Knights of Columbus St. Joseph Assembly #2246 Newsletter

Transcription

1 Knights of Columbus St. Joseph Assembly #2246 Newsletter August, 2016 Catholic Content for Catholic Minds Assembly Officers for Columbian Year Faithful Navigator SK Ruben Esguerra Faithful Friar Rev. Leonard Traverso Faithful Captain SK Leonardo Garcia-Araiza Faithful Pilot SK Charles Hudson Faithful Admiral SK Marciano Estioko Faithful Comptroller SK Ed Blake Faithful Purser SK Andy Dyson Faithful Scribe SK Khai T Phan khaitphan@yahoo.com Faithful Inner Sentinel SK Joseph Ruggiero josruggiero@sbcglobal.net Faithful Outer Sentinel SK Alfonso Montano alfonsomontano@live.com One Year Trustee SK Skipper Yenchik connieyenskip@comcast.net Two Year Trustee SK Julio Galvan sopitogal09@gmail.com Three Year Trustee SK Dave Marshall dmarshall1954@att.net Bulletin Editor SK Ed Blake ebacal@sbcglobal.net Nor Calif. Master SK J.C. Greco jcgreco@comcast.net Vice-Supreme Master Larry Campitiello lcampit1@san.rr.com FAITHFUL FRIAR S MESSAGE My Dear Sir Knights: MERCY IS GOD S LOVE Pope Francis made this year A Year of Mercy. By looking within ourselves we will find the heart of mercy. A favorite saying of Cardinal Merry Du Val to his youth group in Rome is one I hold dearly in my heart. It gives me comfort and meaning. The saying is: Always remember, Jesus loves you with a love the tenderness of which you will never be able to understand. This love is the root and essence of mercy, and it lives in our soul, our inner and true self. We must learn to reach inside to discover our true self. The self, God loves so tenderly. To discover and embrace this tender love is to find mercy. Then we can give it to others. The first and only step required to experience mercy is to acknowledge that we are in need of mercy. Jesus comes for us when we recognize that we are sinners. The merciful love of Jesus will embrace us with a love the tenderness of which we will never be able to understand.

2 God Love You, Rev. Leonard Traverso, Faithful Chaplain FAITHFUL NAVIGATOR S MESSAGE My Brothers, Sir Knights, It is with heavy heart that I inform you of the passing of our Brother Knight, Sir Nonilo Delos Angeles. He was an active member of St. John s Council 5796 and our Assembly before he moved to Tracy, California. Sir Nonilo was 86 on July 19, 2016 and one of his last request to his daughter was to be buried in the 4 th Degree uniform. Honors were given to him and family by the Color Corp at a Rosary at Lima Cemetery on July 26 and a Mass at St. John the Baptist Church on July 27. May eternal rest be granted to our Brother. Plan were made for the Past Faithful Navigator Dinner. It will be held at the Omega Restaurant on August 20, 2016 at 7pm. Try to attend so we can honor Sir Marciano Estioko for all the good work he has accomplished for our Assembly. Our first Assembly meeting for Columbian Year was held at St. John s Pavalkis Hall on July 18. It was a very productive meeting with emphasis placed on fund raising. In order to become involved in community events, we have to have a stable financial base. Please try to attend our next meeting on August 15 to contribute some of your ideas. On July 9, our Officers attend a joint Installation for three Assembles at St. Lawrence Parish. Included was the inspection of the Color Corp conducted by The Northern Master, J.C. Greco and staff. Certificates were given after the inspection to members that attended. A nice lunch was provided by the host council and their wives after the ceremony. Vivat Jesus! Ruben Esguerra, Faithful Navigator FAITHFUL COLOR CORPS COMMANDERS MESSAGE Dear Sir Knights: As mentioned in the Faithful Navigator s article, our Color Corps was a bit on the busy side for the month of July. What I want to do here is recognize those Sir Knights of our Color Corps who participated in the events listed below. July 9 th, St. Lawrence the Martyr Church, Santa Clara. We had the combined inspection and certification of the Color Corps. Present were Sir Knight Ruben Esguerra, our new Faithful Navigator, Marciano Estioko, now our Faithful Admiral, Charles Hudson, our new Faithful Pilot, David Marshall, Trustee, and Joseph Ruggiero, our new Inner Sentinel. We seemed to pass the inspection okay and went through the Manual of the Sword. One of the other Color Corps Commanders from Fra Crespi, Steve Renteria, who helps us out a lot put our contingent through the Manual of the Sword as well.

