Vote for Joe

In the last post, the priest notes that our societies throughout the world are saturated with sin these days, and God may have allowed (not that He directly caused it) a virus to let us know in the physical, at least some of how sick we have become spiritually. And yeah, abortion, gay sex, transgenderism, cloning… All pretty obvious spiritual sickness — that is if you’re reading the Bible, or Catholic Church teaching, or a combination thereof. But what else? Here’s one. Those of us in small town and suburban America, are leaving little kids abandoned, and their parents trapped in transgenerational poverty loops, in, as an example, American inner cities. These inner cities are now blighted war zones. Meanwhile all of us outside those inner cities, stay relatively comfortable, relatively safe, without virtually a second thought about these people. This is a huge sin of omission, and a huge sin of indifference! For five years, our family moved to a hardscrabble area of Cleveland to live among these abandoned people and to volunteer at an outreach to help them. And the poverty was palpable and the danger level was off the charts. (There were two homicides on our block in a four month period, as an example.) So, on the “repent” front. Is it enough to raise up a few “Alleluia, forgive me Jesuses!” And think everything’s then going to be alright? Or do we look, as just one example, at this inner city abandonment thing squarely in the eye, repent and: THEN MAKE IT RIGHT! Our campaign platform calls for nothing less than a Marshall Plan to rebuild and revitalize our inner cities. But more. It also calls for, through a series of creative urban development neighborhood designs and incentives, for some more well healed people to move back into our inner cities to live and help in solidarity, coupled with a tremendously proactive twinning of suburban and inner city churches, and so on. Luke 11:5 Jesus tells the story of a neighbor who comes to a friend’s house, says he needs some bread, and the friend smiles and says something like: “God bless ya buddy and have a good night.” But, oh yeah one thing. He doesn’t give the guy any bread. Uh… And it’s the same here. We know, really know, that these people in these inner cities need all kinds of significant help, and many of us bow our heads in suburban and small town church services during the prayer intentions, and pray: “Lord, please help the poor in our cities.” Then, well, we do nothing, or virtually nothing to really help. This is called being “spiritually sick.” Just like people, again, are getting ‘sick’ from the coronavirus. Time to wake up!

During an interview on NPR, a gay man in Los Angeles, talking in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, said “…my people are used to viruses.” Yeah. In most cases, HIV is a sexually transmitted infection. It affects vital cells in the human immune system, with the body becoming progressively more susceptible to opportunistic infections leading to the development of AIDS. That’s the scientific definition. Here’s the spiritual one. In a series of messages to Fr. Stefano Gobi, an Italian Catholic priest, the Blessed Virgin Mary explained that cancer, and AIDS, were a couple of the “plagues” referenced in the Bible’s Book of Revelation. See, the way the Bible (and the Catholic Church) have it set up, it’s: one man / one woman with no sex before marriage. If both partners are true to this Biblical construct, AIDS doesn’t become part of the equation (sans things like shared drug needles, and such). However many in society, well, couldn’t leave it like this. No, gay sex with multiple partners became more and more prevalent. And AIDS first started up in that community. However soon after, it started happening more and more in the heterosexual community as well. Here again, there were multiple partners — often before marriage. Although extra-marital stuff ran a close second, as people got more promiscuous, then more promiscuous… So what do you got? Instead of a cloister of one man / one woman (both virgins prior) in marriage, you got, well, multiple partners who were doing multiple sexual things that, frankly, were eroding their souls. So what does God do? He injects a transmissible virus into all this — that ‘erodes’ the immune system. It’s, ultimately, physically deadly. As those sins outside of marriage are spiritually deadly. It was a ‘message of mercy’ from God. That is, to persist in the sexually sinful lifestyle leads to Hell, for eternity. And God was giving mankind a distinct clue about all that, and then He even sent the Blessed Virgin Mary back into the world to ‘aid’ in clarifying it even more. Note: It’s been a combination of the breakdown of the family, relaxed sexual mores, and actual “sex addiction,” that have all led to the evolution of the advanced sexual malaise we find ourselves in. To start to reverse this at the core, we have to look at systemically “healing the family.” And our campaign position paper on this goes a long way toward moving America in a direction to do just that. Note 2: The Bible is also crystal clear that gay sex/marriage, monogamous or not, is also serious sin, with potentially grave eternal consequences.

