The March of the Catholic Schoolchildren

May 4 - 9  2014 is Catholic Education Week in Canada - the details of which you could read about here if you were allowed to, which apparently you aren't. 

The program agenda entails several pages of Ontario Catholic schools and their projects for the week under the theme "Serving in the Love of Christ". 

Yesterday, Thursday, was "Serve with Justice" Day which evidently entailed bussing hundreds of their students to Parliament Hill in Ottawa to attend Campaign Life Coalition's March For Life anti-abortion rally ... in what JJ in comments over at Dammit Janet! calls "The March of the Catholic Schoolchildren". 
Ha! An Unrepentant Old Hippie sighting!

Catholic school boards paid for students to attend anti-abortion rally

For critics, public funds being used to transport students to a rally against abortion — a right guaranteed by the Supreme Court of Canada — is controversial.
The annual March For Life rally, organized by national pro-life group Campaign Life Coalition, is now in its 17th year. The group aims to defund abortion services in Canada and ultimately eliminate the practice. They also take issue with gay marriage, gay-straight alliances in schools, transgender identities, comprehensive sex education and stem-cell research.

A variety of reactions from the faithful on the podium greets two streaking prochoice protesters :

The unperturbed speaker at the mike, according to this guy who rattled off the names of dozens of attending cardinals and bishops, is Cardinal Gerald Cyprien Lacroix, archbishop of Quebec, delivering a special message from the Pope :

"His Holiness Pope Francis is pleased to greet everyone taking part in the 17th National March For Life in Ottawa and he assures them of his spiritual closeness as they give witness to the God-given dignity, beauty and value of human life. He prays that this event foster greater respect for the inviable right to life of each person from conception to natural death and supports the efforts of all who labour to ensure that this fundamental right receives adequate legal protection."

His Holiness is evidently not a fan of "My body, my rules" as an integral part of the "dignity, beauty and value of human life" that requires "adequate legal protection".

Chronic abortion bill pez dispenser and Con MP Stephen Woodworth was saddened to hear that all NDP MPs are pro-choice and Justin Trudeau will not be allowing any more anti-choice candidates into the Liberal Party :

"I feel very sad for my colleagues in the Liberal Party that democratic procedures and diversity of opinion is giving way to kind of this top-down ideological approach," Woodworth told CBC News 

and on twitter :  "When did LPC become merely a tool for the leader's personal ideology?"

Irony sighs and wonders if it's too late to get a job doing vaudeville instead.

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Ratz abandoning ship

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Sixth Estate celebrates Pope Benedict XVI’s tenure.
I hadn't realized Bennie had annointed two Canadians to sainthood for performing miracles - one of which involved a cure consisting of prayer and antibiotics. Heh. Go. 

DAMMIT JANET! does the Best of Bennie.
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Pope Pop Quiz

Why is Ratso "deeply ashamed" of clergy sex abuse?

Is it #1) Pope led cover-up of child abuse by priests

"In 2001, while he was a cardinal, he issued a secret Vatican edict to Catholic bishops all over the world, instructing them to put the Church's interests ahead of child safety.
The document recommended that rather than reporting sexual abuse to the relevant legal authorities, bishops should encourage the victim, witnesses and perpetrator not to talk about it. And, to keep victims quiet, it threatened that if they repeat the allegations they would be excommunicated."

I've read that the rationale behind this edict was merely to encourage people to come forward and speak freely without fear of reprisal or publicity, an excuse which would possibly hold more holy water if it weren't for the fact that :

"priests accused of child abuse are generally not struck off or arrested but simply moved to another parish, often to reoffend. It gives examples of hush funds being used to silence the victims."

So he was for it before he was against it but hasn't said word one about it since so no, not #1

Is it #2) "Pedophilia is "absolutely incompatible" with the priesthood," Benedict said.

Nope, because pedophilia is a regular ongoing historical feature of the priesthood, mate :

"Book of Gomorrah, an 11th-century tract written by St Peter Damian which, while condemning all forms of "immoral" sexual behaviour, holds priests who defile boys in special contempt. Such clerical offenders should not only be publicly flogged but also, writes St Peter, their tonsures should be "shorn" and their faces "foully besmeared with spit". Next, he recommends six months of imprisonment and fasting, followed by a further six months of prayer in solitary confinement. Even after their release, St Peter writes, offenders should never again be allowed to "associate with youths in private conversation or in counselling them"."

