FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fortieth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019):THIRTY-NINTH HELPING

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Eighth Helping 

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Eighth Helping

Any presentation of moral rules cannot contain rules that contradict one another. Any moral system must adhere to the principle of noncontradiction. X and not-X cannot both be true. “Without the principle of no-contradiction, morality is impossible,” says Benedict XVI. Moreover, the rules must be related in such a way that following one of them doesn’t automatically commit one to breaking another. So, for any two rules to be part of the same system, they must not only be logically consistent, they must be compatible in the sense that observing one is compatible with not violating the other.

The justification of war as just and therefore morally permissible exists with many philosophies and non-Christian theologies. To the best of my awareness none of these philosophies or theologies violate the principle of non-contradiction by justifying war within the context of their system of morality.

Irrationality, indeed madness in reason’s mask, enters in when the attempt is made to put a just war theory into the understanding of right and wrong, that is, into what is God’s will and what is not God’s will as revealed by the person and teaching of Jesus, the Incarnate Word of God. Not only can a Christian just war theory (CJWT) not be constructed without violating the logical principle of non-contradiction, but it also cannot be implemented without breaking an untold number of moral truths that Jesus teaches as the will of God in the Gospels, e.g., “Love your enemies” vs burn your enemy to death, “Love as I have loved you” vs love as General ‘Blood and Guts’ Patton loved, “I was hungry and you gave me to eat,” vs blockade these people until 400,000 of their children under twelve years of age are dead, Blessed are the merciful,” vs be-medal, be-ribbon, heroize and honor the merciless.

Christian just war theory was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be a phony morality and absurdist Christian morality.

Jesus does not need any of His chosen disciples to participate in any war for any reason in order for Him or them to accomplish all that has to be accomplished to fulfill completely His and their mission in this world. So, on top of all else, there is absolutely no need for a Christian just war theory because neither Jesus nor His disciples need it to do anything they have been commissioned by their Lord, God and savior to do in this life.

So why is there this commitment to misunderstanding and/or ignorance with respect to the Nonviolence Jesus of the Gospels and His way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies among the ruling class of the various Churches? And why is there simultaneously this unctuous, vigorous commitment to this bizarro Christian just war theory that in theory and practice does not have a leg to stand on?

The answer is that hell has no fury like a vested interest masquerading as a moral principle. CJWT theory does not exist for the moral and spiritual benefit of the individual Christian. The proof of this is that it is very rarely taught in Christian institutions and when taught is taught shoddily. CJWT exists primarily to protect and enhance the political and economic interests of the Churches who espouse it in some form or another. It exists to give Christian moral cover to the local political and economic bosses when they want to kill people for some reason and to assure them that there will be no problem in recruiting an endless supply of Christian cannon fodder. CJWT exists so that the Churches and those who rule them will have earthly power and have access to power and wealth of this world by assuring power and wealth that it will be there to supply the powerful and wealthy gunners and enforcer to protector and/or enhance their interest.

So, the bishops and rulers of the just warist Churches nurture and brainwash—by employing every Christian word, symbol and structure available to them—their flocks from childhood onward, diocese by diocese, into the morally cockamamie and unworkable CJWT. They all do this so thoroughly that the individual Christian has CJWT so deeply embedded in his or her brain that most Christians cannot even consider calling CJWT into question; and most cannot even conceive that following a Nonviolent Jesus who teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is realistic or even sane.

So, the question I have for my reader is this: Are you going to tell your bishop, your pastor, the person to the left and right of you in the pew that the CJWT is a bogus Christian moral position? Are you going to inform them that CJWT is as much fake Good News as Christian Just Witch Burning Theory or Christian Just Jew and Heretic Burning Theories? If not why not? If not you who? You certainly have enough material to rationally support what you are saying. Consider the pertinence of a thought from Charles Darwin to your situation: “To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes even better than, establishing a new truth or fact.” Error cannot be eliminated by being silent about it—especially being silent in relations to those who propagate it and those who believe it to be true.

Perhaps a more urgent reason not to be silent about the nuttiness, the absurdity of the Christian Just War Theory can be seen through the words of Voltaire (1694-1778): “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” So those that can make you believe the absurdity of a Christian Just War Theory—the absurdity that a Baptized Christians can follow Jesus and His Way and His teaching by going into the military and killing and maiming enemies, the absurdity that CJWT is logically and operationally compatible with the person and message of Jesus—can make you commit atrocities. Christian history since the time of Constantine is blanketed with layer upon layer of corpses that incontrovertibly attest that to the fact that the absurdity of Christian Just War Theory has ceaselessly led to Christians committing atrocities against humanity and against each other on a grand scale.

So, the question for each Christian is am I going to publicly name an absurdity an absurdity, or am I going to permit this absurdity to propagate freely and thereby continually propagate ever new Christian atrocities? Silence serves the status quo and gives consent to the status quo—and its consequences.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Seventh Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Seventh Helping

The Weapons Scientist: Today’s Grim Reaper

Before the first atomic bomb explosion at Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, there are men and women of great scientific and mathematical learning and of high intelligence who work hard every day for years so that the men in Enola Gay could say “bombs away” 30,000 feet over a hundred thousand of human beings living below in Hiroshima.

Before the first death sentence by electric chair is carried out on a thirty year old illiterate alcoholic from the slums of Buffalo, NY named William Kemmler on August 6, 1890 at Auburn State Prison, In New York, two of the finest minds on the planet work hard and vigorously compete to create and to market to politicians their respective versions of the “killing chair” as the electric chair is less euphemistically called at that time.

August 6, then, is a date on which two utterly new scientific homicide gizmos enter into use in the human community. But before both August 6 dates, there are the scientifically best and the brightest using an enormous portion of their finite life’s time and all of the special talents of intellect with which they are gifted to energetically figure out how to destroy other human beings.

Many, not all, but more than likely most of these brilliant men and women who brought these killing contraptions into existence were Baptized Christians. Edwin Davis who pulled the switch that burnt William Kimmler to death and Paul Tibbets who commanded the Enola Gay B-29, flew it over Hiroshima and gave the order to drop the A-Bomb that burnt 60,000 human beings to death were minor players in both events, although attention is often focused on them probably because of the immediacy of their presence to the event. But, anyone of thousands of people could have done their jobs.

The men and women who are truly indispensible to bringing these instruments of homicide from non-existence to existence are the scientists. They are the that-without-which killing chairs, atomic bombs and many, many other high-tech homicide gadgets and their legacy of multilevel death dealing could not exist. (High-tech scientific homicide implements are so expensive to invent and produce that they kill people, even if it’s never used; by their cost alone they deny many human beings the necessities of life.)

As it became clear to ordinary people after World War I, the manufacturers and marketers of weapons made fortunes once war was declared, selling them to all sides. Indeed, in many cases they were involved as instigators of the lethal hostilities. But the manufacturers and marketers have little to sell if the scientists do not turn their lives, time and talents over to them in order to come up with ever new, astounding and effective ways of doing the dirty deed of homicidal violence.

But in Christianity, the ABCD weapons scientists—atomic, bacteriological, chemical and electromagnetic—seem to be morally Teflon protected. Never in the Christian churches, regardless of the amount of death, destruction and misery that Christian scientists bring into the human condition by their new homicidal apparatuses, are they personally or collectively called to account in light of the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels for what they are doing with their Christian lives by being a major link in the chain of so much death and destruction of life.

Unlike the Christian who is born and brought up in the slum who kills somebody in a robbery and who is then excoriated, told to repent of his or her ways, accept punishment as the justice they deserve, get rehabilitation and make restitution as far as possible to those affected by his homicide, the Christian weapons scientist is either honored or ignored for his or her part in the homicides and misery in which they participated— homicides and misery far beyond one person.

Consider this one example of the end result of the work of the well-paid weapons scientist.

U.S. Pilot speaking:

“We sure are pleased with those backroom boys at DOW Chemical. The original product they made (napalm) wasn’t so hot—if the gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys started adding polystyrene—now it sticks like shit to a blanket. But, then if the gooks jumped under water it stopped burning, so they started adding Willie Peter (WP white phosphorous) so’s to make it burn better. It will even burn under water now. And, just one drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the bone so they die anyway from phosphorous poisoning.”

-U.S. pilot, LIFE Magazine, July 1966

Nothing comes from nothing. Before the killing chair of August 6, 1890 there were the boys in the backroom, Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, giving all they had to make “electricide” a success. Before the atomic bombing on August 6, 1945 there were the boys in the backroom, Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Leslie Groves, Ernest O. Lawrence etc. Nothing comes from nothing. Before the V2 rocket plowed into London, there was Wernher von Braun. Nothing comes from nothing. Before nine year old Kim Phuc runs screeching in pain from the flames in a napalmed village with the clothes burnt off of her and with 90% burns across her body there were the boys in the backroom at DOW. Nothing comes from nothing. There is no sane, reasonable and valid way for a Christian who is a scientist to interpret and to obey Jesus’ “new commandment” to love as I have loved by being one of the boys in the back room.

It is far past time for the Churches to see and as institutional extensions of Christ in time and space, speak as Jesus would speak to the Christian scientists in your Churches. Nothing comes from nothing—not even metanoia.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Sixth Helping 

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Fifth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Fifth Helping

 “You are Christ.”

-St. Pope John Paul II

The Gospel is ultimately about God and about God’s desire and plan for the salvation of each person He adopted in His love when by His Word he drew him or her out of nothingness. Everything that Jesus calls His disciples to do in thought, word and deed, He sees in the Father. His followers were to put up their swords, love their enemies, do good to those who hate them, pray for those who persecute them, forgive 70×7 times and bless those who curse them. Why; So that you may be children of your heavenly Father (Mt 5: 45). Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, His Sermon on the Mount, His Sermon from the Cross are first and foremost an infallible portrait of God—the only God there is, was or ever will be, the God in whose image and likeness each human being is created (Gn 1:26-27).

What Jesus, the Word of God, is, lives and teaches is what every human being at the root of his or her being desires to be and to become, that is, he or she desires to be and to become what he or she is at the point where the root of his or her existence intersects with the very Ground of Bing from which the unique being of each arises and is nourished. St. Augustine when instructing Christians in what is the proper consciousness or disposition for receiving Holy Communion writes, “Consume what you are. Become what you consume.”

If Jesus is “the image of the invisible God” (Co1: 15) and each human being is “made in the image and likeness of God” (Gn1: 26-28) by the “Word of God through whom all things were made,” then when Jesus, the “Word of God made flesh” says, ‘I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you,’ He is saying, “Become what you are—Me. Act from what you are—Me. Put off the culturally nurtured old an, old woman, old image you have of yourself in your mind and be transfigured by seeing and living from the image of yourself that has been at your essence from the beginning—Me. This is the image that I, Jesus—the ‘Word of God made flesh… through whom all things were made”—molded you from and into. Believe in Me and believe Me. Live, indeed embrace passionately, the ‘new commandment” I gifted you with by my life, teaching, death and resurrection and become what you are, Me. Live in what you are, Me. Choose according to what you are, Me. Die into what you are, Me. Rise in what you are, Me.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Fourth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Fourth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Third Helping 

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Third Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Second Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-Second Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-First Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirty-First Helping

Since the “new commandment” imperatively and irrevocably centers the entire Christian moral life as well as the definition of “love” on the person, words and deeds of Jesus, any understanding of the will of God, of the Way of Jesus, of right and wrong, of good and evil, by those who believe Jesus is Lord,  that logically departs from the “new commandment,” cannot be the will of God, the Way of Jesus, right or good. In His “Eleventh Commandment,” His “new commandment,” Jesus commands——that every intentional act, whether it be in the domain of thought, word or deed, be made in conformity with His “new commandment.”

In His Great Commission to the eleven Apostles, to their successors and to the Church (Mt 28:17-20), Jesus says,

“All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you. And know that I am with you always, even until the end of the age,” (Emphasis added)

The “teaching them to obey all that I have commanded you,” segment of Jesus’ Great Commission to the Church has to include, indeed has to rank above all other teachings that must be taught, since the “new commandment” “contains the entire Law of the Gospel” and “expresses the Father’s entire will.” I would ask my reader if, when growing up, this is what he or she was taught by their Churches as the ultimate and definitive norm by which he or she was to discern the will of God in any and every situation?

In most cases in most Churches, most Christians heard of hundreds or thousands of acts that were and were not the will of God. But, they seldom, if ever heard, that the “new commandment” is the final and ultimate norm of the Christian conscience against which all decisions of right and wrong must be measured. If the “new commandment” is not the ultimate norm of morality for the Christian, who or what is a superior ultimate norm of conscience for the Christian?

How many of us Christians were nurtured morally in childhood, in adolescence or in adult life into the moral habitus of mind of continually asking ourselves the simple question, how would Jesus love in this situation? And, why were we not so nurtured by the Church—especially since this is what Jesus explicitly and specifically commissioned and commanded the Church to teach and to do?

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy.

