Mothers' Day on the American civic calendar coincides with Good Shephered Sunday on the American Catholic calendar this spring, and Maureen Mullarkey has thought a lot about the consecration of Russia that was performed earlier this year by Pope Francis. She's cynical but brings receipts, as they say:
Part One: (a snippet): "However grievous Putin’s sins, his regard for the Orthodoxy into which he was secretly baptized in infancy appears more convincing—to those who chance to look—than Joe Biden’s rosary rattling. Does this excuse Putin’s tactics in Ukraine? No, not at all. But it ought not be lost on us that the tactics we now condemn—aerial bombardment of civilian centers; no distinction between combatants and noncombatants—are the very ones used by the Allies in World War II."
Part Two: (a snippet): "Nations exist to protect their own interests. The moral quality of those interests, and the means to advance them, is hard to determine in a world anxious to scuttle Judeo-Christian reasoning. Instead we suffer the presumptions of unaccountable bureaucrats. A self-selected power network, they position themselves outside the constitutional constraints of the existing world order. Pope Francis embraces their enthusiasms. Our Lady of the Great Reset, ora pro nobis."
Meanwhile, Victor Davis Hanson confines his gaze to domestic goings-on, but he has no patience for unaccountable bureaucrats, either:
"...what is behind leaking Supreme Court drafts of impending opinions, or seeking to pack the Supreme Court with 15 justices, or ending the Senate filibuster, or adding two more states to the 60-year-old, 50-state union, or curtailing states’ rights to set their own balloting procedures, or trashing the Constitution’s Electoral College?
The hard Left has detoured from the mainstream of American voters onto a radical trajectory. So it will never find 51 percent public approval for any of its current extremist and crackpot initiatives. Instead, it sees success only through altering the rules of governance or changing the demography of the electorate—or both."
If you think that Hanson's worry about what he calls a "radical trajectory" is misplaced, then you haven't wrapped your head around such Orwellian developments as the new Disinformation Governance Board, the federal penchant for retaliating against disfavored groups, or the complicit silence from the Biden administration about protests at the homes of U.S. Supreme Court justices and the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion that triggered those protests.
Misguided reaction to that leak forced prudent Catholic parishes to pay special attention to security this past weekend, not because the legal reasoning in Justice Samuel Alito's draft is unsound, but because -- as John C. Wright and others (like Bookworm!) have noted -- it makes sense enough to strike idealogues as threatening. There's a good summary of the draft at Bookworm's blog.
Not be be combative, but anyone woke enough to cheer for the Next Big Thing has been miseducated or manipulated. In a few cases, they're manipulators themselves. Journalism and politics attract more than their share of such people -- they're activists under color of authority. But we now know, thanks to the COVID pandemic, that public health has big problems, too.
Fortunately, hope springs eternal, as singer/songwriter Mark Humphreys also reminded us years ago:
