Somewhere in the Meejah yesterday I heard it suggested that, despite the inspiring lead given by Martin Luther King, an American National Hero, America had still not cleansed itself entirely from the sin of Racism.
America, like my own country, has still not entirely cleansed itself from the sin of Adultery. But I am uncertain how clear a lead the Great Man gave in this area of Ethics.
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was for nearly three decades at Lancing College; where he taught Latin and Greek language and literature, was Head of Theology, and Assistant Chaplain. He has served three curacies, been a Parish Priest, and Senior Research Fellow at Pusey House in Oxford. Since 2011, he has been in full communion with the See of S Peter. The opinions expressed on this Blog are not asserted as being those of the Magisterium of the Church, but as the writer's opinions as a private individual. Nevertheless, the writer strives, hopes, and prays that the views he expresses are conformable with and supportive of the Magisterium. In this blog, the letters PF stand for Pope Francis. On this blog, 'Argumentum ad hominem' refers solely to the Lockean definition, Pressing a man with the consequences of his own concessions'.
... once graced the high altar of the church of Sancta Maria in Ara Coeli on the Capitoline Hill.
Fr John Hunwicke
was for nearly three decades at Lancing College; where he taught Latin and Greek language and literature, was Head of Theology, and Assistant Chaplain. He has served three curacies, been a Parish Priest, and Senior Research Fellow at Pusey House in Oxford. Since 2011, he has been in full communion with the See of S Peter. The opinions expressed on this Blog are not asserted as being those of the Magisterium of the Church, but as the writer's opinions as a private individual. Nevertheless, the writer strives, hopes, and prays that the views he expresses are conformable with and supportive of the Magisterium. In this blog, the letters PF stand for Pope Francis. On this blog, 'Argumentum ad hominem' refers solely to the Lockean definition, Pressing a man with the consequences of his own concessions'.
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... once graced the high altar of the church of Sancta Maria in Ara Coeli on the Capitoline Hill.
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https://youtu.be/2rUZIllM5HU
From our brilliant Supreme Court Justice.
But wait---was it not a saintly and noble soul, dearly honored as the special patron of black Americans, who passed into eternal beatitude on April 4th? Dare I even suggest that Catholics throughout these United States petition the USCCB to place him on our altars and liturgical calendars in perpetuity?
I speak, of course, of no other man than:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_the_Moor
As usual, the self-appointed hagiographers in the American meejuh can only ape Holy Mother Church. And badly.
Well. Someone had to bring that up I suppose. But it brings up a good point. It's not like anyone or any culture absolutely gets beyond any particular sin.
I look forward to hearing you cast the first stone when the next King of England ascends to the throne.
Yes, Regina, but there IS such a thing as hypocrisy second-hand. Martin Luther King did not hold himself up to be a saint, at least not from what I observed at the time. However, what has been done to his reputation, notwithstanding the truth, is saint-making Vatican style!
And now that "black lives matter" (as if they never did before!) it's certainly dangerous for Dear Father Hunwicke to be waxing wise on this topic.I have a wonderful book about Vincent McNab in which he refers to black people as "our tawny brothers and sisters." This was in England in the 20s or 30s. Poor saintly man, if he were alive today he'd feel the lash.
As for cultures 'getting beyond any particular sin' of course you are right. But didn't we, in past generations and cultures, at least acknowledge that there was sin to get beyond?
Our present society is a society of fashions. The fashionably sainted yet demonstrably, deeply flawed person is just one symptom of an, ethically, deeply disordered community. In our democratically oriented society, morality is now a creature of political fashion. Its ordering is considered to be the domain of the pop-stars, popular journalists, actors, television personalities, and the whim of politicians clamoring inelegantly to keep their positions of power -- so many of whom, thankfully, have so eloquently and constantly demonstrated that they, themselves, are indeed, the true savants and upholders of morality! Thus, those things considered as anathema in times past are now lauded as good and pure. The lie can be upheld as truth -- the truth is now a lie. Unreality can now be enforced by law as reality. The Emperor's nudity is now perceived as rainbow-hued magnificence!
