As far as scandals in the Church go, this was a normal week by NOChurch standards.
We had Carlo Capella, a former Vatican diplomat, being arrested on child pornography charges in the Vatican - well overdue, one might add.We had Cardinal Schönborn intimating that we could have priestesses in the Catholic Church.
Bergoglio issued yet another apostolic exhortation, this time called "Gaudete et Exsultate" - 'Rejoice and be Glad', which, let not the title deceive you, was yet another big rant against those who hold to the Catholic faith. We also had Bergoglio seeming to aplogise for his handling of the Barros sexual abuse affiliation scandal in Chile, and I write "seeming" because he found a way to say that he was not actually to blame and that he only acted wrongly because of the information he had received.
The fallout from Bergoglio's denial of heresy continuted, with one of the most prominent American neo-Catholics, Fr. Dwight Longenecker, finally publicly turning on him. The Remnant was quick to draw attention to the fact that Bergoglio is losing support from those who have defended him all along.
The big news were of course that the U.S. and its NATO lap dogs launched strikes against Syria. This time at least it took them almost a week before launching strikes against Syria, which is more than the 2-3 days it took them at roughly the same time last year.
Much of the week - by anyone honest - was spent actually exposing the absurdity of the alleged chemical attacks which were used as the justification for this NATO attack to have been carried out by Assad. A rather large chunk went to actually showing that the alleged events never actually took place, and that the whole narrative had been a hoax. That did not matter for Donald Trump and co. , however, as they launched their airstrikes on the very same day that the OPCW inspectors were supposed to visit the site of the alleged incident.
Most of the media covered itself in shame yet again, with Tucker Carlson the one notable and admirable dissenter in the U.S. In a series of episodes he showed just how much the U.S. has lied about this stuff before, that the U.S. defence minister had just 2 months prior come out and said that the chemical attack which was alleged to have taken place last year and which was used as the justification for airstrikes then was never actually proved . He also pointed out that there seems to be a pattern in which as soon as it seems as though the U.S. might be pulling out or drawing down its involvement in helping the Islamists in Syria, a 'chemical attack' takes place, which is used to drum up support for some sort of U.S. intervention in Syria.
The Russians, are, of course, in Syria and helping the Syrian government strike back against the head-chopping heart-eating Islamists who the U.S. and its Western allies - not to mention Turkey - have been hell-bent on unleashing in Syria. Russia had warned that it would shoot down any missiles which threatened its forces in Syria, and not only that, but that they would also target any launch platforms which were used. Fortunately, that did not come to fruition as the NATO strikes were cosmetic at best. Nobody died, which is the most important thing, and the equipment that was destroyed does not seem to have been irreplaceable.
Still, we are talking about an unprovoked attack on a sovereign country founded on a very lazy lie which was easily disproved and we should all be concerned that the NATO gang feel they can attack any country for any reason, or no reason at all. It should also be a cause of embarassment for all Americans that the president of the U.S. has more latitude in attacking countries for no reason than he has to put a stop to spurious money-sucking investigations directed towards him, or even building the wall which was the cornerstone of his presidential campaign.
A petition was launched by prominent Catholics in an attempt to impress on Trump the importance of the just war doctrine, not that it did much help.
I have already had occasion to write once on "The greatest fantasy in the Western rogue states' latest attack on Syria" and I intend to follow this story because it deserves to be followed, and also because of the disgraceful actions I have seen from both Catholics and non-Catholics regardin this latest Western aggression against yet another sovereign state. The mainstream media was predictably extremely vociferous in its support and encouragement for military action against Syria, relying on lies and disinformation based upon previous lies and disinformation to make its case.
Some of the most prominent traditionalist Catholics were very vocal in their opposition to these strikes, as was the Christian community in Syria. The Remnant and OnePeterFive deserve honourable mentions as well as contrast. At The Remnant, nobody commenting on the story believed the U.S. government story. At OnePeterFive, the publishers did not believe it, but since the quality of Catholicism is lower there - it is not exclusively or even primarily traditionalist in nature - the quality of the responses towards the official Western narrative was also noticeably worse.
One more important thing to take home from this is that Donald Trump missed a golden chance to assure his re-election. If he had turned to the people who elected him and told him that this is just another fake news media ploy, I have little doubt that he would have stood out as a giant among (granted, mediocre) men. Instead, he missed the oppostunity to look smart for once and now looks just like another stooge of the deep state and the American war machine. As far as I am concerned, the U.S. would be better off if Donald Trump was to be impeached because at least that would pull...