Catholic apologists fed up with being blagged with the Spanish Inquisition because "it was a long time ago" take note : Nothing in there anywhere about moving them to the parish next door.

or #3) "There were 691 new accusations in 2007 alone, according to an annual report from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The U.S. church has paid out $2 billion in abuse costs since 1950, most of that in just the last six years."

BINGO!

Pope says war is hell

Today the Pope, head of the planet's largest real estate consortium, "called for an end to all wars, saying they were "useless slaughters" that bring hell to paradise on Earth."
"In this stupendous garden which is the world, there is now room for hell," he said.

Really groundbreaking stuff there, Ratso, and certain to up the ante for future Miss Universe contestants competing in the world peace essay category, but didn't the Catholic church pretty much invent that hell brand in the first place?

In a prior contribution to world peace last month, serial pedophile enabler Pope Ratso proclaimed it was ok to pray for the Jews' conversion to catholicism on Good Friday if it made everyone feel better. He also stated that hell is real and his religion is the only true one.

Can't you just feel that message of world peace working its magic already?

Burp!

This is Beep! Beep! It's Me!'s Darwin Fish entry in the "Your chance to be an intelligent designer!" competition. Great, isn't it?

Meanwhile....

Pope says evolution can't be proven

"He stopped short of endorsing intelligent design, but said scientific and philosophical reason must work together in a way that does not exclude faith.

"But it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory."
Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.
"We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory," he said."

Dr Dan Johnson, Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Lethbridge, wrote the first resolution by a Canadian scientific society against the teaching of intelligent design in schools,

Recently he made the following comment on DeSmogBlog in response to a climate change denier, but his lesson on what constitutes a theory applies equally well to the pope's statement.

Take it away, Dr Dan! :

"Theory means a body of knowledge surrounding the science. It doesn't mean a guess or something to be proven.
The idea that 'first you have an observation, then a hypothesis, then a theory, then it graduates to proven" is nonsense, and not what you would call any kind of good science. That is the definition of "theory" that might be in a newspaper or grade school years ago, but it is not what theory means.
"Number theory" doesn't mean we are not sure there are numbers, like maybe 42 has not been proven. "Evolutionary theory" doesn't mean we are not sure that species gave rise to other species over long earth history (why do I just know that you don't agree there?).
"Gravitational theory" doesn't mean that I might float."

Here endeth the lesson.

This week in Hitlertude

Suddenly everybody's posting pictures of cats that look like Charlie Chaplin.

From The Star - Suddenly everybody's a Nazi :

"Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said that comparing Hezbollah to the Nazis — as his caucus colleague Jason Kenney did this month — was a "straight historic analogy."
Thus, an Islamic denomination distinguished by its adherents' minority position on the acceptable principle of caliphic succession 1,400 years ago is equated with a 20th-century anti-communist totalitarian movement with its roots in European social Darwinism, pseudo-scientific race theories, and the long, ugly, and peculiarly Christian tradition of anti-Semitism.
As Mr. Day insisted, "The historic comparison is clear." "

Heh.

In other Hitler news, the pope's chief exorcist has called Harry Potter the devil and compared a Potter character to Stalin and Hitler, saying they were possessed by the devil :

"You can tell by their behavior and their actions, from the horrors they committed and the atrocities that were committed on their orders. That's why we need to defend society from demons," said Amorth, who has performed 3000 exorcisms on behalf of a Sky Monster and is evidently completely lacking in any sense of irony.

UPDATE : Coming soon - Cats that look like Lenin.

The pope does Auschwitz

and asks : "God, why did you remain silent? Where was God?"

(...ring ........ring..)
"You have reached the Offices of Sky Wizard* and Son.
There is No One available to take your call right now but be assured your call is important to Us.
If you know the extension of the Person you are attempting to reach, enter the two digit number now.
For Holocaust and Other Genocides - Press 1
For Natural Disasters - Press 2
For Disease, Famine and Pestilence - Press 3
Please note that the Office of the Problem of Evil is temporaily undergoing restructuring and is not available to the public at this time.
If this is an emergency, please stay on the line as your call will be answered faster than if you hang up and dial again. Our First Available Operator will be with you shortly."
(....from Ipanema goes walking and as she passes each one she passes goes ahhh...oh, but he watches so sa...)
"Thank you and have a nice day."
Click.

* "Sky Wizard" TM - Dave's Random Snarky Northern Canadian Gibberish Blog