N.Y. Post: Are We Serious Catholics?

NEW YORK POST, Feb. 26 — In a report from Rome during the recent consistory, Post columnist Rod Dreher said the Pope invited the Church's 44 new cardinals to heroically offer their lives for the Faith.

But in conversations with Dreher, many of the cardinals noted that there are subtler forms of martyrdom than the bloody kind they are now expected to brave, he said.

“William Cardinal Keeler, the archbishop of Baltimore, said the kind of spite Christians face from cultural institutions like the Brooklyn Museum, and the mockery they may endure in defending their faith against insults like ‘Yo Mama's Last Supper’ amounts to a kind of martyrdom. 'there's a marginalization of spiritual and moral values, and a temptation to be quiet in the presence of that, because when one speaks up in the presence of that kind of thing, one suffers,’; Keeler said. ‘Pope Paul VI called that ‘White Martyrdom.’;

“Robert Royal, author of the recently published Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century, told me the Pope's words about dying for one's faith may sound strange to contemporary Americans because we falsely associate Christianity with a comfortable middle-class lifestyle.

“‘If you really want to be a Christian in the United States these days, especially a Catholic, you are going to bump up hard against the political system and the media,’ Royal said.

“‘And if that's not happening, you probably are not being a very serious Catholic.’;”

Professor Warns of the Lures of Satanism

VATICAN RADIO, March 8 — In an interview with the radio station, Italian educator Carlo Climati warned that pop music groups, compact discs, magazines and the Internet are luring vulnerable young people into the practice of Satanism.

“Behind certain phenomena there is often a world that is aimed at young people, a bombardment of the young that leads them down bad streets,” said Climato, a professor at Regina Apostolorum Atheneum, run by the Legionaires of Christ in Rome.

“First the young people buy a disc. Then they get interested in a singer, and then, little by little, they want to know more about him or her, and they make contact with the sites of esoteric cults.

“Some young people find in the idea of the esoteric something of the transgression with which they may want, in a certain sense, to ally themselves,” the professor said, “but they do not realize that in this way they become more and more slaves because their behavior certainly doesn't favor thought but rather favors lack of thought.”