3 At the vigil for SK Nonilo Delos Angeles which was held on Tuesday, July 26th, Sir Knights Greg Dessel, Ruben Esguerra, Ervin Reyes, Joseph Ruggiero, and Dave Marshall were present. We established a gasket guard at 5:00 PM and ended it at 6:00 PM as that is when the vigil services were to begin. Fr. Eddie from St. John the Baptist Church presided. On the very next day, Wednesday, the funeral Mass was held and Sir Knights Ruben Esguerra, Y Hoang, Joseph Ruggiero, and Ervin Reyes were present. CCC Steve Renteria from Fra Crespi joined us to have a contingent of six (6) members present. We have some events coming up in August that I need to have all of you mark your calendars. Beginning with: Event 1: Date of Event: Sunday, August 14th Event: Installation of Officers at St. John Vianney Council 8993 Event Location: St. John Vianney Church, San Jose, CA Report time: 9:00 AM Event Start time: Mass at 10:00 AM, installation immediately thereafter Event 2: Date of Event: Saturday, August 20 th Event: Past Faithful Navigator s Dinner, this event is open to ALL members of the Fourth Degree Event Location: Omega Restaurant No host cocktails: 6:30 PM Dinner: 7:00 PM Dinner costs are $25.00 per person and can be paid at the door HOWEVER, I d appreciate those of you who will be attending to let me know so that we can advise the restaurant of the head count Event #3 Date of Event: August 27, 2016 Event: Mass of Thanksgiving and Dedication of St. Elizabeth s Church new Parish Ministry Center, Bishop McGrath, Bishop of the Diocese of San Jose presiding Event Location: St. Elizabeth s Church, Milpitas Report time: 4:00 PM Event Start time: Mass at 5:00 PM, Dedication immediately thereafter If the month of July did anything, it once again proved that an expression I use a LOT with the Color Corps, Keep your regalia in order and ready as you know not the day nor the hour when you will be called upon to participate in events. For those of you who need tuxedo and tuxedo accessories, we refer you to our primary vendor: Tuxedo Fashion Primary contact: Israel Wiggins 363 Meridian Avenue San Jose CA Ph: ~ Fax: cs@tuxedofashions.com Web Site: Respectively submitted,

4 Ed Blake, Color Corps Commander Ph: (408) COMPTROLLER S CORNER Dear Sir Knights: Our meetings take place on the 3 rd Monday of the month unless pre-empted by a Church/Religious activity 7:00 PM Assembly Officers 7:30 PM All Members PRAYER LIST FOR THE DECEASED Fr. Mark Catalana Fr. John Halloran Edward and Dolores Blake, Sr. Lady Thuy Phan Lady Beth Crews Lady Doris Kantack Lady Cherri Poehlman Lady Janie Herffernan Lady Jovita Villena Sir Knight Richard Mizgorski Sir Knight Gilbert Martinez Sir Knight Titus Cascaro Sir Knight Bill Quitalig Sir Knight Simon Lopez Sir Knight Hung Nguyen Sir Knight Joseph Talaugon Michael Valenzuela James P. Marshall, brother of SK Dave Marshall PRAYER LIST FOR THE SICK Fr. Leonard Traverso SK Manuel Esteban Patrick Esteban (son of SK Manuel Esteban) SK Ted Galvan SK David Meszaros SK Rito Castaneda SK Nonilo DeLos Angeles Please keep me, SK Ed Blake, or ebacal@sbcglobal.net, posted as to changes in the status of those for whom we pray who are sick. If a person has recovered from their ailment, then we need to have their name removed. Please remember and pray for the victims of war and abortion; in particular for those children who are literally thrown away, for our young men and women who are valiantly protecting our freedom around the world; for those who died on September 11, 2001 and for all deceased members of our Assembly. Excellent Online Catholic Information Available For You At:

