The Eviction of Reason: A Rhapsody On Loss & Reclamation
And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” - St Matthew 8:20
The eviction of the sedate and erudite Cardinal Burke, a faithful son of the Church, from his Vatican apartment by Pope Francis, is a reminder of how quickly one's living arrangements can change and how dependent upon others one can be. Granted, Cardinal Burke has likely landed on his feet just fine, but his eviction echoes what many people would consider at the very least, and even in the best of times, an annoying and unsettling and stressful adjustment.
The apostolic nuncio in Brazil, Archbishop Giambattista Diquattro, has asked Bishop Emeritus José Luis Azcona Hermoso to no longer live in the territory of the Prelature of Marajó, where he served for almost 30 years.Azcona relayed the news to Father Kazimierz Antoni Skorki, the diocesan administrator of the prelature, who in a Dec. 9 Instagram post said the prelature had not received any notice from the nuncio nor been given any reason for the move. - CNA
Why, perhaps, has the bishop been evicted? Capricious landlord?
The former bishop of Marajó pointed out that the (2019 Amazon) Synod working document did not address the real problems facing the region.
He also warned about the lack of mention of sin in the lives of the Indigenous peoples in the working document in addition to warning about the scandal and idolatry caused by the use of Pachamama images during Amazon Synod events.
Azcona criticized that the working document equated Christianity with other religions, denying “the uniqueness and exclusivity of Christ as the way” for the salvation of all men. “A profoundly secular vision” took hold of the Instrumentum Laboris, the bishop said in 2019.
During the synod, there was also debate about the possibility of abolishing priestly celibacy in the Amazon, alleging that abstinence is a concept that could not be understood by the Indigenous people. Azcona firmly defended the doctrine of the Church in this regard.
“The first step toward solving the problem of celibacy,” he pointed out, “is not the abolition of it. It is, on the contrary, inculturating the Gospel as the profound values, vital aspirations, anthropological roots of a certain culture. It’s not the Indigenous culture that encounters insurmountable difficulties in understanding celibacy. It’s because there was no real inculturation of the Gospel among them.”
The bishop emeritus pointed out that “it’s not an Indigenous worldview that determines evangelization and establishes what can or cannot be accepted in the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
All of which reminds:
On what slender threads do life and fortune hang… ! - Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Interestingly, a convicted felon retains his Vatican residence... until, that is, he moves into a spacious jail cell.
Cardinal Angelo Becciu retains the use of a palatial grace-and-favor apartment in Vatican City, despite being convicted of numerous financial crimes.
Becciu has been resident for years in an apartment on the top floor of the Palazzo del Santo Uffizio, the extraterritorial building adjacent to St. Peter’s square which also houses the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith.
Sources close to the Vatican City state’s governorate have told The Pillar that, despite changes in Vatican policy issued by Pope Francis earlier this year, Cardinal Becciu is not paying market rates for the property but instead only a nominal monthly rent, in line with privileges customarily extended to senior curial officials.
Charity or Lack Thereof
Those of us on the West ("Left") Coast of Canada are all too familiar with a housing market that has been appropriated by both foreign buyers with little or no stake in a community, and by profit-hungry locals who purchase buildings to turn into B&Bs and rental properties, making it increasingly difficult for the average hard working citizen to live in most urban areas, and even suburban areas, close to their places of employment. Inflation, i.e., the cost of living is, in three words, out of control. Circumstances invite the criticism that entrepreneurs and moneylenders are putting "profit before people". It's retrograde - people before profit! - rightly issues from the mouths of those impacted by greedy profiteers driving an unnecessarily harsh market.
- https://globalnews.ca/news/9347338/conservative-liberal-party-voting-poll-dec-2022/
- https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/subletter-cleared-from-house-airbnb
Real estate agents participate in the marginalization of the average Joe or Jennifer - who works two and three jobs to barely make rent, utilities and grocery payments - by facilitating higher selling prices to preserve their own slice of the proverbial pie, thus enabling an unbalanced system to fester and inflict increasing harm upon local populations.
Seniors are the most vulnerable in this dog-eat-dog not-so-very-merry merry-go-round. A glance inside any service industry business these days reveals a noticeable increase in retirees working as counter staff, stock clerks, cleaning staff, and the like. Passing conversations identify hardworking folk whose savings have been drained, and who are now earning a minimum wage and are living paycheque-to-paycheque.
Responsible young adults, paying their own way through university and whose lives will eventually be significantly impacted by the repayment of student loans, are working two and three jobs to the point of risking a significant loss of study time while coping with a bare minimum of sleep (three or four hours at most on a good night). Some students are fortunate to have mommy and daddy buy them a condo to live in while at school, a condo that will likely become a rental property once their underachieving gender fluid child graduates and returns home to live safe and secure in their parents' basement to play video games. Someone has to pay for little Jimmy's degree and/or Jane's addiction.
