THE FUTURE OF CONSERVATISM IN THE UK

Existe vida para além do Benfica-Porto do tempo do Calabote entre o Estado Social e o neoliberalismo.

Contra factos não há argumentos (ateístas) ...

"Robert Putnam, the Harvard professor who is author of Bowling Alone [is] now co-author, with David Campbell of the University of Notre Dame, of American Grace. American Grace, describes the impact that going to church, synagogue, mosque or temple has on society.

This is a very serious, scholarly, tome of over 600 pages, based on respected social surveys. It has a startling conclusion, that those who go to church regularly are two or three times ‘nicer’ than those who do not go, where ‘nicer’ is a short-hand term for more likely to give time, talents and money to good causes. This is after all adjustments have been made for other factors such as age, gender, race, class, wealth. It holds true even for giving to, or volunteering for, secular causes. That is to say, a regular church-goer is two or three times more likely than a non-church-goer to give money and their own time even to a secular charity.

... The anti-God squad are keen to explain the failings of church people and pride themselves in placing a high premium on facts and evidence but how do they explain the findings of Putnam and the creation by church-goers of this social capital?"

A Verdade da Fé não está dependente do comportamento dos fiéis (felizmente), nem dos benefícios sociais da Religião.

Mas aquece o coração saber que nem todos os cristãos são pedófilos ou terroristas "fundamentalistas cristãos maçónicos da extrema-direita sionista". Ainda há esperança.

Franco Vs Salazar (na opinião de William Thomas Walsh)

• William Thomas Walsh, historiador norte-americano:
  
  "Franco es un hombre honrado y modesto, que no ambicionó nunca el poder: un caballero cristiano fiel a Dios y a su Patria, como proclamó el Arzobispo de Nueva York, monseñor Spellman, después de hablar con él en 1943; Franco salvó a su pueblo del cruel destino que sufren las masas esclavizadas en Rusia y de todos los países conquistados por la hidra roja. La legislación social de Franco es mucho más avanzada que la de la República de 1931, y en varios aspectos superior, incluso, a la de los Estados Unidos. A mí me gusta el régimen de Franco por los enemigos que tiene. Estos enemigos son aquellos que odian a Cristo y a su Santa Iglesia, los más blasfemos y los más hipócritas de este triste mundo. Son aquellos que, con su propaganda diabólica pretenden hacer del mote fascista sinónimo de cristiano".
  
  
  
• William Thomas Walsh in "Our Lady of Fátima" (1947), pp. 209-210:
  
  "The Republic which so long persecuted the Church and the Fátima pilgrims vanished in the anarchy of 1926. Three generals amid popular acclaim, took over the government, and by various steps set up the dictatorship of Salazar which has greatly improved things. The new government established order and peace. The Church purified by the persecutions has found time for recuperation and restoration, for training new priests, buiding seminaries, bringing lapsed Catholics back to the fold. Tremendous progress has been made in many ways under a new and vigorous hierarchy.
  
  Yet there is much evidence to support the fears of [Sister Lucia] that her people have not done nearly enough by way of reparation for the blasphemies and indifference of former times. After all the marvels of Fátima, only 4 million out of almost 8 million Portuguese pretend to be Catholics in any sense of the word. There are hardly more than 3000 priests...
  
  In the large cities there is bitter anti-clericalism, and much Communistic activity. Churches are still closed after sundown for fear of desecration; nuns do not dare to appear on the streets in their habits; and the Salazar government still retains some of the Church property confiscated by the Republic. Mr. Salazar limits his practice of the Catholic faith to a barely discernible minimum; and has one of his officials said to me, 'It is a mistake to call our regime Catholic. So far as the Church is concerned we are neutral"
  
  Nota: A edição em português deste livro (1996) não contém esta passagem na sua totalidade.

Vatican bank president: Bigger families are solution to economic crisis

Uma opinião já anteriormente aqui defendida:

"The President of the Vatican bank Ettore Gotti Tedeschi said July 21 that the best solution to the current economic crisis is for families to have more children.

Developed nations “must invest in the family and in children in order to generate rapid economic growth,” Tedeschi said in an editorial in the Vatican paper L'Osservatore Romano.

