infanticide

It was Easter week, and a good week it was indeed. Whatever else happens in the world cannot take away from the joy of the Resurrection.

Easter Sunday this year fell on April Fool's day, and Mundabor took the time to make an Easter confession regarding how he had met  a new younger woman and in order to seek happiness he was obliged to follow his emotions and leave his family for her. I recognised it as an April Fools' day immediately, having followed his blog for long enough to realise that he would come up with one, and having learned enough of the man to realise that he would keep his adultery secret, as any half-decent man would, instead of parade it about.

Sadly, not everyone was in on this and we had some of our lost Catholic sheep advising him to have an annulment enough so as to put a NOChurch stamp on his adultery. This again re-inforces the point I have made many times that the annulment process today is little more than a Catholic divorce and furthermore, that is how most Catholics seem to view it as well.

One story which might well have made a good April Fools' day, but which alas, was just another day in NOChurch, was the one about the parish which used a drone to deliver the Blessed Sacrament in  a monstance to the priest. Ringing a bell and walking solemnly to the altar just isn't entertaining enough for modern man, you know.

As the title pointed out, this was neck muscles training time and if there is one thing NOChurch is good at it is getting me to shake my head on account of the sheer volume of the sheer madness which I witness and read about. Shaking one's head is all one can do at times and I admit that I am forced to do it quite often.  I can admit that I never thought I would see the words "drone" and "Blessed Sacrament" in the same sentence, and we have to thank NOChurch for making that happen, I suppose.

Having experienced the pre-1950s Holy Week celebration, Jeff Ostrowski came to realise that he was wrong to Dread the “Pre-1955” Holy Week. One of the most peculiar thing about it was that the vigil was held in the morning - which even I find a bit odd - but he wrote that it didn't seem out of place. That it was much longer did not seem to be as much of a drain as he had feared either.

The Skripal poisoning story still hasn't died, and neither have those who were allegedly poisoned. At this point I am only continuing to use the term 'Skripal poisoning' mainly for categorising reasons, as that is the tag that I gave it at the beginning. Last week we were told that Yulia Skripal had woken up from her coma. This week we were informed that someone had logged into her facebook page when she was supposed to be in a coma. The Russians insist that they   won’t accept probe into Skripal case if Russian specialists won’t take part and who can blame them? There doesn't seem to have been a poisoning at all, one would have to conclude at this point. The Russians are not letting this story die down, and nor should they. The U.K. has to be named and shamed over this, and heads should roll, if not literally then at least figuratively, because we have agents who seem intent on starting a major confrontation and looking for a premise on which to do it.

In this week's entry for the culture of death, we had a German woman jailed for 9yrs for murdering her newborns & keeping bodies in freezer.

It is not all bad news though, so, for instance, in Syria, rebuilding efforts are underway, now that the only major pockets of Islamists remaining are those in areas under American protection. This is exemplified by drone footage from Ghouta showing the clearing of a highway which has been blocked for a long time on account of the fighting.

It would hardly be a week's review if we did not have stories regarding Bergoglio's ongoing efforts to destroy the Catholic Church and the Catholic Faith. This week's entries are varied but I shall only pass over them in brief.

First the world's favourite heretic was busy telling missionaries that they shouldn't be missionaries, and this didn't make news any more as we have tome to expect that sort of nonsense. Then we had a story which was issued on April Fools' day but which had not been retracted or revealed as one, regarding how one non-Italian cardinal confronted him regarding his denial of hell, one of his many heresies. I can't think that our cowardly cardinals will let it go beyond faint voice-raising inside the Vatical walls, but it's good that we have that at least.

Louie Verrechio had is take on Bergoglioism in a piece titled "Bergoglianism: An effort to rewrite the Divine Law" which details how Bergoglio's strategy in fighting the Faith is to reduce it to mere rules and ideals. In "Is Francis Catholic? The burden of proof" he lays out the case that it is simply not enough to presume that bergoglio is a Catholic  until proven otherwise, on account of the fact that he was baptised as one and presumably is in charge of the Catholic Church. No, rather he argues that "there are well-established criteria that must be met in order for one to legitimately lay claim to such membership". This is in accordance with the Encyclical Mystici Corporis written by Pius XII.