- https://torontosun.com/life/homes/housing-market-in-canada-reaching-a-breaking-point
- https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/canadas-surging-cost-living-fuels-reverse-immigration-2023-12-09/
When challenged to think and act differently, realtors will complain that it's the market that is driving up the cost of living. That's a weak admission. What or who is the market after all but people. It is in the realtor's self interest, however, to play along. Some people's parasitical behaviour is draining the life blood out of others, leaving more and more people vulnerable to those same market forces while the profiteers drive around in expensive cars and take lavish vacations. Too harsh?
Landlords certainly have a right to do what they will with their rental properties, but they also have a responsibility to be humane, to be just and law abiding. We are, after all, talking about sheltering human beings.
Sadly, altruistic landlords are often exploited by individuals who are essentially squatters who take over properties and cannot be evicted when they, despite being employed and capable of paying rent, fail to be responsible tenants. There are landlords who, themselves prone to societal ailments, are forced to live in their cars because they cannot reclaim their residences from bad tenants.
Someday, perhaps, people will enjoy a right to fair housing. Not that anyone should feel entitled to a mansion. Unless that is, they are prepared to invest in themselves and work harder and smarter to "trade up" from a basic residence. Likewise, those adults who want to raise large families should be able to have appropriate space for themselves and their children, but they should not expect the state to enable them to avoid their responsibility to work and contribute to the support of their families.
Lest anyone misunderstand, this blogger is not anti-family nor pro-socialism. Far from it! Read on.
Work is essential to human dignity. A just and living wage should not evaporate because greedy entrepreneurs in the food and service industries raise prices knowing citizens have assets that can be exploited. The circle of greed and the cycle of poverty will in all likelihood not be overcome ahead of the Lord's return. In the meantime, however, we must avoid adopting the naive optimism of socialism lest we build housing projects that are grey reminders of prisons that most often become fortresses of violence and crime.
MAID in Canada
Canada is desperate for workers (i.e., taxpayers) to prop up our ailing pension plan (CPP). Pundits have been saying for decades that there will be no money for retirees in coming years due to a lack of contributions to the Plan. Why is that? The efforts to limit population growth have been successful in diabolical ways. To put it bluntly: Canadians have not been having enough children to prop up our ailing economy, among other things. Catholic Canadians, enabled by the Winnipeg Statement generated by complicit clergy and issued by timid bishops, are contracepting themselves out of existence. The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, in 1968, issued the Winnipeg Statement in response to Pope Saint Paul VI’s promulgation of Humanae Vitae.
So, our federal and provincial governments and businesses have been recruiting replacement taxpayers from abroad.
Canadian universities now largely rely on international students who are charged double and triple the tuition rate to attend. The Covid adventure exposed our dependencies. Revenue from international students has dried up. The federal government has capped the numbers of international students who may enter the country. Universities are struggling to make the bottom line, as are the rest of Canada's social institutions.
- https://financialpost.com/news/economy/record-spike-immigrants-leaving-canada
- https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/immigrants-explain-why-they-re-leaving-canada-1.6634641
Canada has a massive shortage of doctors and nurses. Our once vaunted healthcare system is in shambles. The sick are pushed toward MAID (medical assistance in dying = euthanasia = legalized murder) instead of being treated for curable diseases.
- https://www.rosslandnews.com/news/cancer-patient-abandons-bc-healthcare-to-seek-treatment-in-us-7119604
- https://globalnews.ca/news/10118619/bc-cancer-agency-wait-times-surgery-united-states/
- https://www.lifenews.com/2023/12/04/canada-told-this-woman-with-cancer-to-kill-herself-she-got-a-successful-treatment-in-america/
Given the rising chaos, it is not surprising that people are retreating into fiction. The eviction of faith and reason from the public square has left a vacuum that no secular ideology - not materialism nor any other man-made '-ism', can fill. People are undoing themselves because they have few if any coping skills to facilitate resilience and resistance to the virus of despair. The necessary fortitude to stand up to nefarious systems offering cheap "solutions" is undermined by public education programs and political pressure that insist we embrace woke views that rob the vulnerable of their dignity.
Multiple pressures are rising, and the federal government's inept handling of healthcare, the economy, relations with the provinces, our NATO obligations and national security, is so obvious that many Canadians - left and right - are finally beginning to admit Canada can do far better than Team Trudeau.
Just because you can think it doesn't make it so.
Mental illness abounds. Young people, groomed by gender ideologues to become something other than their biological sexual identity, are lost. The suicide rates among high school and college students is beyond alarming.
From 2007 to 2017, emergency visits related to mental health concerns for Canadians aged five to 24 increased by 75 per cent. According to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), 70 per cent of mental health problems have their onset during childhood or adolescence, young people aged 15-24 are more likely to experience mental illness and/or substance abuse disorders than any other age group, and 34 per cent of Ontario high school students indicate moderate to serious psychological distress, including symptoms of anxiety and depression. “Young people are telling us quite directly that they are feeling really anxious and overwhelmed, that they’re struggling with mood issues and they’re looking for support,” says Joanna Henderson, a psychologist with CAMH who specializes in child and youth mental health.