5 American Life League Life Site News The Garden of Innocence LifeNews.Com LifeNews.com. Human Life International Diocese of San Jose Vocations Website His Thoughts Are Our Thoughts

6 We, the Color Corps, are honored to serve this most worthwhile organization The Garden of Innocence Providing Dignified Burials for Abandoned Children

7 Color Corps members, when the call is issued to participate in a local service that is being put on by The Garden of Innocence, respond positively to the call out and participate. Once you go through one of these your life will be changed forever. If you are looking for one of the reasons why you should join and participate in the Color Corps, this is it. Check out their website s link. Fighting Poverty by Eliminating Children by Church Militant ChurchMilitant.com February 16, 2016 By Michael Hichborn Lent is here, and as we begin the season of penance, Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is passing around paper rice bowls and asking for funds. But before you put even a single penny into the massive CRS coffers, consider the character of the organization itself. Sadly, even though CRS' name begins with the word "Catholic," it is all too willing to promote, work with and even participate in programs and organizations that believe the elimination of children is the best way to fight poverty.

8 For several years, Catholic Relief Services has been working hard to defend its funding of organizations that dispense condoms, perform surgical sterilizations, distribute abortifacient contraception, and actually commit abortions. CRS' excuses for this are both proportionalist in nature and speak more to a desire to acquire government funding than to defend and promote Catholic teaching. In 2012, LifeSiteNews revealed that Catholic Relief Services had given $5.3 million to an organization that actively distributed abortifacient contraception. Since then, CRS has been found to be giving tens of millions of dollars, annually, to organizations actively working to push contraception on poor people around the world. When initially faced with this information, CRS' response was to distance itself from the actual provision of these grants by claiming that they were merely acting as a "pass-through" to other organizations for federally designated grants. But this excuse quickly unraveled when LifeSiteNews asked CRS if it would ever provide such a pass-through grant to Planned Parenthood. CRS' official response was: We would never partner with Planned Parenthood. We've given this a lot of consideration, and there's a threshold in terms of what the focus of an agency is, and the preponderance of their work. CRS refrained from defining exactly what it means by "the focus of an agency" or the "preponderance of its work" and failed to establish exactly what the threshold actually is. But even though such a grant is merely a "pass-through" and therefore outside its responsibility, CRS would refuse to work with Planned Parenthood because of this undefined threshold which is to say that CRS will tolerate funding an organization that does some intrinsically evil work, so long as it's not the majority of what that organization does.

9 However, CRS' assertion of a threshold goes up in smoke as we consider the $2.7 million that CRS paid to Population Services International (PSI) because abortion and contraception make up the majority of PSI's work. To be clear, PSI has only one thing in mind, and that is the reduction of the world population by abortion and birth control. In an article PSI posted on its website, it stated very clearly that contraception and abortion are the "linchpin" to poverty reduction. After stating that "[m]eeting the unmet demand for family planning [is] integral to reducing the global fertility rate and the rapid growth of the world s population," PSI said: Improving reproductive and maternal health is the linchpin of poverty eradication. It is only through giving women greater choice and access to family planning and safer births that we will lift communities from desperate poverty. This is the type of safe abortion kit provided by PSI. The vast majority of PSI's work includes the expansion of abortion and contraception, and in fact, there is not a place that PSI works where contraception and/or abortion are not included in its activities. And while CRS claims that it would never work with Planned Parenthood because "there's a threshold in terms of what the focus of an agency is, and the preponderance of their work," CRS owes Catholics an explanation as to how its funding of PSI is dissimilar to the funding of Planned Parenthood. But it's all a smokescreen, anyway. If, as CRS consistently protests, the funding of abortion and contraception-providing organizations are merely "pass-through grants" for projects that cannot be used for immoral activities, then technically speaking, CRS should have no moral problem with funding Planned Parenthood for a morally neutral project. As it stands, CRS' undefined litmus test for the "focus of an agency" and "the preponderance of its work" is immaterial as long as CRS maintains the argument that its grants are merely "pass-through" grants for morally acceptable programs. But CRS' other excuses are equally absurd. In its defense of the $2.7 million grant it provided to PSI, CRS claims that the money was not fungible (meaning, it cannot be used for anything other than what it was

