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Father John Zuhlsdorf #fundie wdtprs.com

The Devil and the fallen angels hate you.

They have angelic abilities. They never sleep, never tire, are never distracted, have no need to travel from point a to b, and they never miss what you are up to.

Think this through.

Imagine what sort of profile on you some government agency could put together. I’ve written on this before, but it bears dredging up and repeating.

Imagine that government agencies want to build a psychological profile of you, much as the FBI might when they use clues and evidence to hunt down an unknown serial killer.

These government agents, let’s call it The Agency, teamed up with a newly minted Dem President’s Domestic Security Force, are profiling Catholics. Real Catholics are, of course, terrorists and dissidents: they refuse to worship Moloch and offer sacrifices of incense to the statue of the POTUS.

Said Agency and DSF plot your movements through your mobile phone and car’s GPS as you move in and out of cells which they monitor to triangulate your location. They learn something about you through your patterns of travel. They learn about your tastes and interests through your purchasing history. They monitor your calls, where you go on the internet, what you write and read in your email and on webpages. They look at all your online transactions. Through your credit card records they hunt up the actual receipts and examine what you bought at every store... including those embarrassing things. After all, you leave amazingly information-rich and detailed trails and clues to who you are with every move and purchase. The Agency and DSF review all your library checkouts, your magazine subscriptions, your movie going habits, your DVD choices through Netflix or digital downloads through Amazon and iTunes. They watch your channel selections through your cable or satellite. All this information can be mined. They watch your every interaction with your friends... and strangers too, for that matter, with listening devices and cameras. After gathering all this information, the Agency’s profiling experts build a picture of you, get into your head. They figure out what you are about, who you are, and what you going to do next.

They are merely humans with a lot of bits of information.

How much better can fallen angels, the demons do this?

Angels, the holy angels and the fallen, have never missed anything of your lives since the instant of your conception. And they never forget. Anything.

Fallen angels, the enemy, the Devil, can’t literally get into our heads or thoughts or touch our will, but they don’t have to in order to know us really well.

And they hate you. They hate you. They hate you.

Mark Kenny #fundie wdtprs.com

Kelly: With a pair of bolt cutters and sense of indignation, custodian cuts down what flies in church

A Mary Poppins mannequin hung from the ceiling at St. Cecilia Cathedral for its 31st annual flower festival, but a custodian used bolt cutters to send it crashing to the floor on the first morning of the event. The custodian said he hopes the incident sparks “conversation” about what types of displays are appropriate in a church.

On the first morning of the 31st annual Cathedral Flower Festival, with its theme of “A Night at the Movies,” an agitated church custodian made a bold move.

Mark Kenney, 59, who grew up in the parish, had worked at St. Cecilia Cathedral for three years. Around 8 a.m. on Jan. 29, he went to a work shed, picked up a pair of heavy-duty bolt cutters and ascended to a catwalk high above the mostly empty nave, or main sanctuary.

He looked through a peephole, he said, to make sure he wouldn’t hurt any people. And then he cut a steel cable, which sent a suspended, umbrella-carrying, hat-wearing Mary Poppins figure crashing to the floor.

Kenney then went downstairs and removed a cardboard Buddha figure from the Nash Chapel, which also featured costumed mannequins from “The King and I.” He threw the Buddha out one door and proceeded to toss costumed mannequins out two other doors.

Someone alerted the pastor, the Rev. Michael Gutgsell, who ran from the rectory next door to the church and saw Kenney.

“Mark,” he called out, “did you see who did this?”

“Father, it was me. You need to call the police.”

Gutgsell had known that his custodian had misgivings about secular displays in the church but says he was dumbfounded and didn’t understand why Kenney would take such drastic action. In a brief meeting that week, the pastor said, he had asked for Kenney’s promise not to be disruptive.

Now the priest was shocked, saying, “You promised!”

In response, Kenney said, he lashed out. “I started screaming, ‘Father, this is bullshit! We can’t have this in the church. This isn’t culture, it’s Disney crap!’?”

Kenney — who has served three terms of up to six months in federal prisons for crossing security lines at military bases in protest of nuclear weapons — then knelt at the communion rail and prayed until officers arrived and handcuffed him.

He spent a night in jail before he was bailed out and pleaded no contest. He said he is scheduled for sentencing “on Holy Thursday,” March 24.

Damaging items at the flower festival was wrong, and Kenney said in an interview this week that he will make restitution. But he says secular items such as movie characters are inappropriate in the sacred space of the cathedral and amount to sacrilege and idolatry.

Gutgsell, a former chancellor of the Omaha Archdiocese and a Catholic University-licensed “canon lawyer,” an expert in church laws and rules, disagrees.

“Obviously, context is everything,” the priest said, noting that the cathedral also is home to about six concerts a year. No sacrilege or disrespect is conveyed, he said, in the concerts or the dozens of exhibits at the flower festival.

“Cathedrals,” he said, “are kind of the epicenter for culture presentation and development.”

Eileen Burke-Sullivan, a theologian and vice provost for mission and ministry at Creighton University, said she sees no problem. The cathedral and the archdiocese, she said, have supported the arts in Omaha for many years.

“In mixing thematic popular culture with the beauty of God’s creation in flowers,” she said, “I don’t think there’s any inherent idolatry.”

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