Bergoglio has, of course, demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that he absolutely abhors Holy Mother Church and the Catholic Faith which she...

There is really only one place to start in a review of this week, and that is with the most tragic death - in the true meaning of the word tragic - of Charlie Gard. This is one of the saddest and certainly most frightening stories that I have come to know in all of Western history.

If my understanding of the facts is correct, this is what happened:

• An unwed couple gives birth to a boy with a rare genetic defect, untreatable to date.
• The doctors decide that the boy's disease is so serious that he will not survive and they want to turn off the life support.
• The parents then say that he should be able to die at home, in the loving embrace of a loving home instead of a sterile hospital.
• The hospital refuses to discharge him insisting that he must die there.
• The parents file a suit to bring him home.
• The hospital challenges this.
• In the meantime, this case has brought enough international attention to it that a doctor working in the U.S. proposes to have him flown there for further treatment, insisting that there is a slight chance that he could lead a relatively normal life if the treatment works.
• The hospital still refuses to dismiss him. The courts still agree.
• The parents have in the meantime managed to raise the money required to take him to the U.S., almost $2 million at the time of the boy's death.
• The high court rules that the hospital can keep him.
• The parents keep fighting.
• The parents appeal to the EU.
• The European Court refuses to hear the case.
• Trump and Bergoglio get involved, with the former saying he is willing to fly the child to the U.S. for help and the latter that he is willing to have him flown to Rome.
• The court case drags on.
• The parents give up, having had the U.S. doctor fly in to the U.K. to physically examine the boy and with the doctor concluding that too much time has passed without treatment for there to be any hope. Had the treatment come earlier his chances might have been good.
• The parents still want to take him to die.
• The hospital refuses to do that and finally...
• Little Charlie Gard dies in a sterile and cold hospital, surrounded by his parents.

I'll have to admit that I didn't really follow this story from the start, so some of the details and timeline might be a bit off, but I think I have captured the gist of it.

My readers can rest assured that I shall not insult their intelligence by even entertaining the idea that the state of the U.K. could at any time in these proceedings have been interested in the well-being of Charlie Gard. So we must look at why the state fought so hard to make sure that little Charlie Gard died in a hospital and was prevented from leaving the country to seek treatment elsewhere.

Beneath all the headlines, the principles that the U.K., and EU were fighting for are not that difficult to piece out. They are that the government:

• Has an absolute right to decide who gets to live or die, depending on what they deem to be a worthy life.
• Has supreme rights which trump parental rights - primarily the parents' rights to decide what is best for the child. This is in spite of the fact that nobody in the governent will mourn for the child, hold a wake for him, or even attend their funeral - that is, assuming they are generous enough to release the body from the hospital for burial.
• Decides when you die.
• Decides where  you die.

I'll simply point out that the reason for keeping him a prisoner instead of releasing him abroad for treatment was because the hospital decided that his life, even if the treatment had worked, would not have been worth living. In other words, if the government determines that your quality of life is low enough, it can keep you locked up in a hospital, preventing  you from seeking treatment from a doctor of your choice anywhere else, and depriving you of any life support.

How is this any different than the most despotic and evil regimes frequently brought up in these conversations? Is it not always the case that the principal at stake for these regimes, and what made their evil snowball, was the very idea that the government assumed the power to decide which lives were worthy of not killing and which ones could be disposed of?

If this doesn't sum up the culture of death, it's hard to think what does. The most startling thing is that the very premise that the government decides what is a life worth living based on its subjective quality measure was not even challenged, as far as I could tell. It has become so ingrained in us that the governnment has absolute power of all within its borders that nobody even notices when a fundamental right is at stake.

I mean, it's so obvious that the government was morally wrong that even Bergoglio intervened on the side of Charlie Gard! In other words, he must have seen it as a very safe space for grandstanding, this being the man who tells us not to obsess with the killing of the unborn, after all.

This is what 3 generations of legal killing of the unborn has led to. We have a society in which children can be killed in plain sight with nobody batting an eyelid. Yes, I know he died naturally, but in preventing him from seeking medical aid which could have saved his life, the government in effect murdered him.

The only other issue of any note is Donald Trump re-introducing the ban on transexuals in the military. What is common sense in every non-Western countries, and what would have been common sense in any...