Obama: A Most Disingenuous Quote (even for him)

From "Heard on the Stump," WSJ: February 27, 2016:

Barack Obama speaking in Jacksonville, Florida about "folks who are on the campaign trail"

"They're spending all their time talking down America .  I don't know when it became fashionable to do that."

Herewith a few wild guesses of when "it became fashionable to do that," courtesy of the Heritage Foundation:

(1) Speech by President Obama, Rhenus Sports Arena, Strasbourg, France, April 3, 2009.  "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world. Instead of celebrating your dynamic union and seeking to partner with you to meet common challenges, there have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."

(2) Speech by President Obama to the Turkish Parliament, Ankara, Turkey, April 6, 2009.  "Every challenge that we face is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation. This work is never over. That's why, in the United States, we recently ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. That's why we prohibited--without exception or equivocation--the use of torture. All of us have to change. And sometimes change is hard...Our country still struggles with the legacies of slavery and segregation, the past treatment of Native Americans."

(3) President Obama, speech at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., May 21, 2009.
"There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America's strongest currency in the world. Instead of building a durable framework for the struggle against al Qaeda that drew upon our deeply held values and traditions, our government was defending positions that undermined the rule of law." 

Why Should We Believe in Sin? (Advent Reflections)

Tom Wolfe on Intellectuals and People of Intellectual Achievement

Author Tom Wolfe was featured today in the Notable & Quotable section of the Wall Street Journal:

Nov. 1, 2015 5:06 p.m. ET

From an interview with author Tom Wolfe by the National Endowment for the Humanities, on the occasion of his being honored as the NEH’s Jefferson Lecturer in 2006:

"I make a distinction between intellectuals and people of intellectual achievement. . . .

"An intellectual feeds on indignation and really can’t get by without it. The perfect example is Noam Chomsky. When Chomsky was merely the most exciting and most looked-to and, in many ways, the most profound linguist in this country if not the world, he was never spoken of as an American intellectual. Here was a man of intellectual achievement. He was not considered an intellectual until he denounced the war in Vietnam, which he knew nothing about. Then he became one of America’s leading intellectuals. He remains one until this day, which finally has led to my definition of an intellectual: An intellectual is a person who is knowledgeable in one field but speaks out only in others."

When Politicians Fail Us: A Bonhoeffer Alternative to Doublespeak and Cunning

US President Barack Obama holds up a copy of the book, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, given to him by the author Eric Metaxas during the National Prayer Breakfast at the Washington Hilton in Washington, DC, February 2, 2012.

Lael Arrington (Published on October 28, 2015)

"We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds. We have become cunning and learned the arts of obfuscation and equivocal speech. Experience has rendered us suspicious of human beings, and often we have failed to speak to them a true and open word. Unbearable conflicts have worn us down or even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?

"We will not need geniuses, cynics, people who have contempt for others, or cunning tacticians, but simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings. Will our inner strength to resist what has been forced on us have remained strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves blunt enough, to find our way back to simplicity and honesty?"

(Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Germany, 1943-45)

Until you reach the last lines you might think this quote could be from political outsiders Ben Carson, or Carly Fiorina or, if it weren’t so eloquent and respectful, even Donald Trump. Simply substitute “political class” for “human beings.”

As a Christian who was passionate about forbearing with others, Bonhoeffer says we do not need “people who have contempt for others.” For Bonhoeffer, a lifestyle of contempt for people made in God’s image was a disqualifying display of pride. As the old hymn says, the place to pour contempt is on “all my pride.”

Any contemporary comparison of the current American political and cultural climate to that of Nazi Germany is automatically dismissed as overreach. But as we read what brave, thoughtful people said in 1940’s Germany we have to form our own opinions.

A fresh wind is blowing through our country. People are weary of the political class. Tired of their murky speech and cunning tactics.

How “truly and openly” did former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speak at the Women in the World Summit on April 29th?

“Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth,” she said. “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.”

The first, most revealing question we must ask in this climate of “obfuscation and equivocal speech” is, “What do you mean by that?”

Mrs. Clinton, what do you mean by advancing “critical access to reproductive health care”? Do you mean advancing abortion? Clearly we have to show compassion to women in crisis pregnancies and those who have chosen abortions. But we must speak simply, honestly and humbly about the evil of abortion too.

What do you mean by the phrase, “deep-seated … religious beliefs … have to be changed”? What “political will” do you intend to summon to make that happen? Passing laws and prosecuting violators? Fines, even imprisonment of those whose beliefs compel them to reveal or oppose the advance of abortion’s evils?