The Vatican bank president explained that because there aren't enough young people in society to support the increasing amount of elderly, population aging “can be considered the true origin of the current economic crisis.”

He said that in Western countries, such as the U.S. and Europe in particular, the percentage of the population over 60 years old continues to grow considerably. The “cost of this tendency is not sustainable,” he added.

Steven Mosher, the head of the Population Research Institute based in Virginia, agreed with the Vatican official's take.

“Larger families are absolutely the answer to the crisis,” he told CNA on July 21.

“If Americans averaged three children, the Social Security Trust Fund would be solvent forever, without recourse to raising taxes, postponing the age at retirement, or reducing benefits,” Mosher said.

“America would possess a more robust economy and our standard of living would be higher.”

Tedeschi warned in his editorial that within the next decade, the ever-increasing percentage of people who retire will become more of a fixed cost that will be impossible to absorb and sustain by younger workers.

“In addition, increasingly fewer people are entering into the production cycle and when they manage to, they do so very slowly,” he said. “Not to mention the factor of the changing concept of employment, which had been stable until some time ago.”

Tedeschi also noted that the economic cycle of production and savings is in “decline and destined to crumble” because of the drastic reduction in income.

Faced with this reality, he said, it is more necessary now than ever “to have the courage to address the theme of births and aging of the population.”

“To ignore it is dangerous and it has become unavoidable to define a strategy to concretely support families in their natural vocation to have children.”

“Only in this way can real economic recovery be triggered,” the bank president emphasized.

Tedeschi said that a two-income family today earns less than the same family earned 30 years ago with only one income. This, he explained, is the consequence of growing taxes on the GDP in developed countries, which are intended to absorb the consequences of aging due to decreased births.

“In the end,” he said, “nature itself teaches us that if a man and a woman do not generate children it is difficult that someone takes care of them when they age. The State can try, but at a very high cost.”

Mosher added that “human beings are the ultimate resource,” and one “that you absolutely cannot do without, and for which there is no substitute.”

Whig plunderers

"In May, 1539 Parliament’s passage of the Second Act of Dissolution declared all the church property confiscated since 1536 ... and all church property to be confiscated in the future to be lawfully the property of the Crown. ... It speeded the completion of the greatest redistribution of English land and wealth since the Norman Conquest in 1066. The whole suppression worked to the direct and immediate advantage of the king, who rather abruptly became richer than any other monarch in Christendom. By the spring of 1540 not a single monastic establishment remained in existence in England or Wales. Hundreds if not thousands of the monks and nuns expelled from them had become itinerant beggars, wandering from village to village in search of work or charity. The number of England’s schools, hospitals, and institutions for the care of the aged and indigent had undergone an abrupt collapse from which it would not recover for centuries.

Under Henry VIII, “the institutions of government became tools of the plunderers, and their aim, when it was not to pull in still more plunder, was to make sure that no one threatened the bounty that Henry’s revolution had funneled to them.” ...

His son Edward, a child of nine who was tutored to be stridently evangelical and anti-Catholic, succeeded Henry. ... By statute, endowments of chantries (small chapels established for offering prayers for the dead) and assets of guilds that provided burial insurance and funded schools and charitable activities were transferred to the Crown. (Also by statute, anyone found guilty of vagrancy could be branded and enslaved.) Then the Crown confiscated most endowments of the dioceses...

Over time the plunderers covered their booty with a veneer of civility. “If it took two centuries to turn the descendants of looters and speculators into the ladies and gentlemen of Jane Austen’s novels,...”

THE CULT OF ROTHBARD: The Apotheosis of McDonald’s

1. "The “free market” fattens us up with fast food and then sells us pants with 40-inch waistlines, manufactured by Chinese wage slaves for the profit of multinational companies and the communist oligarchs with whom they do business. The same “free market” then sells us the drugs that treat all the diet-related diseases and discomforts of the Fast Food Nation, charging inflated “free market” prices made possible only by government assistance ...
   
   But in the Cult of Murray Rothbard, whose headquarters is the Von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, the Fast Food Nation is hailed as one of the “free market’s” greatest achievements...
   
