The Gadfly

The Visitation Center, Babes In Limbo Or Hell, And Performing Political Splits

By Ed Raymond
Staff Writer

A rather amazing admission in the morning papers. Jim Daly, the successor to James Dobson as leader of Focus On The Family of the Christian right-wing, says the organization will not battle same-sex marriage proposals anymore. They will begin nibbling on greener pastures. Daly says, “I think we need to start calculating where we are in the culture.”  Just what does that mean? Don’t evangelicals interpret the Bible literally anymore? Does he mean that common sense can wedge its way into the interpretation of Bible verses? Good Heavens, and I mean that literally, isn’t the Bible Gutenberged in stone? When asked by a reporter from World, a Christian online mag, how conservative Christians were doing fighting same-sex marriage policies, Daly responded: “We’re losing that one, especially among the 20-and 30- somethings (because) 65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage.”

Is Daly actually saying that anything that comes out of the uteri of women is approved by the great GYN in the sky? Is he saying that in the four-million-year march (by scientific evidence so far) of the first human to the likes of Rock Hudson, Elton John, Alexander the Great, John Gielgud, Sir Isaac Newton, Walt Whitman, Chaz Bobo, Katharine Lee Bates, General Friedrich William von Steuben, Pope Benedict IX, Mary Cheney, Catherine the Great, Greg Louganis, Michelangelo, Richard the Lion-Hearted, and Marjorie Main that all gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and transgenders are finally certified as first-class citizens, eligible for all the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of “regular” people, including marriage to a loved one? Mr. Daly, you had better talk to your constituents in the Minnesota Legislature who are still yelling: “The sky is falling!” The sky is falling!” about all the heterosexual marriages that will fail because of same-sex marriages. Perhaps another Rapture will save them on election day, 2012.

Why Not Keep The Visitation Chapel Open All Week?  There Are Many Religious Questions That Need Answers I see in the Forum that the Fargo Catholic Diocese under the direction of Bishop Samuel Aquila is opening an anti- abortion prayer chapel next to the Red River Women’s Clinic in downtown Fargo, the only abortion provider in North Dakota. In that the clinic is open only on Wednesdays, the prayer chapel will also be open only on that day. A Mass will be offered at 8 a.m. and will be followed by prayers until 3:45 p.m. Evidently close proximity intensifies the potency of prayer because the director of the diocese pro-life office said: “We believe prayer is so powerful and what we’re engaged in is a spiritual battle. It’s a place where we need an intense and focused prayer and that’s why we feel the need to be right there.” Do prayers close by “zap and crackle” more? The chapel will be locked at all other times. I think that’s a bit puzzling because the Catholic Church has so many other possibilities for prayer.

I tried to find out if the Vatican has changed its position on unbaptized babies going to Hell. The only authoritative statement I could find was made several years ago by the Vatican’s International Theological Commission. Its celestial orbit is quite wobbly. On April 20, 2007, “after several years of study” according to the Catholic News Service, the Commission decided “there are good reasons to hope” that babies who die without being baptized go to Heaven. That’s the same as saying: “We have definitely decided to probably obfuscate the dilemma.”

What Saint Augustine Said

In the Fifth Century, Saint Augustine determined that unbaptized infants ended up in Hell. His shattering religious analysis stuck around for 800 years. Remember that it took the Catholic Church 400 years to apologize to Galileo that indeed the earth did orbit the sun. Catholic theologians from the 13th century on cautiously refer to Limbo, a mysterious place either in Purgatory or next to it, as perhaps the “resting place” for dead unbaptized infants. In this undefined space “out there” these babies were deprived of the vision of God, but they did not suffer “because they did not know what they were deprived of.” Duh? Duh. It does bring up an image of millions of unborn fetuses, whether minutes after conception, miscarriage, or 8.9 months old, along with the millions of unbaptized infants who die at birth or shortly thereafter, circling like dust mites or space junk in the infinity of Limbo, someplace “out there.” Of course, they are all “out there” because they were born in the concept of “original sin.” (I stand to be corrected by theologians.)

Perhaps somewhere in the uterus of the Vatican there is a manuscript that covers how this eternal predicament has been resolved, and, if it does, I apologize, but Pope Benedict and all Vatican cardinals and bishops have never revealed the resolution of this problem to Google, Microsoft, or Facebook.  I have trusted Google ever since Corky asked me to check on the contents of a cake recipe and I got 1,100,000 responses and the correct answer in 3.2 seconds.

Anyway, couldn’t the diocese open the prayer chapel on Thursdays just to focus on prayers to help the unbaptized and resolve this issue? The problem is connected to what happens next door to the chapel. The Vatican has never defined Limbo, the sky cemetery, as a doctrine of faith. It can’t until it reconciles its teachings that baptism is necessary for salvation. Kind of a conundrum isn’t it? If it isn’t, let me know. The Commission, headed by a certain Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) wrote, even with a funeral rite for unbaptized infants approved in 1970, that: “It must be clearly acknowledged that the church does not have sure knowledge about the salvation of unbaptized infants who die.”

On a third thought, I think it would be helpful to also keep the prayer chapel open on Tuesdays so that supplicants could pray for all the victims of sexual abuse committed or abetted by priests, bishops, cardinals, and popes throughout the world.

The Uncivil Political Wars Fueled By Class Warfare, Religion, Economic Instability, And Secession Threats

The recent standoffs between the two political parties about state and federal budgets emphasize the stark differences in economic philosophy. The chances for an equitable settlement in Minnesota do not seem to be good. The state Republican Party Chairman Tony Sutton calls Governor Mark Dayton a “bored dilettante” with “erratic behavior” tendencies. Sutton has also said that any compromise between the Democrats and Republicans at this point would be “evil.” In other words, Sutton is saying the Minnesota Republicans will never agree to Dayton’s campaign to split the $5 billion deficit between program cuts and increased taxes on the two percent of wealthiest Minnesotans. Business, the wealthy, and organizations such as the Chambers of Commerce generally support the Republican position, although several prominent Republicans support Dayton’s proposal. They agree that the wealthy, with all of their tax cuts over the last ten years and the present rich-poor income gap, can well afford to boost their tax rate to the middle-class rate.

Democrats say that the cuts made in education, elderly programs, and medical care and health insurance by Republican legislators (bills Dayton vetoed) would be devastating to the poor, the disabled, and the middle-class. Democrats support the theme often expressed by Hubert Humphrey, perhaps Minnesota’s most famous politician: “The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy, and the handicapped.”

We Are Surrounded By “Symptoms Of Collective Impoverishment”

Historian Tony Judt in his book “Ill Fares The Land” writes about how we have lost Humphrey’s test of government over the last thirty years. It started when Ronald Reagan spoke his most famous lines: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’” When I was a young boy on a rocky Minnesota farm, my parents were not terrified when the Rural Electric Administration brought electricity to our farm.  My parents were not terrified when FDR’s banking rules prevented the foreclosure on our farm.

Judt claims our downfall as a nation started with the ideas of privatization of basic public services, the acceptance of gross inequalities in income, and the absolute obsession with health. He says excessive private affluence creates public squalor. He summarizes our current condition in this deadly paragraph: “The symptoms of collective impoverishment are all about us. Broken highways, bankrupt cities, failing schools ... Even as the U.S. budgets tens of billions of dollars on a futile military campaign in Afghanistan, we fret nervously at the implications of any increase in public spending on social services or infrastructure. What matters is not how affluent a nation may be but how unequal it is. Unequal societies are unhappy, unhealthy ones.”  Judt writes that the United States has much more poverty, alcoholism, obesity, and mental illness than countries in continental Europe do because of our rich-poor income gap. He adds: “the idea that the point of life was to get rich would have been ridiculed as recently as the 1970’s.”

“Give That Yacht Driver Another Tax Cut!”
Of the 50 states, 46 have budget problems. Only the oil states of Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska are in the black. Arkansas is just on a lucky streak. Eighteen of the states have deficits of 20 percent or more. But in practically all of them it’s the Norquist no-new-tax crowd battling the social service advocates. The negotiators seem to talk past each other, as the Kiplinger Letter says, in mutually unintelligible languages. The fact that there is a whole pile of money available in many of these states is not recognized by the Republicans. As an example, California has a deficit in the neighborhood of $25 billion. If every California taxpayer paid just one percent more in income taxes the deficit would be erased. But pathological greed rules. Texas has the largest per capita deficit in the country—$23 billion. Preliminary budgets indicate dozens of school closings, 100,000 teacher layoffs, and 60,000 elderly chased out of their nursing homes. In the state that Molly Ivins called “the national lab for bad government,” mega-yacht owners are not going to be neglected. The Republican Legislature has guaranteed them a big tax cut!
The story of pathological greed continues when it comes to charitable giving. The University of California at the Institute of Personality and Social Research has studied the charitable giving of persons with incomes around $15,000 and persons with incomes over $150,000. The Institute found that lower-income persons “were more generous, charitable, trusting, and helpful to others and more attuned to others.” High income persons “clung to values that prioritized their own need.” The rich also had less empathy and compassion than the low-income.

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