How can we rally “simple, uncomplicated, and honest human beings” to speak “bluntly” in a nation that cannot name our common enemy as “Islamic fundamentalist terrorists?” If we cannot demand this honesty while we still enjoy great freedoms, how would we demand it if we were to lose our freedoms, like Bonhoeffer did? His simplicity and honesty landed him in Hitler’s prison.

The man who spoke so eloquently about forbearing with the personalities of others that grate on us drew a clear line in the sand for us. When we behold acts of evil we must speak up. We must take risks to oppose it. Bonhoeffer went so far as to join the conspiracy to assassinate the Führer, for which Hitler ultimately had him hanged, even as the Allies were pouring into Germany.

God has allowed the curtain to be drawn back on so many evils this year: the dismemberment of innocent unborns, the oppression of black people, the institutional approval of gay marriage.

May God grant each of us the courage to speak simply and honestly about “what is being forced on us.” Not in contemptuous rants to friends or on Planned Parenthood’s Facebook page. Not by “liking” or supporting candidates who pour contempt on others. We have plenty of respectful alternatives.

Like Bonhoeffer, may we speak truth with sincerity and respect. And sacrifice greatly to redeem the evils we see with actions that back up our words.

 (Adapted from Lael Arrington’s Faith and Culture Blog, “When Politicians Fail Us: A Bonhoeffer alternative to doublespeak and cunning … what you can do” originally published August 14, 2015.)

Roger Scruton: The Search for God

Roger Scruton, the man described by British MEP Daniel Hannan as "the man who, more than any other, has defined what conservatism is," is quoted today in the Wall Street Journal's "Notable & Quotable" section. The quote is from one of the three books he published in2014: The Soul of the World. 

Here's the quote:

There is a widespread habit of declaring emergent realities to be “nothing but” the things in which we perceive them. The human person is “nothing but” the human animal; law is “nothing but” relations of social power; sexual love is “nothing but” the urge to procreation; . . . the Mona Lisa is “nothing but” a spread of pigments on a canvas; the Ninth Symphony is “nothing but” a sequence of pitched sounds of varying timbre. And so on. Getting rid of this habit is, to my mind, the true goal of philosophy. And if we get rid of it when dealing with the small things—symphonies, pictures, people—we might get rid of it when dealing with the large things too: notably, when dealing with the world as a whole. And then we might conclude that it is just as absurd to say that the world is nothing but the order of nature, as physics describes it, as to say that the Mona Lisa is nothing but a smear of pigments. Drawing that conclusion is the first step in the search for God.

Cardinal Arinze Explains "Conscience"

This is a from a post today on Fr. Z's Blog with reference to Lifesite News.

Cardinal Francis Arinze, Prefect Emeritus of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, reminds everyone of what real primacy of conscience is in the Church’s teaching.  He clarifies that we have the responsibility to have a properly formed conscience.

We cannot simply claim “conscience” as justification for sin.

He speaks of the responsibility of bishops and priests to form people’s consciences properly.

He explains (perhaps to Synod members along with everyone else) what “adultery” is.

"Moms Like Me" New NRA Ad Featuring Dana Loesch

Bishop Robert Barron Clarifies Pope Francsi

On October 13, 2015, Bishop Robert Barron did what most Traditional Catholics have been waiting for someone among the prelature to do: he clarified what Pope Francis has often been quoted, and most always misinterpreted, as saying concerning mercy and inclusivity, and being judgmental about sin itself.

Here are two excerpts from the essay, which was published in the National Catholic Register, that could not be clearer:

In speaking of mercy and inclusivity, he is decidedly not declaring that "I'm okay and you're okay." He is calling people to conversion. As my mentor, Cardinal Francis George, said, "All are welcome in the Church, but on Christ's terms and not their own."

Nowhere has the confusion on this score been greater than in relation to the Pope's famous remark regarding a priest with a homosexual orientation, "Who am I to judge?" I would wager that 95% of those who took in those words understood them to mean that, as far as Pope Francis is concerned, homosexual activity is not really sinful. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Pope was responding to a hypothetical involving a priest with same sex attraction, who had fallen in the past and who is now endeavoring to live in accord with the moral law, a sinner, in a word, who has been looked upon by the face of mercy.

You can read the entire essay by clicking HERE.

Cardinal Dolan & Anthony Esolen on The New Marginalized Minority

Two days ago, on his Blog from the synod, Cardinal Dolan surprised many traditional Catholics with his concern for what he dubbed The New Minority.  After all, this is the prelate who proudly served as Grand Marshal for this year's St. Patrick's Day Parade in New York City, which had, for the first time in its history, capitulated to perversion.  Here is the entire post.  It's a very important read for anyone still interested in Truth.

