as I ate a chicken sandwich today, or as I was about to eat it. Though I also recalled it was Friday when the lady in the café offered me no salmon and only two meat sandwiches./HGL
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