12/20/2025

 Saturday, December 20, 2025

1935 Pope Pius XI published the encyclical Ad Catholici Sacerdotii on the importance of priestly celibacy

1983 PLO chairman Yasser Arafat and 4,000 loyalists evacuated Lebanon

In bed around 9:30, up at 5:30.  30°, wind chill 15°, high 37°, windy.

Meds, etc.  Morning meds at 10:30 a.m.

    Another National Obscenity

Alas, that I should live to see such days

Today's Predictable Headlines

Redactions and Unanswered Questions: First Look at the Epstein Files

Victims Upset About Lack of Transparency in Newly Released Files

Lawmakers Criticize Justice Dept. for Not Releasing All Epstein Files

Have I become a conspiracy theorist?  My hunch is that the main reason behind the Epstein files cover-up is that Epstein may have been an agent or an asset of the CIA or of Mossad or of both.  I may be placing too much importance on Epstein's close business and personal relationship with Ehud Barak, who was Israel's prime minister from 1999 to 2001. and who had a long, significant leadership role with Aman, the Israeli military intelligence organization prior to becoming prime minister.  He was also in charge of both Mossad and Shin Bet during his prime ministership.  He and Epstein first met in 2003.  Epstein's "sweetheart deal" with federal prosecutor Alex Acosta occurred in 2007-2008.  Between 2013 and 2017, Epstein’s calendars and emails indicate that Barak met with Epstein approximately 30–36 times at Epstein’s homes in Florida, New York, and possibly elsewhere.  Beginning in December 2015, they reportedly had monthly meetings for about a year.  In 2015, Barak set up an Israeli limited partnership to invest in a tech startup, which developed emergency-tech systems. Epstein provided a significant portion of the capital for that investment, making him a business partner in the venture.  Barak broke off from Epstein after the latter was charged with sex trafficking in 2019, when Barak was attempting a political comeback in Israel.  His friendship with Epstein was a liability and Netanyahu made much of it, though Barak has consistently maintained that he never took part in any of Epstein's nefarious misdeeds.  Was Epstein an agent of Mossad, through Barak, or at least an asset?  Was he an agent of the CIA, or at least an asset?  I suspect we will never know.  I hesitate to even mention the possibility of such relationships, especially with Mossad, since any negative suggestions about the Israeli government result inevitably in charges of anti-semitism.  Nonetheless, I wonder.

    The Epstein scandal, and the continuing, intense cover-up, can and probably has given rise to endless conspiracy theories, including the one I just wrote about.  There is an ever-present risk of innocent people getting hurt by perceptions of guilt by association.  Everyone who ever accepted one of his many invitations to dinners, parties, or other social or professional engagements is now forced to deny wrongdoing.  Just yesterday, I watched David Brooks, of the New York Times and The Atlantic, explaining on The PBS News Hour, a photo showing him and Epstein both present years ago at some affair at which Brooks had been a speaker.

    Regarding the risk of accusations of anti-semitism, I deny the charge and note my anger at those who always and everywhere conflate the State of Israel and its government with the Jewish people.  It is a favorite deceptive political tactic of Benjamin Netanyahu and his ilk, and of various Israel-support groups around the world.  I say Israel-support groups, not Jewish-support groups, because I refuse to conflate the State of Israel and its government with worldwide Jewry.  I believe that a good many Jews, at least in the diaspora, perhaps especially in the United States and in Western Europe, do not support the current government of Israel, though they do support the State of Israel.  Some Jews, though relatively few, don't even support the State of Israel or Zionism.  Indeed, most European Jews did not support Zionism when the movement began, perceiving it as a way for real anti-semites to rid their countries of unwanted Jews.  The rise of Nazism and the Holocaust changed everything.  The Six Day War and subsequent occupation of conquered lands didn't change everything, but it has, I think, changed the world's understanding of Zionism today.  Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned Israel's leadership not to occupy the conquered territories.  He warned against what the occupation would do to Israelis, but his warnings have been ignored for 58 years.  And for 58 years, the occupied Palestinians, the Jewish Israelis, non-Israeli Jews, and the rest of the world have been paying the price of the occupation.   Perhaps I may be forgiven and not be accused of anti-semitism for thinking that Zionism was a mistake from the start.  

The Shrinking Catholic Church.  I watched a half-hour mini-documentary on this subject this afternoon.  It seemed like a review of my life.  It used 1965 as a baseline and sometimes 1970 and compared statistics from that era to dates in this century, comparing drastic decreases in the number of parishes, the number of priests and seminarians, the number of nuns, the number of Catholics who regularly attended mass, etc.  It highlighted the effects of changes wrought by Vatican II and the effect of Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae, which, over the recommendation of the Vatican's advisory council, reaffirmed the Church's moral teaching forbidding artificial birth control including 'the pill,'   I wrote about Humane Vitae in my memoir: The Church, the War, and the Pill

