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Questioning faith

Huw Raphael has posted on the question (and questioning) of faith in True Confessions.

There’s not a lot to say about these types of struggles. Everyone faces them in their own way, and with God’s grace (which you cannot see as being there at the time) you get through it. The best we can do is to pray for the person facing questions of faith. Huw, you have my prayers.

From my own struggles, and these are personal to me and may have no relevance to anyone else, I can offer the following:

The key question for me was whether I was able to deny Jesus. Going through my time of spiritual darkness (which lasted about 10 years) I was able to deny and reject a lot of things. However I was never able to deny or reject Jesus. I was tempted, and I thought about it, but I could never make that statement. I could not tell Him to go away.

Faith is a gift from God. Grace is offered to all and some take God up on the offer, some do not. Some get it right away, some never see it (or at least they won’t admit to it). Why one has faith, when another does not, is a mystery. It comes down to whether we can accept our place in relation to the One who is greater than us and the fulfillment of us.

Dark times are times of maturation. Huw comments on this. Do we replace faith in fantasies (Santa, the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny) with faith in a seemingly more adult fantasy? Do we do this while never really maturing? Is faith simply an immature place to be? The dark times are meant to take us from childish (not childlike – which is good), to adolescent, to adult faith. They are a stop in the journey where we are challenged to grow —“ and growth hurts sometimes.

Scrupulosity is a pitfall we all face. I personally think that God is with us on our journey. He is not distant or removed from it. He knows us better than we know ourselves. If we become overly scrupulous in our actions, learning, practices – about needing to definitively know something – we miss the point of the journey. God put us on the journey in the first place. The point is to be embraced by a love that is at once personal and communal. If you must know faith in an absolute sense you will never get it. Faith is a knowing acceptance.

Some ‘adults’ never get beyond childish faith (I believe in God because mommy would be angry if I didn’t and I don’t want God or mommy to punish me) or adolescent faith (I believe because I want to be accepted in the group/community). That is why we need good and holy priests and deacons —“ to reach these people and bring them along. I fully believe that God has higher expectations of some of us. We have been given talents we must use for His glory, and for the building up of the Kingdom. God pushes us into the dark to test us and to allow us to come out on the other side at the next stage of maturity with our talents at the ready. Even when He puts us out, He never lets us go. He will continuously call us back. God doesn’t throw us to the wolves naked and alone. He’s with us the whole time.

For me, faith is the abiding presence of God in my life, a presence I cannot get rid of. Faith pushes me in ways I do not wish to go, and makes me wait for what I desire, all the while drawing me ever closer to my desire, to my love.

Current Events, Perspective, ,

The priesthood, women, and a lost shepherd

Father Chandler Holder Jones at Philorthodox had a post on Roman Catholic Acceptance of ‘Womenpriests’.

Quite a few bloggers have been posting on this issue since the alleged ordination of a group of women outside Pittsburgh.

A caveat, Father Jones is a Continuing Anglican priest in the Episcopal Church so his post may be is colored by his watching experience of the headlong slide into wherever it is the Episcopalians are going.

What struck me about the post was not the issue itself, but the way the conclusion was drawn. The conclusion over-reached the facts as they were stated. This is one of the primary problems in the blogosphere. It is a problem I have – so this hits home with me.

On to dissecting the content:

The first issue that needs to be addressed on this whole woman as priests issue is the whole concept of the priesthood.

All sacraments require proper matter and form as well as a proper minister. It’s all very well and good that these women thought they were being made priests, but you can’t make a priest out of a material that cannot become a priest (i.e., a woman). It’s like trying to make the Precious Blood out of water. It’s kind of wet like wine, it goes in a chalice like wine, you can consume it like wine, but it is not wine… It cannot be made into the Precious Blood. The same for women, they are human beings like men, they can wear clerical garb like men, but they are not men… They cannot be made into priests. If there were a valid Bishop presiding at the ordination (I doubt it), in seventy-five layers of the most traditional vestments, the ordination would still be invalid. No Holy Spirit, nothing happening.

Calling oneself a priest, and actually being a priest, outside of the Faith and Tradition of the Church, are two different things.

OK, so these women aren’t priests, and any properly catechized Catholic would know that anyway (and as such making a big deal out of it is basically a lot of smoke and no fire – see the Young Fogey’s comment on the issue and on the posting).

