California Republican Representative Bill Thomas has thwarted an attempt to remove the political gag order on churches.
According to Bob Novak, Thomas is part of the secular Republican faction that despises the Christian element in the party and this move signals a coming “civil war” within the Republican party between the Christians (who have given the party the majorities it has needed to achieve parity with the Democrats) and the secularists.
California Republican Representative Bill Thomas has thwarted an attempt to remove the political gag order on churches.
According to Bob Novak, Thomas is part of the secular Republican faction that despises the Christian element in the party and this move signals a coming “civil war” within the Republican party between the Christians (who have given the party the majorities it has needed to achieve parity with the Democrats) and the secularists.
A correspondent writes:
On May 4th of this year, the electrician servicing my parish backed his truck into my parked car. The damage appeared minor, but two estimates for repair came up with the same amount, $1518.00. The electrician’s insurance company mailed this amount to me, plus $150.00 for a rental car.
The car is old, the damage is minor, and the money would be helpful to clear up debts. Would it be an ethical
issue, if I opted not to have the repair done at this time? I would return the $150.00 for car rental to the insurance company.
The money that the insurance company sent you is yours to do with as you wish. This includes the money for the rental car. You can use the money on anything you want. That is why they sent you money rather than a voucher for car repair and a voucher for a rental car. The money is to compensate you for the damage and the trouble you have incurred by the accident, and if you choose to live with the damage and use your compensation on something other than car repair and car rental, that is your business.
You have no obligation to use the money in any particular way, so do with it whatever seems best to you, including the $150 for the rental car. People spend their insurance settlements on other stuff all the time, and if you tried to return any of it, it would probably only confuse the insurance company, and they might well return the check to you again.
Hope this helps, and God bless!
. . . I thought I would get around to blogging something that I’ve been meaning to do for a while: discuss what is and is not required by Catholics in observance of Friday.
First, let’s start with the universal law of the Latin church, as found in the Code of Canon Law:
Can. 1251 Abstinence from eating meat or some other food according to the prescripts of the conference of bishops is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday. Abstinence and fasting are to be observed on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday.
Can. 1253 The conference of bishops can determine more precisely the observance of fast and abstinence as well as substitute other forms of penance, especially works of charity and exercises of piety, in whole or in part, for abstinence and fast.
The universal law in the Latin church, therefore, is that Catholics are to abstain from meat on all Fridays except solemnities and on Ash Wednesday. However, canon 1251 allows national conferences of bishops to substitute some other food for meat as the object of abstinence, and canon 1253 allows the national conference to go even further in regulating the practice of abstinence. This means that we, in the U.S., need to look at what the particular law is for the United States and how it may differ from universal law.
The U.S. norms are found in a document titled On Penance and Abstinence, dated Nov. 18, 1966, which despite the revision of the Code of Canon Law remains in force. Before we look at the norms provided by that document, a word about it is in order: Like virtually everything a national conference produces, it’s a compromise document and reflects tensions between different parties in the bishops’ conference in 1966. Some bishops undoubtedly didn’t want to make the changes the document provides, while others may have wanted to go even farther. One thing the bishops were united in, however, was a desire not to be perceived as gutting the Church’s penitential practice. When one reads the whole document, it is clear that the bishops are bending over backwards to avoid conveying this impression.
The effect of the considerations is that one must read the document carefully. One must do that with any law, but particularly with controversial compromise texts like this one, a person trying to determine what the law is must pay very careful attention to the language being used by the document and what it says regarding the faithful’s obligations under law. In this document, it is particularly necessary to distinguish between the language of law and the language of exhortation. The former pertains to the legal change the bishops were making, and the latter pertains to the pastoral “spin” the bishops want put on the situation. As we’ll see, they remove legal obligations while going on to exhort people to do things freely that were formally obligatory. In this way they seek to avoid the impression that they are gutting the Church’s penitential practice.
Now, here are the norms the document provides:
1. Friday itself remains a special day of penitential observance throughout the year, a time when those who seek perfection will be mindful of their personal sins and the sins of mankind which they are called upon to help expiate in union with Christ Crucified;
2. Friday should be in each week something of what Lent is in the entire year. For this reason we urge all to prepare for that weekly Easter that comes with each Sunday by freely making of every Friday a day of self-denial and mortification in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ;
3. Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence as binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law. Our expectation is based on the following considerations;
a. We shall thus freely and out of love for Christ Crucified show our solidarity with the generations of believers to whom this practice frequently became, especially in times of persecution and of great poverty, no mean evidence of fidelity in Christ and his Church.
b. We shall thus also remind ourselves that as Christians, although immersed in the world and sharing its life, we must preserve a saving and necessary difference from the spirit of the world. Our deliberate, personal abstinence from meat, more especially because no longer required by law, will be an outward sign of inward spiritual values that we cherish.