Inclusion of the New Minority

A very refreshing, consistent theme of the synod has been inclusion.  The Church, our spiritual family, welcomes everyone, especially those who may feel excluded.  Among those, I’ve heard the synod fathers and observers comment, are the single, those with same-sex attraction, those divorced, widowed, or recently arrived in a new country, those with disabilities, the aged, the housebound, racial and ethnic minorities.  We in the family of the Church love them, welcome them, and need them.

Can I suggest as well that there is now a new minority in the world and even in the Church?  I am thinking of those who, relying on God’s grace and mercy, strive for virtue and fidelity: Couples who — given the fact that, at least in North America, only half of our people even enter the sacrament of matrimony–  approach the Church for the sacrament;  Couples who, inspired by the Church’s teaching that marriage is forever, have persevered through trials; couples who welcome God’s gifts of many babies; a young man and woman who have chosen not to live together until marriage; a gay man or woman who wants to be chaste; a couple who has decided that the wife would sacrifice a promising professional career to stay at home and raise their children — these wonderful people today often feel themselves a minority, certainly in culture, but even, at times in the Church!  I believe there are many more of them than we think, but, given today’s pressure, they often feel excluded.

Where do they receive support and encouragement? From TV?   From magazines or newspapers?  From movies?  From Broadway?  From their peers?  Forget it!

They are looking to the Church, and to us, for support and encouragement, a warm sense of inclusion.  We cannot let them down!

Upon reading that October 12 blog post of Cardinal Dolan, one might have been reminded of an earlier essay, posted on September 19 at The CatholicThing.ogr, by the inimitable Anthony Esolen, and even suspect that his Eminence perhaps read that very essay.  Here it is:

Who Stands Up for These Marginalized?

Anthony Esolen

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2015

You want people on the margins? The neglected, the invisible?

Last Sunday I was waiting in a diner for a former student of mine, one of my favorites, and his wife, whom I hadn’t met before, and who was carrying their first child. While I was waiting, I glanced over at another table and saw something remarkable.

It was a boy and a girl who had just sat down. They couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, and they might have been as young as sixteen. He was no body-builder, but he was tall and well set up, as they used to say, clean cut, no tattoos. She was slender and pretty, with long dark hair. As he was talking to her, his cheeks were flushed with delight, and he was beaming from ear to ear. She was smiling happily and sweetly in return. They might have come to the diner straight from church, as I had. They shone out with innocence.

They might have been somebody’s father and mother, a long time ago, before they had determined that their delight in one another’s company was really love, before they had decided to make that company everlasting, and before they had sealed their love and their vows with the full-hearted and full-bodied gift of themselves.

So what was remarkable about them? Reader, friend – when was the last time you saw such a couple?

Then my young friend and his wife arrived. He had not known God at all until he experienced a sudden and shattering vision during the summer before his freshman year at college. He spent that summer reading the Bible and pitching himself with all his considerable resoluteness into a new way of life.

It is seven years later. He’s been working for the Coast Guard, hard physical work, from Nova Scotia to the Falkland Islands, and from the Dominican Republic to the Mediterranean. They don’t even have a chaplain or a small chapel on board ship, he tells me, and sometimes one of the men will mock him when they come upon him kneeling in prayer. I doubt that the mockery is ever too serious, though, because this young man has, shall we say, a formidable presence. Not that he minds it.

So I chatted with them also about their plans, and he looked upon her with pride and protectiveness, and she looked upon him with admiration and delight. Again it was purity, right and just, though purity as having come through the smoke and bitterness of the world.

Why are these sights so rare?

I notice that the American president has made sure that Pope Francis, when he comes to visit the White House, will meet a man representing a group that is now always at the center of attention. Even should you descend into the depths of the newspaper, the sports pages themselves, they are there.

Not one day goes by without our hearing about their problems, their demands, their accusations, their mostly invented cultural history, and so on. Sometimes, as in the case of the man whom the president has elevated to brief celebrity, they proudly spurn the teachings of the Church. Sometimes they proudly follow those teachings but demand that everyone applaud them for doing so, and notice them, even change the way they raise children on their account.

I’m tired of it. And I grow downright angry when I consider the people about whose welfare no one ever troubles himself.

Think of the boy and girl at the other table. Now name for me one single social custom, one single local ordinance or state law, one single common work of literature read in the high schools, one single august pronouncement from the episcopal heights, one single session of prelates in council, one single social institution, one single jot of advice given to them from their teachers of “health,” one single word of encouragement or guidance or praise from the media or the mavens of art or those voluble blockheads in the academy, that will show, not even gratitude for their purity, but awareness that such young people exist?

