Well, I've finally made it.
I have become the latest Catholic, after Fr. Brian Harrison, to warrant personal attention from the odious, spooky, shadowy bunch of reputation-destroying fanatics over at the Get Sungenis blog.
I happen to have the advantage of knowing who the self-appointed KGB officer overseeing my file is- that would be Mr. David Palm.
Go ahead and read his hit-piece, if you like.
I won't.
I stopped at the beginning, where Palm situated his attack upon me by having recourse to the observation that I-scandalously!- hold to the ancient and apostolic Catholic Faith in this exact respect: I am a geocentrist.
That happens to put me in the same boat with just about every Catholic who ever lived, right up until l'affaire Galileo, where it was proven that the Church had it wrong, and Galileo had it right.
Except..........it wasn't.
She didn't.
He didn't.
Every argument Galileo advanced has since been falsified as a matter of science.
Which David Palm knows, or should know.
But it doesn't matter to David Palm that every single argument Galileo advanced against the Church's ancient and apostolic belief, and authoritative magisterial teaching, has been scientifically falsified, and that no Catholic has ever been required under any teaching of the Church in all of Her history to reject geocentrism.
It is enough that Mr. Palm expects that his one or two readers (if that many- I am actually doing him too much of a favor even linking to his site) will find themselves shocked- shocked, I tell you!- that this evil Catholic Rick DeLano believes what the Scriptures, the apostles, the Fathers, the Doctors, and the entire Church believed for centuries upon centuries.
The charge is that Rick DeLano is Catholic, and I can only pray with all my heart, soul, and mind, that the Just Judge will find me guilty.
I have thought long and hard about how to respond to this fellow's attack.
I have decided that the best thing to do is to identify it, and the entire Get Sungenis blog, as the evil calumniation it in fact is, and then to bid hasta la vista to it, to him, and to the entire cabal of self-appointed ecclesiastical KGB operatives at the Get Sungenis blog.
Do you wish to take a shower?
Just go to the Get Sungenis blog, and the desire will rapidly escalate to necessity.
You can bookmark it for that precise purpose.
David Palm specializes in attacks upon Catholics in good standing, for the crime of believing what the Church teaches.
I have discharged my duty in conscience to recount the facts concerning the "Harrisburg Affair", an ugly example of how a good Catholic's name, reputation, and relationship with his Bishop were destroyed by the implacable and pitiless campaign of a very few neo-Catholic "apologists", who end up being apologists for the enemies of our Holy Faith, and enemies of its bravest defenders.
If any reader of this blog, now or in the future, finds any aspect of this ignoble Pharisee's hit job to be of sufficient credibility to raise questions, please feel free to come on over here and post them.
I hereby declare myself guilty of the charge of obstinate and unshakeable Catholicism.
I humbly pray God will agree.
As for David Palm, I shake the dust off my shoes, and I am rid of him.
I wondered what you'd been up to lately. The title of that blog is strange enough. Oh dear.
ReplyDeleteMy posts on the "Harrisburg Affair" ruffled the feathers of these self-appointed Inquisitors.
ReplyDeleteGood.
Thanks Rick for posting this article. It is well stated.
ReplyDeleteI am submitting this comment you see below between the asterisks because this very same comment, in exactly the way you see it, was deleted by Dave Armstrong less than two hours after I submitted it on his blogsite at http://socrates58.blogspot.com/2012/01/2012-sungenis-odd-yssey-robert-sungenis.html on 1-30-2012. The comment was in a thread wherein the strangely obsessive (to say the least!) David Palm was carrying out a vicious slander against Robert Sungenis, a man who Palm falsely claims to be anti-Semite.
Armstrong, in attempting to explain why he deleted my comment, stated this in a subsequent posted comment: "Like Mark Shea, I don't allow blatantly anti-Semitic garbage to be posted on my site." I will leave the reader to judge whether or not my comment in any objective sense of the word is "blatantly anti-Semitic garbage."
For the record I can honestly state that I am not anti-Semite in the least as far as the correct Catholic understanding of anti-Semitism goes which is very clearly and succinctly enunciated by Fr. Denis Fahey. as seen in the article whose link is provided in my below comment. Fr. Fahey, as some readers of this site may well know, was a very dedicated and courageous priest. He was a staunch defender of the rights of Christ the King with all that entails. For this he has to this day been calumniated for supposedly being anti-Semite.
************************************************Mr. Palm's last sentence at Mon Jan 30, 10:32:00 AM EST: "It's that simple." Not quite! What is quite simple, however, for those with eyes to see and ears to hear is that the Catholic American bishops have manifested for a good number of years an abject fear of the Jews. Would they or their supporters openly admit that in those terms? Of course not, but that certainly doesn't make it any less true.
This groveling and shameful fear of the Jews that has continually plagued the Catholic Church for some 2,000 years up to the present day is an incredibly horrible scandal and one not without significant ill effects. Does that sound conspiratorial? No doubt, it does to many of the see no evil hear no evil mindset, the go along to get along bunch, the finger in the wind crowd, the politically correct folks, the folks who act as though the worst sin of all is to be an anti-Semite according to their own application of that term. (cf the very wise Fr. Dennis Fahey's words on the subject of anti-Semitism at http://www.cfnews.org/Fahey-AntiSemitism.htm).
At the same time these folks tend to know very well the power behind the anti-Semite tag. They consistently use it without compunction in an attempt to destroy their opposition and build up their own credits. They tend to use it quite effectively and when they meet any hard hitting opposition they lash out with an ever greater fury of name calling and other verbal insults. They could make a woman scorned look like a choir boy. Sure, they always seem to have some sort of fig leaf pretext to hide behind in carrying out their self-righteous attacks.
[cont.]
ReplyDeleteI ask anybody reading this if they really think Sungenis would not be free of their anti-Semite smears if he didn't have the run-in with Bp. Rhoades. No way Jose. You could be sure they would seek to justify their anti-Semite smear attacks in all kinds of other ways as indeed they actually do. All the time we hear their pompous moral posturing. They know that they have the power of numbers behind them, not to mention people in high places to support them. But that they would use some of their energy in calling to task the demonic ADL or its' Jewish Masonic Mother the B'nai B'rith. No doubt, calumny cats like Abe Foxman like nothing better than to see people like Robert Sungenis smeared -- especially at the hands of fellow Catholics.
Just look at the ADL's partner in crime, the Southern Poverty Law Center. They've branded Sungenis one of the infamous Dirty Dozen. A real Catholic would know that it is a real badge of honor to make that list.
To hear the people who set up and contribute to a website whose sole purpose, contrary to any moral posturing to the contrary, is that of trying to destroy a Catholic's layman's reputation and his career as a Catholic apologist is utterly despicable.
Let the battle continue because Dr. Robert Sungenis is not about to cower before the defamation artists who somehow can find it within themselves to spend an incredible amount of time and energy to bring him down.
James Phillips
************************************************
I think it is important to note that the Church certainly authoritatively taught in Nostrae Aetate that it desires to seek a more respectful relationship with the Jews.
ReplyDeleteI do not doubt for a second that this desire has been twisted in shocking ways, into proposals that the Catholic Faith itself be changed to make it more to the liking of the Jewish partners in this dialogue.
This can never be acquiesced in, and this is precisely what the "Harrisburg Affair" pivots upon.
There is a fine line to be walked here, but when doctrine is perverted in the service of the dialogue, *that line has been crossed*.
Thank God the bishops agree.
The remaining issue is the profound injustice that has been done to Dr. Sungenis, and that issue remains unresolved.
Rick, you're doing the right thing in not trying to reason with Palm. Palm, along with Mark Shea, tried to harras Matt Bellisaro about his defense of Fr Harrison on Matt's Catholic Champion blog. Matt told them both to vamoose when it becase obivous they were trying to drag him into a piss fight about Sungenis. Matt also denounced the Get Sungenis blog as an attempt to willflly destroy the reputation of another Catholic. There's no way to reason with a hatefull closed mind, so go on and do something worthwhile.
