"Shameful GOP Plan Taxes Reality" by Per Laarman, My Response: GOP Budget is a Moral Travesty, Violates Common Good of Majority ,

http://religiondispatches.org/shameful-gop-tax-plan-taxes-reality/?utm_source=Religion+Dispatches+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6b61141254-RD_Daily_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_742d86f519-6b61141254-84562481

Bridget Mary's Response: For me this budget is a moral document that betrays every value I hold dear as a person of faith. How can we give more tax cuts to the wealthy and continue to ignore the needs of the majority of our country especially the workers struggling to make a living and the poor who have nothing? According to Matthew 25, Jesus said "Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do unto me ." This  shameful tax plan turns this justice mandate upside down to take care of the wealthiest among us. It is a moral travesty that violates the common good of the majority of the people .  Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP

"I frankly don’t know whether the Democrats and their allies are willing to call out a perfect example of class warfare waged by the overclass against the rest of us. In my view, far too many Democrats are entirely comfortable with neoliberal economics: they fully accept the thesis that a corporate-friendly regime of deregulation and low taxes is good for everyone. Far too many Dems depend on Wall Street and the 1% to fund their campaigns. Far too many are perfectly happy to campaign as culture liberals while remaining complacent, even welcoming, in respect to the rule of wealth.

As to whether everyday people would even respond to a passionate justice-centered critique of the appalling gluttony epitomized in the GOP plan: I believe they could and would respond to a full-on attack on a plan that so glaringly exacerbates already-soaring inequality. For what other reason would Bernie Sanders be the nation’s most popular politician… repeatedly? And despite what Democratic moderates (and their pundits) would have you believe, the U.S. is not a “center-right” nation; if anything, we are a “center-left” nation, especially when it comes to opposing tax cuts for the wealthy.  

Faith leaders who say they care about the most vulnerable have a real opportunity here in relation to their own messaging and advocacy. As I’ve written before in these pages, tax plans are moral documents—as much, or more so, than budgets.

Faith leaders presumably take the long view. The long view here is that if this tax plan—with its unprecedented permanent cuts—were to go through, we won’t have to wait even ten years to see acute new suffering among people with disabilities, the elderly, vulnerable children, etc. Because as sure as the sun rises in the east, GOP leaders will use the new deficits their own plan creates to demand huge cuts in the social safety net: Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and everything else.

Oh, and did I mention Fun Fact #3: the GOP plan, for all the pro-worker verbiage attached to it, actually raises taxes for the lowest-income workers? Hey, somebody’s got to pay."

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Joan Throm ARCWP Recognized for Humanitarian Work in Florida- 2017 Central Florida Humanitarian

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6px7g7pPw0&feature=share

 Yesterday at 11:05am · Cocoa Beach, FL · 

"Tonight my mother and I will be accepting the 2017 Central Florida Humanitarian Award on behalf of Joan.

This is a tribute to just a Few of her good deeds she has performed. We love and miss you Joan. Congratulations so well deserved." Kevin and Patricia Jackson

Joan Throm: 2017 Central Florida Humanitarian 

Bridget Mary's Response:
Joan Throm ARCWP was a vibrant witness of our Compassionate God's embrace of everyone she encountered especially the elders in her community.  I miss our dear sister's physical presence, but feel her spiritual energy "cheer-leading" our movement for women's equality in the Roman Catholic Church through the women priests' Movement. 
Bridget Mary Meehan ARCWP, www.arcwp.org

"Someday Women Priests May Merit a Vatican Stamp: It Happened to Luther" by Celia Viggo Wexler , Huffington Post

11/01/2017


"November 1 was All Saints Day, a day on the church calendar when we pay homage to exceptional followers of Christ. The day before — October 31 — marked the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s declaration of opposition to what he considered a corrupt papacy that tolerated the selling of indulgences.


When he got wind of what Luther was doing, the Pope excommunicated him. But what a difference a few centuries makes. I can remember a time not so long ago when we Catholics called the Protestant Reformation the Protestant Revolt.


But now, the Vatican has issued a commemorative stamp depicting Luther kneeling at the foot of the cross. The stamp is part of an effort encouraging rapprochement between Catholics and Lutherans.