10 earmarked for), and that the money was specifically used for fighting malaria. CRS said: Some will say that all money is fungible, but that is not true. There are very tight controls over the money to ensure it only goes toward the malaria program in Guinea. PSI, on the other hand, explained on page 52 of this USAID document that its work on malaria was "deeply intertwined" with its "reproductive health" agenda. It said: Reproductive, maternal and child health and malaria are all deeply intertwined, affecting poor and vulnerable populations in rural areas together. Success (or failure) in one area, such as malaria, can free up resources to focus on other areas, or drag down progress. In other words, PSI is using its malaria-fighting programs in order to further its push for abortion and contraception. In fact, the document further explains how it is using the influence and work of organizations like CRS in order to gain access to people it wouldn't otherwise have.' It said, "Integrated programs also offer many opportunities to reach target audiences, especially rural women and caretakers of children under five, more cost-effectively than a vertical program operating in isolation could." Given that PSI so clearly stated its intention to integrate its contraception and abortion-pushing activities in its malaria-fighting programs, it's difficult to see how CRS can claim that the money isn't "fungible." Currently, the Lepanto Institute is examining CRS' latest list of grantees, and the story is simply more of the same. We'll be providing information on the latest list of scandalous grants as soon as the profiles have been written, but here's the thing: CRS' constant excuse-making for why it is funding organizations that push abortion and birth control is a constant retreat into a seemingly endless supply of other excuses. The above excuses were made to exonerate it from the grants it provided to organizations engaged in gravely evil activities. In order to claim to have clean hands, CRS insists that the money was't fungible, and really wasn't its money anyway. However, this excuse cannot be made for its dues-paying membership in COREgroup and MEDiCAM.

11 In 2012, CRS was discovered to be a dues-paying member and on the board of directors of COREgroup, an organization that uses a large percentage of its annual budget to push contraception. Later that year, it was discovered that CRS was a dues-paying member and on the steering committee of MEDiCAM, an organization that actively worked to expand access to and training of abortion providers in Cambodia. The dues paid by CRS for these memberships is indeed fungible, and doesn't come in the form of "pass-through" grants, but is provided by money collected from faithful Catholics sitting in the pews on Sundays. Knowing this, CRS didn't try to make the same excuses it did for the "pass-through" grants it provides to other organizations, but instead opted to claim that membership in these groups was somehow "a means of demonstrating our faithfulness to Church teaching" or that its work would "be hampered if we did not belong." This is a real departure from the previous excuses because it is an acknowledgement of the evil being done by these organizations and with CRS' money and CRS' good name. In other words, CRS is saying that the ends justify the means, and it's ok with that. The real problem here is that CRS sees no problem with funding organizations that view children as a serious obstacle to fighting poverty, and in fact actively work to remove children from the equation. One has to wonder if CRS would ever fund an organization that promoted genocide as the best means of eliminating racism, or an organization that even engaged in sex trafficking as a means of reducing sexual tensions. Even though it would only be a "pass-through" grant and the particular project wouldn't go to such efforts, one wonders if CRS would fund an organization that had a side project to train suicidebombers seeking to blow up Catholic churches. If the answer is "no" to any of these other examples, then either CRS views contraception and abortion as less evil than genocide, sex trafficking and terrorism, it doesn't really believe that contraception and abortion are evil at all, or it just values the money it gets from the government more than it values the souls of those corrupted by its grantees.