Or if they are acknowledged to exist, here and there, are they not mocked, assaulted by the whores of pornography at a thousand virtual street corners, and rejected by their peers?

Who pays them any mind?

C.S. Lewis once wrote that if we really understood the purposes of things, we would see that all of politics and economics and technology exist so that a couple of friends can chat about good books at their leisure; or, as I’d say, so that a mother and father can sit quietly on the back porch as they watch their small children play; or so that a boy and girl, over the moon for one another, can have lunch at a diner and never once think of the lewd, the squalid, the hard-hearted, the licentious, or the base.

So also I might say about our pastoral directives as regards youth and sex. These are the people we must assist, and not take for granted that they will survive the current onslaught of falsehood and wickedness. We want every diner in every little town in the country to be graced with the laughter of innocent young people in love. What are we doing to see to it?

I might put it this way. Why are we doing all we can to ensure that such youths are as rare as diamonds? If we give all our attention to people whose desires are out of order with their bodies, smiling upon Sodom and grinning with Gomorrah, hypocritically and heartlessly saying that we wish to be merciful, we implicitly join the gang of their high school peers who laugh at them. We imply that they are chumps. And eventually, God forbid, even those last few innocents may come to agree.

Margins? Come see the deserted village.

ARCHBISHOP FULTON SHEEN ON "TOLERANCE"

From ROMANCATHOLICMAN.com today:

In 1931, Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen wrote the following essay:

“America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance-it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.”

“Tolerance is an attitude of reasoned patience toward evil … a forbearance that restrains us from showing anger or inflicting punishment. Tolerance applies only to persons … never to truth. Tolerance applies to the erring, intolerance to the error … Architects are as intolerant about sand as foundations for skyscrapers as doctors are intolerant about germs in the laboratory.

Tolerance does not apply to truth or principles. About these things we must be intolerant, and for this kind of intolerance, so much needed to rouse us from sentimental gush, I make a plea. Intolerance of this kind is the foundation of all stability.”

Anthony Esolen: The Invisible Child

Anthony Esolen wrote today at The Catholic Thing.org, a graphic and highly understandable modern-day take on the most famous bible story: The Prodigal Son, but, unfortunately, the modern-day take does not share the happy ending.  As usual, one is tempted to call it his best essay ever, but one is tempted toward such praise about every essay he writes.  So, rather than pick one or two paragraphs to entice you to read the entire essay, the entire essay is reproduced below.  It's not long, so please read it and think about it.

The Invisible Child

Anthony Esolen

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2015

I have been thinking lately about marriage and annulments, and our Lord’s command that we should go forth to seek the one lost sheep that has wandered in the desert, far from the ninety-nine. I believe in that command with all my heart, because I’ve been that lost sheep.

But what happens if it is through our own negligence or disobedience that the sheep is lost? Does the hireling go after the one lost sheep, because that is easier than to shore up the pen-fold that he has allowed to fall into disrepair? Does he go a-singing through the countryside, while the wolf comes prowling? And when he returns with that one bleating and blockheaded sheep, does he bother to count the sheep remaining? Does he even notice the blood and the entrails smeared on the broken post?

There was a child who had a mother and a father. They had promised to love one another and be true to one another until death alone should part them. They were not feeble minded; they knew what the words of the promise meant. And the boy was happy.

Then came the Father of Nuances, whispering to the husband that words were words and not things, and that words were open to interpretation, and that a word uttered with complete confidence in one context need not mean the same thing when the context had changed. And changed it had: for the wife was older now, and the pretty womanish habits that once fascinated the husband were now constant pinpricks and pinches. So he began to cast his eye elsewhere, and his heart grew hard.

“Wife,” he said, “I am going to take my half of the estate, which belongs to me.” And she could do nothing about it, because of the lawlessness of the land where they lived. So he sold their home, even the home the boy loved, and took half of the estate, and traveled into a far country. But he did not travel alone. He brought another woman with him.

And the boy loved his father, because he was his father, and he hated him, because he had abandoned them. Nor could he find comfort from anyone. His teachers went so far as to tell him that he was fortunate, because now he would have two mothers instead of one, and two homes. Soon enough he had two fathers also, because his mother lost heart.

She went to a priest, and said, “See, my husband has left us bleeding in the ditch.” But the priest said he could do nothing for her, urged her to forgive her husband, and suggested that she join a group for single adults. She went to a scribe, expert in the law, and said, “See, my husband has broken our vow, and we are bleeding,” but the scribe smiled, and said that she should be satisfied with her settlement, which was generous enough.