The post goes on to infer that a Roman Catholic parish in the Diocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis is going to sponsor a ‘mass’ by one of these women. Thus the Roman Catholic stance against this sort of nonsense is crumbling and the R.C. Church is on the same greasy slide as the Episcopalians.

Fr. Jones states (emphasis mine):

Saint Joan of Arc parish of Minneapolis Minnesota, a parish ostensibly in full communion with Pope Benedict XVI, is sponsoring a ‘Eucharistic Celebration’ offered by Ms. Regina Nicolosi

and he concludes by saying:

Is this the beginning of a new revolution in the American branch of the Roman Communion? The echoes of the simulacrum which transpired in the Church of the Advocate Philadelphia on 29 July 1974, and subsequent events in the Episcopal Church leading up to 1976 and 2003, are ominously unmistakable.

Now, checking out the website for St. Joan of Arc (which the diocese does not link to) reveals the parish to be on the far outer edges of Catholicism. They wallow in some kind of sci-fi weird flower power religion that vaguely resembles Catholicism. However, nowhere in last week’s bulletin did it state that the ‘mass’ would be in their church or that they were sponsoring the event. They were advertising an event at which one of their parishioners was to speak (maybe they thought it was going to be a bratwurst dinner – yeah, right).

In this week’s bulletin Fr. Jim DeBruycker, the Pastor (do a Google on this fellow – you will be incredulous), quasi-apologizes for the bulletin insert. From what I’ve read, in two weeks of checking out their stuff, the good Father has a real problem with being patriarchal – perhaps he’s a father that doesn’t want to be a father?

The funniest line in last week’s bulletin (beside the phony mass thing – and I don’t mean ha-ha funny) was this from the good Father:

In another e-mail someone suggested I was returning St. Joan’s to archaic times. I’m pretty sure that is the controversy over the ‘lord I am not worthy’ phrase before communion. I know to some people that sounds like a surrender to power based on a fear of abusive dominance. I admit if it was me saying this to the church governance I would be reticent to say it, but to me it is admitting am not perfect before God. I can be the abuser, the breaker of the community. I need the help of God. It heartens me to know the pope, the cardinals and the archbishops have to say it too.

It’s almost good catechesis for his lost flock, if only he would have focused on sin and being a “breaker of community.” Instead, he took a teaching moment and used it to denigrate others. Shame shame, patriarchal and judgmental in sheep’s clothing.

Father, be a good patriarch, a good shepherd, and take a positive stand for something. Being against everything, except what you like, makes the Church of Christ into the church of me, myself, and I…

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Christian Witness, Current Events, Perspective

To whom are we bound —“ Part 3

Today’s Albany Times Union features an article on the Albany Roman Catholic Diocese’s attempts to overturn a New York State law requiring that they provide contraceptive coverage as part of their health care package. They object of course based on the R.C. Church’s stand against artificial birth control.

Some pertinent excerpts from Voices of faith argue against Wellness Act follow with my perspective at the end.

Albany Diocese charity goes to court to fight state’s birth control coverage mandate

ALBANY — Lawyers for the charitable arm of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany are set to argue next week before the state’s highest court that a mandate to provide birth control coverage in its health plan violates freedom of religion, speech and association.

Catholic Charities and two Baptist churches are challenging the constitutionality of the Women’s Health and Wellness Act of 2003, which requires employers that provide group insurance coverage for prescription drugs to include coverage for prescription contraceptives.

…

Legal experts say the range of state and federal constitutional issues at hand — particularly the freedom to express religion — makes the case fascinating to watch. The Court of Appeals will be looking at which, if any, protections have been violated. While Catholic Charities argues the religious exemption is drawn too narrowly to be constitutional, court watchers point to the length of time it took the Legislature to approve and enact the WHWA, intimating it was thoughtfully and carefully created.

…

In court papers, lawyer for Catholic Charities stated: “The WHWA coerces church entities to subsidize private conduct that the churches teach is morally wrong. Government in this country has historically respected the right of organized religions to ‘practice what they preach’ and to refrain from financing private conduct that they condemn.”

By departing from that historical practice, the WHWA has placed New York in opposition to the most fundamental values that underlie both state and federal constitutional guarantees of freedom of religion, freedom of speech and freedom of association, documents said.

