May 16, 2021

 

I have the solution to the Israeli Palestinian problem.  Blow up the Knesset. Ha.

I get infuriated when I hear Netanyahu talk about beating the hell out of the Palestinians in the name of law and order. He, the Israelis, have been ignoring international law for years now and continue to build more apartments in the West Bank, against international law…. It just continues.

   Now Netanyahu blames the obliteration of Gaza on the rockets coming from Hamas. As I see it, the provocation was the other way round, when the Israeli settlers were evicting Palestinians what had legal title deed to their properties, and then the Israeli police going into the Al Aqsa mosque, a sacred place, to me, was the last straw provocation of the Hamas boys to start shooting rockets into Southern Israel, not the other way around.

    It is useless to expect the Palestinians to stop fighting as long as the evictions go on, and as long as the Israel settlers continue to build more houses in the occupied West Bank. Get the Israelis to stop evicting and building and the Hamas may consider stopping rocketing Israel. It is unrealistic to expect Hamas to one-sidedly stop the rockets when the Israelis continue to break the international law.

    Unfortunately, it is sad that the Palestinians can’t get their act together and act as one, and I wonder about Hamas, how long they will continue to throw rockets at Israel, knowing that the Israelis will continue to bomb, and maybe even invade, Gaza until “not a stone is left upon a stone”. Maybe they should consider some other ways of dealing with the Israelis.

    I support Biden when he says that the Israelis have a right to defend themselves, but  I don’t support him when he doesn’t recognize the fact that the ordinary Palestinians have a right to protest against oppression, and the Israeli continued breaking of the law. UN resolution 446, among many others, regards the occupation of the West Bank anEast Jerusalem, as illegal. And Netanyahu dares to talk about law and order.

 

But let me change the subject now and talk about my health. Many people ask, how are you doing? Well, here is how I am doing.

   My last BP reading was 144 / 61 (not  bad for an 85 yr. old)  No diabetes. General good health.

But when it comes to the knee replacement, it is a different story. It continues to  bug me. The spasms continue though the medication seems to have helped to calm them down somewhat. I was at the orthopaedic surgeon’s last Wednesday, May 12^th. I had a 3:15 appointment in the afternoon. He got around to seeing me by about 3:30. He didn’t finish till  5:15. I have been finding it harder and harder to walk with my one elbow crutch. I am beginning to think that there is a trade off involved here… less pain but more instability on the knee which affects the walking (not sure when or if the knee is going to collapse at any time) The doctor compared three x-rays that had been taken previously, including one that was taken a year ago, all showing that the op was perfect.  The one taken last Wednesday seemed to show a small gap between the bone (maybe it receded a bit) and the metal of the replacement. I said he should just put some cement in there and close the gap. The suspicion was that perhaps that gap was causing the knee to wobble a bit . Inconclusive.  However, he explained that if we wanted to do some repairs on the knee, it would mean removing the replacement (which would not be very easy as it was pretty much pounded into the bones) and putting in a new replacement, and there was no guarantee that things would be better after the repaired replacement. Plus, at my age, it was more risky than, say, a 20 yr. old. So I guess that it answered my question, do I have to hobble around like this forever. The answer is…yes. Breaks of the game. The spasms are part of a different equation. But, he said to come back in 6 weeks (at the end of June) and we would check another x-ray and see it there was more receding from the bone and see where we would go from there. Ah, the joys of old age.

   Otherwise, I still take services at Savannah Park every Sunday and at the Hospital on Tuesday and Friday (the crowd is never more than 3, or 4 o4 5), but it keeps up my relationship with the hospital and it gives me a chance to pray for MY hospital, the staff and patients. It is my commitment to the good (spiritual) health of the hospital and its patients and staff.

   Blessedly, I can still drive and the spasms leave me alone there. Amen to that. Now that the virus has been a bit more quiet lately, I have taken advantage of that, and if the family agrees, to visit several families. I say I am having withdrawal symptoms, I need people. We still observe social distancing, masks and sanitizing, but are not too paranoid about these things, just common sense.

     I think we over 60’s are supposed to be getting our vaccinations this coming week. But, there could be crowds and crowds, so we will have to see how they plan this thing. We may go in a group from here, as we did for the test for positivity or not. We shall see.

      It is getting close to my bedtime so I had better bring this scintillating report to a close. Good night. Try, like me, to avoid corona at all costs. And stay or get well. Love and peace, Cas.

 May, 10, 2021

I think  that this may help people to understand a bit better the discussion / debate about Biden's being a

good Catholic or not.

Cultural gap between US and Rome clear in recent reactions to Biden

• John L. Allen Jr.
  May 9, 2021
  EDITOR

In this May 3, 2021, photo, President Joe Biden gestures as he talks to students during a visit to Yorktown Elementary School, in Yorktown, Va., as first lady Jill Biden watches. Biden has met his goal of having most elementary and middle schools open for full, in-person learning in his first 100 days. (Credit: Evan Vucci/AP.)

