Comments for Jittery About Jenky’s Jeremiad at http://www.thecatholicthing.org , comment 1 to 14 out of 14 comments http://www.thecatholicthing.org Wed, 22 May 2013 16:21:28 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.3 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11262 While one must always be careful invoking Hitler and Stalin in modern comparisons (and I think Bishop Jenky was)I thought it important that Bishop Jenky reminded Americans that there is a direct line from Bismarckian State-Worship of the 19th century to the Totalitarianism and World Wars of the 20th. Bismarck's "reforms" are still regarded in our schools as beknighted or at worst benign: health care, social security,etc. "A government big enough to give you what you want is big enough to take everything you have". - John Hinshaw Mon, 07 May 2012 08:04:25 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11242 Sorry you have so much to answer for in your Alma Mater, but then unless you graduated earlier than the Hesburgh 1960s, you can't claim the college started tanking after you left. After ND's Obama apotheosis in May 2009, this Jenky flap is anticlimactic. Why can't we make a direct comparison between the babies left to die in hospital janitors' closets, and the concentration camps? Most of the aborted babies die prolonged, painful deaths. What does "never again" mean except that when someone else threatens (even starts to become) to be another Hitler, he gets called out rather than getting protected by the press? - Sue Sun, 06 May 2012 11:25:08 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11240 Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of HHS, is invited to speak at a 2012 Georgetown University commencement, but not Bishop Jenky. That says it all for too many universities called "Catholic." Although I bet that there are many Catholic high schools which would do the same if they had the pull... - Graham Combs Sun, 06 May 2012 09:13:34 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11230 My only question to Jane given her position derived from her observations whether or not it's OK to demonize Satan? The comparison of seven year olds to adults conferred with political power is a bridge way too far. In looking back on the recent past i.e. the 20th Century, the historical record does not show any seven year old(s) in second grade responsible for the vicious murder of over 150 million people. The President of the United States just made an UNPRECEDENTED decision against the Catholic Church. Given the definition of "unprecedented," it's a bit of a stretch to say the other side is engaged in the same behavior. - Frank Sun, 06 May 2012 00:57:31 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11229 More evidence of the complete dishonesty of the press, and the adolescent brattiness of the academic left. - Tony Esolen Sat, 05 May 2012 16:44:43 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11228 With reference to your first paragraph--do you think it's any better to be a Georgetown alum? - pam Sat, 05 May 2012 16:10:23 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11224 Is anyone in the mood for a pick-me-up vis a vis Mrs. Sebelius and what the future probably holds? SEARCH: Kathleen Sebelius v. Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) on youtube.com and allow yourself five minutes or so. Pay attention and it will make your weekend. - Manfred Sat, 05 May 2012 11:28:05 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11223 Nice try, Jane, but the lies must be refuted. They cannot be allowed to lie unchallenged to grow and to fester and to affect young--and old--minds that have no ability to pick them apart, to expose them, and to call them what they are: not "untruths", not "mis-statements", not any of the other euphemisms that people use to avoid calling a lie a lie. Once again, Hilaire Belloc has come to our rescue in understanding the long warfare of our Church, past, present, and future. His book, "The Old and New Enemies of the Catholic Church" is available on line to read, free of charge. He explains in the Introduction that, from Her founding, the Church has been vigorously attacked in the attempts to destroy Her. He describes how, in any period of world history, three attacks in different degrees of intensity were present at any given period: one attack just defeated and dying out, one in full strength and vigor, and one with its incipient ideas just beginning to be heard. Any gardener knows that the more one can weaken an encroaching weed before it gains strength, the easier it will be to get rid of it in full season. Telling the weeds to "play nice" won't help in the least in creating a beautiful garden. - Louise Sat, 05 May 2012 11:27:25 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11221 Fair enough-mostly. However, I am so sick of the demonizing that passes for honest debate in this country, and ALL sides are guilty of it. In this article, as in almost every defense of bad behavior I read lately, the writer uses this tactic. I am a 2nd grade teacher and I hear this kind of conversation and complaining everyday. Yep I work with seven year old's and constantly hear, "He started it. Or, "She does it too." I then patiently explain, "It is not important who did it before or who started it. We are now talking about YOUR behavior, and you must take responsibility for it." I could add, but don't usually say,"or it will never stop!" This seems to be clear enough for children. Will it resonate with adults? I wonder. - jane Sat, 05 May 2012 04:47:35 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11220 There is sense and then there is sensibility. The left often exhibits inflamed sensibility, but no sense. They are outraged by a tone of voice, or a bit of overstatement and miss the irony that their own tone of outrage is pure overstatement. The purpose (quite obviously) is to suppress dissent. There is a tired old leftist on our parish who periodically mounts a now ancient audio-visual presentation about four nuns killed in Central America by a right wing paramilitary group. The nuns were of the liberation theology persuasion. The audience