Perhaps this is a good day to remember that the church does rethink issues, even if it often takes a very long time to do so.


I’m not sure it will come in my lifetime, but at some point, the Vatican might even issue a stamp marking the ordination of the first woman priest.


That would certainly be a departure from the way the institutional church currently treats women priests. If a woman dares to be ordained to the Catholic priesthood, the church declares her to be excommunicated.


Excommunication is the worst thing that the church can do to its members. It bans the individual from receiving all sacraments and from the Catholic community.


So you would think that the ordination of women priests was either so morally sinful or so damaging to the church, that this type of punishment was warranted.


But it is difficult to view Catholic women who pursue a vocation to the priesthood as reprobates out to damage the church.


Indeed, they’re not even outliers among Catholic faithful. Overall, about six in ten U.S. Catholics support women’s ordination. Even among Catholics who attend Mass at least weekly, 45 percent believe that women should have access to the priesthood.


In 1994, Pope John Paul II claimed that women should be excluded because Christ only called twelve men to be His apostles, and the church has always done it this way. That seems like an awfully lame excuse for centuries of misogyny. After all, the apostles all were Jews, too. And it would have been difficult for Jesus, living in that culture and at that point in Jewish history, to have elevated women to leadership positions, although He certainly paid far more attention to women than was customary at the time.


At a time when women have made great strides in the workplace, proving themselves just as capable to head businesses, excel in the arts and sciences, and lead countries, when Anglican and Episcopal churches have ordained women to serve both as priests and bishops, it appears that the Catholic hierarchy is fighting a battle that becomes less and less intellectually defensible.


The Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests claims that since a validly ordained Catholic bishop ordained the first women bishops, the ordinations that follow are all valid and within the Catholic apostolic line of succession. They also make clear that they see themselves as reformers within their “beloved church,” not antagonists. Both Women Priests and the Women’s Ordination Conference offer a reasoned and respectful rebuttalto the church’s arguments.


But even if we assume that the institutional church is absolutely right about its embrace of an all-male priesthood, why does it feel so threatened by those few brave women who follow their consciences and choose to be women priests?


They know they will not get the chance to serve in any Catholic parishes or hospitals. They accept lives with little economic or professional security, and none of the perks male priests receive. But surely, they do not threaten the viability of the church.


And tell me this: Isn’t pedophilia a real threat to the institutional church? After all, we are talking about millions of Catholics losing faith in their pastors and bishops, and dioceses saddled with multi-million-dollar lawsuits. Parishes have been closed due to the financial burden of this abuse.


Yet there is no similar papal decree that states that any priest found guilty of sexually molesting minors should be automatically excommunicated.


Indeed it appears that many priest molesters get off easy. In 2014, the Vatican reported that over ten years, it had defrocked 848 priests, and given lighter punishments to 2572 others. The Vatican did not report how many priests it reported to law enforcement, or what happened to them. (In defending how it treated errant priests, the Vatican official had the temerity to state that “the Holy See condemns torture, that includes torture inflicted on the unborn.”)


Interestingly, the decree excommunicating women priests came out in 2007, the same year that the Los Angeles archdiocese paid $660 million in damages to resolve lawsuits filed by abuse victims.


It was just three years after a study commissioned by U.S. bishops revealed that more than 4,000 priests and deacons had been the targets of more than 10,000 complaints of abuse.


Or course, the greater irony is that women who seek ordination do so not to do evil, but to do good. They are not predators. They want to give more to the church, inspired by their faith to live out the gospels as fully as possible. They have not cost the U.S. church the $2.5 billion in damages caused by abusive priests.


I’m not aware of women priests storming parish churches, demanding to say Mass. They are not breaking into rectories, asking for room and board. They are attending schools of theology, but they have not attempted to secure for themselves the benefits that their male colleagues – seminarians – take for granted.


Aspiring priest Lisa Cathelyn must pay $50,000 in tuition to earn her graduate degree in theology from the Jesuit School of Theology at Santa Clara in Berkeley, CA. She is on Medicaid because she can’t afford to buy the school’s health insurance. She’s living in a group home to save on rent. She faces an uncertain future, but one in which service to others is her lodestar.