The big legal change comes in norm #3, where the bishops state that “we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence as binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday.” So the obligation to abstain from meat is terminated. The question becomes: What obligation, if any, have the bishops put in its place?
The clause “as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday” is consistent with the idea that they did establish another obligation or a mandate to do penance in some form on Friday, but it also is consistent with the idea that they did not establish a new obligation. If the latter is the case then the remark is simply noting that previously abstinence had been the only prescribed way of observing Friday. Other acts of penance could be performed on Friday, but they had to be in addition to abstinece.
To find out what other obligation there may be, one must look at the surrounding text of the norms. When one does this, one discovers several things.
The first, per norm #3, is that the bishops “especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday . . . we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat.” This is an exhortation and as such does not establish a legal obligation. So abstinence continued to be a recommended practice for the observance of Friday, but not a legally binding one.
The next thing, per norm #1, is that Friday continues to be a day of penance. The norm clarifies the sense in which this is to be understood by explaining that it is “a time when those who seek perfection will be mindful of their personal sins and the sins of mankind which they are called upon to help expiate in union with Christ Crucified.” This qualification strongly suggests that, though Friday is a day of penance, it is not one on which all of the faithful are legally bound or bound under pain of sin to do penance. Instead, “those who seek perfection” will do penance on the day. If the bishops intended all to be bound to do penance on Friday, they would not have used such restrictive language.
This interpretation is confirmed by norm #2, which states that “Friday should be in each week something of what Lent is in the entire year. For this reason we urge all to prepare for that weekly Easter that comes with each Sunday by freely making of every Friday a day of self-denial and mortification in prayerful remembrance of the passion of Jesus Christ.” Again, the language of exhortation is used (“we urge”) rather than the language of mandate. Thus no obligation is created. If the bishops intended to create an obligation then they would have used other language, such as “all are required to prepare for that weekly Easter.”
The norms–the part of the document that would create a legal obligation if there was one–thus fails to do so. As a result, there is no obligation in the United States to practice penance on Friday, but Friday remains a day of penance which the bishops have urged all to do penance and, in particular, recommended the continued practice of abstience.
Reading the remainder of the document confirms the interpretation outlined above. As a compromise document and a controversial one, the stress that is placed on the recommendation to continue to do penance and to abstain is great, and with an inattentive reading the strength of the recommendation might lead one to think that there is an obligation to do penance on Friday. But a careful reading of the text shows that the language being used in the text never strays from the language of exhortation to the language of legal mandate.
There also is a dog that didn’t bark in this text.
The bishops were so concerned to avoid the impression that they were gutting the practice of penance that if they were creating an alternative obligation then they could not have failed to underscore this point. It would have been the most crushing rejoinder to their potential critics if they had said something like, “Though we have terminated the obligation to abstain, the faithful are nevertheless bound to perform a penance of their choice on Fridays and thus the Catholic practice of Friday penance remains in place even though the form the penance takes is now left to the determination of the individual.” The fact that the bishops nowhere say this or anything like it strongly indicates that it was not the bishops’ intent to create an alternative obligation. Calling attention to the alternative obligation by frankly stating it would have utterly invalidated the criticism the bishops were most concerned to avoid.
But the fact that the bishops nowhere state an alternative obligation indicates that one does not exist. Legal obligations do not exist that are not legislated.
Thus we conclude that the American bishops have exercised their competence, later acknowledged by canon 1253 of the 1983 Code of Canon Law, to determine more particularly the manner of abstinence by restricting it to a few days a year (Ash Wednesday, the Fridays of Lent, and Good Friday–the last being part of Triduum rather than Lent) and by recommending the continued practice of abstinence on other Fridays. Rome confirmed this document, and thus it is the law for Latin Catholics in the United States.
This also is the understanding indicated in the Canon Law Society of America’s New Commentary on the Code of Canon Law. The commentary on canon 1253 summarizes the obligations and recommendations without indicating that a legal obligation to do penance continues to exist on typical Fridays of the year.