…

Now here’s the key fact:

More than $28 million of Catholic Charities’ $32 million annual operating budget comes from the government.

Jared Leland, a spokesman and lawyer with the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, supports Catholic Charities’ position.

The group’s credo is “that freedom of religion is a basic human right that no government may lawfully deny; it is not a gift of the state, but instead is rooted in the inherent dignity of the human person.”

With contraception and abortion, Leland said, “There is no ambiguity there. Contraceptive care runs afoul of the very tenets of that faith.”

An organization shouldn’t be forced to choose between its identity and its mission, he said: “There should be an exception to the rule.”

The WHWA does contain an exemption clause for religious employers, like seminaries, but state Assistant Solicitor General Shaifali Puri is expected to argue on Wednesday it doesn’t apply to Catholic Charities.

Two courts, including the local appellate panel, ruled that Catholic Charities does not qualify as a religious employer since it provides health care, food and clothing, domestic violence shelters, drug counseling and other services to people in need, regardless of their religious beliefs.

…

The New York State Catholic Conference has said that the legislation is really intended to mandate coverage for abortion, in an attempt to destroy the church’s network of social services, hospitals, nursing homes and schools.

Albany Attorney Michael Costello will argue the Catholic organization’s case that religious beliefs prevent Catholic Charities from paying for something they believe is sinful.

More than 1,100 Catholic Charities staff members in the 14-county diocese — along with 2,100 volunteers — work at more than 100 sites, serving nearly 100,000 families and individuals annually from all faiths and walks of life.

Statewide, the Roman Catholic Church operates more than 700 schools serving some 300,000 students, 36 hospitals with more than 380,000 inpatient admissions, 57 nursing homes with 11,615 beds, and hundreds of social services agencies that serve more than 1.3 million people every year.

It is the largest nonpublic provider of education, health care and human services in the state. Services are not limited to Catholics.

Nearly 88% of their money comes from the government. Now they do many positive things with that money as the article explains. But, if an organization receives about 88% of its funding from the government, and provides services to all (without proselytizing them), can it still call itself a religious organization?

It appears that the lower courts don’t think so. So the question remains, Who do you serve and to whom are you bound?

The outcome will be interesting. Will the Church eek by or will they have to start acting like the Church in all their endeavors.

Current Events, Perspective, Political

About moral or intellectual confusion

Last night Keith Olbermann of MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann delivered a masterful retort to Donald Rumsfeld’s diatribe against the vast majority of Americans who do not agree with this administration’s pursuit of war.

A transcript of his remarks is available at Crooks and Liars. See Keith Olbermann Delivers One Hell of a Commentary on Rumsfeld where in part he says:

Sadly, we have no Winston Churchills evident among us this evening. We have only Donald Rumsfelds, demonizing disagreement, the way Neville Chamberlain demonized Winston Churchill.

History – and 163 million pounds of Luftwaffe bombs over England – had taught us that all Mr. Chamberlain had was his certainty – and his own confusion. A confusion that suggested that the office can not only make the man, but that the office can also make the facts.

You can also view his comments in a better format at TMP Café in Olberman Our New Murrow.

What shocked me about Rumsfeld’s speech was the following (from a transcript of his remarks at Stars and Stripes):

And in every army, there are occasional bad actors, the ones who dominate the headlines today, who don’t live up to the standards of the oath and of our country. But you also know that they are a very, very small percentage of the literally hundreds of thousands of honorable men and women in all theaters in this struggle who are serving our country with humanity, with decency, with professionalism, and with courage in the face of continuous provocation.

And that is important in any long struggle or long war, where any kind of moral or intellectual confusion about who and what is right or wrong, can weaken the ability of free societies to persevere.

So Mr. Rumsfeld is stating that former military leaders and servicepeople who have come out against this war are traitors to their oath and to their country? Wow!!! I wonder what he thinks of his boss when he uses the Constitution as toilet paper.

Mr. Rumsfeld then he goes on to call the rest of us morally and intellectually confused? Cool, because if we were we wouldn’t see, nor would we care about, the loss of our freedoms and the high cost of our misadventures.