It is the Jesuits who take a vow of poverty who live in relative comfort, while Polovick and other women who study for the priesthood do not need the vow: They are living the real thing."


Celia Viggo Wexler is the author of Catholic Women Confront Their Church: Stories of Hurt and Hope (Rowman & Littlefield).

Celine Dion & Josh Groban Live "The Prayer"

https://youtu.be/DbviXG_56ss

New Movie on Nuns in the 1960's: "Novitiate"

https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/in-novitiate-director-maggie-betts-delves-into-intimacy-of-conventlife/article36809972/?ref=https://www.theglobeandmail.com&service=mobile

Review: Novitiate tells an enthralling story inside a cloistered convent

Open this photo in gallery:

Margaret Qualley stars as Sister Cathleen in Novitate, which is set at a convent in the 1960s.

COURTESY OF MONGREL

JULIA COOPER

SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL

12 HOURS AGONOVEMBER 3, 2017

3 out of 4 stars

TITLE

 

Novitiate

WRITTEN BY

 

Margaret Betts

A breathy whisper: "You're all I could ever want." The erotic refrain spoken in voiceover in Margaret Betts's feature film Novitiate isn't meant to fall upon the ears of man or woman. This sweet nothing is meant for God. It comes from the rosebud lips of Sister Cathleen (Margaret Qualley, stealing the show), a young American nun-in-training who is hot for the Almighty.

Set in the 1960s when the Catholic Church in Rome adopted a number of reforms known as Vatican II (a sort of modern rebrand, Vatican 2.0 if you will), Betts's film takes her audience into a cloistered convent an ocean away. The convent's old-school Reverend Mother (played with just the right amount of theatrics by Melissa Leo) thinks change is for the weak and that the Sisters of the Blessed Rose are doing just fine in the confines of tradition.

Floating in between the dramatic and the campy, Novitiate doesn't tell a straightforward story of love and sacrifice, of faith and its crises. Betts's film is ritualistic and enthralling, with a complex feminism woven into its cloth and it's something of a blessing.

Bridget Mary's Response: I look forward to seeing this movie when it comes to U.S. theaters. Many of the nuns I entered in the convent with in 1966 may relate to the spirituality described above and the transitions that led to a mass exodus in the 1970's and 1980's!

Krista Tippett Interview: Ursula King, Andrew Revkin, and David Sloan Wilson — Teilhard de Chardin's "Planetary Mind"

https://onbeing.org/programs/ursula-king-andrew-revkin-and-david-sloan-wilson-teilhard-de-chardins-planetary-mind-and-our-spiritual-evolution/

URSULA KING, ANDREW REVKIN, AND DAVID SLOAN WILSON

Teilhard de Chardin's "Planetary Mind" and Our Spiritual Evolution

The coming stage of evolution, Teilhard de Chardin said, won’t be driven by physical adaptation but by human consciousness, creativity, and spirit. We visit with his biographer Ursula King, and we experience his ideas energizing New York Times Dot Earth blogger Andrew Revkin and evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson.

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Anne Lamott (Author) Writes Down Every Single Thing She Knows, As of Today

--by Anne Lamott , syndicated from kindnessblog.com, Nov 03, 2017

"I am going to be 61 years old in 48 hours. Wow. I thought i was only forty-seven, but looking over the paperwork, I see that I was born in 1954.
My inside self does not have an age, although can’t help mentioning as an aside that it might have been useful had I not followed the Skin Care rules of the sixties, ie to get as much sun as possible, while slathered in baby oil. (My sober friend Paul O said, at eighty, that he felt like a young man who had something wrong with him.).
Anyway, I thought I might take the opportunity to write down every single thing I know, as of today.


1. All truth is a paradox. Life is a precious unfathomably beautiful gift; and it is impossible here, on the incarnational side of things. It has been a very bad match for those of us who were born extremely sensitive. It is so hard and weird that we wonder if we are being punked. And it filled with heartbreaking sweetness and beauty, floods and babies and acne and Mozart, all swirled together.


2. Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.