One of the all-time GREAT Saturday morning shows is The Land of the Lost, which aired back in the mid-1970s. For me, as for countless other boys and girls of my generation, Land of the Lost was the EPITOME of cool.
And deservedly so! Just look at what the show had going for it:
1. First and foremost, it had DINOSAURS! Lots of them! You can’t get cooler than that!
2. It had a likable family living in a world filled with groovy science fiction concepts.
3. It had A-list science fiction authors (like Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, Ben Bova, David Gerrold, and D. C. Fontanta) doing the scripts.
4. It had the semi-insectoid, semi-reptilian Sleestak, the barbaric descendants of the Land of the Lost’s original builders.
5. It had the short, ape-like Pakuni
6. It had guest stars from the past of our world (like Jefferson Davis Collie III–a loney Confederate veteran convinced that “The South will rise again”) and from the future of our world (like Beauregard Jackson of Ft. Worth, Texas–an astronaut plucked from flying a hypersonic glider over Ecuador) and the main cast themselves as guest stars from their own futures or alternate universes–as well as other guest stars too bizarre to classify.
7. It had spray-painted chickens, giant carrots, turnips, and strawberries, glowing power crystals, lost cities, abandoned temples, circular rivers leading nowhere, peril-infested swamps, earthquakes, talking skulls, and everything else that makes for coolness.
What a show!
It’s probably the most intelligent show ever to appear on Saturday morning. It wasn’t dumbed down and didn’t patronize the children in the audience. How many Saturday morning shows that expect kids to understand–and succeed in communicating to them–that the series is set in a parallel universe so small that you can stand on the top of a hill and see the back of your head with binoculars because its space-time is curved. Not only that, but it is an *artificial* universe built by a once noble race that has now fallen into barbarity. It is a universe still being run by an automated control system that the characters must interact with. It is a universe connected to any point in our world’s history–and countless other worlds–via time doorways.
Some favorite lines following a dinosaur attack:
BEAUREGARD JACKSON: Hey, I sure am happy to see you kids. . . . Where am I? And, uh, what in the heck was that?
WILL MARSHALL: Aw, that’s only a coelophysis. It’s omnivorous.
JACKSON: Don’t much care where it goes to church. It sure has got bad manners.
The series also had an evolving storyline, in which the characters progressively learned more and more about their new universe and how it worked, with concepts building over time, enabling the stories to to grow more complex, with the characters getting ever closer to figuring out how to return home to Earth. This was not a series where everything gets reset to just the way it was at the beginning of the episode.
The characters also are more realistic than on most childrens’ series. The kids do not function as grownups in miniature. They make mistakes and do juvenile things, and the series underscores the need for them to hang together and obey their father in order for the family to survive. Even though the family members may squabble, the genuinely love and depend on each other. The kids also grow and mature over time.
You may be of the impression that Star Trek’s Klingon was the first TV sci-fi language to be developed to the point that people could actually speak it, but you’d be wrong. The Land of the Lost’s ape-like Pakuni spoke a language that had hundreds of words and its own grammar and phonology–designed by a professional linguist (as with Klingon).
The show also had all the delicious scare-factor one could want. The Sleestaks in particular provided the satisfying chills every young boy was longing for as a way of testing his courage. I can’t tell you how many nights I lay awake, convinced by the shadows in my bedroom that there was a Sleestak standing in my closet door–yet I wouldn’t have missed Land of the Lost for anything!
Now, at last, Land of the Lost comes to DVD. The first season (of three seasons) came out yesterday in an affordable edition that contains the foundational episodes of the series, which set up the key concepts that come into play later. Watching them now, the child-like aspects of the series are more noticeble to me than they were when I was nine, but it’s still AMAZING how different, more mature, and more sophisticated the series is than ANYTHING else ever made for Saturday morning TV.
I must admit that I am a huge fan of Land of the Lost. In fact, I pre-ordered the DVDs, so they arrived early, and I’ve just taken the DVD bonus materials quiz on the show and scored 100% (on 13 questions with four options each), so I’m very proud of myself.
For those who saw the series when it was first on, it will be an unbelievable nostalgia fest, and for those who missed out on it the first time, you’ll WISH you’d seen it as kids back in the 1970s. It’ll also provide an unending delight for your own children.
One of the all-time GREAT Saturday morning shows is The Land of the Lost, which aired back in the mid-1970s. For me, as for countless other boys and girls of my generation, Land of the Lost was the EPITOME of cool.
