Reverend Sir,
I desire to express to you my admiration of the heroic and distinguished service you are rendering to the most unhappy of my subjects; and to pay, in some measure, a public tribute to the devotion, patience and unbounded charity with which you give yourself to the corporal and spiritual relief of these unfortunate people, who are necessarily deprived of the affectionate care of their relations and friends.
I know well that your labors and sacrifices have no other motive than the desire to do good to those in distress; and that you look for no reward but from the great God, our sovereign Lord, who directs and inspires you. Nevertheless to satisfy my own earnest desire, I beg of you, Reverend Father, to accept the decoration of the Royal Order of Kalakaua, as a testimony of my sincere admiration for the efforts you are making to relieve the distress and lessen the sufferings of these afflicted people, as I myself had an occasion to see on my recent visit to the settlement.
I am,
Your friend,
Lili`uokalani, Regent (1881)
A Hawaiian Catholic catechist said that St. Damien of Molokai is a “hero” to the Hawaiian people, after a prominent congresswoman claimed the statue honoring him in the U.S. Capitol is part of colonialism and “patriarchy and white supremacist culture.”
St. Damien “gave his life” serving the isolated leper colony at Kalaupapa peninsula on the Hawaiian island of Molokai, said Dallas Carter, a native Hawaiian and a catechist for the diocese of Honolulu, in an interview with CNA.
“Any Hawaiian here who is aware of their history–which most Hawaiians are–would absolutely, Catholic or not, defend the legacy of Damien as a man who was embraced by the people, and who is a hero to us because of his love for the Hawaiian people,” Carter said.
“We did not judge him by the color of his skin. We judged him by the love that he had for our people,” Carter told CNA.
In an Instagram story on Thursday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) asked why there were not more statues honoring women historical figures, at the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall Collection. The collection includes statues honoring historical figures from all 50 states, which are chosen by the states and sent by them to Congress for display.
“Even when we select figures to tell the stories of colonized places, it is the colonizers and settlers whose stories are told – and virtually no one else,” Ocasio-Cortez posted, with a picture of Fr. Damien’s U.S. Capitol statue in the background.
In 1969, Hawaii chose to honor St. Damien alongside Kamehameha I in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol.
Go here to read the rest. Dale Price at Dyspeptic Mutterings gives a memorable response:
Three thoughts.
Go here to comment. Identity politics manages the feat of being both anti-Christian and anti-American.
Amen Donald, especially #3: “The coming disintegration of huge segments of “higher education” will, on balance, be a good thing.”
Mr. Price’s first point is from a scene from the movie Billy Madison, and is a speech any good conservative should have memorized and be able to recite at a moment’s notice. Personally, I like a shorthand version from Justified. When hearing an inane argument, the proper response is to say, “I have a goldfish.” When the AOC before you responds with “What does that have to do with what I just said?”, then you reply, “Well, I though we were talking about sh__ that just don’t matter.”
Charity! After all, we are Christians. I wish you hadn’t smeared half-wits as you did by equating AOC with them.
Being ignorant and stupid isn’t a sin. Being dishonest and hateful is.
Outside the web, my rule is never to argue with a person for whose opinions I have no respect. Or something.
Occasional-Cortex manifests in a purified form what you see among the young and among people with the most extensive formal schooling (more intensely so among women than among men). It’s failure to appreciate the efforts and accomplishments of others that are a foundation of the comfortable life you lead, and a failure to understand the efforts of others in making your life as agreeable as it is. The mentality is the entire basis of the psychological world of the Democratic Party and of the occupational segments and subcultures for which the Democratic Party is the electoral vehicle. In her case, even losing her father to cancer when she was 19 was not instructive to her in this regard. Her conduct in Congress has been that of a woman bursting with enthusiasms but who really knows nothing about anything. (Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar each know one thing: they want to stomp on their enemies). She’s currently being handsomely compensated for wasting her youth. It’s so too bad.