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirtieth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirtieth Helping

 The “New Commandment:”

                                                The heart, the Sacred Heart, of Christian morality

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§782) teaches that the Church is marked by characteristics that clearly distinguish it from all other religious, ethnic, political or cultural groups found in history: Its law is the “new commandment “‘to love as Christ loved us’ (Jn 13:34). This is the ‘new’ law of the Holy Spirit (Rm 8:2; Ga 5:25).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§1970) also teaches The Law of the Gospel requires us to make the decisive choice between “the two ways”and to put into practice the words of the Lord. The entire Law of the Gospel is contained in the “new commandment” of Jesus to love one another as he has loved us (Jn 15:12,13:34).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§2822, 2826) also teaches that Jesus teaches us that one enters the Kingdom of Heaven not by speaking words, but by doing the will of my Father in heaven (Mt 7:21). His commandment is that you “love one another; even as I have loved you, you should love one another. This commandment summarizes all the others and expresses the Father’s entire will (Jn13:34;1Jn 3;4;Lk 10:25-37). 

Jesus in the Gospels lives and teaches by word and deed a Way of Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstance, even of lethal enemies. Therefore, that love which is “as I have love,” that love which “contains the entire Law of the Gospel,” that love which “summarizes all the others and expresses the Father’s entire will,” that love which “clearly distinguish the Church from all other religious, ethnic, political or cultural groups found in history ,” that love for which “the Law of the Gospel requires us to make a decisive choice and to put into practice,” that love which is in conformity with Jesus’ “new commandment” is a Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies in imitation of Him. It is love (agape) in logical conformity with the words and deeds of the  historical Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels. It is love in conformity with the Nonviolent Person in the Gospels whose will on earth and in heaven was and is to do the entire will of the Father, regardless of cost: “Father if you are willing take this cup from me; yet, your will not mine be done” (Lk 22:42).

“I would like to obey the “new commandment” but the price I would have to pay to do it in this situation is just too much. No reasonable person can be expected to pay such a price.” Christians and institutional Christian Churches have filled libraries and pulpits for centuries trying to morally justify this “walk away” from Jesus’ “new commandment.” But, if the “new commandment” “contains the entire Law of the Gospel” and “express the Father’s entire will,” then to “walk away” from Jesus’ “new commandment” is to refuse to do the Father’s will. It is to say, to the Lord God, “My will be done not Yours.” “Non serviam.” “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe.” “I will not serve because I no longer believe.”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Ninth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Ninth Helping

There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil

to one who is striking at the root. -Thoreau

Most of what is most important in existence takes place on the invisible side.”

–Rabbi Abraham Heschel

To chip away only at the visible side of the iceberg of evil is to leave evil as powerful and as destructive as ever in the human condition.. It is to support the status quo of evil, even if protesting against it. To effectively overcome evil, a person while chipping away at the evil on the visible side of existence must simultaneously chip away at the evil on the non-visible side of existence.

It is the evil on the invisible side of existence, which is the source that relentlessly feeds and sustains evil on the visible side of existence. Diminishing and eliminating the non-visible dimension of the iceberg of evil can only be achieved by one method, namely, doing acts that chip away at visible evil with Christlike love of friends and enemies.

Only God and the power of God can completely conquer evil—and death. Only the power and wisdom of God can vanquish the gargantuan power of evil that lay behind all visible evil acts but is not visible. Jesus as presented in the Gospels is God, the “Word (logos) made flesh, the Messiah, Lord and Savior. He knows and taught the Way to subdue evil, the Way of Resurrection, the Way to Eternal Life, the Way to eternal communion with God for one and all. To again quote St. Peter, from the time when many disciples were leaving Jesus because His teachings were thought to be too difficult and Jesus asked, “Are you also going to leave me?” Peter replied, “Lord, where can we go, you have the words to eternal life.”

The littlest thought, word or deed in the spirit and model of  “new commandment” love is the Way and is what must be present if a human being, regardless of what he or she is doing, is in reality to undermine the power of evil in him or herself and in the human condition. To only hack at the branches of evil is to perpetuate evil, even if one is simultaneously denouncing it. “New commandment” love strikes at the root. It is the only reality that evaporates the invisible root of evil while simultaneously trying to make  visibly evil branches good and good fruit bearing.

Of course, since “new commandment” love is “to love as I have love,” it must be a nonviolent  Christlike love for all in all circumstances, since this is the love that “I” historically lived unto His last breath and commanded His disciples to live until their last breaths.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Eighth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Eighth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Seventh Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Seventh Helping

The Mystery of The Nonviolent Jesus and His Way of Nonviolent Love

The original name of Christianity was The Way — The Way – in scripture. It was called The Way which meant a way of living; a moral way of existing in the World consistent with the will of God. Jesus teachings were the way. We all know deep in our hearts that Jesus really does expect us to live what he taught.

—

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Sixth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Sixth Helping

Gospel Nonviolence and Culpable Conscience

“The effort one is obliged to make in order to acquire moral certainty that an action is morally permissible is to be measured by the importance of the action itself and the consequences which can be reasonably anticipated. If the life of a neighbor is liable to be imperiled by actions of ours, we must choose the safest course of action so as to avoid this evil effect. War with its dire consequences can never be waged on the grounds of probable right.” —Rev. Bernard Haring, C.SS.R., THE LAW OF CHRIST, Vol I, Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur (1960)

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Fifth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Fifth Helping

Gospel Nonviolence and Self Deception

Self Deception: “It is all but impossible to get a person to see a truth if his or her livelihood or status, or even just comfort, depends on him or her not seeing that truth.” -ECM

Self-deception is making oneself believe or forget something of critical importance, which points overwhelmingly to conclusions opposite to the ones adopted by the self-deceiver. In other words, it is critically important that Jesus was non-violent. It is critically important that He taught a way of non-violence, of friends and enemies. It is critically important that original Christianity was non-violent. Stephen, Paul, and so forth and so on, those are critical matters, so we won’t even look at that. It’s critically important that the cross itself is the presentation of a man in an ultimate crisis, being attacked by violence and responding non-violently to it.

The cross is a symbol of non-violent love. It is not the sword. It is not a symbol of revenge. It’s returning good for evil, not hurt for hurt. Father, forgive them, and so forth, for they know not what they do. These are matters of critical importance that are simply ignored or forgotten—and hence, evil is called good.

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Fourth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Fourth Helping

All human beings desire to know, and truth is the proper object of this desire. Everyday life shows how concerned each of us is to discover for ourselves, beyond mere opinions, to know how things really are. People cannot be genuinely indifferent to the question of whether what they know is true or not. If they discover that it is false, they reject it; but if they can establish its truth, they feel themselves rewarded. It is this that St. Augustine teaches when he writes: “I have met many who wanted to deceive, but none who wanted to be deceived.” — John Paul II, Encyclical Fides et Ratio

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Third Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Third Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Second Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-Second Helping:

Unjust War

The first weapon of war is the lie. The first casualty of war is the truth. These two universally known and historically validated facts are truths that Christian just war theory, Christian just warists and Christian just war Churches are adamantly and chronically culpably blind to. And this, despite the verifiable fact that this head-in-the-sand moral posture has resulted in and is resulting in Christians destroying ten of millions of human beings and inflicting intolerable human suffering on ten of millions of others by their Ostrich based just war.morality. Morally culpable self-deception is refusing to look because I know I won’t see what I want to see.

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-First Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twenty-First Helping:

Post-Constantinian Christianity  

A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right.

The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands, and even millions, of other people’s lives for personal gain. As Patrick J. Buchanann writes in his book, The Unnecessary War, “War is the creations of individual not of nations.”

The struggle of human beings against those who lust to have power over them is the struggle of memory against forgetting. A long habit, systematically nurtured and systematically sustained, of not remembering the violent, vile and vicious as wrong gives them a superficial appearance of being right—which then morally permits, indeed fosters further violence, vileness and viciousness. To justify an evil is to perpetuate that evil. To justify an evil is to be a perpetuator of that evil. To ignore an evil is to guarantee that it will perpetuate itself with evermore lavish zeal.

• Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twentieth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twentieth Helping:

The Church and the Massive and Monstrous Violence of War

—

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Nineteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Nineteenth Helping

Nonviolence, Conscience and History

• Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Eighteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Eighteenth Helping

Nonviolence and Resurrection Ethics

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Seventeenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Seventeenth Helping

Gratitude and Nonviolence

https://youtu.be/08qpZrJm60w

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019):Sixteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019):Sixteenth Helping:

A concise 10 minutes on Nonviolence & Hope – The Christian vocation is about hope.

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fifteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fifteenth Helping:

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fourteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fourteenth Helping:

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Thirteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twelfth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Twelfth Helping

The Gift of Nonviolence: (Ten minutes)

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Eleventh Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Eleventh Helping

Why not pray the Sanctus on Sundays as follows,

“Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of love (or Lord God who is love or Lord God Father of all)

Heaven and earth are full of your glory.

Hosanna in the highest.

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.

Hosanna in the highest,”

instead of

“Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of host

Heaven and earth are full of your glory, etc.”

Host as use in the Sanctus is a little known archaic English word that means armies. It comes from the Medieval Latin word hostis that means army. But, the archaic host is an accurate translation of the official Latin Mass text which reads,

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth. Dominus Deus Sabaoth is a Latin translation of the Hebrew Yahweh Sabaoth, which means God of Armies. The title is common in the Old Testament being used 284 times. However, Jesus never uses it.

So why do most of the Christian Churches still employ God of armies? Why do they not use Jesus’ designation for God: Abba or Father, or even love

Are heaven and earth filled with the glory of the God of armies or the glory of God who is love, Father of all?

Why the obfuscation via the use of a misleading, almost unknown, archaic English word?

Do you, personally, as a disciple of Jesus,  want to call Holy and praise the God of Armies or the God of love  each Sunday?

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Tenth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Ninth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Ninth Helping

The saving act of Jesus is an act of love of the type which He recommends in the Gospels. The power which destroys all other powers is the power of love, the love of God revealed and active in Jesus Christ. God revealed in Jesus that He loves man and will deliver him through love and through nothing else.

The pivot of the Christian moral revolution is love [agape]. This love is the entirely new and unique feature of Christian moral teaching; it is not the center of a moral structure, it is the entire moral structure.  I venture to state its totality by saying that in the New Testament an act which is not an act of love has no moral value at all. There is no moral action in Christian life except the act of love, the kind of love which is specifically Christian was so much a novelty that to express its revolutionary significance, it was necessary to infuse new meaning into a Greek word rarely seen in profane literature: “agape.” The power of this love is seen in the death of Jesus; it is seen more fully in His resurrection. 

The saving act of Jesus is an act of love of the type which He recommends in the Gospels.

Rev. John L. McKenzie, Premier Catholic Biblical Scholar mid-Twentieth Century

The deed of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, as Jesus loved His friends and enemies, is not unrelated to the eternal salvation of one and all. Gospel Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstances is not merely, or even  primarily, a temporal political tactic, nor is it a mere never-to-be-achieved ideal of the human imagination.

The deed of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, as Jesus loved His friends and enemies, is an act in conformity with the definitively revealed will of God through Jesus—the Incarnate Word of God—which is to be obeyed in this moment and in the next and in the next all the way to eternity by those who call Jesus, “Lord.” The deed of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, as Jesus loved His friends and enemies, is participation in the Life of God, Who is love, now, and ending in participation in the Life in God, Who is love, forever for all.

Parenthetically, an act that is logically inconsistent with Gospel Nonviolent Love is neither participation in the Life of God now, nor does it conclude in participation in the Life of God forever.

The absence of an on-going, explicit consciousness in Catholics and in Christians of the ultimate teleological purpose of Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is a major incarnational, evangelical, spiritual and moral catastrophe in many, many Christian Churches, and even in many explicitly nonviolent Christian peace and justice  ministries. Gospel Nonviolence and its relation to Eternal Life appear to be close to a non-thought in the world of Catholic and Christian Nonviolence—and in the understanding of nonviolence in general.

In T.S. Elliot’s play, Murder in the Cathedral, St. Thomas Becket knowing that some people are out to murder him articulates the last and most severe temptation he faces and must overcome in these words: “The last of these is the greatest treason, to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” With these words he is paraphrasing precisely what St. Paul proclaims in 1 Corinthian 13: 1-3, 13.

Gospel Nonviolence is not merely the absolute rejection of violence, although it includes that. Nor is it possible for it to be solely a political tactic. It is the rejection of violence coupled with “returning good for evil,” with returning of Christlike love to the person(s) perceived to be engaged in evil or about to be engaged in evil. “Love of the type which Jesus recommends in the Gospels” is the power, the only power, that imbues a nonviolent act/action with authentic temporal and transcendental efficaciousness.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Eight Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Eight Helping

To justify an evil is to promote the evil. To name an evil good is to assure that an evil will propagate itself. To sanctify an evil is to energize it with self righteous religious zeal.To accept an evil as justified, good and/or holy is to also accept the network of logical implications, conclusions and obligations that flow from that just, good and holy evil.

When Church leaders, bishops, priests, ministers and pastors, tell a Christian in their spiritual and moral care that he or she can be a faithful Christian, a faithful follower of Jesus, and join the military, go through military training and fight in war, they thereby weaponize Jesus. They make Him part of the homicidal military reality that motivates a Christian, empowers a Christian, to pull the trigger or press the button that will kill other infinitely loved sons and daughters of the “Father of all.”

How do bishops, priests, ministers and pastors who weaponize the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and put Him at the beck and call of homicidal military operations live with themselves? Weaponizing Jesus! What an atrocious agenda to have as part of your ministry!