3. There is almost nothing outside of you that will help in any kind of last way, unless you are waiting for an organ. You can’t buy, achieve, or date it. This is the most horrible truth.


4. Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy, and scared, even the people who seem to have it more or less together. They are much more like you than you would believe. So try not to compare your insides to their outsides.


Also, you can’t save, fix or rescue any of them, or get any of them sober. But radical self-care is quantum, and radiates out into the atmosphere, like a little fresh air. It is a huge gift to the world.


When people respond by saying, “Well, isn’t she full of herself,” smile obliquely, like Mona Lisa, and make both of you a nice cup of tea.


5. Chocolate with 70% cacao is not actually a food. It’s best use is as bait in snake traps.


6. Writing: shitty first drafts. Butt in chair. Just do it. You own everything that happened to you. You are going to feel like hell if you never write the stuff that is tugging on the sleeves in your heart–your stories, visions, memories, songs: your truth, your version of things, in your voice. That is really all you have to offer us, and it’s why you were born


7. Publication and temporary creative successes are something you have to recover from. They kill as many people as not. They will hurt, damage and change you in ways you cannot imagine. The most degraded and sometimes nearly-evil men I have known were all writers who’d had bestsellers. Yet, it is also a miracle to get your work published (see #1.).


Just try to bust yourself gently of the fantasy that publication will heal you, will fill the Swiss cheesey holes. It won’t, it can’t. But writing can. So can singing.


8. Families; hard, hard, hard, no matter how cherished and astonishing they may also be. (See #1 again.) At family gatherings where you suddenly feel homicidal or suicidal, remember that in half of all cases, it’s a miracle that this annoying person even lived. Earth is Forgiveness School. You might as well start at the dinner table. That way, you can do this work in comfortable pants.


When Blake said that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love, he knew that your family would be an intimate part of this, even as you want to run screaming for your cute little life. But that you are up to it. You can do it, Cinderellie. You will be amazed.


9. Food; try to do a little better.


10. Grace: Spiritual WD-40. Water wings. The mystery of grace is that God loves Dick Cheney and me exactly as much as He or She loves your grandchild. Go figure. The movement of grace is what changes us, heals us and our world. To summon grace, say, “Help!” And then buckle up.


Grace won’t look like Casper the Friendly Ghost; but the phone will ring, or the mail will come, and then against all odds, you will get your sense of humor about yourself back. Laughter really is carbonated holiness, even if you are sick of me saying it.


11. God; Goodnesss, Love energy, the Divine, a loving animating intelligence, the Cosmic Muffin. You will worship and serve something, so like St. Bob said, you gotta choose. You can play on our side, or Bill Maher’s and Franklin Graham’s. Emerson said that the happiest person on earth is the one who learns from nature the lessons of worship. So go outside a lot, and look up.


My pastor says you can trap bees on the floor of a Mason jar without a lid, because they don’t look up. If they did, they could fly to freedom.


12. Faith: Paul Tillich said the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty. If I could say one thing to our little Tea Party friends, it would be this. Fundamentalism, in all its forms, is 90% of the reason the world is so terrifying. 3% is the existence of snakes.


The love of our incredible dogs and cats is the closest most of us will come, on this side of eternity, to knowing the direct love of God; although cats can be so bitter, which is not the god part: the crazy Love is. Also, “Figure it out” is not a good slogan.


13. Jesus; Jesus would have even loved horrible, mealy mouth self-obsessed you, as if you were the only person on earth. But He would hope that you would perhaps pull yourself together just the tiniest, tiniest bit–maybe have a little something to eat, and a nap.


14. Exercise: If you want to have a good life after you have grown a little less young, you must walk almost every day. There is no way around this. If you are in a wheelchair, you must do chair exercises. Every single doctor on earth will tell you this, so don’t go by what I say.


15. Death; wow. So f-ing hard to bear, when the few people you cannot live without die. You will never get over these losses, and are not supposed to. We Christians like to think death is a major change of address, but in any case, the person will live fully again in your heart, at some point, and make you smile at the MOST inappropriate times. But their absence will also be a lifelong nightmare of homesickness for you.