I despair when I hear MLK referred to as an American Hero. Perhaps he is, but in strictly Maoist terms. Does it make me a racist if I do not burn incense before the image of the late plagiarist/adulterer/heretic/leftist fraud? Do I really have to pretend that he was anything more than a charlatan? Do we have to carry on the charade that he was some sort of Moses, endowing Black people with rights that they never had before? Must we ignore that he helped turn the Civil Rights movement into the Big Gravy Train of the Left? Selected for leadership by establishment Whites, he was well on the road to repudiation when he was killed. He was showing his true colors when he delivered his second-hand "I Have a Dream" speech with bodyguards provided by the Nation of Islam. Its sickening.
You are such an evil man.
Not only was he not a saint, he was a scumbag - and that had nothing to do with the colour of his skin.
Fr, as phrased, the purpose and meaning of your post are not entirely clear. Would you care to clarify for the slower among us?
Blogger Manocan here commented recently on 06 April, 2018...
"You are such an evil man."
May I ask him: who did he mean was or is so evil? The tense of his comment confuses me somewhat.
And then there was Cardinal Spellman.
The problem must be faced with courage;
Is it an evil and cruel world in which MLK is dead but the last Munchkin ( Wizard of Oz) lives?
Robert Penn Warren interviewed Martin Luther King and MLK made a quite amasing (given today's racial narrative) admission:
On looking to Africa and to America:
KING: I think one can live in American society with a certain cultural heritage, whether it's an African heritage or other, European, what, what have you, and still absorb a great deal of this culture. There is always cultural assimilation. This is not an unusual thing; it's a very natural thing. And I think that we've got to come to see this. The Negro is an American. We, we, we know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he's got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is. He's got to know what he is. Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America.
It was Jesse Jackson (who falsely claimed he held the head of MLK as he died) who demanded the media identify negroes/blacks as African Americans and they dutifully obliged and then Mr. Jackson soared to great heights - like going to Stanford University and leading the chant Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho; Western Culture has got to go
Dear Father. You have no idea of the fun to be had as an American citizen...
I am disappointed to see such gratuitous blackening of the memory of the dead as I read in this thread. Was Dr King an adulterer? Read his biographies. Was he a heretic? Read his papers from divinity school. Was he a plagiarist? Look up the conclusions of the committee at Boston University that reexamined his dissertation in 1991.
But does any of that take away from the good he did in the Civil Rights movement? No. Read Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin if you don't understand what life was like for black Americans in the 1950s. You couldn't vote, whether or not the law said you could vote. You could only use the public restrooms and drinking fountains that said "colored only," and if you wanted to buy or rent a home outside the ghetto, good luck. A black man was in danger of being murdered for looking funny at a white woman. It was no different if you were rich and famous. Jackie Robinson couldn't stay in the same hotels as his white teammates. The Dave Brubeck Quartet couldn't play in certain venues because club owners wouldn't accept white and black musicians playing together. Nat King Cole—who was unable to even order a drink in many hotels that hired him to perform—moved into a white neighbourhood in Los Angeles and was greeted with a burning cross on his lawn.
And whatever other faults Martin Luther King had, he was there to confront this monumental injustice. He travelled the country, not preaching the sense in which Christ is "divine" or the joys of living at some distance from the ideal of marital fidelity, but fighting for racial equality. He was perceived at the time by both whites and blacks as the most important and effective Civil Rights leader. And major legislation tearing down institutional discrimination followed, because Civil Rights leaders, Dr King first among them, convinced people it was the right thing to do. Even a constitutional amendment (the Twenty-Fourth), which is practically impossible to pass in America without broad nationwide consensus, was passed to protect the right of black people to vote.
I once heard an elderly religious describe King as a saint. Isn't it enough for us to say that this is not true without going to the length of this anti-canonisation where he is held up as a wicked man deserving of public vilification for his many vices?
King, who plagiarized not only his speeches, but most of his doctoral dissertation, was an agent of the left, who turned the Civil Rights movement from a respectable pursuit of equal rights as established by law, into a horrible entitlement trap, ruining millions of lives.