It is universally understood that the first casualty of war is truth. The individual men and women who start wars lie because they know if they told the truth they could not get people to go to war. Jesus for Christians is the truth, “I am the truth” (Jn 14:6). For Christians then, the first casualty of war is always the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels who teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies. He is a casualty—in principle and in practice, theologically and morally, metaphysically and physically (Mt 25: 31-46, Acts 9:4-5). All possible efforts are expended by Church leaders to bury Him out of sight in some place inaccessible to the consciousness and conscience of ordinary Christians. To have the Jesus of history intentionally erased from Christian memory, by Church leaders, precisely in the area that the war makers need His memory erased in order to be unimpeded in securing Christian cannon fodder, makes the true Jesus of history who is thetruth a casualty, a victim, of war and of Church leaders/rulers who have some other agenda than the task Jesus explicitly gave them: “And teach them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:20).

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Seventh Helping

Jesus speaking to His chosen disciples said:

“Behold, I am sending you out like lambs among wolves” (Lk 10:3; Mt 10:16). 

 

From the Merriam Webster Dictionary:

Viper

1 a viper is a venomous snake with large hinged fangs.

2 a treacherous person.

 

Lamb

1 lamb is a young sheep.

2 used figuratively as a symbol of meekness, gentleness, or innocence: to her amazement, he accepted her decision like a lamb. 

3 used to describe or address someone regarded with affection or pity, especially a young child: the poor lamb is very upset. 

4 (the Lamb) short for Lamb of God. 

5 like a lamb to (the) slaughter, a victim

Lamb                                                                                                                  Viper

Assuming some of these women, “Viper Chicks,” are Baptized Christians, whatever pope, patriarch, bishop, priest, minister or pastor Baptized them and taught them what Jesus, the Lamb of God,meant when He says to His chosen ones, “Follow me,”  “Love one another as I have loved you,” “Put up the sword” and “Love your enemies,” needs to ask him or herself if he or she has been deceived by Satan and if he or she has deceived others, who trusted him or her to teach them the Gospel truth about Jesus and His Way.

 

Every Christian Viper Chick should also ask herself if she has been deceived by Satan and/or by her Christian pastors.

 

Below a Jesus who never existed saying what the Jesus who did exists never would and never could say to His chosen disciples:

“Behold, I, Jesus, am sending you out like vipers among wolves” 

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy 

All FAST FOOD (AD 2019)  Helpings can be found at

centerforchrisriannonviolence.org

or

http://www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org/category/fastfood2019/

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Sixth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Sixth Helping

The power and wisdom, the love and resurrection of Jesus enables Christians, if they so desire, to see, to name and to disassociate themselves from the evils that the rulers of nation engage in on a regular basis. Unfortunately, the sacrifices of the historical Jesus, which have made such awareness possible, are being sacrificed and squandered by Christians, their Churches and their Church leaders who have cozied up to power and wealth in one-hand-washes-the-other, and ‘you take care of my earthly business and I will take care of your earthly business’ deals.

“As a theologian, I, Leonardo Boff, am filled with sorrow, I ask myself: why the great majority of those dominant elites here in Brazil are Christians and Catholics. How can they reconcile their perverse practices with the message of Jesus? What do the many Catholic Universities and hundreds of Christian schools teach, that allows such a blasphemous movement to grow, because it touches the very God who is love and compassion and who took the side of those who cry for life and for righteousness? But I understand, because to the Catholic and Christian dominant elites the Spanish saying, “Dios y el dinero, lo segundo es lo primero,” is most apt. “Between God and money, the second always comes first.” How sad.”

Luxury wealth, whether held and controlled by secular political and economic elites who rule society or held and controlled by the ecclesiastical political and economic elites who rule the institutional Church, can only be defended by violence from those who do not have enough to live. (815 million people go to bed hungry each day and 25,000 children die of hunger each day according to UN statistics). Luxury wealth and violence are the opposite sides of the same evil coin. The late Rev. John L.McKenzie, a world renown Catholic Biblical scholar writes, “The single greatest impediment to the attainment of the Kingdom of God listed by Jesus is wealth.” I might paraphrase this statement by saying that the single greatest impediment to the institutional Church proclaiming the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is wealth.

Any thought that an institutional Church with gargantuan planetary wealth is going to seriously teach and proclaim by word and deed what Jesus in the Gospels teaches and proclaims by word and deed about violence is fanciful. Any time the institutional Church uses the word nonviolence, it means a nonviolence that publicly carries a halberd as its default position. Its wealth requires that the institutional Church, at most, proclaim by word and deed a halberd based nonviolence—which is not nonviolence  at all but is rather justified violence in the sheepskin verbiage of nonviolence. And for certain, it is most definitely not nonviolence as proclaimed by word and deed by the Nonviolent Jesus in the Gospels.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fifth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fifth Helping

Leo Tolstoy writes, “Most men cannot accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.” 

A “simple and most obvious truth” is that the Jesus of the Gospels, the only Jesus there is, was or ever will be, is Nonviolent and teaches by word and deed to His disciples a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies under all circumstances without exception. To accept this truth of the Gospels would oblige bishops, priests, ministers and pastors of the Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant and Evangelical Churches to admit the falsity of their conclusion that a Christian can faithfully follow Jesus and kill other infinitely loved son and daughters of the “Father of all” in war time or at any other time.  This of course, is a falsity which they have delighted in explaining to others, which they have proudly taught to others and which they have woven into the fabric of their own lives.

It has been said, “It is impossible to get a person to understand the obvious if his or her livelihood depends on not understanding the obvious.” But, it is not only the loss of a person’s livelihood that can make him or her impervious to unpalatable facts. Potential loss of anything in which one has made a significant investment of his or her life’s time, mind, talent and/or treasure can blind a person to plain-to-see, incontrovertible truth. I can’t see because I can’t afford to see. I rather teach and live a falsity than pay the price or incur the loss of teaching and living the truth. This is called protecting the investment by committed obliviousness to glaring truth.

 -Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

— 

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fourth Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Fourth Helping

The teaching of Jesus, the Word (Logos) of God incarnate is a Divine Mandate to which all Christians must commit their total allegiance. When Jesus, the Creator—”All things were made through Him and without Him nothing would have been made” (Jn 1:1) speaks, unconditional obedience by the creature is the only rational, indeed the only sane, response. This is so because God’s Word (Jesus) is Truth, Reality, and Power—the only Truth, Reality, and Power that has eternal significance and that can effectively conquer evil and save each and every human being who has ever lived, who lives now, or who will ever live from eternal death.

The Christian who rejects Jesus’ teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, while at the same time calling Jesus “Lord,”brings into disrepute not only these teachings of Jesus, but also instantly tarnishes the credibility of all the teachings of Jesus, indeed, he or she publicly undermines belief in Jesus as God Incarnate. This practice, of Christian contradicting, correcting and/or dismissing Jesus on His teaching on how He wants His followers to deal with violence and enmity, is Divinity denying. No amount of money nor state of the art public relations brainwashing techniques can totally camouflage the denial of Divinity implicit in contradicting, correcting and dismissing the teaching of the Word (Logos) of God “made flesh.” To proclaim that Someone is God “made flesh” and that “through Him all things were made and without Him nothing would have been made” and then in the next breath to pooh-pooh His teachings of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as naïvely morally simplistic or unrealistic in the ‘real’ world is intellectually and spiritually clownish.

 To obey God’s Word and Will when they are known is to be a realist, and a pragmatist, and a prudent person. To refuse to obey God’s Word and Will, once they are known, is what is truly nonsensical, is what is imprudent in the extreme.

For the creature to refuse to obey the God’s Word is more than irrational. It is madness, chaos, and evil. Jesus is the Word of God. To try to proclaim the Gospel, by continually abandoning the Gospel, calling its teachings naïve, is just preposterous Christianity—regardless of how many adherents such a form of Christianity has. Numbers of participants do not validate the truth of a proposition, nor does the longevity of a proposition validate it as true. To publicly adore Christ-God, while secretly believing His teaching of Nonviolent Love to be half-baked, quixotic, utopian, stupid, nonsensical fantasies is preposterous.

Of course, if Jesus is not Lord, the Word (logos) made flesh, God and risen from the dead, then we Christian are the worse off of all people if we follow Him and His teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies unto death.

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Third Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Third Helping

‘”The saving act of Jesus is an act of love of the type which He recommends in the Gospels.”                                                                   -Rev. John L. McKenzie

The Nonviolent Love of the Nonviolent Jesus Christ in the Gospels, is not merely the rejection and condemnation of those forms of violence—usually located in “the other”—that a person feels particularly upset over.

Christ does not just condemn illegal violence for those He has chosen;

He condemns all violence.

Christ does not exclusively condemn illegitimate violence for those He has chosen;

He condemns legitimate violence.

Christ does not simply condemn sordid violence for those He has chosen;

He condemns romantic violence.

Christ does not merely condemn personal violence for those He has chosen;

He condemns social violence.

Christ does not only condemn revolutionary violence for those He has chosen;

He condemns governmental violence.

Christ does not solely condemn external violence for those He has chosen;

He condemns internal violence.

Jesus Christ authorizes no one under any circumstances to substitute violence for love. Still less does He authorize anyone to rename violence love of the type He commands in the Gospels: “I give you a new commandment, love one another as I have loved you.”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

— 

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Second Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): Second Helping

No reader of the New Testament, simple or sophisticated, can retain any doubt of Jesus’ position toward violence directed to persons, individual or collective, organized or free enterprise, he rejected it totally… Jesus in no way accepts violence as a means of controlling violence.                                                                                                                                                                        Rev. John L. McKenzie, Preeminent Catholic Biblical Scholar Mid-Twentieth Century

Jesus may not be risen from the dead. Jesus may not be the Word of God “made flesh.” Jesus may not be Lord, God and Savior or the Messiah, the Christ. I believe as the first premise and primary allegiance of my life that He is all of these. But whether He is or is not any or all of these, what Jesus teaches in the Gospels is no more a matter of faith than what Galileo teaches is a matter of faith. Even if Jesus is just a smart rabbi, He teaches Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as the Way to live, the Way to die and the Way to eternal communion with God. If He is just a smart rabbi, then he may be wrong about this. If He is Lord, God, Savior, the Word of God “made flesh” and the Messiah, the Christ, risen from the dead, then He is and must be absolutely and infallibly right.

The overriding issue in Gospel Nonviolence for Christians and for all human beings is not what Jesus teaches, but who He is?  “Who do you say I am?” Jesus’ teaching by word and deed of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as the Way and Will of God stands or falls, is validated or invalidated, by the answer to that question, because the Messiah, the Christ, God Incarnate does not lie and is not ignorant of what His Way and His Will are.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): First Helping

FAST FOOD (AD 2019): First Helping

“If Jesus can be trusted to have said anything at all, he renounced violence…If Jesus did not reject any type of violence for any purpose, then we know nothing of him.”                                  

—Rev. John L. McKenzie, Preeminent Catholic Biblical Scholar Mid-Twentieth Century

The issue of whether the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels teaches by word and by deed a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is settled. He does! All attempts today to justify violence and/or enmity from the life of Jesus or from the teachings of Jesus are devoid of spiritual and intellectual merit. That is not opinion, that is fact. A person or a nation of persons, a Christian or a Church of Christians may consider Jesus and His teaching of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies unrealistic, stupid, naive, impracticable, unfeasible, fanciful and foolish, e.g., “love your enemies,”” put up the sword”, “love one another as I have loved you,” “do good to those who hate you,” “turn the other cheek,” “pray for those who persecute you”, etc. So be it, if that is what a person or a group of persons think of Jesus’ teachings. All I am saying is, “That’s what the Man said!”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD 2018: First Helping

FAST FOOD 2018: First Helping

Jesus then asked His disciple the most radical question in the Gospels: “Who do people say I am—no, who do you say I am?” Everything in Christianity, everything in our lives, in fact, depends on the answer we give to that question. And Peter answers in the name of all: You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus does not ask this question until His disciples have been with Him a considerable amount of time. And the reason is simple. Jesus was about to reveal to the Twelve His Way of saving the world, and it was so different, so totally different from what they were expecting that they had to be prepared beforehand to accept with unconditional faith what He was going to say. Before Jesus could tell them what kind of Messiah He was going to be, they had to accept Him absolutely, unconditionally and irrevocable as the Savior God had sent.

We can see Jesus looking around at His disciples after Peter made his famous answer, looking intently into the eyes of each one, probing his heart: “Do you all agree? Am I the Messiah you have been waiting for? Is that your final answer?”

They all agree. They are decided. He is it.

“All right,” Jesus says, “Now I will tell you how I am going to save the world.”

“My plan, my Father’s plan,” Jesus says, “is this: I am going to save the world by enduring evil with love. I am going to go up to Jerusalem and there they are going to crucify me. But I am going to endure it and love back. And anyone who wants to be associated with me as Messiah has to do the same thing. You have to ‘carry your cross’—that is, accept whatever happens to you, whatever falls on your shoulders as a result of the sin and ignorance and blindness of this world—and love back.”

“And that is how we are going to save the world.”

-Rev. David Knight

No Power But Love

_________

David Knight was born in Dallas, Texas, ordained a Jesuit priest in Lyon, France, and spent three years as a bush pastor in Chad (Africa). He then earned his doctorate in theology at Catholic University, Washington, D.C., and after serving as acting rector of the Jesuit novitiate in Grand Coteau, Louisiana, was made pastor of two parishes there — one black, one white — with the mission of integrating them. He was then made spiritual director for the Jesuit community of Loyola University in New Orleans. In 1973 he went to Memphis to help found a religious order of nuns, which did not succeed. But while he was engaged in this, a new provincial suggested he join the diocese of Memphis, into which he was incardinated in 1980 and where he was pastor of Sacred Heart Parish for nearly thirty years.

Fr. Knight has taught at Catholic University (Washington, D.C.), at Loyola University in New Orleans, Christian Brothers University in Memphis, lectured and directed retreats throughout the world. He is the author of fifty books on Christian Spirituality.

FAST FOOD (2018): Second Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Second Helping

Christians frequently think that the question of non-resistance to evil is an invented question, a question which it is possible to circumvent. It is, however, a question which life itself puts before all people and before every thinking person, and which invariably demands a solution. Ever since Christ’s teachings have been preached, this question has been the same as the question for a traveller of which road to take when he comes to a fork on the highway on which he has been walking. He must go on and he cannot say, “I will not think. I will continue to walk as before.” Before there was only one road and now there are two of them, and it is impossible to walk as before. One of the two roads must be chosen. Ever since Christ’s teaching was made known to Christians, it has been impossible for them to say, “I will continue to live as I have lived before without solving the question as to resisting or not resisting evil by means of violence.” It is inevitably necessary at the appearance of every conflict that they solve the question, “Shall I with violence resist that which I consider to be evil? Violence or not?”

-Leo Tolstoy

The Kingdom of God is Within You

-ECM

FAST FOOD (2018): Third Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Third Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Fourth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Fourth Helping

If you don’t want answers, you don’t ask the questions.

“The majority of men do not think in order to know the truth, but in order to assure themselves that the life that they lead, and which is agreeable and habitual to them, is the one that coincides with the truth. Slavery was contrary to all the moral principles which were preaches by Plato and Aristotle, yet neither saw this, because the negation of slavery would destroy all that life which they had and liked.”

–Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910)

Are violence and war necessary for Christianity to survive or for the eternal salvation of a single person?

“Do you really believe that Christianity will perish unless it be defended by war? If you do believe that, then you have deliberately passed a vote of no confidence in Christ. If Christianity needs this kind of defense then there is little that is really divine about it.  We must conclude that a Christian faith which needs the defense of warfare is not a faith which even deserves to survive.”  -William Barclay (1907-1978)

Questions looking for answers from popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, ministers, pastor and laity: Can you imagine the immediate disciples of Jesus joining a band of soldiers called a Roman Legion and going forth with Caesar to kill barbarians on the other side of the mountains? What does it mean morally for those who call themselves Christians that Jesus, whom they consider God incarnate, their Lord and Savior, their way, truth and life, lived and taught His disciples to live and to teach a Way of Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstances, whether they be friends or enemies? Is the unequivocal teaching of God Incarnate absolute or optional for a faithful disciple of Jesus? Can the explicit teaching of the “Word made flesh” be morally replaced or overridden by human conjecture regarding good and evil or how to respond to evil?

-Emmanuel Charles Mccarthy

FAST FOOD (2018): Fifth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Fifth Helping

Isaiah 55:8-9

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
“As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Consider the dreadful and ruinous consequences to the life of a Christian and to the life of the Church if the statements in1 and 2 below are reversed.

1. A person does not need theologians to make sense of Jesus. A person needs Jesus to make sense of theologians.

2. Theologians, sophisticate or unsophisticated, do not validate or invalidates the teaching of Jesus. Jesus validates or invalidates the teaching of any and all theologian.

Consider how CJWT exists and thrives and Jesus’ Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is all but lost to the Church and Christians in general by reversing the statements in 1 and 2.  What in the life and teaching of Jesus validates CJWT? What in the life or teaching of any theologian, i.e., any concupiscence riddled creature,  gives him or her the slightest competence to dismiss the truth of the Creator and to substitute for it a contradictory idea?

I am just asking a question. I am asking it because I want an answer from those who control the catechesis of the Churches.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (2018): Sixth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Sixth Helping

“No Christian theologian or writer prior to Constantine justified killing or Christian participation in the military.”

The Early Church on Killing

—Ronald J. Sider, PhD (History, Yale)

The Christian Just War Theory is rooted in two statements:

1. God Incarnate, the Messiah, the Jesus of historical record, the Jesus of the Gospels was Nonviolent and taught a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies to His Apostles and disciple so that they could “love as He loves” and so they could teach those they Baptized “to obey all that I have commanded you.” And this they did for the three hundred years closest to Jesus’ Resurrection.

2. “Nevertheless,” Christians can engage in the mass homicide of war.

Huh? Where does this “nevertheless” come from after three hundred years? No one even mentioned it during those first three hundred years. If Jesus wanted to make this a part of His salvific teaching and Way, why didn’t He? And, if those Christians who lived and died during those first three hundred years did not ever mention a “nevertheless” was it because they were unable to cognitively conceive a homicidal “nevertheless” alternative to Jesus’ teaching? Or was it because right-mindedness, truthfulness, uprightness of conscience and moral integrity would not allow them to replace the clear teaching of their Lord, God and Savior with a “nevertheless” that was a direct contradiction of the teaching of God “made flesh?” And of course, those first three centuries were times of brutal Roman persecution of Christians. There were at least three instances during that time that it became the policy of the Roman government to execute the ‘final solution’ to its “Christian problem” and liquidate the Christian community. Yet, in the face of lethal enmity and the seeming total destruction of Christian lives, loved ones and livelihoods, not a sentence was written by a Christian theologian or writer during that time justifying killing of lethal enemies who were unjustly massacring Christians and their families or anyone else.

One would think that if there was ever a time for the Church to introduce and justify a “nevertheless” to Jesus’ teachings of the rejection of violence and the love of enemies, this was certainly it! Natural law, justice, third party defense, duty to family, etc., were all available to prop-up a “nevertheless.” But, none of the old and well-known justifications for killing enemies was called into service to give Christian credence to a “nevertheless.” It did not happen—and it did not happen because it was self-evident that it was in direct contradiction to the teachings of the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels.

Did isolated Christians and groups of Christians engage in defensive or retaliatory violence? Of course they did. But the Church never called it good or taught it as a way of faithful discipleship. Just as Christian committed adultery, but the Church never called it good or taught it as a way of faithful discipleship for those chosen by Jesus to be among his followers. “Nevertheless,” was not in the vocabulary of Christian moral discourse and discernment in original Christianity or for the first three hundred years thereafter. Yet, today “Nevertheless” is the operating moral norm in almost all Churches. “Nevertheless” owes its place in Christianity to the Fourth Century theologians and writers Ambrose and Augustine—not Jesus.

—Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

All FAST FOOD Helpings are available at this URL:

http://centerforchristiannonviolence.org/events/fast-food-2018.

FAST FOOD (2018): Seventh Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Seventh Helping

The Post-Constantinian theological lavishing of concentration of interest upon the physical death of Jesus vitiates, by intentional de-emphasis, all of the salvific teachings of Jesus that precede His death. The pre-death work of Jesus as He struggles against the false ideas about “what kind of God God is and what God expects of peoples” is reduced to near irrelevancy. Indeed, the ceaseless theological focus on the physical death of Jesus and its implications is so excessive and exclusive that Jesus’ death is almost never called by its correct name, murder. Murder is different from mere death and it raises questions and opens up doors of reflection, and closes others, on the salvific work of Jesus prior to His murder that the generic term death does not. Everyone dies, but everyone is not murdered.

If the physical death of Jesus was all that God desired for reconciliation with human beings, why didn’t Jesus simply suffer and die in utero. If beyond His physical death, what Jesus said and did in His life as recorded in the Gospels is not essential for the salvation of one and all, for reconciliation between humanity and God, then why not have that accomplished by a miscarriage or an abortion. The fully divine and fully human person, who is Jesus, is in Mary’s womb from the time of the Annunciation. Death in the womb and death on the cross are equally death. If Jesus’ death is the exclusive sine qua non reality for the salvation of the world and eternal communion of humanity with God, why does Jesus have to live for 30 to 40 years and teach, e.g., the rejection of violence and the love of enemies, and why did He have to die as He did, e.g., rejecting violence and the loving His enemies?

—Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (2018): Eighth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Eighth Helping

Unconditional faith in Jesus as the Messiah precedes His teaching of unconditional Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstances—whether they be friends or enemies. How could unconditional faith in Jesus as God’s Messiah not precede committing to such a love within a humanity fed on a daily diet of evil, sin, fear and death? Without the absolute assurance of God that—the Way of Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstances as taught and lived by Jesus of Nazareth, God’s Messiah—is the Way to overcome evil and death as well as the Way to eternal life for one and for all. Why would any sane person ever commit to such a Way in a world where violence, deceit, fear and oppression not only reign supreme but are also justified?

Yes or No: 

1. Is the Jesus of the Gospels God’s choice to be the Messiah of the Jewish people?

2. Is Jesus the Word of God “made flesh?”

What, if anything, in the teaching of Jesus—God’s Messiah of the Jewish people and the Word of God “made flesh”—is an absolute moral imperative valid at all times, in all places and under all circumstances, to which Jews and Christians must adhere with no exceptions because they are revealed by God Himself or by God’s uniquely chosen agent to be his moral will for the salvation of the Jewish people and through the Jewish people for the salvation of all people?

So, does the Jesus of the Gospels communicate any imperative Divine moral absolutes, e.g., the rejection of violence and enmity?

“No reader of the New Testament, simple or sophisticated, can retain any doubt of Jesus’ position toward violence directed to persons, individual or collective, organized or free enterprise, he rejected it totally…If Jesus did not reject any type of violence for any purpose, then we know nothing of him.

Jesus presents in His words and life not only a good way of doing things, not only an ideal to be executed whenever it is convenient, but the only way of doing what He did.”

—Rev. John L. McKenzie

Sounds like a moral absolute to me. Is it? Is anything in the Gospels?

—Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (2018): Ninth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Ninth Helping

We are disciples of Jesus who commanded us to, “Love your enemies.”

It is governments that kill their enemies.

We are disciples of Jesus who commanded us, “Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you, if your enemy is hungry give him to eat, if he is thirsty give him to drink.“

It is governments that hate, starve, oppress their enemies, let them suffer and die of thirst and make it the crime of treason punishable by death “to give aid and comfort to the enemy” (U. S. Constitution, Article III, Sec 3).

Are there really Christian theologians and writers, popes, cardinal, bishops, priests and ministers who would teach that when governments engage in the activities mentioned above, it is morally consistent with the teaching and Way of Jesus for a follower of Jesus to participate in such activities? Why would any Christian who believes Jesus is his or her Lord, God and Savior believe them and follow them instead of Jesus?

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (2018): Tenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Tenth Helping

“If we know anything at all about the words of Jesus, we know that he was not indifferent to human pain. Fear of compromising his divinity has often kept Christians from seeing how deeply human pain entered into his soul. Jesus never said that suffering is not real, or that it does not hurt much, or that it passes quickly, or that it is good for you. He seems to have recommended something too simple, which does not touch the theoretical, philosophical problem of suffering. His response to suffering was this: stop hurting each other. That much anyone can do; if you cannot do that much, do not form a study group. If one believes anything about Jesus, one knows that he was deeply and personally involved with people, more deeply than anyone who ever lived; it is blasphemy to suggest that he was cold or unfeeling or could ever have thought that people, like eggs, had to be broken for a good cause.”

–Rev. John L. McKenzie

Catholic Biblical Scholar

Gospel Nonviolence insists that Christians and Churches stop being agents of pain. Simple enough. But there are very few Christians and no Churches willing to relinquish whatever degree of pain-inducing power they possess. In fact it would require a watershed change of mind, aka metanoia, to commit and to persevere to not being an agent of pain in this world. One of the perennial issue of philosophical ethics is, “Who should suffer and why?” It is a critical question within the mystery of human existence, but it is a question that is seldom to never heard asked among Christians or any other people. Jesus answers the question. But few like His answer whether communicated in the Sermon on the Mount or in the Sermon from the Cross.  And so, they make up answers to the question, which they say are just as good as Jesus’—all of which permit Christians to be voluntary agents of pain, to be perpetrators of pain on other human beings, to break a eggs to make a beautiful and delicious omelet.

-ECM

FAST FOOD (2018): Eleventh Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Eleventh Helping

As I have often noted, the first word out of Jesus mouth in His public ministry is repent. The Greek word He employs and that is translated into English as repent is metanoia, which means “change your mind.” But, change your mind to what? Obviously, “put on the mind of Christ,” think like Christ. One could then reasonable ask what good will it do anybody or the world to struggle and persevere in the struggle to think like Christ? Here is the answer the late Rev. John L. McKenzie, one of the most significant Catholic Biblical Scholar of the twentieth century, gives to that question.

“To think like Christ, what will that do to our world of values which have been built up in us by nurturing, habit and conviction in our years for childhood, which we have learned from our parents and teachers, from our peers, from our friends and from our enemies— with whom we share many values—from our reading, from stage and screen, and now from the omnipresent television? Suppose we ask ourselves what we think is really important or valuable, really worth doing or experiencing, and what is to be avoided at all costs? It will shock us, if we go through these things, how many of them have been uncritically accepted, how few are the result of mature spiritual thought and conviction. Think like Christ—and how much of what we adore would we have to burn? Both the Gospels and epistles insist that thinking like Jesus is a personal responsibility, which each must fulfill for him or herself.