All truth is a paradox. Grief, friends, time and tears will heal you. Tears will bathe and baptize and hydrate you and the ground on which you walk. The first thing God says to Moses is, “Take off your shoes.” We are on holy ground. Hard to believe, but the truest thing I know.
I think that’s it, everything I know. I wish I had shoe-horned in what E.L. Doctorow said about writing:



“It’s like driving at night with the headlights on. You can only see a little aways ahead of you, but you can make the whole journey that way.”
I love that, because it’s true about everything we try. I wish I had slipped in what Ram Das said, that when all is said and done, we’re just all walking each other home.
Oh, well, another time. God bless you all good."




This article is syndicated from Kindness blog. Kindness Blog Shares Media Featuring Kindness In All Its Varied Forms, celebrating the angels of kindness that walk among us every day. These are the people who freely give their help, that lend a listening ear to a sad soul’s tragic tale, that share what resources they have, that tolerate, that seek to understand another person’s plight and actively work to uplift others from poverty, oppression and loss.

"ONE HEART" BY JD MARTIN & JAN GARRETT, Music Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q5ia2jUeqc&feature=youtu.be

"Calling All Angels" by Jane Siberry & KD Lang

https://youtu.be/KRUErh47sao

IS THE FRANCIS ERA ENDING THE CATHOLIC BISHOPS’ COZY TIES TO THE GOP? by Patricia Miller

http://religiondispatches.org/is-the-francis-era-ending-the-catholic-bishops-cozy-ties-to-the-gop/?utm_source=Religion+Dispatches+Newsletter&utm_campaign=6b61141254-RD_Daily_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_742d86f519-6b61141254-84562481

..."And Trump himself has largely frozen the Catholic prelates out of his inner circle thanks to his co-dependent relationship with evangelicals. As the Rev. Katharine Henderson noted recently in RNS, the only voices of faith Trump hears are a “narrow echo chamber consisting exclusively of conservative Christian evangelicals.”

In the short run, however, the bishops have already gotten exactly what they wanted from Trump: an exemption for anyone who wants it for “religious” or “moral” reasons from the contraceptive mandate in the Affordable Care Act. This wasn’t due to their lobbying or political prowess, but because Trump was smart enough to latch on to the “religious liberty” issue as a powerful lever with the religious right.

As Hugh Hewitt recently noted in the Washington Post, Trump’s “enduring support among evangelical Christians and Mass-attending Catholics” is due to one thing and one thing only: “religious liberty remains the overarching issue of the day, the alpha and omega of whether Trump gets a nod of approval or at least a pass.”

ARCWP: The Baptism of Constantin Rafael Pelzer. October 15/17. Olga Lucia Álvarez Benjumea in Colombia, South America

https://evangelizadorasdelosapostoles.wordpress.com/2017/11/01/arcwp-en-el-bautismo-de-constantin-rafael-pelzer-olga-lucia-alvarez-benjumea/

Upon my arrival, I have been invited, to participate with the Pelzer family, in the parish church, of Santa Barbara of Erftstat-Liblar, with family and friends, to the Baptism ceremony of the new member of the family, Constantin Rafael, presiding over the Father Wilhelm Bruners, a priest, with the charisma of a shepherd and with the "smell of sheep".

The greeting for Constantin, in the Baptistry of the Church, was A Letter of love as follows:

Constantin waiting for his Baptism. October 15/17

Letter of love to Constantin

You are a letter, son 
a page has just started 
yet without a 
semicolon 
the first word

You are a love letter 
without accents and buts 
pushed with golden fingers 
in rough letters 
and not to be eliminated

Inserted and 
sealed this first sentence 
between you and us

I love you

You can always 
call us 
We know: the Promise 
needs a pledge of hands.

There were songs, reading and reflection from Corinthians 3: 2

2 Corinthians 3: 2-3

²  Our letters are written in our hearts, known and read by all men;

³  being manifest that we are a letter of Christ issued by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not on tablets of stone, but on tables of flesh of the heart.