   This is the Cult’s message ...: that in the “free market,” which “blesses” us in so many ways, good or evil motives don’t matter. What matters is the attentive response to “profitability signals.” It never occurs to people like Tucker that these same “profitability signals” are generated by corporations themselves, whose products—from fast food to pornography—are designed, tested and marketed to create demands for things people never needed in the first place and which only cheapen and even ruin their lives. ...
   
   Our entire civilization has been corrupted, debased and brought to the brink of outright barbarity by vices the “free market” peddles and government protects from any restraint by Christian morals or even basic human decency. In their worship of the market as a living thing that “blesses” us, the members of the Cult reject what even the renowned free-market advocate Wilhelm Röpke, in The Social Crisis of Our Times, called “the necessary sociological limits and conditions circumscribing a free market.” It was Röpke who decried “the libertarian fanatic who, postulating absolute freedom, forgets that freedom without constraint will end in the worst kind of bondage…” He likewise condemned what “we can hardly call by any other name but liberal anarchism [whose] adherents seem to think that market competition and economic rationality provide a sufficient answer to the question of the ethical foundations of our economic system.”
   
   But that is precisely the dogma of the Cult, which (to quote Röpke again) exhibits “that form of economic liberalism whose aberrations, too, cannot be better characterized than by reference to the infatuation with the Unconditional and Absolute.” By this he meant the 19th century economic rationalism the Cult promotes...

   
   

2. "Even Tucker is forced to admit, however, that “It’s true that McDonald’s is not entirely sustained by the market alone, and even overly scrupulous libertarians have jumped on the attack.” Aside from all the other government-conferred competitive advantages it receives, without which it could not sell its health-destroying trash food so cheaply, these “overly scrupulous libertarians” have noted that McDonald’s received government bailout loans from the TARP program after the “meltdown” of 2008...
   
   So, it seems even some libertarians are not willing to go as far as the Cult in lauding multinationals like McDonald’s and Wal-Mart, a veritable partner with China’s communist oligarchs. Indeed, it seems there is an accelerating bandwagon of libertarian disillusionment over a “free-market” that, as I show in the book, is really a corporate-state cartel pretending to be free enterprise. The Cult is clearly concerned about this alarming trend: “There’s a growing moral scrupulosity going on in libertarian land,” Tucker frets, “to the point that every really existing business is closely examined for any hint of state involvement (sin!)... If you defend Wal-Mart—an amazing company that provides for the world—the scrupulous will cite how it thrives off public road access.”
   
   Come, come now, Mr. Tucker. We are talking about a lot more than public road access here. We are talking, first of all, about a vast taxpayer-subsidized and maintained public transportation network—state and interstate highways, railways and airports—without which Wal-Mart, with its vast central warehouses, would be out of business and small local competitors would no longer be at a fatal disadvantage. Even Rothbard admits that the railroads without which mass capitalism was impossible could not have been built unless federal, state and local governments had seized land under eminent domain and handed it over to the railroad tycoons..."

Anders Behring Breivik é Maçon !

Este facto é relatado pela Reuters e confirmado pelos próprios maçons noruegueses.

O autor deste blog quer manifestar a sua solidariedade para com todos o maçons que se vêem injustamente associados ao bárbaro acto de um dos seus. Como é do conhecimento público, os assassínios em massa têm sido desencorajados pelas principais lojas de maçons, visto que - e cito - "são maus para o negócio [craft]".

Já agora, e como membro dos "fundamentalistas cristãos de extrema-direita", gostaria de saber quem foi o responsável pelo recrutamento de um maçon para a organização !

O responsável deve enviar de imediato os seus contactos para a sede. Entretanto, eu vou acendendo a fogueira.

É preciso que "a secreta" largue o Bernardo Bairrão e passe a vigiar...

... os "fundamentalistas cristãos da extrema-direita".

Eu estou bastante familiarizado com este meio e, portanto, gostaria de avisar os agentes d'"a secreta" para terem um especial cuidado com os letais guarda-chuvas das senhoras de idade que vão à Missa todos os dias.