News Analysis

ROME – Back in the pre-Covid days of yore, when there still was such a thing as a lecture circuit, one of the more popular talks I gave was titled, “Rome is from Mars, America from Venus: Navigating the Cultural Gap between the Vatican and Main Street USA.” Basically, it explored the different clusters of instincts, perspectives and assumptions in these two cultural worlds, which often lead one to misunderstand the other.

The topic comes to mind again this week, watching reactions to the Biden administration play out on both sides of the Atlantic. In the States, you’d think we’re getting set for an MMA octagon title bout; in Rome, you might think Biden and his Vatican buddies are BFFs.

In US Catholic circles, a debate is reemerging which has lain largely dormant since the last time the Democrats nominated a pro-life Catholic for president, which is the question of whether someone who identifies as Catholic yet breaks with Church teaching on the life issues, especially abortion, should be denied communion.

Last week, that debate was thrust back into the spotlight after Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco issued a pastoral letter calling on such political figures not to present themselves for the Eucharist at Mass, insisting that they’re breaking communion with the Church through the policies they advocate.

The fact that the message came from Cordileone means that that it carries relevance not just for Biden but also House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, another pro-choice Catholic Democrat, since her residence is in the Archdiocese of San Francisco.

The US bishops’ Committee on Doctrine is said to be working on a broad document about fitness for communion, though it’s unclear whether a draft of that text will be ready for the bishops’ spring assembly in mid-June.

This ferment is consistent with the tone the bishops have set from Inauguration Day, when Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles warned that the incoming Biden administration would advance “grave moral evils,” and that this presents a special conundrum for the bishops because the president is himself Catholic.

Meanwhile, this is not the conversation about Biden that’s prevailed here in Rome over the past week, where the top note instead has been praise for the president’s decision to waive intellectual property rights for Covid vaccines in order to speed up distribution to poorer nations.

That decision may be dividing much of Europe, with European Council President Charles Michel expressing skepticism Saturday that it’s a “magic bullet” and French President Emmanuel Macron saying that if the US really wants to help, it could end bans on vaccine exports and share technology to ramp up production.

Yet in the small piece of Europe represented by the Vatican City State, the reaction has been much more enthusiastic.

In a May 6 piece, L’Osservatore Romano said Biden’s decision marks a “before” and an “after” in the press for global justice.

“The ‘before’ was expressed in the request of India and South Africa, made as long ago as last October, to suspend the property rights to allow mass production of generic vaccines,” L’Osservatore wrote. “That request was sifted and resifted, with producer countries of name-brand vaccines against it and a group of seventy nations supporting it. It’s a ‘before’ in which Pfizer just posted earnings in excess of already high expectations.”

“The ‘after’ will be written beginning with the choice of the United States, which carries weight even though it may not have immediate repercussions,” according to L’Osservatore.

Yesterday, Pope Francis dispatched a video message to a Covid relief concert hosted by Selena Gomez and organized by Prince Harry And Meghan Markle. He lamented the “virus” of individualism that Francis said leads to indifference to the suffering of others.

The pontiff used language widely taken as an endorsement of the Biden policy shift.

“A variant of this virus is closed nationalism, which prevents, for example, an internationalism of vaccines,” he said. “Another variant is when we place the laws of the market or intellectual property over the laws of love and the health of humanity.”

All this is emblematic of a long-standing contrast between the US and Rome, one that reaches back to the Obama years and beyond. In the States, Catholic reaction to a political leader is heavily conditioned by the abortion issue; in the Vatican, many other considerations come into play, especially concerns about justice for the world’s poorest peoples and nations typically left behind.

That cultural gap tends to give rise to prejudices on both sides of the relationship. Vatican types sometimes assume American Catholics are fixated on abortion for political reasons, to promote the broader agenda of the cultural right. (That was the spirit, for example, of the infamous “ecumenism of hate” piece about the American church penned by two close allies of Pope Francis in Civiltà Cattolica in 2017.) American Catholics, meanwhile, sometimes conclude the Vatican is simply flabby and weak on abortion, unwilling to take a firm stand.

What Vatican personnel sometimes struggle to appreciate is that unlike Western Europe, the battle over abortion is still a going concern in the States, so the Church still has a chance to move the needle. American Catholics, meanwhile, often don’t appreciate that the mere fact something is a raging priority for them doesn’t necessarily mean it is for the rest of the world, and the Vatican has a global responsibility.

In any event, fact of the matter seems clear: While America’s second Roman Catholic president may have an ambivalent relationship with the leadership of his church at home, here at the global HQ so far he’s getting a friendlier reception. If nothing else, that dynamic ought to make the announcement of Biden’s pick as his Vatican ambassador, which should come soon, an interesting one indeed.