And deservedly so! Just look at what the show had going for it:
1. First and foremost, it had DINOSAURS! Lots of them! You can’t get cooler than that!
2. It had a likable family living in a world filled with groovy science fiction concepts.
3. It had A-list science fiction authors (like Larry Niven, Theodore Sturgeon, Norman Spinrad, Ben Bova, David Gerrold, and D. C. Fontanta) doing the scripts.
4. It had the semi-insectoid, semi-reptilian Sleestak, the barbaric descendants of the Land of the Lost’s original builders.
5. It had the short, ape-like Pakuni
6. It had guest stars from the past of our world (like Jefferson Davis Collie III–a loney Confederate veteran convinced that “The South will rise again”) and from the future of our world (like Beauregard Jackson of Ft. Worth, Texas–an astronaut plucked from flying a hypersonic glider over Ecuador) and the main cast themselves as guest stars from their own futures or alternate universes–as well as other guest stars too bizarre to classify.
7. It had spray-painted chickens, giant carrots, turnips, and strawberries, glowing power crystals, lost cities, abandoned temples, circular rivers leading nowhere, peril-infested swamps, earthquakes, talking skulls, and everything else that makes for coolness.
What a show!
It’s probably the most intelligent show ever to appear on Saturday morning. It wasn’t dumbed down and didn’t patronize the children in the audience. How many Saturday morning shows that expect kids to understand–and succeed in communicating to them–that the series is set in a parallel universe so small that you can stand on the top of a hill and see the back of your head with binoculars because its space-time is curved. Not only that, but it is an *artificial* universe built by a once noble race that has now fallen into barbarity. It is a universe still being run by an automated control system that the characters must interact with. It is a universe connected to any point in our world’s history–and countless other worlds–via time doorways.
Some favorite lines following a dinosaur attack:
BEAUREGARD JACKSON: Hey, I sure am happy to see you kids. . . . Where am I? And, uh, what in the heck was that?
WILL MARSHALL: Aw, that’s only a coelophysis. It’s omnivorous.
JACKSON: Don’t much care where it goes to church. It sure has got bad manners.
The series also had an evolving storyline, in which the characters progressively learned more and more about their new universe and how it worked, with concepts building over time, enabling the stories to to grow more complex, with the characters getting ever closer to figuring out how to return home to Earth. This was not a series where everything gets reset to just the way it was at the beginning of the episode.
The characters also are more realistic than on most childrens’ series. The kids do not function as grownups in miniature. They make mistakes and do juvenile things, and the series underscores the need for them to hang together and obey their father in order for the family to survive. Even though the family members may squabble, the genuinely love and depend on each other. The kids also grow and mature over time.
You may be of the impression that Star Trek’s Klingon was the first TV sci-fi language to be developed to the point that people could actually speak it, but you’d be wrong. The Land of the Lost’s ape-like Pakuni spoke a language that had hundreds of words and its own grammar and phonology–designed by a professional linguist (as with Klingon).
The show also had all the delicious scare-factor one could want. The Sleestaks in particular provided the satisfying chills every young boy was longing for as a way of testing his courage. I can’t tell you how many nights I lay awake, convinced by the shadows in my bedroom that there was a Sleestak standing in my closet door–yet I wouldn’t have missed Land of the Lost for anything!
Now, at last, Land of the Lost comes to DVD. The first season (of three seasons) came out yesterday in an affordable edition that contains the foundational episodes of the series, which set up the key concepts that come into play later. Watching them now, the child-like aspects of the series are more noticeble to me than they were when I was nine, but it’s still AMAZING how different, more mature, and more sophisticated the series is than ANYTHING else ever made for Saturday morning TV.
I must admit that I am a huge fan of Land of the Lost. In fact, I pre-ordered the DVDs, so they arrived early, and I’ve just taken the DVD bonus materials quiz on the show and scored 100% (on 13 questions with four options each), so I’m very proud of myself.
For those who saw the series when it was first on, it will be an unbelievable nostalgia fest, and for those who missed out on it the first time, you’ll WISH you’d seen it as kids back in the 1970s. It’ll also provide an unending delight for your own children.
A new imaging technique goes far beyond conventional ultra-sound in revealing the early life of each of us in the womb. New images reveal babies “walking,” yawning, and rubbing their eyes in the wombs of their mothers.
More evidence upon more evidence for the humanity of pre-born babies.
Share it with your friends who doubt these points.
