Is the Pope Catholic? Part II

Catholic Boy magazine, with a cover by Charles Kerins, showing a boy with Pope Pius XII.

Is the Pope Catholic?

Pope Benedict XVI, as seen greeting his followers in St. Peter's Square today.

Now honestly, does this look like the face of a man who would protect child molesters?

This excerpt from The Week:

Since the 1960s, four American-born Catholics have left the church for every one who has converted, according to a 2009 Pew study. In 2008 alone, Catholic membership declined by 400,000. More than 1,000 parishes have closed since 1995, and the number of priests has fallen from about 49,000 to 40,000 during that same period. Some 3,400 Catholic parishes in the U.S. now lack a resident priest. “Catholicism is in decline across America,” says sociologist David Carlin.

Franco Origlia/Getty Images

Buddhas Survive Quake

Health workers spray disinfectant at a collapsed temple in Yushu, China, where soldiers rescued these giant Buddhas from a collapsed temple following the 4/14 quake.

The death toll reached 2,046 in Qinghai Province, with 193 people still missing.

And now, 15 sayings of the ancient Buddhists, not in a flip-through gallery:

There is no sweet companion like pure charity.
-Foshohingtsanking

Almsgiving, it is said, constitutes the value of riches.
-Jatakamala

Good is restraint in all things.
-Dhammapada

Unselfishness, truth, and self-control.
-Jataka

Though a man conquer a thousand thousand men in battle, a greater conqueror still is he who conquers himself.
-Udanavarga

Root out the love of self.
-Jataka

The man of honor should minister to his friends... by liberality, courtesy, benevolence, and by doing to them as he would be done by.
-Sigalovada-sutta.

Practice the art of "giving up."
-Foshohingtsanking

Speak not harshly to anybody.
-Dhammapada

May I speak kindly and softly to every one I chance to meet.
-Inscription in Temple of Nakhon Vat.

Offensive language is harsh even to the brutes.
-Suttavaddhananiti

Courtesy is the best ornament. Beauty without courtesy is like a grove without flowers.
-Buddha-charita

He knew not the art of hypocrisy.
-Jataka

As he who loves life avoids poison, so let the sage avoid sinfulness.
-Udanavarga

He sees danger in even the least of those things he should avoid.
-Tevijja-sutta.


ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images

No Blogging Today

Sleeping.

Six Degrees of Nicole Kidman

Scientology escapee and lip-enhanced Nicole Kidman at the Country Music Awards on Sunday, and lipless actor and Madoff victim, Kevin Bacon.

About six degrees apart.

Please Don't Write on Christ

Taggers managed to climb the scaffolding on the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio, and left their mark on the face of Jesus.

Landslides following heavy rains closed the road to the statue, which has been undergoing restoration.

It took nine years to build the 130-ft. sculpture, designed by local engineer Heitor da Silva Costa and sculpted by Paul Landowski. It opened in 1931. The statue was struck by lightning in 2008, damaging the fingers, head, and eyebrows.

Genilson Araujo/Globo via Getty Images

Suri Knows All

Suri Cruise, as seen on a Greenwich Village street on Saturday, exquisite in butterflies and bunny ears, notices the dead expression of the cult on Katie Holmes' face, and checks her mother's jugular for a pulse.

Collateral

These tragic photos of Katie and Suri (with a handler close behind) were shot during a shopping excursion on Thursday in New York. Fashionplate Suri starts a new trend with her fuzzy bunny slippers for daywear. Expect to see this on Paris runways next season. Suri has the look of dread and desire to escape that I feel each time I see a picture of the two.


Katie's face shows the horrid effects of cult life; and still, she manages to care for her young.


Pray for them.

Betty Deuce in Wonderland

No, Buckingham Palace is not staging an amateur version of Alice in Wonderland... that's just Her Majesty, Betty Deuce, just after Maundy Service, in which Betty gives money to selected people in recognition of their service to the church or community.

I mean, that's what they say she's doing, but this hat is distinctly down the rabbit hole.


Darren Staples/WPA Pool/Getty Images

Happy Passover

President Barack Obama, praying at the Western Wall.

Happy Passover

6.2. Speech by Rabbi Herschel Schacter
Rabbi Herschel Schacter was a U.S. Army chaplain who participated in the liberation
of Buchenwald and aided in the resettlement of Displaced Persons after the
Holocaust. This reading is an excerpt from a speech given at a conference convened
by the United States Holocaust Memorial Council at which eyewitnesses to the
liberation shared their memories. In the excerpt Schacter refers to some of the other
speakers, including Elie Wiesel.