Too often in the modern world we take refuge behind such excuses as quotation marks, “everybody does it.” Was it ever different in any society? My friend Gordon Zahn wrote about a German peasant named Franz Jagerstatter who refused the advice of his bishop, his priest, his neighbors and his family, all of whom were Christians. He stubbornly resisted going along with Hitler, although “everybody is doing it,” and he maintained this position in spite of no more than an elementary education and apparently much less native intelligence, than many who served Hitler with a good conscience, or at least a quiet conscience. Of course it cost him his life; he was beheaded. But, he died having saved something, which those who survived had lost; they better than anyone else can tell what that is. I do not know whether Jagerstatter always thought like Christ; he succeeded, however, in doing so at the most critical moment of his life, when millions of other Christians had failed to do so, and his spiritual directors told him he was wrong.

My concern here is with putting on the mind of Christ, thinking like Christ, so that I can make Christian moral decisions in my state of life, in my profession, in those complex of human relations which are uniquely mine. No one is so lacking in talent or education or so underprivileged that the mind of Christ, thinking like Christ, is beyond their grasp.”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (2018): Twelfth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twelfth Helping

“Nonviolence is not one among other behavioral implications that can be drawn from the gospel but is integral to the shape of Christian conviction.[True or False?] Indeed, nonviolence is not just one implication among others that can be drawn from our Christian beliefs; it is at the very heart of our understanding of God. [T or F] If we do not think it possible to love our enemies then we should plainly say Jesus is not the Messiah. [T or F] But he is! [T or F] Therefore because we Christians may love our enemies, we must love our enemies.” [T or F]

-Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School, Professor of Christian Ethics.

T or Fs added by ECM to facilitate insight into and honesty about the supreme importance the Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies that Jesus in the Gospels lives unto death and teaches.

-ECM

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirteenth Helping     

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirteenth Helping  

Guilt

   Written By Albrecht Haushofer as he awaited execution

    as an anti-fascist resister in Nazi Germany

    The burden of my guilt before the law

    weighs light upon my shoulders; to plot

    and to conspire was my duty to the people;

    I would have been a criminal had I not.

    I am guilty, though not the way you think,

    I should have done my duty sooner; I was wrong,

    I should have called evil more clearly by its name

    I hesitated to condemn it for far too long.

    I now accuse myself within my heart:

    I have betrayed my conscience far too long

    I have deceived myself and fellow man.

    I knew the course of evil from the start

    My warning was not loud nor clear enough!

    Today, I know what I am guilty of—

Self-deception and cowardice!

* Self-deception: the action or practice of allowing oneself to believe that a false feeling, idea or situation is true, lying to oneself, e.g. allowing oneself to believe that Jesus teaches, supports, justifies or endorses for His disciples under any set of circumstances the statement, “Kill your enemies.”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (2018): Fourteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Fifteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Fifteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Sixteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Sixteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Seventeenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Seventeenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Eighteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Eighteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Nineteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Nineteenth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twentieth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twentieth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-First Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Second Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Second Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Third Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Third Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Fourth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Fourth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Fifth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Fifth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Sixth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Sixth Helping

A Concise Ten Minutes on Gospel Nonviolence:
Effectiveness

https://www.youtube.com/watch? time_continue=25&v=-ebieLANxoc

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Seventh Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Seventh Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Eighth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Eighth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Ninth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Twenty-Ninth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirtieth Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirtieth Helping

https://www.youtube.com/watch? time_continue=10&v=08qpZrJm60w

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-First Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-First Helping

The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by their nurturing in the monstrous traditions of politics to murder each other or be murdered in quarrels not their own.

-Aldous Huxley

Author of The Perennial Philosophy, Means and Ends, Brave New World and pacifist

It is a provable falsehood to communicate that Jesus in the Gospels in any way—explicitly or implicitly— teaches that His disciples can be instruments of human destruction. Any pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, minister or lay person who—by intentional commission or calculated omission—entices a fellow Christian to believe he or she can be a faithful disciple of the Jesus of the Gospels and His Way as He presents it in the Gospels, and simultaneously be an instrument of human destruction, is serving the “father of lies.“

John 8:44

“You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Second Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Second Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Third Helping

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Third Helping

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-FOURTH HELPING (2018)

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Fourth Helping

Our Heroes?

If a war is unjust according to Christian Just War Theory norms, then the killing in that war is unjust. The unjust killing of a human being is murder. Men and women who participate in killing people in an unjust war are not heroes by Christian standards and must not be celebrated or honored as heroes by Christians—regardless what the non-Christian secular society and government proclaim them to be.

Those Christians who participate in the killing process in a war, unjust by the moral standards of CJWT, must be revered because of the Spark of the Divine that resides within them and they must be loved as Jesus loves them. But they must never be related to as a hero. “Hero” is absolutely not the word that a Christian can attach to them or the disposition a Christian should have towards them for the killing in which they participated in an unjust war according the standards of CJWT. The use of the word “hero” in such circumstances can only motivate other Christians, especially young Christians, to participate in murder in future unjust war. The exalting, honoring, praising, admiring, lauding men and women who have murdered people in an unjust war is first and foremost a recruiting tool. Second, it is a clever diversionary method to keep peoples’ minds off of the overwhelming physical, psychological, moral and spiritual atrocity into which the rulers of a society have led people, namely, the unjustified mass slaughter of human beings.

The Nonviolent Jesus who lives unto death a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies is the prototype hero of all Christians and only those people who are heroes in the model of the Nonviolent Christ should receive the designation “hero” from any Church, Church leader or Christian. Most certainly, the soldier who unjustly stuck the lance into the heart of Jesus and the other soldiers who participated in His murder should not be called heroes by any Christian. And, it should go without saying that whenever a soldier unjustly kills even the least of Jesus’ brothers or sisters in the human family that soldier is simultaneously sticking a lance in Jesus’ side as sure as the soldier on Golgotha did. It would be gross blasphemy for a Church, a Church leader or a Christian to call such a soldier a hero.

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-FIFTH HELPING (2018)

How does this Christian child 

​ 

become this Christian man?

90% of the casualties of modern war are civilians.

“Patterns in conflict: Civilians are Now the Target” www.unicef.org

​”How can we bridge the enormous intellectual, emotional, psychological and religious gap between the friendly repairman who a few months later has become a soldier spraying fiery death upon his screaming victims, between the playful collegian who after ROTC training becomes a pilot lowering a blanket of death upon thousands in a flame-rimmed city?  Certainly not by coldly rational calculations of good and evil effects. The secret lies in conditioning via military training and not in conviction. A person is entices and then chooses to enter a military metanoia conditioning process and this by design then reduced him or her to being an obedient depersonalized homicidal agent of those above him or her in a chain of command; like Pilate, he or she washes his or her hands of all responsibility, leaving that to those who made the decisions and issued the orders.“

-Gordon Zahn, PhD (sociology)

The institutional Churches, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant, are an intimate and vital cog in the military metanoia operation, for they—through their military chaplaincies and their generally highly favorable and profitable attitude towards the military—give, what is perceived to be, Christ’s stamp of moral approval to the process and to “change of mind and heart and behavior” that military training almost universally produces. “That Christian child” does not become “that Christian man” if the Church nurtures him in the mind, the Spirit and the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels.

So is military metanoia the same as the metanoia to which Jesus calls His disciple in the Gospels? Or, is it the direct diabolical opposite, whether it is training for killing by bayonet or training for killing by artillery shell or training for killing by drone?

If you believe the military training metanoia process is in direct contradiction to the metanoia  process called for by Jesus in the Gospels, then tell your Catholic, Orthodox or Protestant bishop, priest, minister and fellow communicant to cease and desist from endowing military training for Christians with the Church’s stamp of moral approval, because under no circumstance could it ever receive Jesus’ stamp of approval.

Without military training “this Christian child” does not become “this Christian man” or woman. It is the Satanic that turns “this Christian child” into “this Christian man or woman.” It can be said with moral certainty that military training is a school for evil for anyone called by Jesus to follow Him.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-SIXTH HELPING (2018)

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Sixth Helping

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-SEVENTH HELPING (2018)

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Seventh Helping

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-EIGHTH HELPING (2018)

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-NINTH HELPING (2018)

FAST FOOD (2018): Thirty-Ninth Helping

Theatre of the Absurd

The Final Act in Constantinian Christianity’s Tragicomedy,

“Christian Just War Theory.”

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

All Fast Food Helpings are available at this URL:

http://centerforchristiannonvi olence.org/events/fast-food-20 18

www.centerforchristiannonviole nce.org or www.emmanuelcharles mccarthy.org

FAST FOOD: FORTIETH HELPING (2018)

The murder of forty thousand Christians in Nagasaki by an entirely military bomb crew composed only of Christians, the murder of St. Edith Stein at Auschwitz by Christians in the military and the murder of Bl. Franz Jagerstatter in Brandenburg Prison by Christians in the military are not anomalies in the history of Christianity since the time of Constantine. Christians murdering Christians and justifying it as being in conformity with faithfully following Jesus has been the normal of Christian history for the last 1700 years. Indeed from the very beginnings of the Constantinian alteration of Christianity, Christians murdering Christians has been the taken for granted moral norm. The Roman government killed more Christians after the Roman Empire became “Christian” than were killed when non-Christians ruled it.

The murder of Christians by Christians in the military at Nagasaki, at Auschwitz and at Brandenburg Prison on August 9, 1942,1943, 1945 is but a symbol of what Christians in the military have done to Christians almost non-stop every day for the last one thousand seven hundred years of Christian history—with no end in sight on August 9, 2018.

Such a history of Christian savagery, justified as acceptable Christian morality by practically every institutional Church of Christianity, reveals a fundamental structural defect in all mainline institutional Churches, Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant. An occasional eruption of violence between two members of the Mystical Body of Christ would not call into question the validity of the structure of an institutional Church, no more than would the occasional sins of adultery or envy. But 1700 years of non-stop, justified, mass savagery aimed at Baptized Christians by other Baptized Christians, all members of the Body of Christ, represents a Church structure that has conclusively proven it cannot do what a Church structure must do, namely, make the Church an extension of Jesus Christ in time and space, that it cannot be an instrument that can fulfill an absolutely essential part of the Great Commission Jesus gave to His Church “teach them to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:19).

 ^“Do you not know that your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?” (1Cor 6:19)

Let us publicly hear from the Bishops of the Constantinian Churches the theology that permits one living temple of the Holy Spirit to desecrate and destroy another living temple of the Holy Spirit?

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many…you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor12:12-14, 27).

Let us publicly hear from the Bishops of the Constantinian Churches the theology that permits one living Baptized member(s) of the Body of Christ to savage another living Baptized member(s) of the Body of Christ.

The need for Bishops of the Constantinian Churches to publicly do this arises from the 1700 year old historical fact that this is exactly what the Bishops of the Constantinian Churches have been daily and unequivocally telling the members of their communities that they can do since the Fourth Century. The Christians of Nagasaki, Edith Stein and Franz Jagerstatter, along with tens of millions upon tens of millions of other Christians who have suffered homicidal violence at the hands of their fellow temples of the Holy Spirit and members of the Body of Christ have a right to know from their Bishops why they have approved and still do approve, have taught and still do teach, that one Baptized member of the Body of Christ can destroy another Baptized member of the Body of Christ and still be a faithful disciple of Jesus—Who to this moment remains the Existing Head of the Body.

Christian Just War Theory (CJWT) does not address for Christians the Temple of the Holy Spirit issue or the Body of Christ issue. CJWT is nothing but the “baptizing” of a philosophical just war theory that existed long before Jesus was born and that did not have the same understanding of a human being as Jesus does or the same understanding of God as Jesus does or the same understanding of God’s relationship to the human being as Jesus does. CJWT owes nothing at any level to anything Jesus ever said or did, lived or taught.

From natural law philosophy just war theory can be derived—providing a person posits certain “self-evident” truths as first premises that may not be disputed i.e. earthly survival of self or community is the first law of human existence. But, the “self-evident” truths by which stoic natural law can establish a just war theory, and many other understandings of right and wrong, are not the truths that Jesus teaches in the Gospels and in many cases are contradictory to the truths taught by Jesus in the Gospels as the Father’s Will and Way.

The picture of the ruined brick and mortar Church at Nagasaki after August 9, 1945 is an accurate symbol of what the Constantinian Just War Church is and has done to Christianity since the Fourth Century. It has ruined it. Edith Stein on August 9, 1942 and Franz Jagerstatter on August 9, 1943 are also accurate symbols of what the Constantinian Just War Church is and has done to ordinary Christians by the tens of millions since the Fourth Century. It has destroyed them.

