Daviel Maguire: Dissing the Pope as Usual

Dan Maguire is doing his usual thing, bitching about the Pope and the teaching of the Catholic Church with which he disagrees. Happily, the New York Times, which sought out a comment from him, also printed several letters from loyal Catholics lauding the Pope.

In an e-mail to Theology Department faculty and graduate students, Maguire goes further:

Yesterday morning, I was invited by The New York Times to submit a letter on the pope’s departure. When I spoke to the editor about my letter, she asked about Matt. 16:19. People are interested in theology when they see its effects unfolding in public life. I told her, as Hans Kung puts it that “the famous saying about Peter as the rock on which Jesus will build his church” that “strikingly has no parallels in the other Gospels, is not a saying of the earthly Jesus but a post-Easter construction…” probably coming from the Palestinian community and inserted into Matthew’s Gospel.

Maguire, of course, is doing what liberal theologians typically do when faced with scripture they find inconvenient: they dismiss it as bogus.

The fact that there are no parallel passages in the other gospels proves nothing, since many of the things Jesus said appear in only one gospel. Of course, Maguire doesn’t believe that what Jesus said has any authority anyway, since he is, at most, barely a theist and certainly not a Christian.

Maguire has every right to whatever religious views he wishes to hold, but he shouldn’t pretend that those views trump the views of people who are really Christians, and he certainly should not pretend that his views and those of like-minded theologians trump those of the bishops.

Hate Speech Laws Work Both Ways: Muslims Arrested for Dissing Pope

From Breitbart:

ROME (AP) - Italian police on Friday arrested six Moroccan men suspected of inciting hatred against Pope Benedict XVI for converting a Muslim journalist in Italy to Catholicism.

Stefano Fonsi, head of Brescia police’s anti-terrorism squad in northern Italy, said the suspects allegedly banded together and met privately with the goal of stirring up religious hatred against non-Muslims, including the pope.

Investigators say they found literature exhorting Muslim immigrants against integrating into Italian society and saying the pope should be punished for having baptized the journalist during an Easter vigil ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica.

The investigation grew out of security checks ahead of a pastoral visit by Benedict to Brescia in 2009, but authorities insisted that their probe revealed no plot against the pontiff or other terrorism aims.

Brescia Prosecutors Fabio Salmone said there was “absolutely no” indication that the group had attacks in mind. “I rule that out,” he told reporters. “There wasn’t even a plan” to organize attacks, he said.

In 2008, Egyptian-born journalist Magdi Allam angered some Muslims by becoming a Catholic. After being baptized, he changed his name to Magdi Cristiano Allam. He had built a career in Italy as a newspaper commentator and author attacking Islamic extremism and supporting Israel.

We consider hate speech laws an outrage, and think they should exist nowhere.

Happily, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that they can’t exist in this country.

But if there are going to be such laws, we want them enforced not only against people who verbally attack politically correct victim groups (blacks, gays, feminists, Muslims) but also against people who attack politically incorrect groups (conservative Christians, whites, males).

Hate speech laws, of course, are part of a leftist agenda to shut up speech that liberals and leftists disapprove of. And so long as they can, with impunity, shut up speech they disapprove of, they will continue to do so -- sometimes by actually punishing people who utter politically incorrect speech, and sometimes by simply chilling politically incorrect speech with the threat of punishment.

But this is a prisoner’s dilemma.

If the left knows that they themselves may be punished for their own hateful speech, they are likely to back off a bit on the issue.

Lame Explanation