Source: Brewster Chamberlin and Marcia Feldman, eds., The Liberation of the Nazi
Concentration Camps 1945—Eyewitness Accounts of the Liberators (U.S. Holocaust
Memorial Council, 1987), pp. 35–37.

Dear friends, so very very much has been spoken. All of us here, I know, have seen so
much, have read so much, and yet I am convinced that we can't begin to fathom the
enormity of the cataclysm, of the tragedy that struck our people and so many other
peoples of the world.
During the Second World War, I served as a young Army chaplain, perhaps not as young
as Leon Bass or Alan Rose, but not much older than they at that time. I worked my way
across with front-line combat troops through Europe. I was attached to the VIII Corps
Headquarters of the Third Army.
The most unforgettable day of my life is April 11, 1945. I learned from some of the
officers in my unit that early that morning our forward tanks had entered the notorious
concentration camp called Buchenwald, outside of Weimar. I had heard the name before.
My mind's eye conjured up all sorts of images. I quickly ascertained the directions and
drove at high speed to Weimar and then to the camp.
As I drove up to the main gate, I was struck by the large German inscription over the
gate: Arbeit Macht Frei—what a tragic travesty. I drove through the gate into the open
Appellplatz [inspection or roll call area] and there I was in Buchenwald. This was about
4:00 in the afternoon, just hours after the first columns of American tanks drove through
and liberated that dungeon on the face of this earth.
I did not know where to go first. Happily, a young American Army lieutenant recognized
my Jewish chaplain's insignia, and he approached me almost reverently. He urged that I
follow him to see first the crematoria. We've heard descriptions. As I said, we've read,
and we've seen pictures. As long as I shall live, I will never, never forget that gruesome
scene that is indelibly engraved upon my heart and my mind. There simply are no words
in the human vocabulary. Yes, our Polish friend this morning told us how difficult it was
for him to find the words in any language.

I slowly approached the site of the huge ovens from which the smoke was still curling
upward. I could smell the stench of the charred remnants of human flesh. There were
literally hundreds of dead bodies strewn about. Dr. Kelling, you were right, but many of
these bodies were not stacked neatly like cordwood. They were just scattered, waiting to
be shoveled into the furnaces, which were still hot.
I stood riveted to this scene for what seemed like an eternity, tormented within with
searing agony, until I finally tore myself away, my eyes burning from the smoke and,
even more so, from my inner rage. I walked back from the crematoria toward the endless
rows of barracks still dazed by what I had just seen.
I asked the young lieutenant who was there at my side, and who seemed to know his way
around, whether he knew if there were any Jews still alive in this camp. He led me to an
area called the Kleine Lager—the little camp within the larger camp. I hurriedly walked
into one of the dilapidated, filthy, foul-smelling barracks, and there again I was smitten
by an indescribable scene. There on a series of shelves—and again, you've seen the
pictures of the series of shelves—were just raw planks of hardwood. From floor to ceiling
were hundreds upon hundreds of men and very few boys who were strewn over scraggly
straw sacks looking down at me, looking down at me out of dazed eyes. Last night Elie
Wiesel so graphically and movingly described how he perceived our eyes. I remember
their eyes, looking down, looking out of big, big eyes—that's all I saw were eyes—
haunted, crippled, paralyzed with fear. They were emaciated skin and bones, half-crazed,
more dead than alive.
And there I stood and shouted in Yiddish, "Sholem Aleychem, Yiden, yir zent frey!"
"You are free." The more brave among them slowly began to approach me, as was just
described, to touch my Army uniform, to examine the Jewish chaplain's insignia,
incredulously asking me again and again, "Is it true? Is it over?"
Indeed, as Elie Wiesel said, I felt that love, that gratitude, that admiration. I ran from
barracks to barracks throughout the whole area, repeating again and again the declaration,
the scene, the experience. As I moved about, bands of Jews were now following me,
pouring out tales of woe, asking me over and over, "Does the world know what happened
to us? What will now happen? Where will we go from here?"
I stood among them. As I saw these men—brothers, flesh of my flesh, and blood of my
blood—I could not help but think of the old cliché, "There but for the grace of God go I."
Alan [Rose] was so right. If my own father had not caught the boat on time, I would have
been there.
Thus started a period of about two months during which I spent every day in
Buchenwald. I must confess that I paid little attention to the needs of American
servicemen who really, at that time, did not need many of my services. I devoted
myself—what little energies, what little ingenuity, what bit of initiative a young man
could muster—to my new-found flock.
While I could never develop any accurate statistics, my estimate was that there were
approximately 20,000 inmates, from every country in Europe, in Buchenwald at the time
of the liberation, of whom only about 5,000 were Jews.
We know that Buchenwald was primarily built and maintained for the incarceration of
political prisoners and was, therefore, less, less savagely brutal and torturous than the
extermination camps in Poland. There were no gas chambers in Buchenwald, only
crematoria. And the inmates who were then becoming my friends related to me in
harrowing detail how every morning dead bodies were collected in the barracks and in
the work stations and were carried off on wheelbarrows to the crematoria. And this was
the less brutal? How much more gruesome could the other death camps have been?