A new imaging technique goes far beyond conventional ultra-sound in revealing the early life of each of us in the womb. New images reveal babies “walking,” yawning, and rubbing their eyes in the wombs of their mothers.
More evidence upon more evidence for the humanity of pre-born babies.
Share it with your friends who doubt these points.
This is not a joke.
The ESPN sports network is doing an interview with the Pampa, Texas parents of one of two boys in Texas to be named after the network. Two-year old ESPN Malachi McCall, whose first name is pronounced Espen, was named by his parents after the popular sports network. So was another child, four-year old ESPN Curiel, who hails from my home town of Corpus Christi, Texas. A third child, ESPN Blondeel–who is also four–hails from Michigan.
ESPN McCall’s parents decided to name him after hearing a report on one of the other children on the radio:
Rebecca and Michael McCall said their son’s name started as a joke after they heard on the radio about another couple naming their son “ESPEN.”
“He looked at me and said, ‘That’s a cool name,'” Rebecca McCall said in Saturday’s editions of the Amarillo Globe-News.
Rebecca McCall said she resisted her husband’s idea at first, but the idea grew on her.
“I didn’t like it until he was born,” she said, adding that by then, she couldn’t think of calling her son anything else [source].
A network executive explained:
“We don’t have viewers. We have fans,” ESPN spokesman Dave Nagle said Saturday. “And I guess there’s no better testament than when someone names their child after your product. It just shows the bond we have with people.”
Nagle said the feature will air Sept. 6 as part of a two-hour special celebrating the network’s 25th anniversary.
I thought I’d take the opportunity to list some of the rules that I use on this blog. Folks may have noticed some of them in operation, wondered about others, or simply been mystified. So here goes:
1. People are welcome to disagree with me in the comments boxes as long as they are polite. I don’t mind disagreement. I do mind rudeness. (Be sure and see Rule 20 for how disagreement should be expressed in certain cases!) Rudeness towards others on the blog is also out of bounds.
UPDATE: Commenters whose
interaction on the blog consists principally of discussions of the same
subject over and over (e.g., the writings of John Dominic Crossan, whether the pope is the pope, or the
evils of Vatican II, the current rite of Mass, or a
particular political figure or party–or any other single subject) are
being rude. Conversation involves an ability to talk about more than
one thing, not an obsessive harping on one subject. Say your piece and
move on, per Rule 2.
2. Because of the format restrictions blogging involves, I can’t engage in sustained back-and-forth discussions with folks, either in the comments boxes or in the main section of the blog. Therefore, I ask that folks say their piece and then let the subject go (for now, knowing that it will likely surface again in the future).
UPDATE: This rule also may be invoked on discussions that, in the opinion of the blogmaster, are getting overly repetitious or unproductively long.
3. Also because of the format restrictions, everyone must be concise. Don’t go on at length about things. Pasting large amounts of text into the combox also counts as going on at length. Going on at length constitutes rudeness.
4. Comments violating the first three rules will be deleted.
5. Readers who repeatedly violate the first three rules will be banned. (So far I haven’t had to do that.)
6. When I link to other sites, unless I say otherwise, I am only recommending that you look at the material on the page that I link. The way this blog works, I often have need to document what I am saying by linking to a very specific piece of information, and I cannot endorse other material on sites containing this information.
7. Related to rule 6, I hereby warn you that some material on sites I link may possibly be inconsistent with the Catholic faith or offensive. I try to minimize this, but doing apologetics–and living in the real world–means encountering material that is contrary to the faith or offensive. If you don’t want to take a "Test everything and hold fast to what is good" approach (1 Thess. 5:21) then you should avoid apologetics blogs (and the real world).
8. Except where stated otherwise, when I recommend a book, video, or other product, I am recommending it for individuals who are mature and secure in their Catholic faith. Such recommendations are not to be taken to mean that the material is perfect and free from every possible objection that could be made against them. Nor are they to be taken as recommendations for children or for people who are insecure in their Catholic faith. People falling in the latter classes are not the subjects of my recommendations unless the contrary is stated.
9. I reserve the right to delete comments that I don’t think are helpful for one reason or another (e.g., if someone who is converting to the faith asks for a book recommendation and someone in the comments box recommends a book that I haven’t read, I may delete the recommendation since I don’t know if it suits the person’s needs or not).
10. If you want to ask me a question not related to what’s currently on the blog, don’t use the comments box. Use the e-mail address listed on the blog site.
