Thursday, September 25, 2014

Katharine Jefferts Schori & Hildegard


Perhaps you remember that Katharine Jefferts Schori, Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (TEC), has taken to quoting Hildegard von Bingen, 12th Century Sibyl of the Rhine. For Schori, Hildegard is all about viriditas (greenness), like a latter-day Gaia worshiping U.N. apparatchik.

Here's Schori, apparently oblivious to irony, referring to her new patron rebuking Barbarossa for fueling Church schism:

Listen to Hildegard the prophet: “He Who Is says, ‘I destroy contumacy, and by myself I crush the resistance of those who despise me. Woe, woe to the malice of wicked men who defy me! Hear this, king, if you wish to live; otherwise my sword shall smite you.”

And here's Hildegard again, preaching on the Cathar heretics:

"Diabolical seduction [by the Cathars] gives rise to criminals and seducers, the hate and the crime of the devil, brigands and thieves; but it is in homosexuality that the sin is most impure, the root of all vices. When these sins have accumulated among the nations  the constitution of God’s law will be torn, and the Church, like a widow, will be stricken."


Hildegard

Why didn't Jefferts Schori reference that, when preaching to her crew of greenist mountebanks in Taiwan?

We'll return to Hildegard and her apocalyptic visions later. In the meanwhile, KJS, be very careful when invoking the Teutonic Seer.

Mind how you go,

LSP


8 comments:

  1. "but it is in homosexuality that the sin is most impure, the root of all vices."

    So does this mean that she has renounced both her lesbian lovers and Satan? What a change.

    I wonder if she was oxygen deprived as an infant (prolapsed birth cord or something) or smitten by fetal alcohol syndrome and if that accounts for her behavior?

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  2. I get the feeling that her reading of her favorite new Saint is, er, selective.

    Dropped on head as an infant?

    Come back, 1st Crusade, all is forgiven.

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  3. Having a woman, even a high priest of Baal like Katharine Jefferts Schori, lead a crusade to ISIL to explain the error of their ways to them, makes so much sense to me.

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  4. "What a pretty nun!," I thought. So I looked her up, too.

    It is really quite surprising that Schori would pick her to quote!
    Hildegard largely considered her mission to be REFORM OF WAYWARD CLERGY, justifying "her prophetic role by claiming that in such disjointed times, when the world was hastening toward its end, the expected leaders and teachers had failed in their task."

    And the end of the bio and summary of her works which I read on none other than www.hildegard.org even stresses "the importance of viewing Hildegard's work in its historical context. Failure to do so has contributed to misreadings of Hildegard as an exponent of Creation Spirituality, environmentalism, or feminism. Hildegard's views are best understood in the context of her own times and of her entire oeuvre, rather than being selectively quarried to support currently popular positions."

    It seems Schori wasn't even CREATIVE in her attempts misusing this woman for her own purposes.
    Which is uneducated, showy, and lame.
    Very lame.

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  5. She's an interesting Saint and Doctor of the Church to boot.

    I get the impression that Schori may not have bothered to read much of what she had to say...

    But maybe that won't matter when she and her House of Bishops are in Raqqa, waging a "green peace crusade" against ISIL.

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  6. Does St. Dr. Jefferts Schori write her own speeches? I'm asking because one of several catamites may have written it for the old harridan and she simply took it at face value since she clearly doesn't have the God-given power of discernment.

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  7. That's a good question and I've always thought she did -- but now I'm not so sure.

    I'll look into it.

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