pbs.org

Camilla -- Good Lighting, Bad Saints

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, looking appropriate, visits the crypt of the Orthodox Cathedral of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Prague.

This graven image should make it clear to everyone what Charles sees in her.

Cyril, btw, was a Jew-hater, and Methodius was a real pain. But they also created the Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets.

This picture of Camilla makes a fine desktop wallpaper (tiled).

Chris Jackson-Pool/Getty Images

Happy Birthday, Jean Harlow

Jean Harlow was born on this day in 1911. She only made it to 26. Her mother, a Christian Scientist, would not allow her to see a doctor after she became seriously ill. Jean died of uremic poisoning.

Here are some excerpts from "Dinner at Eight."

Ash Wednesday: Ben's Day

Former Hitler Youth, Pope Benedict XVI, slapped on his beanie, power scarf and red shoes for a trek near the Basilica of St. Sabina in Rome.

Lent begins today, although the Pope did not disclose what he'd be giving up... perhaps he'll quit hating on the gays... until Easter.

Vatican Pool/Getty Images

Won't Melt in His Hands

Stigmata can be so inconvenient.

This artwork by the brilliant Rev. Josh is the first part of his Tasteless Jokes series.

Visit Josh's blog at LifeWithoutTaffy.

Thanks, Josh!

A Prayer for Haiti

A man prays at the entrance to the destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral on Saturday before the funeral for Monsignor Joseph Serge Miot, Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, who was killed in the quake.

Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Palins Glad

I'm not.

I Will Cut Me!

Shiite Muslim men and boys assault themselves with chains and blades in Kabul, Afghanistan during Ashura -- a 10-day mourning period for Imam Hussein, who was killed in a battle in Iraq in 680 AD.


Self-flagellation... when you care enough to send the very best.

Majid Saeedi/Getty Images

Happy Birthday, Christ

Famous Jewish carpenter and miracle performer Jesus Christ was born on this day just as the B.C. era ended. Ain't that a coinkydink?

This spooky illustration of Jesus with his eyes both open and closed first appeared c. 1880, by Chicago printers Kurz & Allison.

Jesus died by crucifixion around 33 AD. He was around 33.

He is still widely popular.


Vintagraph.com

Amy and Cinnabons for Jesus

My imaginary daughter Amy, 6, had a few erudite questions about the Christmas holiday, which I attempted to answer with the aplomb befitting a father who is also a daydreamer and pantheist.

"What's the deal with Christ?" Amy asked aggressively, "I don't get his whole thing," she mooed in the Boston drawl of her mother's side. "If he was so great, why'd they hang him up?"


"Well, dear," I hesitated, "Some people don't like it when you tell it like it is."

"If it's Jesus' birthday, how come we don't get him a present?" she asked.

"I think that's a splendid idea," waiting to suggest some charitable endeavor. Amy had other ideas.

"Let's go to the mall and get Jesus a Cinnabon."


"But Jesus died on the cross, Amy, and that has a way of killing one's appetite," I said, with the pithiness of a lifelong wisecracking mercenary. Amy laughed, "Okay, if he doesn't want it, I'll eat it."

At times, I wonder if Amy's past life was lived in Vaudeville.

"You can try your theory with some celery sticks and almonds," I trumped.

"What if he prefers candy?" she retorted. You know Christ has to be into dark chocolate." She had a point, and knew that I would accept nearly any excuse to get some See's candy to test her theosophical presumptions.


On the way back from the mall, with a mouthful of raspberry truffle, Amy bleated, "Chocolate is definitely Jewish." Her complex labeling was again not only food related but ethnically titillating. "How do you figure?" I honked.

"I'm going to have to work on my theory," she said, reaching for the box with a grin.

Amy was careful not to get chocolate on the new coat I bought her for Hanukkah. Yes, I know, she's big for six.