That is why she lost heart. And one day when she and her son were in the Temple, gathered with others for prayer, they heard the words of the One who said, “So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”

Then the priest said that words were words and not things, and that words were open to interpretation, and that a word uttered in one context need not mean the same thing when the context had changed. And changed it had: for the priest urged the people to open their minds and accept the fornicators in their midst, and the sodomites, and the adulterers. And the boy heard it, and he came to believe that the whole thing was a lie.

He was supposed to say that he enjoyed visiting his father and the woman who helped to ruin his boyhood, and that was a lie. He was supposed to say that he believed in the words of Jesus, but evidently nobody believed them, but instead they lied continually.  His mother took up with another man, not bothering to marry, because nobody believed that marriage and the marital act were connected, but instead they all lay in their sins as a matter of course, continually. He was supposed to love that other man, and he did, in a way, but he had also to pretend that it had all worked out for the best, which was also a lie.

When his body was ready for fornication, so was he. He grew practiced in the art of saying, with his body, “I am yours forever,” when “forever” meant “until I am weary of you,” which sometimes was soon enough, sometimes even in the act itself. But the girls were liars too, so one needn’t feel too sorry for them.

Then one day his father returned with his stepmother, and all the people were instructed to celebrate, because he had returned. He had not returned to his wife, and he did not seek to make up for his son’s sadness and abandonment and loss of faith. He did not say, “Treat me as one of your hired servants, because I have sinned against God and against you.”  He said, “Come and feast with me, because I have returned!”

And the fatted bishop said to the son, “It is right that you should feast with your father, because he has returned.”

So the boy went in to the feast and got drunk. He put out of his memory the many times he wept at night, because his father was gone. He put out of his memory that first terrible day when it occurred to him that no one ever told the truth. He put out of his imagination that Jesus who said, “Let the little children come to me.”

He hung a millstone round his heart. He did not forgive, because everyone was telling him that there was nothing to forgive. So he got drunk.

Nigerian Bishops Speak Up for the Family

Excerpt from The National Catholic Register today:

As Synod Approaches, Nigerian Bishops Speak Up for the Family (1009)

PORT HARCOURT, Nigeria — Nigeria’s bishops closed their latest assembly with a view toward the upcoming Synod on the Family, re-affirming the family while warning about homosexual activism.

The bishops said “we reaffirm the validity of the family as a divinely instituted community of persons made up of a man and a woman who are open to life in love, together with their children and relatives.”

They commended the Pope for his recent document Mitis Iudex Dominus Iesus (Lord Jesus, the Meek Judge), which aimed at accelerating the process for investigating the nullity of a marriage.

“We pledge to use this new process for the pastoral and spiritual benefit of our people,” the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Nigeria said in a wide-ranging statement closing its second plenary meeting, held Sept. 10-18 in Port Harcourt, the capital of Nigeria's Rivers State.

The bishops also voiced “deep concern” about homosexual, bisexual and transgender activism in many parts of the world.

“We reiterate our unreserved condemnation of all acts of homosexuality as sinful and opposed to the natural law of creation,” they said. “We call on our government to continue to resist the attempt by some external governments and agencies to impose an acceptance of same-sex unions.

“Nevertheless, we maintain that persons with these orientations should be assisted pastorally, spiritually and psychologically, with respect for their dignity as human persons created in the image and likeness of God.”

Yogi Berra Dies at 90, R.I.P.

Yogi Berra, the most famous, and, most agree, the greatest major league baseball catcher of all time, died yesterday at the age of 90.  The following is from Time.com. 

Yankees Hall of Fame Catcher Yogi Berra Dies at 90

AP

New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra poses at spring training in Florida in an undated file photo

He caught the only perfect game in World Series history

(NEW YORK) — Yogi Berra, the Hall of Fame catcher renowned as much for his dizzying malapropisms as his record 10 World Series championships with the New York Yankees, has died. He was 90.

Berra died of natural causes Tuesday at his home in New Jersey, according to Dave Kaplan, the director of the Yogi Berra Museum.

“While we mourn the loss of our father, grandfather and great-grandfather, we know he is at peace with Mom,” Berra’s family said in a statement released by the museum. “We celebrate his remarkable life, and are thankful he meant so much to so many. He will truly be missed.”

Short, squat and with a homely mug, Berra was a legendary Yankee who helped the team reach 14 World Series during his 18 seasons in the Bronx.