12 Whatever the case, when considering the Rice Bowl collection this Lent, why not send CRS a note instead telling them that you will not give them money until they stop funding the enemies of Christ? For your convenience, we've made one that you can print out and send to them yourself. Just click the image and print the page. Natural Law, Reality, and Ideological Fantasies March 02, 2016 Liberalism defines its own absolutes, and when normal human reactions and aspirations get in their way, the absolute takes precedence and the word normal has to be done away with as hateful. James Kalb

13 (Photo: us.fotolia.com Sergey Nivens) Last month I noted that Catholics, along with presenting the Faith, should try vigorously to make natural law more visible in public discussion. But how? The very idea of natural law provokes incomprehension today. It favors principles that aren't engineered or controlled, so they don't fit into a technological understanding of rationality. Even worse, it means discrimination, since it recognizes functional distinctions and arrangements like the natural family, with its acceptance of parental authority and sexual complementarity that seem at odds with the principle of equal freedom. To the extent it includes subsidiarity, it even promotes what is now considered exclusion and xenophobia, since it tells us we have greater obligations to the members of smaller and closer communities, to whom we are bound by a denser and more stable network of connections. How can such principles be taken seriously by our contemporaries, especially when loss of social support has made them less functional? Why wouldn't they want to get rid of them, so social policy can start with a clean slate and build something truly just and rational from scratch? To add to the difficulty, supporters of natural law aren't especially combative. Their views are basically a matter of common sense, of noticing patterns and connections that have generally been obvious to everybody, so they are not normally inclined toward ideological battles. On the whole, they just want life to go on sensibly, and if other people deny something as obvious as sex differences or the value of functional local communities and the boundaries that make them possible, they're not sure how to continue the discussion. In spite of such difficulties, however, reality has decisive advantages over ideological fantasy, even when the fantasy advances basic interests of bureaucratic and commercial elites by entrenching their control over social relations. But how can we make those advantages tell in the face of the principled incomprehension and even contempt of educated, respectable, and wellplaced people? Our best weapon in the struggle, which I hope to discuss in a future column, is to live better with the aid of our beliefs. We must fight on all fronts, though, so other means are also necessary. Man is a rational and social animal, so the ideas available in his environment have a powerful cumulative effect on how he lives. The entire absence of natural law conceptions from public life has led, for example, to the Supreme Court's insistence that everyone treat gay marriage as marriage, on the grounds that the only possible reason for doing otherwise is to injure people. We must change that state of affairs. One way to start is by pointing to the consensus gentium, or the universality of natural law conceptions. If there's something everyone always approved of until very recently, such as sex roles or a sense of greater obligation to people to whom we are more closely connected, how does it suddenly become a dreadful abuse that must be eradicated instantly? Has everyone always been crazy, or have we become crazy ourselves? The question shouldn't be ignored. Another way is to debunk the technocratic outlook, the attempt to rationalize human affairs on industrial lines. Living systems, such as men and societies, function in ways that are far too

14 complicated to analyze fully. They're adaptive, so their functioning varies according to circumstances, but not without limit. People can do without eating this food or that, but they must eat some food or other, and they do better when it's more nutritious and varied than a pure diet of beer and potato chips. Social relations and other intangible aspects of human life are still more subtle and complex than diet, and our ability to predict them or make them do what we want is quite limited. For confirmation look at history. There are always people who are good and bad, smart and stupid, and they are mostly good, bad, smart, and stupid in similar ways, but even so some periods display much greater crimes or achievements than others. Nobody is quite sure why that is or what to do about it. It's not simply random, but attempts to bring about a new Golden Age, or even minimize crime and vice, have routinely failed, often catastrophically. In a setting with so many imponderables the technocratic approach, however effective for manufacturing plastics, is useless. The best we can do humanly is rely on experience, good judgment, and general principles derived from long reflection on man's nature and good in other words, tradition, practical wisdom, and natural law. And if that approach sometimes includes stereotypical thinking thinking based on cooperating with the normal patterns of human life rather than engineering them out of existence it should be noted that the general reliability of stereotypes is one of the most solid findings of the social sciences. Another way to promote natural law is to draw attention to the alternative now being forced down our throats. If human nature and natural law go, no purpose or pattern of living can have a value essentially superior to any other. It's all a matter of what particular people want, how to get it, and how to divide it up. The result is that family becomes a private arrangement we each define for ourselves, and the human body and even human life become resources without intrinsic value, to be used for whatever purposes people want. All that remains of authority are institutions like global markets and transnational bureaucracies based on universal content-free principles like equality, preference satisfaction, and technology, and on simple and apparently reliable motives like money, envy, power-seeking, and fear of penalties. Can such a stripped-down public sphere be enough for a social being to live by? We are told it is, because it leaves each of us free to choose his own values and decide on his own way of life. If you like your traditional family or religion you can keep it. But that's absurd. We are rational beings who want what's real, and need to be able to say that who we are and how we live is in line with the way things are. For that reason a family, religion, or way of life needs a basis in the nature of things and in social and institutional reality to become something more than playacting. Otherwise I could make myself a Druid, Jedi knight, or Assyrian nobleman by choosing the role and acting on my choice. Liberalism cannot possibly mean free to be you and me. Any society as complex, hierarchical, and functionally integrated as our own is going to promote and often enforce a particular set of values and way of life. To say that way of life is based on freedom and equality is avoiding the issue. Freedom to do what? Equality in what direction? How can we be forced to be free and equal, and by whom? And are the people who do the forcing our equals? The freedom liberalism offers is necessarily limited by the requirements of the efficiency, stability, and coherence of the liberal system, and the equal freedom of other choices. We can choose only what fits those demands, and they become continually more stringent: current examples include the indoctrination of students against microaggressions, the cyber-lynchings of offenders against PC, the re-education programs known as sensitivity training, and severe

