The Crookedhart Emails – Re: Death by a Conviction in Mantillas

No, this is not the lucky result of a google image search. This is Crookedhart. More on it later!

Dear Rothoof,

I’m happy – a poor choice of word, I know – to hear that your man has found out about Catholic factions. Not to be too optimistic, though we did invent that particular worldview, but this may be all you need to drag him down into our warm, warm, inviting arms. I should rephrase, at any rate. From your email it does not seem that your man has ‘found out’ factions, for to find them is to avoid them, but has become rather caught up in the talk of ‘them’ vs. ‘us’, though he is still to naive to know who ‘they’ are
and who on earth is ‘us’.

How it delights Our Master to create divisions! Not differences mind you; differences are the strange and rather repulsive glue that make Our Enemy’s Church actually stick. He really is a mindless collector of trash, when it all comes down to it. Thus he sees no logical contradiction – which we Higher Minds Below can sniff immediately – between a Thomistic scholar, a Franciscan poet, a Latin-mass old man and a LifeTeen mass high-schooler, all existing in the same religion. He has made his Church catholic to the point of stupidity, not by making multiple truths, but by making one, as if throwing a clumsy rock into the cess-pool of humanity and letting the ripples spread appropriately, as if Catholicism is the sum of a million shocked reactions to one loud and brash statement. Never let your man know the difference between another ripple and an entirely new rock. This ignorance will surely ruin him, if he looks at a man praying in tongues and runs in fear of a devious lie, or – on the other hoof – looks at a man preaching that Vatican II was our invention – how I hate when the humans associate that ridiculous trash with us! –  and assumes it’s true.

Yes Rothoof, it’s divisions we must put our faith in, and a divided church is most clearly seen by it’s lack of forgiveness. It is of no use to us to have a Church in which a certain old ladies want liturgical dancing and everyone disagrees with them, nor is it any value to Our Master for a congregation to be equally split between at Latin liturgy and the Novus Ordo. The real pleasure only comes when no one can forgive the old ladies for their liberal views, nor pardon them for honest ignorance, only convict them of disrespect for the Mass. The pleasure comes when the humans get condescending, laden with bitterness over the battle for truth. When a sinless division over whether the apparitions at Medjugorje are real slowly rots into a delicious sniping competition over ‘loonies’, ‘heresy’ and the ever present implication of a lack of piety in members of the opposite view. The sorrow this causes Our Enemy is truly desirable. How wonderfully this factionalism, this warped and prideful hatred is expressed across the internet, where the humans lose their identity and become mere conveyors of view, to the delight of us all. (I am a frequent blog commenter, if you wouldn’t mind keeping that to yourself) Push your man into this ocean of mercilessness, if you can. There he will surely drown.

If however, you cannot link him to any particular faction, try relativism, the opposite reaction in which, because of the grief the fighting of the factions causes, your man will conclude that there is no certainty in his faith, that liturgical dance is just as good as Gregorian chant, and will end up with a watered-down version of the faith that I, personally, have very little fear of. If the faction leaders would realize that it is their own zealous hate that causes so many relativistic souls, would they attempt mercy? I doubt it. The belief in female altar servers or mandatory mantillas can quickly overcome the belief in God.

To recap then, let me tell you what you don’t want your man to become. A sniveling man who holds faith in the Holy Church above all else, who sees obedience to Her teachings as primary, who will hold those teachings with joy and power but will practice patience, forgiveness, mercy, empathy, and understanding with those he knows to be wrong, praying before discussions with them, exiting when the discussions become arguments, and maintaining confidence in Christ’s ridiculous promise, that He would bring all things to Himself. (As if.)

Anything smaller than him we might be able to swallow whole.

Yours,
Crookedhart