The voice of God will never contradict the Word of God, who is Jesus (Jn 1:1 ff). Refuse to be complicit in the monumental mockery of the truth of Nonviolent Jesus that is Christian Just War Theory.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

RECLAIMING JESUS —BUT NOT— THE NONVIOLENT JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

http://www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/RECLAIMING-JESUS—BUT-NOT—THE-NONVIOLENT-JESUS-OF-THE-GOSPELS-03.pdf

RECLAIMING JESUS

—but not—

THE NONVIOLENT JESUS OF THE GOSPELS

It is difficult, if not impossible, to figure out which Jesus is being reclaimed in the recent much-ballyhooed document, Reclaiming Jesus: A Confession of Faith in a Time of Crisis (attached below). But, what is clear is the Jesus that the document presumes to reclaim is not the Jesus of the Gospels who was Nonviolent and who teaches a Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies. Not once in the entire Reclaiming Jesus document is Jesus’ rejection of violence by word and by deed in the Gospels mentioned, although the document gives a list of things that must be rejected based on Jesus’ teachings and His being Lord. Nor is it mentioned that His disciples are called to follow Him and reject violence. So, the document communicates that a Christian, whether American or British, who has reclaimed Jesus as the document prescribes could join the American or British military and bomb the be-Jesus out of human beings designated “enemies” or designated “collateral damage” in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria.

The idea governing Reclaiming Jesus and around which its authors state the entire document is composed and validated, is this: “Jesus is Lord. That is our foundational confession. It was central for the early church and needs to again become central to us. If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar was not—nor any other political ruler since. If Jesus is Lord, no other authority is absolute.” Neither I nor any other Christian could reasonably disagree with this. It is in fact the theological basis for proclaiming and adhering to Gospel Nonviolence. The Gospels themselves in which Jesus teaches, lives and dies in the Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies—and which Gospels the Catholic Church teaches in its Vatican II Dogmatic Constitution Revelation (sec 18-19), “faithfully hand on what Jesus Christ, while living among men really did and taught for their eternal salvation” —are the historical root of Gospel Nonviolence. But the profession, Jesus is Lord, is the theological root of Gospel Nonviolence, because if Jesus’ authority in matters of Christian faith and morals is not absolute, then He is just another guy conjecturing about the manner in which life should be lived or how to be saved from eternal death.

The Reclaiming Jesus document goes on to say, “What we believe, i.e., Jesus is Lord, leads us to what we must reject. Our ‘Yes’ is the foundation for our ‘No.’ “It then goes on to list those matters that Christians must say, ‘No’ to and rejected on the basis of their, ‘Yes’, to Jesus is Lord. The given list of what must be rejected because Jesus is Lord is this: “white nationalism and racism, misogyny, the mistreatment, violent abuse, sexual harassment, and assault of women, language and policies of political leaders who would debase and abandon the most vulnerable children of God, the practice and pattern of lying that is invading our political and civil life, any moves toward autocratic political leadership and authoritarian rule, “America first” as a theological heresy for followers of Christ.”

It should be noted, and noted well, that while their document states, “If Jesus is Lord, then Caesar is not,” these Christian peace activists from the U.S. and Britain and their document do not reject Christian participation in Caesar’s violence and war because Jesus is Lord. This is bizarre since the Lord Jesus’ rejection of violence in the Gospels is unambiguous. It is strange since the authors respective countries are two of the greatest purveyors of violence in the world historically and today. It is gravely disingenuous since the Christians in their societies did and do most of the violence done by each country. Reclaiming Jesus and proclaiming Jesus is Lord in such societies should, at a minimum, mean rejecting participation in the legal and illegal, romantic and sorted violence of these societies and their institutions that incarnationally follow the way and use the means of the violent Caesar rather than the Nonviolent Jesus. It should mean at least this because,

“Jesus taught that violence belongs to the Reign of Satan, and that men must expel violence if they wish to liberate themselves from the Reign of Satan. If Jesus did not reject any type of violence for any purpose, then we know nothing of him. No reader of the New Testament, simple or sophisticated, can retain any doubt of Jesus’ position toward violence directed to persons, individual or collective, organized or free enterprise, he rejected it totally. Jesus in no way accepts violence as a means of controlling violence.

Jesus presents in His words and life not only a good way of doing things, not only an ideal to be executed whenever it is convenient, but the only way of doing what He did.” (Quoted section is from the Catholic Biblical scholar, Rev. John L. McKenzie.)

It is, however, not surprising that no mention is made of reclaiming the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels. Some of the authors of this document were formally on Barack Obama’s, aka Barack Obomba’s, spiritual consultation team. And, one the authors is the episcopal chaplain of the British royalty—a gene pool that has never existed, cannot exists and does not exist without gargantuan amounts of violence being employed to sustain it and to protect its unholy and promiscuous accumulation of luxury wealth in the face of thousands of human beings writhing in pain and unnecessarily perishing daily because they lack the few cents to procure the needed food or medicine. The hording of luxury wealth in a world where billions do not have the bare necessities needed to live can only be defended and sustained by violence.

If a Christian were to truly desire to reclaim the Jesus of the Gospels—the only Jesus there ever was or will be—it takes no literary skill to say,

“What cannot be done without violence cannot be done by a faithful follower of the Lord Jesus. A Christian cannot follow Jesus’ “new commandment” to “Love one another as I have loved you,” and use violence to do good or to fight evil.”

But this is exactly the Jesus that this document and its peace activists authors do not want to reclaim, any more than the institutional Churches of Christianity want to reclaim Him. Both want a “Jesus” who endorses violence so they can carry out their plans to make the world a better place by using violence, whatever their plans may be.

So which Jesus is this Reclaiming Jesus document trying to reclaim? It is trying to reclaim—or more accurately trying to propagandize—a “Jesus” that never existed in history as a person—a violent liberal-Constantinian Jesus. But a violent liberal-Constantinian “Jesus” is no more the reality of the Person revealed and proclaimed in the Gospels than is a violent conservative-Constantinian Jesus. They are mirror images of each other in terms of the means they use to respond to evil and to promote the good. What each calls Christian love is saturated with violence—that is, with that phenomenon that “Jesus teaches belongs to the Reign of Satan.” It is Christians and their Churches that almost universally confess faith in a violence-endorsing “Jesus” that are the source of this time of crisis. The spiritually malformed Christians Trump, Obama, Clinton, Bush, Merkel, Blair, Putin, etc., are but blips on the screen of the crisis.

It is the institutional Christian Churches and their deceitful leaders, who—through nurtured hardwiring—created in them, and in billions of other Christians the mind-style of justified Christian killers and liars under the pretense of helping them put on the mind and truth of Jesus, who are the cause of the crisis. It is absurd to believe that implementing a new agenda for the betterment of humanity via a new version of a violence endorsing “Jesus” can solve this crisis. The violence-endorsing “Jesus” illusion is the crisis in the Church and in the world.

The Jesus that must be reclaimed to solve this crisis is the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels with His Way of Nonviolent Love, without exception, of friends and enemies. The Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels is Lord. Believe it or not. His authority is therefore absolute. Believe it or not. Jesus presents in His words and life not only a good way of doing things, not only an ideal to be executed whenever it is convenient, but the only way of doing what He did. Believe it or not. And, that Way unequivocally rejects violence, even when—indeed most especially when—ordered by Lord Caesar. Believe it or not.

Let this new evangelization program, as well as all new evangelization programs of all Churches, be in fact new and reclaim the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels from the deceitfully concocted and institutionally propagandized illusion of the violence justifying, endorsing, supporting Jesus, that has brought so much evil and misery into the world and prevented so much good from being done.

—Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

HOLY COMMUNION AND UNHOLY COMMUNICATION

Download Holy Communion_Unholy Communication

An introduction:

When cars continue to drive the wrong way down a One Way street causing serious injury and death, it is important to get out on that street and try to stop the cars going in the wrong direction at the present moment. It is also important, that when the eventual catastrophe occurs, to get out on that street and attend to the broken and bleeding victims, regardless of whether they were going in the wrong direction or in the right direction. Pain is pain, and as human beings and as Christians we must do whatever we can to alleviate it in a fellow human being who is suffering.

But does there not come a time when it is morally demanded to go beyond the tragedy of the day and figure out why so many people are driving in the wrong way down a One Way road, while simultaneously thinking they are going in the right direction?

We drive our vehicles from point A to point B by utilizing a system of symbols, e.g., “Stop” signs, “Do Not Enter” signs, “One Way” signs. If a person, under the influence of some kill-joy, lying and murderous spirit, were to alter the signs, making the “Stop” sign a “Go” sign, removing the “Do Not Enter” sign, reversing the “One Way” sign, catastrophe would ensure. And, while there would still be an imperative moral demand to attend the the immediate needs of the victims of this lethal fraud, there would equally be an imperative moral demand to get rid of the untruthful signs and replace them with signs that clearly communicate the truth; this is “One Way”, “Stop,” “Do not Enter”.

To engage in healing the immediate wounds of those deceived by untruthful symbolization is in utter conformity with the Gospel. To ignore the continuing untruthful symbolization, that ceaselessly and inevitably leads to such human carnage, is in flagrant disobedience to the Gospel. It is not Christic love for a Christian to ignore an untruth that is causing the continual destruction of people. Likewise, a lie does not morph into Christic truth or Christic love because a Christian is deceiving others out of love for God, country, Church, corporation or any subdivision of these. And above all, it is not Christic love to be indifferent to the victims in the street or to the mis-communicating symbols that led to their victimization.

Indeed, until the symbols communicate what they are suppose to communicate about this being a One Way road, pain and sorrow, wretchedness and death will be the required fare in life for traveling the down this road the wrong way.

May the God of love never allow the symbol-changers to know the suffering and horror they are responsible for pouring down upon their fellow human beings by their choice to transpose symbols and their meaning.

(To continue click on the Holy Communion_Unholy Communication.)

Abortion “Intrinsically Evil,” Capital Punishment “Morally Neutral

Kansas City, Missouri, Catholic Bishop teaches why capital punishment is a valid Christian moral choice but abortion is not.

http://catholickey.org/2016/10/20/weighing-the-issues/

The key concept that erroneously morally props up all Catholic killing that is designated “just” is one that cannot be found in the teachings of Jesus. It is the idea that Catholic popes and bishops designate with the words “intrinsically evil.”  It goes like this. Some acts are so evil that there can never be an excuse for doing them. They are evil per se. Examples of such acts according to popes and bishops are artificial contraception, abortion, killing innocent people, and today, but not for most yesterdays, slavery. The alternative designation of an act is that it is morally neutral. Examples of these acts are capital punishment and the slaughter of war for which there can be an excuse for engaging in them. So who determines what is intrinsically evil and how is this determined? Is it by what Jesus teaches? Or is it by way of some philosophy or another? Beyond abortion, euthanasia, embryo destructive research, acts of racism, and same sex marriage mentioned by the Catholic Bishop from Kansas City that are cited what else is intrinsically evil, e.g. swearing oaths, not following Jesus’ new commandment to love as He love, not loving all enemies, even lethal enemies, not putting up the sword as Jesus ordered Peter to do? If not doing what God Incarnate, the Source and Fount and Standard of all Holiness commands, is not intrinsically evil, what other standard can the Christian have that is higher to determine what is intrinsically evil?

The intrinsically evil verses the not intrinsically evil distinction raised between, say, abortion and capital punishment is a distinction that cannot be found in the teaching of Jesus regarding intentional homicide. The “intrinsically evil” versus the “morally neutral” distinction of an act of homicidal violence is a distinction that is an effort to circumvent Jesus’ complete rejection of violence. It is merely situation ethics. Homicidal violence is a morally neutral act that is good or evil depending on the circumstances. If the circumstances are not present that permit it, it is evil. Otherwise it is a morally good act that a Christian may do and be faithful to Jesus.

Now, who determines what these circumstances are? Ah, there is the rub! If it is Jesus, no circumstances could ever arise that could morally justify using of homicidal violence. If it is a pope and a bishop controlling and running an institution of great wealth and who desire to stay in the good grace of the violence justifying local politicians, or if it is a kept house-theologian for, say, PNAC, then I am sure a cornucopia of situations and good reasons can be conjured-up and rationalized where the destruction of human beings can be justified or participated in or ignored as a morally acceptable way of following Jesus!  It is simply a matter that whosever ox is being goad has a good reason for setting aside Jesus’ teaching in the Gospels of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies.

For example, the Catholic Church says that using a condemn in marital sexual relations is intrinsically evil and can never be done morally, even if it is being used to prevent one of the spouses from contracting AIDS from the other. But it also says that killing people in war can be done morally if there is a good enough reason for doing it. Why a spouse with AIDS is not a good enough reason for using a condom defies rationality, once the “good enough reason” exception to intentional homicide is permitted to be employed as a moral justification to engage in the mass human slaughter of war in direct defiance of Jesus’ explicit teaching in the Gospels. Who determines and how do they determine what is a “good enough reason?” Who determines and how do they determine which acts can never have a “good enough reason” for doing them and which acts can?

If Jesus had availed Himself of the loophole of homicidal violence being only morally neutral, which means it can be engaged in if the right circumstances are present that justify it, then He along with Peter and the other Apostles would have violently fought their way out of the Garden of Gethsemane and saved Him from being murdered. If the circumstances and the “good enough reason” ever existed, that made homicidal violence morally justifiable and in conformity with the will of God, the attack on Jesus in Gethsemane would have been the prime example of such a situation and circumstance in the history of humanity. But, Jesus leaves no room for confusion or doubt that homicidal violence as a choice for defense or offence or anything else, e.g. protecting one’s divinely commissioned ministry, is to be completely rejected as the Way to do the will of the Father and as a Way to follow Him. He is clear in all four Gospels that there is never a “good enough reason” for it.