11. All mail sent to the e-mail address listed on the blog is bloggable unless you say "Don’t blog this" (or an equivalent) in the e-mail.
12. The same goes for e-mail sent to other addresses.
13. I can’t promise reponses to comments or to e-mail that is sent to me. My schedule doesn’t permit me to make this commitment.
14. If I can respond, it may be a few days before the response appears.
15. When I respond to comments or e-mails in the main blog section, I do not use people’s names. Instead, I say things like " A reader writes . . ." This is not to be impersonal. It has a specific reason. Many people stumble across the blog and want to ask questions without having their identities exposed, particularly if they have a sensitive question (e.g., one involving family members or sexuality). To assure them that their privacy will be honored, I don’t use names when responding to queries in the main blog section. If people saw me responding to e-mail or comments with names in the main blog section, they might think that I would use their names or e-mail addresses and be afraid to ask their questions. I would rather have people ask questions and get answers than have them not ask their questions because they are afraid their privacy won’t be honored.
15b. Rule 15 will be suspended for bloggers, guestbloggers, and the senders of press releases. It will also be suspended for others at their request/with their consent.
16. I do use names when responding in the comments boxes since visitors have already seen (or can scroll up to see) that the person identified himself publicly.
17. When responding to e-mails, particularly e-mails sent to me at accounts not listed on the blog site, I take extra pains not to quote material that could give away the correspondent’s identity. The purpose, again, is so that people won’t be scared to ask their questions or feel that I have violated their privacy by exposing them in public.
18. Currently I am trying to do at least two blog entries per day, one of which goes up bewteen 7 and 8 a.m. (Eastern Time), and one of which goes up between 3 and 4 p.m. (Eastern Time). Individual days may vary, usually by having more blog entries than this. Since I have a job and a life, I can’t commit to more than this at present. I try to do at least this as my way of honoring those who support this blog by visiting and reading it, though it may not be possible on all days.
19. I very much appreciate your efforts to promote this blog by linking it on your own blog/web page or by recommending it in other forums. That is one of the key ways you can honor my efforts in producing the material that I research and write for the blog. Another way is by commenting. I love reading your comments.
20. When Jimmy is answering a pastoral question (i.e., for a person asking about an actual that they or someone they know is involved in, as opposed to a hypothetical situation) that can be phrased in the form "Is it morally licit to do X?", do not contradict Jimmy in the comments box. People asking pastoral questions on moral subjects often feel very disoriented and confused if they get a debate rather than an answer on a sensitive question about a situation they, a friend, or a family member is involved in.
For the peace of mind of the person who asked the question, challenges to such answers need to be handled a different way. Instead of using the comments box to pose your challenge, e-mail Jimmy. If you win him over, he’ll make a correction and notify the person who asked the question. Comments violating this policy will be deleted. Widespread violation of this policy will result in the comments box being turned off for such questions.
Posts subject to Rule 20 will have a "20" at the bottom of the post.
21. Commenters in the combox are to use either their real name or a (non-offensive, non-spiteful) handle that distinguishes them from others when posting comments. They are not to post comments while leaving the "Name" field blank. It’s rude to expect people to interact with you and give them no way to refer to you.
22. When someone is under a warning not to ride his hobby horse, others on the blog are not to post comments tempting him to get back on the hobby horse (e.g., "I wonder what So-and-so will do to twist this thread onto his favorite topic"). That’s rude because it tempts another person to break a rule when he already may have trouble restraining himself on a particular topic.
23. The following terms are pejorative and their use as actual descriptors (as opposed, for example, to quoting someone else’s use of them for purposes of critique) constitutes rudeness: "Romanist," "Romish," "Roman" (when used to mean or as a substitute for "Catholic"), "Roman Church" (when used to mean the entire Catholic Church, as opposed to the Roman church sui iuris that exists within the Catholic Church), "Papist," Papistic," "Papistical," "Popish," and any cognate terms based on the terms "Roman" or "Pope."
The term to be used on this blog is Catholic, without scare quotes.
This is a Catholic blog, and Catholics are to be called Catholics on it.
24. It constitutes rudeness to make inflammatory assertions that one is not prepared to back up by anything more than hearsay (e.g., "Mother Theresa prayed to Hindu idols. I know because my friend said so.").
Inflammatory claims are those likely to inflame passions. An inflammatory claim can be true. But because of its emotion-stirring character, it requires concrete evidence (more than just hearsay) to back it up if the discourse is to be kept civil and not degenerate into an impassioned muddle.