WSJV in Bush Sounds Off Against War Critics reports that President Bush’s speech in front of the American Legion’s national convention included the following:

The president said years of pursuing stability in the Middle East was proven a mirage after Sept. 11, 2001. Now, only a nation that commits itself to freedom can help itself and the rest of the world to defeat terror.

I take it that means that those who have pursued peace are idiots and that peace can only be obtained at the end of a gun?

Who knew? Now that I am aware of my moral and intellectual ineptitude, as well as the fact that I am an idiot, I can go out and buy some guns and give peace a chance.

For my part I will pray that our dear Lord grant the light of wisdom to our leaders. I will pray that their moral and intellectual darkness be eliminated, and that they see the truth. I will pray that they cease calling evil good and good evil and that they see that war is not peace.

God have mercy on us all.

Perspective, Political

Union President —“ milking a dry cow

Danny Donohue, President of the Civil Services Employees Association in New York State (a union that represents clerical workers) wrote an editorial in today’s Albany Times Union entitled: CSEA’s pension costs are not out of control.

In part he states:

First of all, the average CSEA pension is $11,000. That’s hardly excessive, especially when you consider that worker pay is at its lowest level in nearly 40 years and corporate profits are at the highest level ever recorded. Meanwhile, corporate CEOs are making 450 times what their average employee makes, and tax cuts for the wealthy are being handed out like candy to trick-or-treaters.

The typical Union line… Everyone else is so rich, we’re so poor. I guess Mr. Donohue fails to recognize the fact that he represents clerical employees. He also fails to realize that state pension costs are not CSEA’s pension costs (as his editorial’s title would suggest).

I think Mr. Donohue was absent from school on the day they talked about working hard and focusing on achievement. He might have missed the lesson on basic capitalism as well. He probably never missed a lesson on the philosophies of Marx, Lenin, and Mao.

Just because someone makes more money or just because companies are profitable, and that profit inures to those who put up the money to make it so, is not an evil in and of itself. Certainly, everyone deserves a fair wage and appropriate benefits (heath care for instance). What they do not deserve is to be treated as if they are someone else. A clerical employee by rights makes far less than a professional employee. Both make less than upper management or executives. Makes you want to go out and get an education, work hard, and get ahead doesn’t it?

He goes on:

Second, pension costs are not out of control. The governor himself says the impact of cost-of-living adjustments and other recent pension improvements has been negligible. What makes today’s pension costs seem overwhelming to many localities is that, for more than a decade, they had to pay nothing at all due to the success of the financial markets. In fact, employers are still paying less today, in terms of percentage of payroll, than they were years ago.

Yet the taxpayer is bearing the cost. That’s you and me (the government employer is us). It’s not the government employer versus the working man. It’s the taxpayer having to bear the costs of union dictated demands, agreed to by the politicians that are in their pockets.

This point also begs the question, What if I as a taxpayer do not want to fund pensions? What if I, and enough of my fellow citizens, would prefer that we keep our money for our own benefit? What if we preferred to invest in education, roads and bridges, or any of a thousand other priorities?

Look at the bills passed by the New York State Legislature in the past session. Thankfully the governor vetoed almost seventy (70) bills, the majority of which were pro-union giveaways to the tune of $1 billion in additional union benefits (reference here).

That’s part of the perpetual cost of unionized government employees. Sure, hiring a contractor may be more costly on a hour by hour basis, but once the contract is done the cash flowing out stops. With government employees the costs go on and on, and in some cases go on even after they die.

Now here’s the oxymoron:

Finally, suggesting that taxpayers will benefit by reducing public employee benefits to the levels of their nonunion counterparts in private industry ignores years of good faith bargaining between the state and its unions to negotiate contracts that are fair for everyone, including the taxpayers.

CSEA is not going to apologize for helping our members get a fair deal. Our wages and benefits are the result of years of responsible, good faith bargaining, and we’ve earned a reputation as a union that gets results while being fair and responsible. After all, our members are taxpayers, too.

If they did so well, why did he state in his opening that the —average CSEA pension is $11,000. That’s hardly excessive, especially when you consider that worker pay is at its lowest level in nearly 40 years…— Did they, or did they not do well by their members?

CSEA should be focusing on the big picture in New York State. There will be no jobs, no raises, no pensions, and no healthcare if employers, the young, and the general population (i.e., taxpayers) continue to leave in droves for low tax, small bureaucracy, and high employment states. The unions (along with all the other special interests) need to get on board and give up quite a bit to get to the point where New York is a viable, growing, and attractive state.