The pandemic is only making things worse. In addition to generalized fear and anxiety, students have had to adjust to mostly remote learning and the potential severance of their support networks. Part-time jobs may have been lost, parents might be facing unemployment and making rent might seem impossible. On top of that, the commitment to post-secondary education is largely predicated upon preparation for a desirable future, but that future feels particularly cloudy and uncertain at the moment, and some students might be wondering if they will ever have the chance to apply what they’re trying to learn. - Inside the mental health crisis at Canadian universities, by Sarah Treleaven
Who is responsible for creating a lost generation? None other than the same caring, mental health-minded prophets of Baal who have marketed free sex, freedom from responsibility, and who have annexed young children's minds by promoting fallacious non-binary identities and other myths.
High rates of depression and suicide among sexual and gender minorities (SGM) have motivated an array of studies aimed at detailing these epidemics and their specific risk factors (Haas et al., 2011; Hottes, Bogaert, Rhodes, Brennan, & Gesink, 2016; King et al., 2008; Marshall, Claes, Bouman, Witcomb, & Arcelus, 2016; Plöderl et al., 2013). Consistent with international studies (Ross et al., 2018), a Canadian population probability survey found a prevalence of self-reported mood disorders (including depression) among sexual minorities between 15–25% (Pakula, Shoveller, Ratner, & Carpiano, 2016), while a study of transgender people in Ontario, Canada, indicated that 66.4% of participants had symptoms consistent with depression (Rotondi et al., 2011). - Depression and Suicide Literacy among Canadian Sexual and Gender Minorities (June 2020)
"Sexual and gender minorities" is an interesting if not diminishing classification of those souls incapable of prying themselves loose from the bondage of illusion or willingly rebelling against the natural law. Interesting, as in a sad linguistic attempt to normalize destructive behaviours. Destructive behaviours - how so? Destructive to those who embrace poisonous ideas that trap someone in a cycle of depression and despair, and rob the individual of the ability to grow as a person. Real compassion does not help people avoid reality. Real compassion helps by offering support to confront reality, to adapt and grow, to change toward realistic outcomes and retain dignity and to practice resilience in the face of challenges. Real compassion helps a person grow in authentic love for oneself and others.
When the pressures of existence play out as expected and, sadly, they are playing out as expected, then an individual with a compromised mind will experience the harsh reality that befalls anyone or any group that attempts to defy the truth of human existence when that human existence is not aided by God's grace. That truth, that fact, is despair and self destruction. Human beings, even those rare intersexed individuals (formerly known as hermaphrodites) who present with both male and female attributes to a greater or lesser degree, are binary by design. It's in the DNA. No mental gymnastic or evasion nor any political or legal coercion can alter that fact.
When ideologues - harbingers of the woke pestilence - attempt to indoctrinate others into accepting science fiction, they are condemning vulnerable people to a path that is fraught with danger, if not death, as narrated by the above article summary.
The preceding information heralds an approaching reckoning. Most western societies, certainly Canadian society, starved of wisdom and having become pagan once again, are descending into darkness. Everything fought hard for during the last century - freedom from tyranny, life, liberty and justice - has been squandered.
How do we repair the social fabric? A return to Judeo-Christian principles is a rather obvious suggestion. Without Christians living Christian lives, an entire nation is at risk of failure. Hospitality, justice, mercy, accountability, brotherly love, authentic altruism, resilience - these issue from a Christian heart. Vibrantly lived even by a faithful few, the Gospel made manifest will spread life, hope, joy and meaning first among families, friends, neighbourhoods and communities, and then - God willing - out into a nation to increase and enhance civility and the common good.
This very hour our society is on life support. The Catholic Faith alone is capable of guiding our nation. Catholicism in Canada, however, is in a sorry state. One could say that the Catholic Church in Canada is the Liberal Party at prayer. For a long time that was true. Liberals are now on record as excluding anyone who is pro life, i.e., faithful Catholics. Thus saith the apostate and tergiversator Justin Trudeau.
A lawless nation - and there is no law for or against abortion in Canada, though many imagine that a right to an abortion is protected in law - is a nation largely enslaved to mankind's basest instincts, and because it is enslaved it will in time, if not already, resemble more and more those lands hated by God.
When morning dawned, the angels urged Lot, saying, “Arise, take your wife and your two daughters who are here, lest you be consumed in the punishment of the city.” But he lingered; so the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him forth and set him outside the city. And when they had brought them forth, they said, “Flee for your life; do not look back or stop anywhere in the valley; flee to the hills, lest you be consumed.” And Lot said to them, “Oh, no, my lords; behold, your servant has found favor in your sight, and you have shown me great kindness in saving my life; but I cannot flee to the hills, lest the disaster overtake me, and I die. Behold, yonder city is near enough to flee to, and it is a little one. Let me escape there—is it not a little one?—and my life will be saved!” He said to him, “Behold, I grant you this favor also, that I will not overthrow the city of which you have spoken. Make haste, escape there; for I can do nothing till you arrive there.” Therefore the name of the city was called Zo′ar ("little one": Segor in the Septuagint). The sun had risen on the earth when Lot came to Zo′ar.
Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomor′rah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the valley, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and what grew on the ground. - Genesis 19:15-25
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