Joan Vennochi's ire is aimed at the wrong target - Part I

Pope Benedict XVI can’t wait to crack down on “radical feminist” nuns. But will he ever really crack down on protectors of pedophile priests?

A Vatican-led investigation of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious cites the nuns’ silence on abortion and same-sex marriage. How bad is that up against the silence of church officials, from parish priests to the Vatican, who ignored and concealed child sex crimes?

That old straw man sure gets a lot of mileage.

The smack down of nuns misleading the faithful and the pedophiles the Church ordained are two separate matters.

Both needed and have received the intervention of the Vatican.

In fact, even innocent and falsely accused priests are removed. Some sit penniless, without a source to defend them against the cowards in the Chancery who defile the law and truth to appease the devil. The silence of bigots and malcontents can be bought with money and the vocation of an innocent priest.

As Joan Venocchi demonstrates, so long as the Church carries on with the mission of the salvation of souls, it will never be enough. Any time they wish to silence Church teaching and salvation, they will build their ridiculous strawman that the Catholic Church is a pimp for sodomization of children so the weak-kneed Bishops and Cardinals will retreat. Throw another priest to the lions.

People who drew oxygen in the same room with a pedophile or even a supervisor of the pedophile is a potential victim of the vigilantes.

Obama has raised an era of vigilantes. It turns out their hope is predicated upon pitting one person against another.

The poor against the people who have the money to employ them. Blacks against people of every other color. Hispanics are loathed as much as whitey. The Arabs against the Jews. The Muslims against Christians.

He has raised a general war against Christianity and Catholicism in particular. We have yet to see the whites of their eyes. If we do not come together to overthrow a second term for Obama - it's going to get mighty ugly. In every conceivable way.

Vennnochi, last I knew, was coming and going weekly in her parish - without the intervention of whatever weakling priest was put in charge of the parish she is in. And so here she is twenty years later, still rebelling against Christ's Church and truth.

God help me. I have such little patience for it. Jesus, meek and humble of Heart, make my heart unto Thine.

I've been thinking about the upheaval of the leadership of the Sister Simone Campbells in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious. What has gone awry. What the Vatican is trying to lead them and all those they influence away from and thought I should share the most magnificently-written on the theology of obedience to Catholic teaching, dying to ourselves and rising with Christ,nm[p- I have ever read.

It's from Fr. Edward Leen, in his book In the Likeness of Christ and he is talking about the dumbfounded Apostles looking at the Risen Body of Christ, with wounds still fresh from his Crucifixion and the challenge Christ had - and continues to have in all of us - in teaching the Apostles the purpose of dying to His Own Will, how it relates to rejecting sin, dying to ourselves and rising with Christ...and salvation. How it lives in each one of us. Every. Single. Day.

It's long, so I will put it up in parts.

Here's part 1:

They deemed that the Resurrection had a reference to a post-terrestrial life: in a vague kind of way they assumed it to be something that was to take place when the present world should be at an end. They had not grasped that it had a bearing on man's earthy destiny. Their beliefs in this connection were, very likely, those voiced by Martha, the sister of Lazarus, when on receiving the assurance from the Lord that her brother would rise again she immediately understood him to refer to the resurrection at the last day. They had scarecely a conception of any other rising from the dead--still less had their minds entertained any idea of a newness of life to be attained through suffering.

And yet, it is to lead us to this newness of life that God orders all the sufferings and trials He sends us in our earthy pilgrimage. Our Lord draws us towards this risen life by His example after having merited it for us by His Passion. He teaches us that to arrive at the term it is necessary that the concupiscences in us be crucified, and that it is God's love for us that orders and directs the execution. That tendency in us which makes us cleave to the creature to the prejudice of the Creator, which makes us elect perishable things in preference to eternal, must die. Tlo reach the perfect freedom of this life that is all for God, there must be effected in us a detachment from all that is not of God. Pains and sorrow are the instruments of this detachment. it is through them that sinful desires are dulled and concupiscence reduced to a state of quiescence.

The attraction to evil is in us, in consequence of original sin, cannot be made to disappear completely in this life. It continues to exist even in the saints. The repugnance we experience in ourselves to what God's laws desire of us, and to what our own will aspires to, retains us in humility and allows us to distinguish clearly between what we can do of ourselves and what God can accomplish in us by His Holy Spirit. The experience of our own powerlessness in the fight against the evil tendencies in our nature teaches us not to attribute to our own strength but to God's grace, the victories we may achieve in the struggle. The ever-renewed conflict in us convinces us of the necessity of the crucifixion of our wicked nature in order that we may be able to serve God without offending Him.

To live to God we must die to sin, and this death to sin cannot be achieved without its own passion. It was through the Cross that the world was redeemed - it remains that by the Cross and the Cross only, personally born e and endured, each individual enters fully into the redemption and is sanctified. Self must die in order that God may reign in undisputed ways in us. In that lies the whole explanation of suffering in life. It is only over the hilltop of Calvary that we make our way into the brightness of splendor and glowing life of the Garden of Resurrection. The beauty of a body, free from the corruption of sin, and the radiance of a soul filled with God's life is that in which our Calvary finds its explanation and the term in which it issues. The Cross is the way or the means to the Resurrection. Without the one we cannot have the other. If God makes the path of our life converge on Calvary it is only in order that it may lead us into the calm and peace and light of the Resurrection -- of a life in which the germ of mortality, namely, concupiscence, has been successfully combated by the healing virtue of the Grace of Christ, working through sufferings patiently accepted.

But of course, not all sufferings effect in us this wonderful transformation, which is at once an image of Christ's glorious life and a pledge of future immortality. There were three who underwent a crucifixion together on the Hill of Calvary. One of them suffered and blasphemed. Guilty though he was, he rebelled against his fate. He dared to abuse God for tortures he had brought on himself by his own misdeeds. He railed at and cursed Divine Providence for the evil that had come upon him. "And one of those robbers who were hanged blasphemed him, saying "If Thou be Christ, save Thyself and us.:. So there are many, who when crushed upon the cross of life, instead of entering into themselves, acknowledging their sinfulness and humbling themselves under the Hand of God revile their Maker for allowing suffering to exist, or at least, for allowing it to befall them. Such men, far from being purified by their passion, plunge themselves into a worse death than that of the body. They sink from one death into one yet more profound.

My dear Joan, Sister Simone Campbell and Sisters in the Leadership Conference of Women Religious,

Even if you only have one toe in the world of reality, one can feel and see this is a reign of the devil. Christ, through His Pope and His Church, is gathering.

Choose wisely.