Berra played in more World Series games than any other major leaguer, and was a three-time American League Most Valuable Player.

But his name appears almost as often in Bartlett’s Famous Quotations as it does in baseball’s record book.

“It ain’t over ’til it’s over” is among eight “Yogi-isms” included in Bartlett’s.

“When I’m sittin’ down to dinner with the family, stuff just pops out. And they’ll say, ‘Dad, you just said another one.’ And I don’t even know what the heck I said,” Berra insisted.

Berra played for the Yankees from 1949-65. His teammates included fellow Hall of Famers Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford.

In 1956, he caught the only perfect game in World Series history and after the last out leaped into pitcher Don Larsen’s arms. The famous moment was captured in photographs published in newspapers around the world.

After his playing days, Berra coached or managed the Yankees, New York Mets and Houston Astros. He led both the Yankees and Mets to pennants.

In 1985, his firing as manager by the Yankees 16 games into the season sparked a feud with George Steinbrenner. Berra vowed never to return to Yankee Stadium as long was Steinbrenner owned the team.

But in 1999, Berra finally relented, throwing out the ceremonial first pitch of the Yankees’ season-opening game.

Berra, the son of Italian immigrants, got his nickname while growing up in St. Louis. Among his amateur baseball teammates was Jack McGuire, another future big leaguer.

“Some of us went to a movie with a yogi in it and afterwards Jack began calling me Yogi. It stuck,” Berra told the Saturday Evening Post.

He was a fan favorite, especially with children, and the cartoon character Yogi Bear was named after him.

Berra, who played in 15 straight All-Star Games, never earned more than $65,000 a season.

Growing up, he was anything but a natural.

Chunky and slow, Berra was rejected by his hometown St. Louis Cardinals after a tryout in 1943. But a Yankee scout recognized his potential and signed him.

He reached the majors late in the 1946 season and homered in his first at-bat. The next year, he continued to hit well, but his throwing was so erratic he was shifted to the outfield, then benched.

His breakthrough season came in 1948, when he hit .315 with 14 homers and 98 RBIs while continuing to improve his fielding. In 1949, he compiled a .989 fielding percentage and did not make an error in the All-Star Game or World Series.

“I don’t care who the hitter is,” New York manager Casey Stengel told the New York Journal-American. “(Berra) knows just how he should be pitched to.”

Berra was AL MVP in 1951, 1954 and 1955. He holds World Series records for most hits (71) and most games (75).

He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972.

“You never think of that when you’re a kid,” Berra said. “But egads, you gotta be somethin’ to get in.”

Among his boyhood friends was Joe Garagiola, who went on to a career as a major league player and broadcaster. In rejecting Berra at the 1943 tryout, the Cardinals signed Garagiola, another catcher, instead.

Lawrence Peter Berra was born in St. Louis on May 12, 1925, the son of Pietro, a laborer in a brickyard, and Pauline Berra. He grew up in “The Hill,” or Italian district, with three older brothers and a younger sister.

Berra was forced to drop out of school in the eighth grade and go to work to help support his family. He took jobs in a coal yard, as a truck driver and in a shoe factory.

He continued to play amateur baseball, which brought him to the attention of major league scouts.

In 1943, his first professional season with the Yankees’ farm team in Norfolk, Va., was interrupted by World War II.

He joined the Navy and later served on a gunboat supporting the D-Day invasion.

Berra married his wife, Carmen, in 1949. The couple, who met in their native St. Louis, had three sons, including Dale Berra, who played in the major leagues as an infielder.

Berra published three books: his autobiography in 1961, “It Ain’t Over …” in 1989 and “The Yogi Book: I Really Didn’t Say Everything I Said” in 1998. The last made The New York Times’ best seller list.

In 1996, Berra was awarded an honorary doctorate from the state university in Montclair, N.J., where he and his family lived. The university also named its baseball stadium for Berra. The adjoining Yogi Berra Museum opened in 1998.

The museum houses Berra memorabilia, including what he said was his most prized possession, the mitt he used to catch Larsen’s perfect game.

He tickled TV viewers in recent years by bringing his malapropisms to a commercial with the AFLAC duck. (“They give you cash, which is just as good as money.”)

His wife once asked Berra where he wanted to be buried, in St. Louis, New York or Montclair.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Why don’t you surprise me?

Anthony Esolen: Ignoring Beauty, Goodness, and Truth

Anthony Esolen, wrote today on The Catholic Thing.org, an essay that absolutely needed to be written.  It's about those among us trying to live life as it is meant to be lived, so of course it is difficult to find anything written about them.  We are inundated, by the media and certain political groups, and even encouraged by some to endorse and even embrace lifestyles being pushed on us by well funded groups interested in touting their own agendas, regardless how perverted some of those agendas might be.  We are commanded, it should be remembered, to love all people, not to embrace all lifestyles.