Os agentes do sexo masculino devem estar muito atentos a qualquer movimento das ditas senhoras; depois de décadas a rezar o terço de joelhos, as suas rótulas têm a consistência do betão e transformaram-se com o passar do tempo em verdadeiras armas de destruição macias (i.e. de destruição de zonas macias).

Richard Dawkins vítima da inquisição ateísta

Os ‘católicos’ adversativos (pelo P. Gonçalo Portocarrero de Almada)

"A barca de Pedro é como a arca de Noé. Se esta providencial embarcação incluía toda a espécie de criaturas que havia à face da terra, também a Igreja congrega uma imensa variedade de almas. Todas as gentes, qualquer que seja a sua raça, a sua cultura, a sua língua ou os seus costumes, desde que legítimos, cabe na barca de Pedro. Por isso, graças a Deus, há católicos conservadores e progressistas, de direita e de esquerda, republicanos e monárquicos, regionalistas e centralistas, etc.

Se, em política, tudo o que parece é, o mesmo já não se pode dizer na Igreja. Tal é o caso dos ‘católicos’ adversativos. Muito embora a designação seja original, a realidade é, infelizmente, do mais prosaico e corrente:

- Eu sou católico, mas...

E, claro, a seguir a esta proposição adversativa, seguem não poucos reparos à doutrina cristã. A saber: eu sou católico, mas creio na reencarnação; eu sou católico, mas defendo o aborto; eu sou católico mas, não acredito no inferno; eu sou católico, mas sou a favor da eutanásia; eu sou católico, mas concordo com o casamento entre pessoas do mesmo sexo; etc., etc., etc.

É verdade que a Igreja acolhe também aqueles que, por desconhecimento ou por debilidade, não conseguem ainda viver de acordo com todos os seus preceitos. Ao contrário do que pretendiam os cátaros, a Igreja não é só dos puros ou dos santos, os únicos que são, de facto, cem por cento católicos. Com efeito, a Igreja não exclui os néscios, nem os fracos que, na realidade, somos quase todos nós. Mas não aceita os nossos erros, nem os nossos pecados, antes impõe que, da parte do crente, haja uma firme decisão de conversão.

Esta é, afinal, a diferença entre o pecador e o fariseu: ambos pecam, mas enquanto aquele reconhece-o humildemente e procura emendar-se, este justifica-se e, em vez de mudar de conduta, desautoriza a doutrina em que, afinal, não crê. O pecador que é sincero no seu propósito de santificação, tem lugar na comunidade dos crentes, mas não quem intencionalmente nega os princípios da fé cristã.

Na comunidade cristã há certamente margem para a diversidade de pontos de vista, também em matérias doutrinais opináveis, mas não cabe divergência no que respeita aos princípios fundamentais. Um cristão que, consciente e voluntariamente, dissente de uma proposição de fé definida pela competente autoridade da Igreja, não é simplesmente um católico diferente ou divergente, mas um fiel infiel, ou seja, um não fiel.

Conta-se que o pai de uma rapariga algo leviana, sabendo do seu estado interessante, tentou desesperadamente conseguir-lhe um marido que estivesse pelos ajustes. Para este efeito, assim tentou aliciar um possível candidato:

- É verdade que a minha filha está grávida, mas é só um bocadinho...

Ser ou não ser, eis a questão. Pode-se ser católico sendo ignorante e até muito pecador, mas não se pode ser ‘católico’ adversativo, ou seja, negando convictamente a doutrina da Igreja.

A fé não se afere por uma auto-declaração abstracta, mas pela opção existencial de seguir Cristo, crendo e agindo de acordo com os princípios do Evangelho. Não é católico quem afirma que o é, mas quem pensa e quer viver como tal. «Tu crês que há um só Deus? Fazes bem, no entanto também os demónios crêem e tremem. O homem é justificado pelas obras e não apenas pela fé. Assim como o corpo sem alma está morto, assim também a fé sem obras está morta» (Tg 2, 19.24.26)."

D. José Policarpo retracta-se das declarações sobre a Ordenação Sacerdotal de Mulheres

Chega tarde e sem o destaque que as declarações originais tiveram.

Mas não é do tribunal da opinião pública que devemos ter medo e, por isso, antes tarde do que nunca.