Exodus 2: 1-10

Birth of Moses

2  There was a Levite who took a wife of his own tribe as his wife. ²  The woman became pregnant and had a son, and when she saw him so beautiful, she hid him for three months. ³  When he could no longer hide him, he prepared a basket of papyrus, smeared it with pitch and asphalt and, placing the child in it, went to leave the basket among the reeds on the bank of the Nile.  ⁴  But the child's sister He stayed at a distance to see what would happen to him.

⁵  At that, Pharaoh's daughter came down to bathe in the Nile. Her maids, meanwhile, were walking along the riverbank. Suddenly Pharaoh's daughter saw the basket among the reeds, and ordered one of her slaves to go for her. ⁶  When Pharaoh's daughter opened the basket and saw a crying child inside, she had compassion and exclaimed:

- He is a Hebrew child!

⁷  The child's sister then asked Pharaoh's daughter:

"Do you want me to go and call a Hebrew nurse to raise the child for you?"

⁸  "Go call her," he said.

The girl went and brought the child's mother,  ⁹  and Pharaoh's daughter told her:

-Get this child and raise him. I'll pay you to do it.

This is how the child's mother took him and raised him. ¹⁰  Once the child was grown, he took it to the daughter of Pharaoh, and she adopted him as his son; He also named him Moses, [ a ]  for he said: "I took him out of the river!"

De los niños
Tus hijos no son tus hijos (Kahlil Gibran)

Y una mujer que sostenía a un niño junto al pecho dijo: “Habla de los niños”.

Y él dijo: “Tus hijos no son tus hijos.

Son hijos e hijas del deseo de la vida por uno mismo.

Ellos vienen a través de ti, pero no de ti;

Y si están contigo, no son tuyos.

Puedes darles tu amor, pero no tus pensamientos,

Porque tienen sus propios pensamientos.

Puedes albergar sus cuerpos, pero no sus almas.

Porque sus almas habitan en la casa del mañana, a la cual no pueden entrar,

ni siquiera en tus sueños

Puedes esforzarte por ser como ellos, pero no busques, ellos harán lo mismo contigo hacer.

Porque la vida no corre hacia atrás, ni permanece en el ayer.

Tú eres el arco desde el cual tus hijos son enviados como flechas vivientes.

El tirador ve el signo en el camino del infinito, y Él te inclina

Su poder, para que sus flechas vuelen rápido y lejos.

Puede inclinarte en la mano de Sagitario para hacerte feliz;

Porque así como ama la flecha voladora, así ama el arco, el firme

permanece “.

Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931) libanesich-amerikanischer Dicheter

 The Creed of Kurt Marti

Yo creo en el Dios

de amor

el Creador del cielo y la tierra

Yo creo en Jesús

su palabra encarnada

el Mesías de los oprimidos y oprimidas

quien proclamó el reino de Dios

y fue crucificado por eso

entregado como nosotros a la destrucción de la muerte

pero resucitó el tercer día

para continuar trabajando por nuestra liberación

hasta que Dios sea todo en todos

Yo creo en el Espíritu Santo

quien nos hace compañeros combatientes del Resucitado

a los hermanos y hermanas de aquellos

que luchan por la justicia y sufren

Yo creo en la comunidad

la iglesia mundial

para el perdón de los pecados

a la paz en la tierra,

para quien tiene sentido trabajar

y el cumplimiento de la vida

más allá de nuestra vida

AMEN.

Baptism is performed according to the Roman Catholic Rite of the Church.

The Alleluia (Taizé) was sung

 GRAPHICAL REPORT OF THE BAPTISM OF CONSTANTIN RAFAEL PERZEL

In the Church of Santa Barbara, Erftstadt-Liblar, in the Baptism of Constantin

Apologizing to Constantin Rafael, because we have not finished our mission to improve the world so that he can enjoy it. It will be your job to work, but you will not be alone, we will accompany you.

The grandfather of Constantin has asked those present, we wish Constantin to take in the ark of his life.

Read, aunt and godmother of Constantin, lights the candle in the Light of Christ.

Constantin, receives the Baptismal water, in the presence and support of their parents, grandparents, relatives and friends, who will be responsible for taking care of their faith and their Christian values.

The Community in procession has accompanied Constantin to the altar.

After the ceremony, the family offers sweets to the participants at the exit of the temple.