CSEA would do even better by focusing its energies on honesty – telling their members that they need to prepare for a future. CSEA should develop retraining and education efforts to move their members to a future without clerical employees. Clerical employees, whom they vehemently represent, are a throw back to the 1950’s. The days of rooms full of clerks processing paper are long gone. That is why state bureaucracy is so screwed up. Professionals are needed, paraprofessionals are needed. No one needs a file or steno clerk any longer (and if they think they do they should wake up and re-engineer).

I’ve said it before —“ compulsory union membership is un-American, is not democratic, it is extortion, and is a form of involuntary association. New York needs Right to Work legislation now. New York politicians need to develop the courage to reject the small cadre of union members and their leaders, focusing instead on the good of all New Yorkers. Otherwise our dry cow will become a dead cow.

Current Events, Media, Perspective

Miscellaneous Stuff

There are a few things I’ve been meaning to comment on:

The Lord Madonna

Madonna has been using Christian symbolism from her beginning as a peppy, sex charged, pop star. Her name, the use of statues, anything Christian, etc., etc. is almost a constant component of her act.

Fr Joseph Huneycutt points this out in a post from about a week or so ago entitled: MADONNA: Sounds of Sanity.

I imagine that there are many explanations for this: she’s confused, she’s mentally unstable, she likes cheap PR tricks, it’s the only way she can keep her career alive (note that she rarely tours in the U.S. and can’t get a U.S. TV gig anymore), or she thinks she is a god…

Whatever the reason, I don’t bear her any ill will. She is simply a person who is so self-involved that she fails to see her own human value. She cannot see herself as God sees her.

Let us pray that she be given the grace to move from self-involvement to reality.

Islamo-Fascism

President Bush made a comment the other day in regard to terrorist plot to blow-up airliners in midair. He referred to the participants in this plot as Islamo-Fascists.

Now, I expect my president to be angered over plots to kill my fellow citizens (and any human being for that matter – yeah, I know). I expect him to express his outrage. I also expect him to use considered words – words that make some sense.

Calling the plotters Islamo-Fascists is one of the dumbest statements I’ve ever heard. Have you ever just starred at the TV incredulous over what you’ve just seen and heard? Well that was me.

Mr. President, if your grasp on political and historical movements is so weak as to mix metaphors on live television in the heat of anger (and I don’t believe for a minute that his indignation was anything other than contrived —“ he knew about this stuff for days or at least hours in advance of his words), then use a speech writer.

Fr. Jim Tucker has commented on this in his post: Commies, Fascists, and Other People We Don’t Like. It looks like he got a lot of flack and he followed up with: Sobran on Islamo-fascism.

In Mr. Sobran’s article he states:

In other words, Islamofascism is nothing but an empty propaganda term. And wartime propaganda is usually, if not always, crafted to produce hysteria, the destruction of any sense of proportion. Such words, undefined and unmeasured, are used by people more interested in making us lose our heads than in keeping their own.

Exactly.

Perspective

Home Depot – get it, got it, done

We received a call from a trucking firm on Monday advising us that our patio furniture would be delivered Wednesday. Yesterday afternoon at about 4:30 the driver called to advise me that our stuff was at the house. It was indeed there when I returned from Holy Mass last night.

I took a look at the shipping manifest. The shipment was prepared on July 31st, the Monday after I placed my order. It’s been traveling the country for sixteen (16) days.

All-in-all this whole process would have gone better if Home Depot’s staff were better trained, if their customer service knew how to communicate with a concerned customer, and if they had been honest in the first place, stating that delivery can take up to three weeks…

I appreciate the fact that customer service is difficult. I appreciate the fact that service itself is difficult (hey – I’m a deacon). Getting answers like ‘I’m stressed, busy, I haven’t been trained, I don’t know, etc.’ is not helpful.

What happened to the classic notion of getting satisfaction from having helped someone and knowing that you have done your job well? That would pre-suppose a connection with classic values born out of Christianity. It would mean that people understood that there is more to life than the paycheck and the bottom line.