Dear Mr. Engime. ABS had a white grandfather who converted from Methodism to Catholicism in the 1930s in Springfield, Vt. The local KKK burned a Cross in his backyard. Throughout the Northeast, me ancestors were greeted with NINA (No Irish Need Apply) signs when looking for work. Throughout the Caribbean, there were prolly as many white slaves as black slaves (Slavs is the root for the word, slavery). Civil Rights used to mean the rights of me and me ancestors to be free from the use of illegal force by and coercion from the federal government and MLK was the main man who perverted that concept. MLK was the man, in large part, responsible for the Federal Government become involved in breaking-up the ethnic Catholic voting blocs within the major cities of the North because it feared the power of the Catholic vote and so it moved black families into these ethnic powerhouses to break them up (Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing).
O, and the night before he was assassinated he committed adultery with two different women and beat-up one of them.
ABS toured the Lorraine Motel where he was assassinated and it was not James Earl Ray who shot him from the grimy little bathroom window across the street. The shots came from the shrubbery directly across the street and a man was seen leaving the shrubbery and tossing his rifle to an accomplish and each man ran in different directions. By the next afternoon, the shrubbery had been removed and the official lie established that the shot came from that grubby bathroom.
Almost all of the official narrative of these United States is execrable owing to its official creation as being opposed to Jesus Christ the King and America's penchant for legislating against His commandments (positive law has enshrined the four sins crying to heaven for vengeance) and so we are expected to swallow the callow lies of America's putative heroes .
There can be no doubt that MLK was personally courageous - he continued his public agenda despite numerous death threats- but he is in no way a hero or exemplary man.
Gosh, what a sensitive nerve you have trod upon, Fr. H! And there's me thinking it nothing but a clever jab at the "meejuh", and the idea that any nation has or could eradicate any sin of any variety.
Amazing thing to think that this same meejuh which universally acknowledges racism to be sinful is quite content to support murdering black people at a disproportionate rate through the sin of abortion - all in the name of "civil rights."
I need to take exception to "Calvin's" view of history. He says Black people could not vote. Really? Where? Some insular pocket of the South, perhaps, but much like the poor, voter suppression you will always have with you. I come from New York City, and there never was racial voter suppression in this town. Much of what he says is just a regurgitation of leftist lies, and is never closely examined. For instance,he complains that a Black person could not rent or buy a home outside a "ghetto" Ignoring that many cities were heavily mixed. Including Yonkers, where the Black and Italian sections ran on parallel streets, only about 100 yards from the wealthiest part of town. That did not stop Judge Leonard Sand from crucifying Yonkers with spurious accusations of segregation. I wonder if Calvin objected to the suppression of Black conservative voters in Philadelphia? Does that excite his outrage? The truth is that the insertion of government involvement into the housing market, and federal rules about who can sell what to whom, has been a great act of tyranny, that has helped level our great cities into mounds of dust and ashes. If someone wants to say that Blacks did not always get the practical use of their legal rights at all times and in all places, my answer is that one of the obligations of citizenship is vigilance in asserting those rights. People like King killed the Civil Rights Movement by changing it from a way for people to stand up for their rights, into a vehicle for big government and social change. It has reduced the Black people to lower levels than they had ever occupied in the past.
The problem is here is that people reduce the Gospel to their own political visions and agendas. And that happens on both the "left" and "right" as currently categorised. This habit of mind seems to be particularly endemic in America. It right to point out that populist liberals in the media and in the Church highlight only those injustices and sins that suit them while conveniently ignoring the rest of morality, which might perhaps challenge them more deeply on a personal level. But it is equally true that many who regard themselves as orthodox and/or traditionalist equate that with fiercely upholding every ideal of the 'republican' right. This often includes things like defending the so called "second amendment" right of every citizen to be armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, for example. Where is that defined in the teaching of the Church? It is equally possible to have a realistic assessment of the personal moral contradictions and political complexities of Martin Luther King (as of other political leaders like Kennedy and indeed the present POTUS) and yet still abhor racial prejudice, injustice and brutality and to see good things - flawed too, of course - in what he achieved. He was certainly no saint and he did deny the divinity of Christ. But we fall into the same trap of editing the Gospel to suit our own bias if we simply equate it with our local party political loyalties. The American versions of political "left" and "right" do not exist in the quite same configurations outside the USA. It is perfectly possible to be be anti-abortion and yet not agree with radically individualistic and unmodified capitalism, in accordance with the social teaching of many popes; also to regards society as a familial community with shared provision of health care, for example, and to be against the unfettered proliferation of guns on our streets. Catholic morality has social consequences as well as personal ones, neither of which should be edited out of our world view. But the Catholic faith challenges and cuts across all our political and personal prejudices and seeks to make 'new men' of us all.