A popes or bishops telling people century after century how to do morally what is the morally impossible by the standards of Jesus is not the commission a pope or bishop is given by Jesus (Mt 28:20). Jesus explicit and unambiguous commission to popes and bishops reads, “Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you.”

To anticipate here the usual objection raised by popes and bishops to what has just been said —“We have to also teach our people how to apply the teaching of Jesus”—let us noted in large upper case letters that an irrational, illogical extension of Jesus teachings is not a valid or authentic expression of fidelity to the commission given to them: “Teach them to obey all that I have commanded you.” Why? Because, God as revealed by Jesus in the Gospels is Logos (Jn1: 1ff), because the God of the Gospels isLogos, because God Incarnate, “made flesh” is Logos. The moral will of the God of Christians is not and cannot be self-contradictory because God is Logos and therefore God cannot be self-contradictory, communicating on Monday by His Word that an act is evil and then communicating on Tuesday that the act is good.

Justified violence, as a moral option for Christians is in the end a distortion of the image of God as revealed by, in and through Jesus. The terrible questions that remain open for dialogue as of today are these: Does the proclamation of a God of justified homicidal violence by a Christian amount to idolatry? Or, is it what Jacques Maritain calls “the practical atheism of Christians” hiding behind sophisticated or less than sophisticated mere speculative philosophy rooted in concupiscence, nurtured disordered desires? Whatever morally justified homicidal violence for Christians is, it is never the teaching of Jesus and never can be a logical extension or application under any situation or circumstances of the teaching of Jesus—“good reasons” notwithstanding.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

The First Joyful Mystery: The Annunciation

The First Joyful Mystery:

The Annunciation

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In the Mystery of the Annunciation three “Yes”es are necessary. Each “Yes” has to be spoken in the context of a potentially horrific future.

Mary must say “Yes” to carrying Jesus in her womb for nine months, and in her heart forever. Her “Yes” would bring with it the probability of being set aside by Joseph, to whom she was betrothed, because he would know the child was not his. Being set aside by Joseph would bring with it either death—for she had ostensibly committed adultery, and the just punishment for adultery was stoning—or else a life of shame and of being ostracized by her “spiritual betters.”

Joseph must say “Yes” to that which his reason and nurturing would insist he say, “No.” From his human perspective at the moment, Mary is guilty of adultery. If he does not divorce her or marry her but instead exposes her to the Law, she—and hence the child she is carrying in her womb—will almost inevitably be stoned to death as her just punishment (Dt 22:21-24). This is important because Joseph’s “Yes” is not the “Yes” of justice under the Law; it is the “Yes” of righteousness, the choice of doing out of love—and contrary to his own interests—God’s mysterious and unfathomable will. This “Yes” of Joseph’s is the earthly father of Jesus saying, “Thy will be done, not mine,” thirty-three years before his son, also against His own earthly interests, would say the same thing.

And the third, “Yes,” is God’s. God, “who is love (agapé),” must say “Yes” to becoming a human being, a member of a humanity long ravaged by and long subject to every manifestation of evil capable of expressing itself through the choices, including the choices of violence and enmity, of these same human beings. In Jesus, God, “who is love (agapé)”must be the human incarnation of that agapé—unconditional, nonviolent, self-sacrificing love for all, friends, strangers, and enemies alike. This Divine choice—to become incarnate as a human being in an environment in which legions upon legions of evil dynamics are operating within human beings and within the institutions they have erected, and to become human with only the power of love (agapé) available to confront and conquer these diabolical forces—is a choice that infinitely surpasses any understandings of justice and of reality. It is a Mystery that is beyond human fathoming because such a choice will inevitably result in a life of having to struggle to love, having to suffer to love, and having to die at the hands of other human beings to love—as God must and will always love on earth He loves in heaven.

In the Mystery of the Annunciation, from the perspective of human beings in their spiritually fallen state, these three “Yes”es defy all notions of what is reasonable, even reason itself. Yet all three “Yes”es were freely given—and of what follows from these three gifts of “Yes,” we are all aware.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

October the Month of the Rosary: A Time for a Consideration

“The Rosary is essentially a contemplative prayer, which requires tranquility of rhythm or even a mental lingering which encourages the faithful to meditate on the mysteries of the Lord’s life”(Congregation of Divine Worship, 2001). The Rosary is a sympathetic participation in and an empathic pondering of the drama that is the life of Mary, whose life is inextricably intertwined with Jesus’ life from the moment of His conception to His crucifixion—and beyond. Prayed sincerely, the Rosary intensifies a person’s encounter with the depth, breadth and immensity, immensity, love, power and glory of the Mystery of God’s Plan for the Redemption of all, through His Word “made flesh,” in Mary’s womb, Jesus the Christ.

The interlocking dramas of the joyful, sorrowful and glorious events of Jesus and Mary’s mutual existences as recorded in the Gospels are presented in fifteen acts in the Rosary, each of which is called a Mystery. We sometimes, perhaps ofttimes, lose sight of the mysterium tremendum that lay beneath and within these Jesus-Mary events and we wind-up believing we understand precisely and totally what the Annunciation, Visitation, etc. are. But the Gospel is about God, and God is of immeasurable depth. Every time we ponder a piece of the Gospel we are encountering a piece of, an aspect of, the Infinite. So also it is with every event in the lives of Jesus and Mary of which the Gospel as leave us a record. When we look at Jesus and Mary acting or being acted upon in the Gospels we are looking into windows to the Infinite; we are approaching God-designed doors to a new reality, to a new life. The Mysteries of the Rosary are moments within that larger mystery of God, within the fathomless mystery of existence, within the mystery of our own life, within the mystery of the drama of salvation in God through the Christ-event.

The Ukrainian Orthodox religious and social philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev, writes, “We will either breathe in the atmosphere of the infinite or we will suffocate in the atmosphere of the finite.” The fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary, allow a Christian to breathe in the atmosphere of the Infinite, which is an atmosphere of Unconditional Eternal Love for each and for all. This is why billions people over the centuries have prayed the Rosary as, they observed from one vantage point or another evil, suffering, fear and death making the, individual and /or collective, experience life hopelessly spiritually claustrophobic.

I met a little girl by the name of Mary Harrington who told me about the Blessed Mother.

Years passed and I attended high school and college and then went to work for the Socialist and Communist movements in the early ’20s. Nevertheless, I often went into churches. One winter when I was working in New Orleans and living across the street from the cathedral there I found great joy in attending Benediction. That Christmas a Communist friend gave me a rosary. “You were always dropping into the cathedral,” she explained.

I did not know how to say the prayers of the Rosary but I kept it by me. A year or so later my friend, Peggy Cowley gave me a tiny statuette of the Blessed Virgin, pale blue and white

Later still, Sister Aloysia of the Sisters of Charity who lived at St. Joseph’s by the Sea, on Staten Island, taught me to say the Rosary. I had known before, as I am sure many children do, the Our Father. But the Hail Mary and the Salve Regina and the Memorare were new to me.

God was our Father, so I could approach Him, daring to say, “Our Father.” But it was reading of Jesus Christ in the New Testament that made me want to put off the old man and put on Christ, as St. Paul said. And who had given me our Lord but the Virgin Mary? It was easy to pray to her, repetitious though it might seem. Saying the Rosary as I did so often, I felt that I was praying with the people of God, who held on to the physical act of the Rosary as to a lifeline, a very present help in time of trouble.

-Dorothy Day

Since October is the month of the Rosary and since so many Christian, Catholic and Protestant, whom I know or know of who are resolutely committed to the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, also pray the Rosary, I thought it might be helpful over the fifteen days beginning October 10^th to forward a short meditation on one of the Mysteries of the Rosary on each day. Hopefully this will be of some spiritual assistance in aiding some Christians to catch a breath in the Atmosphere of Infinite Nonviolent Love of all from which flows the Mystery of God’s Plan of Redemption of all through Jesus the Christ

Charlie

P.S. A DVD or a CD presentation of the Rosary being prayer with these meditations on the Mysteries is available from Bob Aroian at raroian@charter.net  or 978-355-2360 for cost of shipping or less.

FAST FOOD: FORTIETH HELPING (2016)

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FAST FOOD: THIRTY-NINTH HELPING (2016)

Giovanni Bugatti

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The grotesque and blasphemous picture of the Blessed Mother above was published in the summer 2016 edition of the Notre Dame Magazine. The picture accompanies an article titled,For the Children I Would, by a woman working on a master’s degree in English at Notre Dame, while teaching at a Catholic school in South Bend, IN. The article is basically a first person narrative where the author asks herself and her class in an exercise in case book morality the question “what I would do if,” by presenting some short vignettes of scenarios of life threatening situations to herself and others and possible responses. She reaches this conclusion: “I would kill the guy or die trying. I would grab for the most damaging weapon within my reach, the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary, fair skinned, blue-sashed, hands clasped in prayer, eyes turned to God, flowers at her feet, and twenty-four inches of heavy, club-shaped plaster, and I would beat his brains out with a statue of the Mother of God.”

 

“Later, with my class gone to PE and the room quiet,” the author writes, “I looked at Mary so serenely poised there on her limestone pedestal. I imagined that Mary could have had that fighting thing within her. How could a mother not allow that protective beast within her to act? Maybe she did try to fight [to save her Son], and the scribes didn’t write it down for us to read these thousands of years since. Mary has been a spiritual help to me throughout my life. If run and hide won’t work, she will give me more strength in the fight.”

With all the bright people at Notre Dame and all the subjects that could be written about, this is what is published! Why?

 

This same issue of the Notre Dame Magazine also contained information on this year’s Commencement Speaker, recently retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey, and on two powerhouse Washington politicians who were given a medal for being “Outstanding Catholics.” Both, since 2003 have voted for every appropriations bill funding the human slaughter in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. One is even publicly pro-abortion.

Out of 65 million Catholic in the U.S this is the best that the richest and most well known Catholic University in the U.S. can do? Why?

 

Perhaps it is fortunate Bugatti is dead or he, upon retirement from his prestigious position, would have been given an “Outstanding Catholic” medal or invited to give the Commencement address. But maybe not, for he only participated in killing 516 human beings.

 

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-EIGHTH HELPING (2016)

“To sate the lust for power more horrid still,

The foulest stain and scandal of our nature, murder,

Becomes its boast. 

One murder makes a villain, millions a Hero. 

Princes are privileg’d

To kill, and numbers sanctified their crime.”

-Beilby Porteus (1759)

“Murder does not become other than murder because it is mass murder.” 

-Thomas Merton

-Wars, conflict, it’s all business. One murder makes a murderer, a million murders make a hero. 

-Charles Chaplin (1947)

If you shoot one person you are a murderer. If you kill a couple of persons you are a gangster. If you are a crazy statesman and send millions to their deaths you are a hero.

-Watertown Daily News, (1939)

Christians have not realized yet that what men may not do as individuals they may not do when enough of them are gathered in large numbers to form a political society…A Christian cannot do in a crowd what he cannot do alone.

-Rev. John L. McKenzie, Biblical Scholar

Normalized wickedness, culturally accepted wickedness, glorified wickedness, societally honored wickedness, statistically sanctified wickedness is still wickedness in the mind of Christ-God and must also be understood as wickedness in the minds of His disciples. If it is not identified as wickedness at least in one’s own mind, it will become part of the person and perpetuate itself through him or her in ways beyond anticipation or control. There is much money to be made, many laughs to be gotten, enormous power to be grabbed and prestige and privilege to be had by turning a blind eye to normalized wickedness and treating it as acceptable because “that’s just how thing are.” There is even more money to be made in leading others to do the same. To morally justify a manifestation of wickedness is to become part of the process of promoting that wickedness and thereby unleashing ever more wickedness into the human condition. If for the Christian the ultimate and defining norm of good and evil is the Person and the teaching of the Jesus of the Gospels (and if He is not who or what is), then war is raw wickedness and so is military training, as well as, capital punishment and abortion—regardless of how normal they are in a society or in the institutional Churches.

“The Christian obligation of loving one’s enemies—and by implication the sinner—does not require that we cease to recognize the wickedness a person has chosen as wicked and hateful. No higher model of Christian love can be found than Jesus Christ, whose love was not the affirmation of the goodness of men, but a desire to confer on them a goodness that they lacked. There is a world of difference between Christian love toward the sinner and a sentimental sympathy for him. Christian love will spare nothing in order that the one doing evil be redeemed from his condition. Sickly sympathy with the wicked, however, is not true compassion, even for the wicked.”

-Rev. John L. McKenzie, Catholic Biblical Scholar

 The Two-Edged Sword (Imprimatur)

To see and listen to the wicked is already the beginning of wickedness.

-Confucius

It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts and minds.

– Carl Jung

If anyone tries to tell you, or tries to convince you, or tries to make you believe that a faithful follower of the Jesus of the Gospels can participate in the wickedness of mass human slaughter in war, say to him or her with your whole soul, whole mind and whole strength, what Jesus said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do” For, if you as a Christian, regardless of your position in the institutional Church, do not wholeheartedly reject the untruth that Jesus approves of participation in the mass slaughter in war, you will become that untruth.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-SEVENTH HELPING (2016)

Thomas Merton writes, “People may spend their whole lives climbing some ladder of success only to find, once they reach the top, that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.” Are the mainline and evangelical Christian Churches and many Christian Peace and Justice groups scaling the wrong wall? They seem to be trying to be “successful”  at scaling the wall of wickedness that is governmental politics. But what if that is the wrong wall? What if the heart of the Gospel is opposed to entering into any process or organization, whether it be the Mafia, the government, the military, etc., that operates and that must operate on”violence, deceit, betrayal and corruption” (see Fast Food Fourth Helping)? 