            The Catholic Church also revealed its feet of clay during 1968.  Cardinal Spellman was spouting his murderous nonsense about ‘a war for civilization’[1] without restraint by the Vatican and Catholics were generally as resistant as any other group to much of the civil rights demands.  The big difference maker in terms of Church authority however had nothing to do with war and peace or civil rights, but with sex, Paul VI’s encyclical banning contraception, including birth control pills.  In 1963, John XXIII had established a commission to study population and birth control issues.  Paul VI appointed 15 cardinals and bishops and 64 lay experts to the commission.  The commission provided a report in 1966 saying contraception was not intrinsically evil.  The vote among the clergy was 9 to 6; the lay commission vote was 60 to 4.  One of the dissenters was Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, later John Paul II.  The dissenters feared that a change in the Church’s position would call into question the pope’s teaching authority.[2]  The report was leaked to the press in 1967 and there was a very favorable reaction among modern Catholics, who expected the pope to adopt the commission’s recommendation.  Instead, on July 25, 1968, Paul VI rejected the commission’s recommendation and adopted the dissenting position, undoubtedly fearing that any change in the Church’s position would weaken the claim to papal authority.

            The opening lines of Humanae Vitae were priceless, words that could have been written only by a celibate and childless male who had spent his entire adult life in a misogynistic power structure, i.e., the self-proclaimed Holy Apostolic and Roman Catholic Church:

To His Venerable Brothers the Patriarchs, Archbishops, Bishops, and other Local Ordinaries in Peace and Communion with the Apostolic See, to the Clergy and Faithful of the Whole Catholic World, and to All Men of Good Will

Venerable Brothers and Beloved Sons [quaere:  how about the sisters? daughters? mothers?]  The most serious duty of transmitting human life [humanae vitae], for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress.

The words of the encyclical as well as its substance were patronizing and arrogant and essentially untrue.  What happened, of course, was precisely what Paul and the Vatican conservatives (like the future John Paul II) wanted to avoid: widespread rejection of the Church’s teaching authority, especially by American and Western European Catholics. The pope and his conservative curial apparatchiks were seen as, at best, mired in medievalism, and, at worst, more concerned about the power of the shepherds than in the welfare of the flock.

            From my point of view, the United States’ position on the war in Vietnam and the Church’s position on contraception flowed from the same source.   Johnson and his advisors and Paul VI and his advisors were more concerned with institutional interests than with the lives of their “subjects.”  Not losing face, nationally and personally, was more important to Johnson than the lives of the thousands of Americans and Vietnamese who were suffering in the war.  Better that thousands should die or be horribly wounded than that the United States be seen for what it inevitably was in Vietnam, an arrogant and feckless loser.  Nixon and Kissinger, of course, had the same value system at work as they kept the war going until 1973 and indeed they were more immoral and corrupt than Johnson.  Kissinger had been privy to the 1968 peace negotiations in Paris and fed information to the Nixon election campaign that it looked like the negotiators were going to arrive at a settlement before the election.  Nixon communicated with South Vietnamese President, Thieu, advising him to boycott the peace conference because ‘we are going to win.’  Thieu refused to attend, the efforts to end the war came to naught and three days later, Nixon narrowly defeated Hubert Humphrey by less than 1% of the popular vote.  Between 1969 and 1973, tens of thousands of Americans would be killed in the war and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese.  To Nixon and Kissinger and to millions of other Americans, American “honor” was more important than American lives, and infinitely more important than Vietnamese lives.  For Paul VI, the Church’s magisterium was more important than the lives of millions of Catholics affected by the Church’s teaching on birth control.  Better that Catholics, especially women, should face the choice between (1) bearing children they did not want or could not properly care for, or (2) the fear of eternal damnation (“Do you know how long eternity is, boys and girls?”) than that the authority of the boys in laces and brocades be questioned.

            1968 is still considered by some to be the worst year in American history.  Others consider it the best year, at least in some ways. The common element that dismayed the former group and delighted the latter was the widespread rejection of Authority.  Princes and potentates, presidents and popes – all were seen to have feet of clay.  The late 60s was an anarchic period, especially for the young.  No person or ism commanded respect.  Imperial capitalism and imperial communism were both seen as deeply flawed.  Religion was rejected as exploitative and practically useless.  Christianity was not able to keep Christendom from mass murders in World Wars I and II; nor was it able to keep American Christians from killing hundreds of thousands of Buddhists in southeast Asia and poisoning the earth in the mid and late 60s.  Nationalism was rejected as mere chauvinism and as the cause of wars.  American capitalism, American imperialism, American militarism, American nationalism, American exceptionalism, American religiosity including Catholicism were all viewed as interlocking conceptual systems ultimately producing personal and global oppressions.  Unlike earlier periods of social turmoil, there was nothing around to take the place of these pillars of American and Western society.  Catholicism could not be rejected only to embrace a purifying Protestantism, for all Christianity was rejected.  If any religion had any appeal, it had to be exotic and non-Western, non-deistic Buddhism or polytheistic Hinduism.  Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll replaced God, Family and Country.  Turn on, tune in, drop out

  The Church’s position was mocked by Monty Python troupe in The Meaning of Life.