ReplyDeleteDave who?
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip to Matt's blog. I'll check it out.
As for the Get Sungenis blog, that's the spookiest site I've ever seen.
So happy to have made it.
Now, as you say, I can get back to dealing with only mildly disturbing people- like atheists threatening to kill me in cold blood :-)
More about that in Mary's Bones Part III, absolutely not to be missed, this one is gonna be goooooood :-)
"I stopped at the beginning, where Palm situated his attack upon me by having recourse to the observation that I-scandalously!- hold to the ancient and apostolic Catholic Faith in this exact respect: I am a geocentrist."
ReplyDeleteThat depends on what you mean by the term. Geocentrism and Heliocentrism are both true.
Well, under the assumptions of Relativity, they are both equally "true", to the extent that Relativity cannot establish absolute, but only relative, motion, and requires that all forces be exactly the same no matter what reference frame is chosen from which to calculate them.
ReplyDeleteHopwever, this is a postulate, not an experimentally demonstrated fact.
If Relativity holds true, then geocentrism is still true, and heliocentrism false, since the question would now be one of theology, not of science, and the theological data is unambiguous: the Sun moves and the Earth does not, according to Scripture, the unanimous consent of the Fathers, and the authoritative exercise of the magisterial authority of the Church in the Galileo affair.
If Relativity proves to be false, then the question is, at least theoretically, still a matter which could be established within the domain of experimental science, since Relativity itself was adopted in order to explain the failure of the Michelson Morley experiment in 1887 to detect the universally assumed motion of Earth around Sun.
If Relativity were to be experimentally falsified (as, for example, in the OPERA experiments at CERN), then we would have no answer for the results of the Michelson Morley experiment, and physics would be required to revisit the matter.
It is also important to note that the foundational contradiction of our time in science is between Relativity and quantum physics.
Relativity treats space as a vacuum, quantum physics treats it as a substance, and more and more theorists are ascribing properties to space which resemble ever more the old concept of the "aether", which Einstein banished from physics in order to explain the puzzling Michelson Morley result.
Bottom line: geocentrism has never been scientifically falsified.
Relativity says it can never be falsified even in principle.
If Relativity is falsified, then the best evidence we have favors geocentrism.
Perhaps you should look at it the way the early Church Fathers did.
ReplyDeleteIf you do, we can know by observation that they are both true. It's not a matter of theology, but of how God created the world about us.
Actually, the Fathers considered geocentrism true and heliocentrism false. This is because the Scriptures are quite clear that it is the Sun that is moving and the Earth is standing still.
ReplyDeleteI agree with the Fathers.
I tried to read the link on the Get Sungenis blog, it has gone private:
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You might be interested that David Palm also has a page where he debunks you as well and as ill as he can, and that I have made my latest blog post on the creationist blog against his misconstruction about Bible Commission of 1909:
Creation vs. Evolution : Mark Shea Recommended David Palm Who Misconstrues Bible Commission of 1909
http://creavsevolu.blogspot.fr/2014/01/mark-shea-recommended-david-palm-who.html
The above-linked post by Lundahl is excellent. I am posting it on my social media networks.
DeleteThanks, Mr. Lundahl. I would be very interested to know whether you receive a response to your request.
ReplyDeleteThe blog has been taken down by mutual agreement of its owners and Dr. Sungenis, who has removed material concerning the Jews which the blog owners at the Get Sungenis blog were targeting.
Mr. Palm is not worth my time or effort. My response to him is the post above. I have nothing further to say.
If Mr. Palm should ever succeed in making himself worth my time and effort, then he will know of it.
I am very interested in your response on Palm's treatment of the 1909 text. I will work through it as soon as I can, and perhaps post it on my own social networking links.
You have posted links to very interesting papers from your blogs here previously. I hope people are clicking on them and taking notice.