Professor Esolen's essay is reproduced below in its entirety.  It gives us hope.

Who Stands Up for These Marginalized?

Anthony Esolen

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2015

You want people on the margins? The neglected, the invisible?

Last Sunday I was waiting in a diner for a former student of mine, one of my favorites, and his wife, whom I hadn’t met before, and who was carrying their first child. While I was waiting, I glanced over at another table and saw something remarkable.

It was a boy and a girl who had just sat down. They couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, and they might have been as young as sixteen. He was no body-builder, but he was tall and well set up, as they used to say, clean cut, no tattoos. She was slender and pretty, with long dark hair. As he was talking to her, his cheeks were flushed with delight, and he was beaming from ear to ear. She was smiling happily and sweetly in return. They might have come to the diner straight from church, as I had. They shone out with innocence.

They might have been somebody’s father and mother, a long time ago, before they had determined that their delight in one another’s company was really love, before they had decided to make that company everlasting, and before they had sealed their love and their vows with the full-hearted and full-bodied gift of themselves.

So what was remarkable about them? Reader, friend – when was the last time you saw such a couple?

Then my young friend and his wife arrived. He had not known God at all until he experienced a sudden and shattering vision during the summer before his freshman year at college. He spent that summer reading the Bible and pitching himself with all his considerable resoluteness into a new way of life.

It is seven years later. He’s been working for the Coast Guard, hard physical work, from Nova Scotia to the Falkland Islands, and from the Dominican Republic to the Mediterranean. They don’t even have a chaplain or a small chapel on board ship, he tells me, and sometimes one of the men will mock him when they come upon him kneeling in prayer. I doubt that the mockery is ever too serious, though, because this young man has, shall we say, a formidable presence. Not that he minds it.

So I chatted with them also about their plans, and he looked upon her with pride and protectiveness, and she looked upon him with admiration and delight. Again it was purity, right and just, though purity as having come through the smoke and bitterness of the world.

Why are these sights so rare?

I notice that the American president has made sure that Pope Francis, when he comes to visit the White House, will meet a man representing a group that is now always at the center of attention. Even should you descend into the depths of the newspaper, the sports pages themselves, they are there.

Not one day goes by without our hearing about their problems, their demands, their accusations, their mostly invented cultural history, and so on. Sometimes, as in the case of the man whom the president has elevated to brief celebrity, they proudly spurn the teachings of the Church. Sometimes they proudly follow those teachings but demand that everyone applaud them for doing so, and notice them, even change the way they raise children on their account.

I’m tired of it. And I grow downright angry when I consider the people about whose welfare no one ever troubles himself.

Think of the boy and girl at the other table. Now name for me one single social custom, one single local ordinance or state law, one single common work of literature read in the high schools, one single august pronouncement from the episcopal heights, one single session of prelates in council, one single social institution, one single jot of advice given to them from their teachers of “health,” one single word of encouragement or guidance or praise from the media or the mavens of art or those voluble blockheads in the academy, that will show, not even gratitude for their purity, but awareness that such young people exist?

Or if they are acknowledged to exist, here and there, are they not mocked, assaulted by the whores of pornography at a thousand virtual street corners, and rejected by their peers?

Who pays them any mind?

C.S. Lewis once wrote that if we really understood the purposes of things, we would see that all of politics and economics and technology exist so that a couple of friends can chat about good books at their leisure; or, as I’d say, so that a mother and father can sit quietly on the back porch as they watch their small children play; or so that a boy and girl, over the moon for one another, can have lunch at a diner and never once think of the lewd, the squalid, the hard-hearted, the licentious, or the base.

So also I might say about our pastoral directives as regards youth and sex. These are the people we must assist, and not take for granted that they will survive the current onslaught of falsehood and wickedness. We want every diner in every little town in the country to be graced with the laughter of innocent young people in love. What are we doing to see to it?

I might put it this way. Why are we doing all we can to ensure that such youths are as rare as diamonds? If we give all our attention to people whose desires are out of order with their bodies, smiling upon Sodom and grinning with Gomorrah, hypocritically and heartlessly saying that we wish to be merciful, we implicitly join the gang of their high school peers who laugh at them. We imply that they are chumps. And eventually, God forbid, even those last few innocents may come to agree.

Margins? Come see the deserted village.