Every Sperm is Sacred

DAD:

There are Jews in the world.

There are Buddhists.

There are Hindus and Mormons, and then

There are those that follow Mohammed, but

I've never been one of them.

 

I'm a Roman Catholic,

And have been since before I was born,

And the one thing they say about Catholics is:

They'll take you as soon as you're warm.

 

You don't have to be a six-footer.

You don't have to have a great brain.

You don't have to have any clothes on. You're

A Catholic the moment Dad came,

 

Because

 

Every sperm is sacred.

Every sperm is great.

If a sperm is wasted,

God gets quite irate.

 

CHILDREN:

Every sperm is sacred.

Every sperm is great.

If a sperm is wasted,

God gets quite irate.

 

GIRL:

Let the heathen spill theirs

On the dusty ground.

God shall make them pay for

Each sperm that can't be found.

 

CHILDREN:

Every sperm is wanted.

Every sperm is good.

Every sperm is needed

In your neighborhood.

 

MUM:

Hindu, Taoist, Mormon,

Spill theirs just anywhere,

But God loves those who treat their

Semen with more care.

 

            For millions of Catholics, however, Humanae Vitae, was no laughing matter.  It confirmed that conscientious Catholics who exercised responsible control over the creation of children were sinners, guilty indeed of “a grave sin,” something against “the natural order” created by God Himself!  The great 20^th century Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner said of the Church’s moral theology

 

But it is a part of the tragic and irreducibly obscure historicity of the Church that in both theory and practice it used bad arguments to defend moral maxims based on problematic, historically conditioned pre-convictions, ‘prejudices’ . . . This dark tragedy of the Church’s intellectual history is so burdensome because we are dealing here, in all or very many cases, with questions that penetrated deeply into the concrete lives of human beings, because such false maxims, which were never objectively valid . . . placed burdens on people . . . that from the standpoint of the freedom of the Gospel were not legitimate.

 

Among the people illegitimately burdened by the Church’s false maxims was my mother, one of the faithful whose ‘concrete li[fe]’ was ‘penetrated deeply’ by the Church’s valuing more dearly its claim to Authority than any respect for Truth or for real spiritual and material ‘burdens on people.’  Wretches, anti-Christs!

            1968 was a very bad year and it set the country up for another bad year under Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and J. Edgar Hoover.

---

[1] The Onion’s “Our Dumb Century” mocks the absurdity of all the apocalyptic and hyperbolic rhetoric about the so-called defense of  South Vietnam in a piece with the headline U.S. Loses Vietnam War; Ford Urges All Americans to Salute Our Vietcong Rulers: ‘We Must All Get Behind New U.S. President Le Duc Tho,’Ford Says.  The story carried a by-line of “New Hanoi, D. C.,” and this text:  After nearly a decade of fighting and more than 58,000 American casualties [sic] the U. S. lost the Vietnam War.  President Ford officially announced an unconditional surrender Wednesday in a formal ceremony in Haiphong, North Vietnam, then ceded full control of the U. S. to its Communist foes. ‘We are defeated,’ said Ford, bowing before Vietcong military leaders.  ‘The United States of America is now under your control, O valiant conquerors.  On behalf of the American people, I salute you. . . .  Ford rose from his desk and handed a ceremonial key to the White House to his successor, new U.S. President Le Duc Tho.  President Le then ordered members of his elite Red Guard to shackle Ford and remove him from the White House.  Ford is believed to have been taken to a North Vietnamese POW camp.  Numerous other key members of the Ford Administration have also been relocated to camps, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, Treasury Secretary William Simon and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.”

[2] “If it should be declared that contraception is not evil in itself, then we should have to concede frankly that the Holy Spirit had been on the side of the Protestant churches in 1930 (when the encyclical Casti Connubi was promulgated) and in 1951 (Pius XII’s address delivered before the Society of Hematologists in the year the pope died). 

“It should likewise have to be admitted that for a half a century the Spirit failed to protect Pius XI, Pius XII, and a large part of the Catholic hierarchy from a very serious error. This would mean that the leaders of the Church, acting with extreme imprudence, had condemned thousands of innocent human acts, forbidding, under pain of eternal damnation, a practice which would now be sanctioned. The fact can neither be denied nor ignored that these same acts would now he declared licit on the grounds of principles cited by the Protestants, which popes and bishops have either condemned or at least not approved” [Emphasis added by me.]

[3] Cardinal Wojtyla’s warning took root in Paul VI’s thinking, for in the ensuing encyclical, Paul wrote:  “However, the conclusions arrived at by the Commission could not be considered by Us as definitive and absolutely certain, dispensing Us from the duty of examining personally this serious question.  This was all the more necessary because, within the Commission itself, there was not complete agreement concerning the moral norms to be proposed, and especially because certain approaches and criteria for a solution to this question had emerged which were at variance with the moral doctrine on marriage constantly taught by the magisterium of the Church.”