I just heard someone use the metaphoric vernacular that people should “…avoid this like the plague.” If you’re, say, Christian, what would some of these things you should avoid be? They would be: abortion; homosexuality; transgenderism; straight sexual immorality; false gods; gluttony; selfishness… So, let’s take America. We’re at 65 million abortions. Homosexuality and transgenderism are now considered acceptable, mainstream lifestyles. Promiscuity among singles, and marital infidelity, are off the charts. (There’s a 65% divorce rate now in America.) Professional athletes, materialism, media/entertainment… have all become false gods in a major way here. Our gluttonous First World lifestyles are tremendously fueling climate change that’s destroying the planet and killing people, now. And 66% of us are overweight, with 33% being downright obese. We continue to build better homes, drive nicer and nicer vehicles, get wider and wider TV screens… Meanwhile millions of desperate refugees are amassed at borders worldwide, two billion people live in deplorable slum conditions, and another billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water… America is “the best country on earth,” we’ll say. If it is, the (spiritual) bar is awful low. Note: Mother Theresa, after a trip to America, called it the most “spiritually poor” nation she’d ever visited. We can’t keep getting pumped up with blind, patriotic pride here. It’s spiritual suicide. We need a leader, a spiritual one and/or a political one, who will tell the American public the truth: A lot of what we’re doing these days should “…be avoided like the plague.” In fact, maybe that’s why the real plague is here. Hmm. Note 2: For the kind of leader I allude to, go to www.voteforjoe.com

As I mentioned in an earlier ‘Nineveh post,’ the airwaves these days are saturated with sexual imagery. (And here comes an invisible deadly virus into our air waves now. Hmm.) But many of us have become so desensitized to this sexual imagery that we simply accept it as normal now (unless it’s tremendously X-rated stuff). But here’s the spiritual rub… Jesus said anyone “who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in their heart.” [Mathew 5:28] While giving a talk at a moral theology class at Bluffton College a number of years ago, I said, for instance, husbands and wives spend hours sitting on a couch together watching scantily clad actors in all kinds of sexual poses, and much more — on prime time TV without thinking anything of it. During the Q & A period after the talk, the professor said that when you think about this objectively, it would be like saying, to your wife, for example: “Honey, I’m going next door to look in the window at Marge for a couple hours.” What’s more, the more we watch TV fashions getting more suggestive, and more suggestive… well, life imitates art, if you will. And all of a sudden, just as one example, we have a majority of women, teenage girls, and even young children wearing tights — and thinking nothing about it! Does any of us think, for even a second, that God condones this? In fact, He might be, oh, a bit angry about it — given what his Son said. Just sayin’. So, as president, how would I impact this? As just one example, I would vocally, and regularly, support “1 Million Moms Fight for Decency” on television. What’s more, I wouldn’t have a super-model wife modeling suggestive stuff at political events. Think loose, but fashionably fitting of course, LL Bean clothes or something. Note: The Bible’s 1 Timothy 2: 8-9… “I also want the women to dress modestly, with decency and propriety…” Uh, short shorts, tight jeans with rips all over, tights in general… I mean, c’mon. Note 2: In 1917 at Fatima (a Catholic Church approved apparition), the Blessed Virgin Mary said souls were falling into hell like “snowflakes.” And the number one reason, she said: “Sins of the flesh.” That, incidentally, is the kinds of ‘sins’ I’m writing about in this post.

The reading at Mass today was Numbers 21:4-9. The colloquial cliff note on this is… Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt. God gave them manna (small tortilla bread like stuff) to sustain them. And it did. But, okay, it wasn’t Outback Steakhouse. So the Israelites started to complain. God, in turn, got angry. How angry? He sent poisonous snakes among the people. And some died. In short order, they repented (from coming off as spoiled) and eventually the snakes left. So… It’s the year 2020 in the First World. Instead of being happy with fans, we wanted air conditioning units, then central air, then… Instead of being content with your basic vehicle for transportation, we wanted two nicer vehicles, and then even nicer vehicles (with all the options), and then even… And yeah, after watching a few HGTV shows, we wanted a sun porch, then we wanted an add on den, and then we wanted… Meanwhile some 2 billion people live in slums worldwide. Many don’t even have bicycles with trailers to get their meager crops to market in town. And air conditioning? More than one billion people live without any electricity worldwide. And now here comes a virus into our First World midst that is ‘biting’ some of us, our loved ones, and so on. We need to come to grips with the fact that God, through the years, has chastised his people. But even more (and this will be a good kind of more), we need to understand why He’s doing it (Coming off as spoiled?), repent, and change. One could only wonder what would have happened to the Israelites if they hadn’t repented and changed. Note: And it won’t be enough to just scale back. We’ll need to take the savings to help all these other people in tough straits. For an overall template of how our administration would inspire this, and provide many more conduits into the Third World, see…