What if the wall the Christian and his or her Church should be ambitious to scale is the wall St. Paul presents in 1 Corinthians 13: “Be ambitious for the greatest spiritual gift,” which he say is “agape” (love), as defined by “Christ Jesus who is the visible image of the invisible God” (Col 1:15)? What if faithfulness to God for a Christian and for an institutional Christian Church means struggling to live out of the Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as taught by word and deed by Jesus and St. Paul? Indeed, what if faithfulness means rising daily to live our very lives each day to do precisely that above all else as many times as possible daily?

However, a Christlike deed in one moral moment does not ratify doing evil in another situation. A Mafioso giving some money for food or fuel to a poor person in his neighborhood does not validate his being a participant in an institution of systemic violence, enmity and evil. The works of mercy are not works of violence. But, neither do the works of mercy at one time morally validate the works of violence at another time. Constantine (d.337) abolished crucifixion in the Roman Empire. Does this mean that Christians should seek to be politicians, kings, dictators, prime ministers or presidents in order to get their hands on the levers of dominative, coercive, violent power of the state so they can force people by the threat of violence to do good and avoid evil?

Is Jesus’ solution to the problem of violence in the human situation to get all the instruments and agencies of violence into the hands of the good guys, the good politicians of the kingdoms of this world?

Or, is Jesus’ solution to the problem of violence to designate other people to do violence for Him?

If two Mafia gangs go to war against each other how should the Christian respond, if he or she desires to follow the teaching of Jesus? What should his or her Bishop inform that person is morally right Christian choice to make? Should the person join in with the gang that rules the territory he lives in? Should she join the gang that run the protection racket in her area? Should he make a determinations which gang is killing for a just cause or using just means to kill and join it? Should she join the gang that has been most helpful to her in peace time, the time between internecine Mafia wars for territorial control, power over people and greater wealth? Or, should the Christian’s moral stance when confronted with two Mafiaesque gangs going to war be, “I am a follower of Jesus. I’ll take a pass on both of your offers to sign up for duty in your intrinsically violent organizations.” And a Christian Bishop’s public teaching and direction to those in his spiritual and moral care should be what? “Do what you want. Join up or don’t join up; its up to you. I am washing my hands from having any moral obligation to my flock in this matter?” Or should it be, “It is your Christian duty to join the violent organization that is your local protector?” Or should it be, “You are a follower of Jesus, stay away from the wickedness of homicidal violence regardless of who is engaged in it or why. It is better to die by choosing the Way of Christ than to live for a few more seconds by choosing the way of Satan?“

Which wall must a faithful disciple of Jesus put his or her ladder against? Christilike nonviolentagape or the wall of “violence, deceit, betrayal and corruption” that is politics in any of the kingdoms of this world?

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-SIXTH HELPING (2016)

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FAST FOOD: THIRTY-FIFTH HELPING (2016)

If you, as Christian ministers do not specify and confront real issues, what you say will surely obscure them. If you do not alarm anyone morally, you will yourself remain morally asleep and inevitably drift to the coming hell. And in all this you will continue well the characteristic history of Christianity, for the Christian record is rather clear: from the time of Constantine to the time of global radiation and the uninterceptible missile, Christians have killed Christians and have been blessed for doing so by other Christians.The verbal Christian belief in the sanctity of each human life has not of course interfered with the impersonal barbarism of Christians in twentieth-century war.

A Pagan Sermon to the Christian Clergy (1958)

 C. Wright Mills

-Emmnauel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-FOURTH HELPING (2016)

​         Johannes Ude

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FAST FOOD: THIRTY-THIRD HELPING (2016)

To avoid the slightest doubt, Christ and the apostles speaking in His name again and again emphasized love of the enemy. How can one reconcile these easily understandable commandments of Christ with the use of vio­lence against an assailant? Who dares to claim that violence, armaments, and war are compatible with Christianity? I can only derive from Christ’s commandments that they are not compatible. To be armed for war means to be always prepared to meet the enemy with violence, to harm and pos­sibly kill him. Is this the love which Christ demands of us? To wage war means to inflict as much harm, misery, and death as possible on the enemy while claiming to bring about peace. Is this the love which Christ demands of us?

How can the citizens of a warring nation say that they are obeying the great commandments to love the enemy and to repay evil with good if they stab him with a bayonet, throw hand grenades at him in order to dis­member him, drop tons of bombs on him out of airplanes, and mercilessly fire canons and machine guns into his ranks? And such people want to be called Christian and Catholic?                                                                     Johannes Ude

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-SECOND HELPING (2016)

 Johannes Ude

Whoever is a Christian, that is, who truly abides by Christ’s teaching, may not touch a murder weapon and does not need a rifle, a revolver, a canon, or poison gas. His defense is nonviolence, and his weapons are love, goodness, compassion, patience, and gentleness.

Johannes Ude

How do Catholic moral theologians, priests, and laymen justify the right of self-defense? Are they not violating the unambiguous words of Christ and His apostles when they declare arming and training for war to be acceptable and the “just defensive war” to be morally permissible? How can they, without contradicting themselves, teach that the great commandment to love includes all people, friend and foe, with no exceptions, and, on the other hand, judge the force of arms, preparations for war and self-defense— the killing of the enemy—to be morally permissible, justified, and even a duty?

Johannes Ude

If our remarks are correct, and we are deeply convinced that they are, all churches, starting with the Catholic Church, instead of supporting the right of self-defense and the right to wage war, have to forbid their members to fight in wars and to defend themselves with weapons or any kind of vio­lence because these are incompatible with Christianity.

Johannes Ude

Whoever believes that military preparations help the economy is like the man who wants to heat his stove with dynamite because he thinks it has greater heating power than coal. After a war the economy is like the dynamite heated oven: exploded and completely destroyed. We have to make a decision. Either we are for canons and renounce Christianity, or we are for Christianity and renounce canons, self-defense, military preparations, and war. Either we are for an “armed peace,’ for military preparations, and the use of violence, but then we may not call ourselves Christians. Or we want to be true Christians, but then we have to profess nonviolence and forego self-defense.                                                                                                                                                 –Johannes Ude

However, if the supporters of war, in order to demonstrate how “Chris­tian” they are, demand that war be waged “humanely” and form organiza­tions which object to the various horrors of war, these people are playing a ludicrous, not to say, a childish role. Either one is for war or opposed to it. If one is for war, then one is for war fought with every, even the cruelest, methods in order to totally destroy the enemy as soon as possible, because that is real war. Every war is the opposite of love, and each war is brutal. If I support war, then I also support also the cruelties committed. However, as a Christian I may not commit even the smallest brutality. A Christian has to be a total conscientious objector.

Johannes Ude

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD: THIRTY-FIRST HELPING (2016)

Those who control the writing and publication of church history as a matter of course, consign Christian pacifists to the threshold of oblivion. In twenty-one years of formal Catholic education I had never been taught a sentence about or even heard about such Christians. The sole exception to this was when snide remarks were made about Quakers’ refusal to fight for U.S. However, in every generation of Christianity such Christians have in fact existed, remembered or not. They have proclaimed in their time, often at horrendous cost, the truth of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies as taught and lived by the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels. And, when the time was precisely right and their witness was needed for salvation of each and all—Christians and non-Christians—the Lord of history raised them from the oblivion to which the masters of this world thought they had confined them forever.

Yet, I am stunned that in 70 years of being an American English speaking Christian and Catholic I never came across one word about Rev. Dr. Johannes Ude (1874-1965), a highly learned Austrian Catholic priest, theologian and sociologist, who was totally and publicly committed to the Nonviolent Jesus and His Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, before, during and after Hitler’s Germany. Twice imprisoned for His views by the Nazis, he was nominated twenty-six times for the Nobel Peace Prize by such people as Albert Schweitzer.

How is it possible in the voluminous Catholic newspapers articles, books, journal, religious education materials, and works on Catholic peace and justice that I have read, and Catholic radio and television programs, lectures and sermons to which I have listened, no mention of this priest surfaced in the first 70 years of my Catholic life? More baffling, no mention was ever made of his Catholic theological masterpiece on Gospel Nonviolence, Das Sollst Nicht Toeten(Thou Shall Not Kill) which he completed in 1944, just before being taken off to a concentration camp. How is it possible in all these intervening years no Catholic organization with publishing capabilities has been interested in translating his book into English and putting it before the  English speaking Church membership and before the English speaking world in general?

But thanks to the persevering work of a solitary woman, Ingrid Leder, translating Das Sollst Nicht Toeten into English and thanks to Wipf and Stock publishers who will be releasing it later this year (2016), the English speaking Christian world will have access to this extraordinary Christian and his thoughts on Gospel Nonviolence—thoughts that are presented in the relatively unknown traditional and formal categories Catholic moral theology, which those in power in the Church say validates their claim that there can legitimately be such a moral monstrosity as a war Christians can join in. Ude specifically holds that they do no such thing.

Three Reflections From the Writings of Johannes Ude (all prior to 1944):

1. 1. An irreconcilable contradiction exists between what is generally taught in the Catholic Church about self-defense, training and arming to fight, and the “ just defensive war” and Jesus’ com­mands of love of neighbor and enemy, as we see in the Gospels, the letters of the apostles and in the lives of the early Christians who refused to go to war. We emphasize that a true Christian has no right to self-defense, to train for war, or to serve as a soldier because all of these are a flagrant contradic­tion of Christ’s teaching about love.
2. Did the Catholic military vicar proclaim Christ’s teachings when, ac­cording to the Grazer Volksblatt of September 6, 1936, in an address he extolled the status of soldiers as a glorious and God pleasing profession and stated: “Military leaders are committed to the principle, ‘Our hearts beat for God. Our fist beat on the enemy.’”
3. Every weapon and every violent defense are contrary to the teachings of Christ, which demand that we meet the assailant with goodness and love and allow him to attack us. The weapons of Christ are solely nonviolence, all forgiving love, and forbearance, which suffer even the greatest injustice but never harm the enemy, never return evil for evil. 

No wonder those with political, economic and canonical power in the U.S. institutional Church designated Priest Johannes’ book for oblivion along with its author name.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD: THIRTIETH HELPING (2016)

Psychologically, emotionally, financially, spiritually and socially Bishops are imprisoned in a cult. By choice each has entered into The Cult ofHierarchs. And, like all members of any cult, once chosen the cult is a total immersion, closed reinforcing instrument from which there is almost no possibility of one lone cult member breaking out of the cult cage. In the case of Bishops their cage is a gilded cage.

FAST FOOD: TWENTY-NINTH HELPING (2016)

FAST FOOD: TWENTY-EIGHTH HELPING (2016)

“There is, indeed, no difference between war and murder apart from the fact that the one is on an immeasurably larger scale than the other, and claims an infinitely greater number of victims.That is true of all wars. And the only way to stop them is to say quite definitely that in no circumstances and upon no pretext will we allow ourselves to be dragged into war.

But that, gentlemen, is precisely what you won’t say. You can’t say it, because at heart you believe in violence. That is why, even when you make efforts to establish permanent peace, you can’t think of any means of realising your aim apart from the threat of violence.”

-Hugh Richard Sheppard (1880-1937), English Anglican priest, Dean of Canterbury Cathedral, Christian pacifist.

FAST FOOD: TWENTY-SEVENTH HELPING (2016)

“The most commonplace example of the cognitive dimension in art is the reader’s recognition—sometimes the shock of recognition—the “verification” of a sector of reality that the reader had known but not known that he had known. You are telling the reader or the listener or the viewer something he already knows but which he doesn’t quite know that he knows, so that in the action of communication he experiences recognition, a feeling that he has been there before, a shock of recognition. And so what the artist does, or tries to do, is simply to validate the human experience and to tell people the deep human truthswhich they already unconsciously know.“

-Walker Percy

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

FAST FOOD: TWENTY-SIXTH HELPING (2016)

“There’s strong. Then there’s Army strong.Do your part to spirirtually strengthen our troops.” Be a Military Chaplain.

​”There’s strong. Then there’s Army strong.Do your part to spirirtually strengthen our troops.” Be a Military Chaplain.

Satan uses patriotism to delude people into following him. He sends his deceiving spirit of patriotism to whip people into a flag-waving frenzy, which is nothing more than a ritual of pagan idolatry. Face up to the truth Christian just warists—Bishops, priests, ministers, military chaplains laity; dropping 2000 pound bombs on sinners or slitting sinners throats cannot possibly be the will of God as revealed by Jesus. It is the devil’s work. Nothing discredits Jesus more than Christians, especially Bishops, priests and ministers, claiming to be doing God’s will by terrorizing people or by supporting the terrorizing of people—and war is now and always has been terrorism in military costumes

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
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URL for all previous Fast Food Helpings:

https://www.dropbox.com/sh/glxqoed6fkhhadp/AAD9iNfalEIGL67oI9F0UinOa?dl=0 https://goo.gl/C92GN8

www.centerforchristiannonviolence.org or www.emmanuelcharlesmccarthy.org