Creating an altar out of snow
An unpleasant byproduct of the blizzard yesterday was repeatedly hearing about a bus full of Catholic high school students stranded on the freeway in Pennsylvania on their way back from an anti-abortion rally in DC.
Returning from Washington D.C., where they took part Friday in the annual March for Life, they at least had food and water on board, said Tim McNeil, chancellor of the Archdiocese of Omaha. A nearby maintenance building gave them access to bathrooms.
And while there was nothing resembling a chapel anywhere near the cars, buses and trucks stopped westbound between the Bedford and Somerset exits, the group managed to hold Mass anyway by improvising, creating an altar out of snow, he said.
See what I mean?
“We were proud that they stood up for a cause they believed in,” Mr. McNeil said of students and adults who participated in the pro-life trip; he commended their reaction to the storm as well. “We’re proud of them now for their resilience.”
Yeah, proud that they stood up for the cause of taking away women’s right to stop being pregnant.
I would have thought God clearly attempting to smite them should have simultaneously given them a message about what he/she/it thinks of their actions; and also how damned ineffective God is.
It’s all so… cultish.
If their school is anything like the Catholic schools in my town, there may be a lot of back story behind standing up for a cause they believe in. The Catholic schools here require students to begin doing anti-American projects at an extremely early age. They start making posters in the earliest grades, being indoctrinated from birth to believe in the same things the parents believe in. They also learn very young to get an adrenaline rush from the group activities that make them part of the in-crowd. They also get to feel superior to adults as they give out information they do not understand and don’t realize is inaccurate. So they get to tell competent professional adult women that they, the children, are much smarter than the adults.
Well JHC!! We had ample warning about the storm – like 4-5 days notice. No-one has an excuse for being out on the expressways or anyplace else during it. People who weren’t completely reckless would have rescheduled their rally of anti-abortion petulance and not put people at risk of hypothermia and other complications from storm exposure. Of course anyone with a lick of sense would have just stayed home anyway. But to leave DC on the friday evening when the severity and extent of the storm was well defined and it was already well underway just smacks of sheer stupidity. What puzzles me is why they needed a mass altar – it wasn’t sunday.
Here in Ontario, Canada, about 1/3 of our public schools are designated Catholic. Though the academic part of the curriculum is the same as for the public schools, they have in addition a religious education component that is mandated by the RCC. And of course, anti-abortion is a key component of that (though I think they don’t have the sort of anti-government indoctrination that iknklast cites.
Every year in May there is a “March for Life” on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. This weekday event is well attended by Catholic highschool students (and also the creepy guys from the Knights of Columbus). Though I think they are no longer able to use public funding for the buses to transport them to the protest, public money of course pays teachers* for supervising the event.
*and by the way, the Catholic schools are permitted to discriminate on the basis of religion for the hiring of teachers.
Good lord. I had no idea of that.