Media, Perspective

What adherence means

The American Conservative has a piece on What is Left? What is Right? Does it Matter? In it Patrick J. Buchanan states the following (excerpted):

What Ms. Emery’s piece [in The Weekly Standard] reveals is that conservatism today is as shot through with corruption as the Church of Pope Alexander VI, two of whose brood of bastards were Lucretia and Cesare Borgia.

We are in need of a Council of Trent to redefine who we are.

Still —conservative— remains a respected term and the right term for those who devote their lives to family, faith, community, and country…

A few years ago, when called a —neo-isolationist,— I wrote,

Most of us … are not really ‘neo-‘ anything. We are old church and old right, anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist, disbelievers in Pax Americana. We love the old republic, and when we hear phrases like ‘New World Order,’ we release the safety catches on our revolvers.

As in New Deal days, our Cultural Revolution, and the high times of the Great Society, a conservative today must be a counterrevolutionary. While Bush’s judges and Supreme Court justices have been top of the line and his tax cuts conservative, his democracy crusade and his open-borders immigration policy, his Big Government conservatism and free-trade-í¼ber-alles globalism owe more to FDR and LBJ than Goldwater or Reagan.

But the returns are now coming in from the Bush experiment with a Rockefeller Republicanism that he calls —compassionate conservatism.—

The rising casualties and soaring costs of an unnecessary war in Iraq, an overstretched military, immense trade deficits that must bring down the dollar, the loss of sovereignty and economic independence, a bloated federal bureaucracy to which Bushites have added as much as LBJ, an unresisted invasion over our southern border, the selling of the party of Reagan to the money power—”all are the marks of an empire at the end of its tether.

What can save this Republic is the restoration of authentic values and policies of conservatism, imposed at some cost and hardship upon a people who may have lost the capacity and belief in the need to sacrifice to save what their fathers gave them.

…

Conservatives have seen their movement hijacked by ideological vagabonds and hustlers who are redefining it to mean what it never meant. We need to find who sold the pass. Before we can take back our country, we must take back our movement.

Yes, those who are corrupt, for whom the ends justify the means, will co-opt any movement to achieve their ends. That is why freedom of speech, debate, and adherence to values and principals is much more important than shifting in whatever wind blows.

Tip o’ the biretta to the Young Fogey.

Current Events, Perspective

Shuffle back to Buffalo

Donn Esmonde wrote an op-ed in the Buffalo News entitled: Bringing them all back home. There is an effort underway in Buffalo, New York to reclaim those whom the city has lost to greener pastures.

An excerpt follows:

She is swimming against a tidal wave. She is walking into a hurricane. She believes she will beat the odds and the elements.

Contrary to evidence, including a decades-long exodus, Marti Gorman thinks Buffalo’s renaissance has begun.

…

She is putting her pro-Buffalo conviction into motion. She and a dozen other True Believers are reviving, after 99 years, Buffalo Old Home Week. They are contacting folks who left – and they are legion – and inviting them to visit Aug. 24-27. If everybody comes, North Carolina will lose half of its population.

Barely 5 feet tall, fluent in three languages, Gorman is fueled by confidence, intelligence and a waterfall of energy. The talkative workaholic left Buffalo with no regrets 32 years ago. She recently returned and saw the city for what it is: An architectural museum close to water, with low-cost quality housing, minuscule commute times, 17 colleges and universities, big-city culture, great quality of life and a sense of community.

All of which, she says, overshadows the high-tax tonnage and consequent business flight that make this livable city so leave-able.

“Maybe I’m naive,” she said. “But I think the renaissance already has started.”

Planned are four days of tours, job fairs, parties and open houses, wrapped around the Elmwood arts festival.

The hope is that seeing will translate into staying, that expats will become repats – and buy a house or bring a business with them. Folks long gone bring fresh eyes and energy – they haven’t been beaten down by decades of petty politics and tail-first leadership.

…

The hurricane in Gorman’s face is downstate’s control of Albany. The consequence is high health care and utility costs and generous public-worker wages and benefits. It leaves job-challenged upstaters carrying the heaviest tax load in the nation.

We lost nearly a third of our 25-to-34-year-olds in the past 14 years. That is the tsunami that Gorman and friends face. They think they are up to it.

“There is a lot to build on here,” she said, “that offsets the absurd taxes and political smallness.”

The odds are long. But the cause is just, and the spirit is strong. Let the crusade begin.

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