English: Pope John XXIII at Porto Viro (Rovigo, Italy) Italiano: papa Giovanni XXIII a Porto Viro (Rovigo) Français : Le Pape Jean XXIII à Porto Viro (Rovigo, Italie) Español: El Papa Juan XXIII en Porto Viro (Rovigo, Italia) Português: Papa João XXIII em Porto Viro (Rovigo, Itália) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Like a good many of you, I really enjoyed Jess’ article on Sunday about the two Popes who were made Saints. As i said somewhere in a comment, I don’t remember Pope John XXIII all that well, I was too young to be all that interested, and in honesty, in those days the Catholic Church wasn’t interested in talking to the rest of us. Pole John XXIII had a good deal to do with ending that, but he did some other things as well that bordered , in human terms, on the heroic as well. Yesterday, Jonathon S. Tobin writing in Commentary Magazine told us about some of them. Here’s an excerpt
Two Righteous Men Among the Nations
[...]
That stand by itself would have secured John Paul’s place in history. But he also deserves enormous credit for transforming Catholic-Jewish relations. While some in the media took a cynical view of Pope Francis’s effort to highlight the similarities between John XXIII, who is viewed as the hero of church liberals, and John Paul II, who is depicted as the champion of conservatives, there is no question that they shared a common agenda when it came to revolutionizing relations between Catholics and Jews.
John XXIII is best remembered for his convening of the Second Vatican Council that led to changes in Church doctrine and practices. Most importantly for Jews, it ended the teaching of the deicide myth, effectively acquitting the Jewish people of a role in the killing of Jesus. He also ended the use of the word “perfidious” with respect to Jews in Catholic prayers. But even long before this important work, John XXIII earned the gratitude of the Jewish people for his role in saving many Jews from the Holocaust while serving as papal nuncio in Turkey and Greece. After the Shoah, while serving in the same capacity in France he refused orders not to return baptized Jewish children to their surviving parents. He is also believed to have helped influence Pope Pius XII to remain silent about the question of partition of Palestine thus making it easier for Catholic countries to vote for the creation of a Jewish state.
Pope John Paul II built on the good work of Pope John XXIII with regard to interfaith relations. He was the first pope to visit a synagogue as well as the one who finally recognized the State of Israel. His advocacy for treating Jews as brothers in faith rather than rivals or enemies marked a turning point for the relationship between the two faiths and in the way Catholics were educated by their church. Under his leadership, the church became a bulwark in the struggle against anti-Semitism in a manner that it had never before assumed. Just as important, his personal example of friendship with Jews with whom he had grown up in Poland and suffered under Nazi rule ended forever the notion of a natural antagonism between Catholics and Jews.
via Two Righteous Men Among the Nations « Commentary Magazine.
Cassandra over at Villainous Company has run across an article in Wapo which chronicles how difficult it is to live on $90K per year. Yeah. really!
Mortgaging Tomorrow to Pay for Today
The WaPo begins a long article about how the middle class can barely make ends meet with the sad tale of a couple who make almost twice the median income, yet had no money put away to replace a car with over 200K miles on it. Replacing it with a used car (we’re told) caused them not to be able to pay their electric bills:
The Johnsons both work, earning $90,000 between them, not a princely sum but one that places the couple squarely in the middle of household incomes for the Washington region. But for the Johnsons and many other American families, being middle class means living paycheck to paycheck.The couple’s retirement savings are meager. The college fund? Nonexistent.
We’re supposed to believe that this couple are living paycheck to paycheck because they don’t make enough money. But as their tale unfolds, a disturbing pattern emerges: they repeatedly spend money on “wants” and defer spending on “needs”:
One factor behind the financial squeeze is that the middle class’s expectations — a house, music and dance lessons for the kids, the latest in home entertainment — have stayed the same or increased even as costs have soared.
A while back, we wrote about how artificially cheap credit was crowding out household saving. Essentially, American families are deliberately choosing not to save, relying on loans to cover the growing gap between what they spend and what they earn. And contra the WaPo’s misleading assertions, wages aren’t really stagnant and the basic cost of living has actually gone down over time:
via Mortgaging Tomorrow to Pay for Today
Too bad nobody in America ever heard of saving money to buy those toys when you can afford it. I have a lot of sympathy for people who work hard for scut wages, for any reason, these fools, not so much. But they tend to drive the conversation on the left, because so many think it inhuman to actually think.
This may be some extraordinarily Good News, in both senses.
After traveling 250,000 miles through Dar al-Islam (“House of Islam”) as Muslims call their world, career missiologist David Garrison came to a startling conclusion:
Muslim background believers are leading Muslims to Christ in staggering numbers, but not in the West. They are doing this primarily in Muslim-majority nations almost completely under the radar—of everyone. In the new book, A Wind in the House of Islam: How God is Drawing Muslims Around the World to Faith in Jesus Christ, Garrison takes the reader on his journey through what he describes as the nine rooms in the Muslim-majority world: Indo-Malaysia, East Africa, North Africa, Eastern South Asia, Western South Asia, Persia, Turkestan, West Africa, and the Arab world. Muslims in each of those regions have created indigenous, voluntary movements to Christ.
“What did God use to bring you to faith in Jesus Christ? Tell me your story.” This was the core question Garrison asked as he traveled and conducted more than 1,000 face-to-face interviews. In his background research, he documented 82 historic Muslim movements to Christ, consisting of either at least 1,000 baptisms or 100 new church starts over a two-decade period. The first sizable movement of Muslims toward Christianity did not occur until the mid-19th century, nearly 1,300 years after Mohammad established Islam. Garrison said 69 of these movements today are still in process:
via Why Muslims Are Becoming the Best Evangelists
And it’s apparently against the law now in the United Kingdom to quote Winston Churchill in public
I also note that this isn’t really all that much more strongly said that what former PM Tony Blair recently said to Bloomberg, which the link addresses.
It’s not clear that it wasn’t in a sense a publicity stunt but, it’s a legitimate WSC quote, from The River War which many of us have used. I also note that public mention of Drummer Lee Rigby, who was publicly murdered in Woolwich, is apparently either strongly discouraged, or forbidden.
A very sad state of affairs for the cousins.
via Powerline