Admiral Hyman Rickover: Man's Purpose in Life

Hyman G. Rickover (January 27, 1900 – July 8, 1986), the "Father of the Nuclear Navy,"  is the author of today's Notable and Quotable section in the Wall Street Journal, entitled: "Man's Purpose."  

Notable & Quotable: Man’s Purpose

‘Having a vocation is something of a miracle, like falling in love.’

Sept. 15, 2015 6:39 p.m. ET

From Hyman G. Rickover’s “Thoughts on Man’s Purpose in Life,” the Council on Religion & International Affairs’ annual Morgenthau Memorial Lecture in 1982, after his retirement as a U.S. Navy admiral:

Man’s work begins with his job; his profession. Having a vocation is something of a miracle, like falling in love. I can understand why Luther said that a man is justified by his vocation, for it is proof of God’s favor. But having a vocation means more than punching a time clock. It means guarding against banality, ineptitude, incompetence, and mediocrity. A man should strive to become a locus of excellence. . . .

Man has a large capacity for effort. In fact it is so much greater than we think it is that few ever reach this capacity.

We should value the faculty of knowing what we ought to do and having the will to do it. Knowing is easy; it is the doing that is difficult. The critical issue is not what we know, but what we do with what we know. The great end of life is not knowledge, but action. . . .

To seek and accept responsibility, to persevere, to be committed to excellence, to be creative and courageous, to be unrelenting in the pursuit of intellectual development, to maintain high standards of ethics and morality, and to bring these basic principles of existence to bear through active participation in life—these are some of my ideas on the goals that must be met to achieve meaning and purpose in life.

Bishop Robert Barron on His Episcopal Coat of Arms

President Reagan: A Soldier's Pledge

Fr. Pilon on Conscience and God

Fr. Mark Pilon, a priest of the Diocese of Arlingtom, Virginia, wrote an essay today at The Catholic Thing.org entitled: "When Conscience Trumps Faith and God."

In his essay, Fr. Pilon debunks the wishful thinking of the many Catholics who, in the aftermath of Vatican II, have allowed themselves to believe that their own conscience is the final arbiter of good and evil.

Here are some brief excerpts, but we would all do well to read the entire essay, and file it under "keepers."

The notion that conscience is absolute is a great anthropological and theological lie. Nothing is absolute but God. And conscience, which is an act of the intellect, declares itself absolute only if it simultaneously declares God is not God.

...while man sins if he does not follow his conscience, this doesn’t mean that he does not sin if he follows his conscience.

Indeed, where conscience deliberately refuses to be subject to the law of God, it becomes an agent of sin.

For additional reading on this topic, please read the essay written today, by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, entitled: "Conscience And Truth," by clicking HERE.

Carl Olson: Sixty percent of Catholics are Wrong on Same-Sex Marriage

Carl E. Olson, editor of Ignatius Insight.com and Catholic World Report, was interviewed on NewsMaxTV's "The Hard Line" program today, and the topics were Abortion and so-called Same-Sex Marriage.

When told by the interviewer that statistics show 60% of Catholics believe that gay couples should have the right to marry, and asked what that means, Olson responded:

"…it means that 60 % of Catholics are wrong." 

Bishop E.W. Jackson: The Truth about Margaret Sanger and Planned Parenthood

The following is from CNSNews.com:

(CNSNews.com) - At a press conference outside the National Portrait Gallery on Thursday, Bishop E.W. Jackson said that if Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger had her way Civil Rights Movement leaders Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks "would never have been born."

The press conference brought together a group of black pastors and pro-life leaders who are demanding that the portrait gallery, which is a part of the federally funded Smithsonian Institution, remove a bust of Margaret Sanger.

The bust is featured in the gallery’s “The Struggle for Justice” exhibit, which focuses on historical equal rights achievements in America. Depictions of King and Parks are featured in the exhibit nearby Sanger’s bust.

“So even though, for PR purposes, she went from talking about eugenics to talking about birth control, her commitment to stopping the growth of the populations of those that she considered to be unfit or defective or unworthy continued,” Jackson said. “She said this: ‘We are paying for and even submitting to the dictates of an ever-increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all.'

“Planned Parenthood is nothing more than a euphemism for Planned Death for the people that Margaret Sanger thought should not exist,” said Jackson.

“To think that her bust sits alongside MLK and Rosa Parks!” he said. “If Margaret Sanger had her way MLK and Rosa Parks would have never been born.”

Jackson is the president of   STAND (Staying True to America’s National Destiny).

On Thursday, after the press conference, he delivered a petition signed by 14,000 calling for the Smithsonian to remove Sanger’s bust.