I can only say to anyone who thinks I have been taken in by lies about history that there are still plenty of black Americans around who can tell you what it was like to live through that era. There are also still plenty of white Americans who will tell you that they're not prejudiced, but they miss the days when the blacks knew their place.
No doubt there are also Europeans around who can tell you what they thought at the time of all the racial equality and harmony that America was so famous for around the world.
It is also good to remember what King himself used to tell his congregation about his own personal sanctity—without being too specific—when tearing him down from the pedestal he has been put on by others...
"But you know, some of us feel that it’s a tension between God and man. And in every one of us this morning, there’s a war going on. (Yes, sir) It’s a civil war. (Yes, sir) I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life. (Yes it is) And every time you set out to be good, there’s something pulling on you, telling you to be evil. It’s going on in your life. (Preach it) Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate. (Yes, Yes, sir) Every time you set out to be kind and say nice things about people, something is pulling on you to be jealous and envious and to spread evil gossip about them. (Yes, Preach it) There’s a civil war going on. There is a schizophrenia, as the psychologists or the psychiatrists would call it, going on within all of us. And there are times that all of us know somehow that there is a Mr. Hyde and a Dr. Jekyll in us. And we end up having to cry out with Ovid, the Latin poet, "I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do." We end up having to agree with Plato that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions. Or sometimes we even have to end up crying out with Saint Augustine as he said in his Confessions, "Lord, make me pure, but not yet." (Amen) We end up crying out with the Apostle Paul, (Preach it) "The good that I would I do not: And the evil that I would not, that I do." Or we end up having to say with Goethe that "there’s enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue." (All right, Amen) There’s a tension at the heart of human nature. (Oh yeah) And whenever we set out to dream our dreams and to build our temples, we must be honest enough to recognize it. ... I don’t know this morning about you, but I can make a testimony. (Yes, sir, That’s my life) You don’t need to go out this morning saying that Martin Luther King is a saint. Oh, no. (Yes) I want you to know this morning that I’m a sinner like all of God’s children. But I want to be a good man. (Yes, Preach it) And I want to hear a voice saying to me one day, "I take you in and I bless you, because you try. (Yes, Amen) It is well (Preach it) that it was within thine heart." (Yes) What’s in your heart this morning? (Oh Lord) If you get your heart right . . . [gap in tape]"
Yes, black Americans.
I have met a huge number of Black Americans, who frankly loathed MLK during his lifetime. They will be fewer, and further between, now that MLK has achieved his secular Apotheosis, thanks in large measure, to blackmail and boycotts. Yet the wonderful Bishop Lynch, a close friend of mine, God rest him, often told me that the Black people in South Carolina almost universally called MLK "Martin Loser King" before the assassination.
I often think of an acquaintance of mine, a man who was a REAL hero of the Civil Rights movement, James Meridith, whom I knew when I lived in Jackson, MS. Now THERE was a man! And a conservative Christian, too!
King was a fraud. He helped usher in the huge degradation of Black America, where 60% of Black babies are killed in abortion, and where adultery and the single parent family rule. Where meaningless advanced degrees are plentiful, but real education is an elusive mirage. Where prison seems to loom in everyone's future. Where the merit based Black middle class has been wiped out, replaced by the divisive and unjust affirmative action regime.
I do not need to hear errant nonsense about there being Black people still alive who can remember the way it was. Look out the window- it is worse now, and getting worse by the hour.
The "you" who is evil is the author of this blog. It says a lot about those who are attracted by this blog when such vitriol is directed toward Martin Luther King. I don't doubt that these authors are not wildly attracted by King's work or message. What would one call such people?
Dear Mr Manocan
Life is short; I, personally, do not waste my time searching the internet for things to read which simply irritate me. I go for those sites in which there is a degree of fruitful overlap with some of my own thoughts.
May I, pastorally, suggest to you that you do not put yourself through the agony of reading stuff that makes you cross?
I will remember you at Mass tomorrow.
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