is meant to be in the full incandescence of righteous outrage by the time the thing spools out. He seems to be unaware of the millions of contemporaneous deaths in...oh...Cambodia, or China, or dropping back a few decades, the thousands of nuns and priests killed by the reds in the Spanish Civil War, some 3,000 in a single day. The preferred method of the left seems to be to take a small particle of truth and inflate it until by proportion alone it becomes a big lie. Perhaps it is time to fight overstatement with overstatement, if only to recalibrate the center. What was conventional twenty years ago is now called extreme by those who would be our secular masters. - Other Joe Sat, 05 May 2012 03:50:56 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11219 One principle that resonates in this story as with other stories of similar stripe, are the words of the late historians Will and Ariel Durant. "What we have fought against, we have become." Oh I remember the 60's all too well and the cliches that were born from a bunch of spoiled brats who because they were either in college or had just received their degrees, were now ready to assume the mantle of political leadership because of the injustices they saw in the world and if they could not "get the power," they were willing to whine, cry, break windows, light fires and in essence, "bring it all down man!" And if that wasn't enough, the cliches were just as truculent. "If it feels good do it!" "Tell it like it is!" etc etc. Now these spoiled little brats now occupy and are entrenched in a number of academic chairs in most of our colleges and universities now sporting gray hair and a middle aged spread, but pretentious brats nonetheless...the spots on the leopard don't change. So now, Bishop Jenky has chosen to "Tell it like it is," to speak truth to power only to be the recipient of a backlash from those who stridently embraced and interjected these "virtues" into the social dialectic. In essence, the secular humanists to include those at Notre Dame, are the new Pharisees organizing their cultural Sanhedrin ready to strike at and marginalize those who oppose them. What they once fought against, they have now become. I'll go one step further than Bishop Jenky and place Obama in the same category of the murderous tyrants noted here for he carries the same narcissistic behavioral traits. He believes in the absolutism of his purpose and will not seek compromise or accommodation with those who disagree with him. Against the backdrop of the American Experiment that does place value on political compromise, Obama is having none of it. Obama will never be swayed from his mission that all who have gone before him are in his view, an antiquated oppressive order to be vanquished and brought to heel and the Catholic Church is part of that old order. Obama campaigned on compromise and unity in the same manner as any tyrant in recorded history and once they attain the power, those platitudes find the round file replaced by autocratic fiat. The sad thing is that this "Pied Piper" still has enough blind rats following him. In the end, Obama will be snared in the very trap he's tried to lay for others and with respect to the Church, his willful disregard of history will lay his legacy waste. For 2,000 years, the attempts to marginalize and destroy the church from within and without have failed and so to this current attempt. Large ego's render one blind to their own ignorance and arrogance. Such pride goes before the fall. The tragedies of recorded history from the evil that men do are hard to accept but as Catholics, the difficult part of our faith requires us to embrace the greater good in God's eternal design, a design none of us can fully comprehend. Evil has come and evil has gone only to receive the Divine sweep and be placed upon the refuse pile of the cosmos. So to Bishop Jenky, please to continue to speak the truth to power. In a time of God's choosing, the broom will be applied. - Frank Sat, 05 May 2012 03:04:14 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11218 Legitimate comparison is not permitted if it strikes at what the agenda-mongers don't want anyone to really notice. We have put ourselves in the position, with "political correctness" and "will it offend" as our benchmark, to shy aware from comparisons at all. Jenky, like several other priests I know who are not high profile enough to get any press, has made a valid historical comparison; one which demands consideration. - Kathy Sat, 05 May 2012 03:03:59 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11217 Well written, sir. Of course, "liberals" today aren't really liberal. They're Leftists, which puts them in opposition to genuine liberalism and on the same side as the fascists, which explains their sensitivity to Hitler comparisons. It wouldn't do for two generations of people indoctrinated to believe that fascism is right wing to discover that the opposite is true. - Mark L. Chance Sat, 05 May 2012 02:56:53 +0100 http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/jittery-about-jenkys-jeremiad.html#comment-11216 I think it may come to pass that Catholics will be forced to go to jail rather than violate their consciences, if we have a second term of what we have now and unless the Supreme Court continues to throw out the Administration's overreaching. The fact that university professors are so politicized -- to the Left -- so as not to see the historical spectrum in which Bp. Jenky's observations were made tells one a lot about the state of American Catholic higher learning. Sometimes I think it would be better for our finest young minds to bypass elite Catholic higher education altogether and go to colleges and universities that have the grace and honestly openly to oppose Catholic teaching, rather than to expose themselves to the kinds of insidious corrosiveness they will encounter at ND, Georgetown, and their likes. Or they can choose any number of the very fine smaller and authentic Catholic colleges and universities that are doing a wonderful job preparing their students for success at the best graduate schools in the country. - Dave Sat, 05 May 2012 02:18:57 +0100