15 penalties for Christian florists and bakers who decline to collaborate with gay weddings. So it's evident that liberalism defines its own absolutes, and when normal human reactions and aspirations get in their way, the absolute takes precedence and the word normal has to be done away with as hateful. To understand what is going on, then, people need to forget the rhetoric of freedom and equality and look instead at the way of life they are being herded into and the goods that motivate that way of life. Once we look, the question becomes whether we should want to be primarily employees, consumers, clients, and hobbyists, continually supervised and re-educated by our betters to keep us out of each other s' way in accordance with ever more demanding standards since that's what current tendencies have to offer us or whether a different direction would mean a better life. And it is that question whether liberalism gives people the best life or even a tolerable life that we should insist on in public discussion. About the Author James Kalb James Kalb is a lawyer, independent scholar, and Catholic convert who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of The Tyranny of Liberalism(ISI Books, 2008) and, most recently, Against Inclusiveness: How the Diversity Regime is Flattening America and the West and What to Do About It (Angelico Press, 2013).

16 August 2016 St. Joseph Assembly #2246 Activities Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday 7:30 PM Council 8993 Bus. Mtg. 1 7:30 PM Council 9718 Bus. Mtg. St. Elizabeth Council 8747 Officers Meeting Manuel Esteban 5 6 Transfiguration of the Lord Primo McHugh 7:00 PM 8747 monthly Council Meeting 7:30 PM Council 4112 Bus. Mtg. 7:30 PM Council 5796 Bus. Mtg. Dick Jones and Miguel A. Arbaiza Color Corps, installation of St. John Vianney, 9:15 AM 7:00 PM-Officers, 7:30 PM Members Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Fr. Joe Okorie Y.N. Hoang Birrthday 21 Bruce Poehlman Eduardo Martinez Color Corps callout, Dedication of new Parish Ministry Center 4:00 PM Innocencio M. Pereira 28 Greg Dessel Guillermo Uribe Regino A. Favor Jul 2016 S M T W T F S Sep 2016 S M T W T F S

17 September 2016 St. Joseph Assembly #2246 Activities Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Aug 2016 S M T W T F S Oct 2016 S M T W T F S Eddie S. Edjan 7:30 PM Council 8993 Bus. Mtg. 7:30 PM Council 9718 Bus. Mtg. Ed Kantack 7:30 PM Council 4112 Bus. Mtg. 7:30 PM Council 5796 Bus. Mtg. David L. Meszaros Chuck Tappero and Arthur Basco Labor Day St. Elizabeth Council 8747 Officers Meeting Todd Robinson and Ramon F. Umali :00 PM 8747 monthly Council Meeting Exaltation of the Holy Cross Joseph W. Silva :00 PM-Officers, 7:30 PM Members 20 Joseph Ruggiero Marciano Estioko, Jr 29 30