Franciscan University Hands Over Control to Church Militant

January 14, 2019 By Mark Shea

So a year or so ago, Dr. Stephen Lewis, who was, until this past Friday, the Chair of the English Department at Franciscan University, taught a class to students in which one of the texts was written by an atheist who is deeply hostile to the Faith. It included passages deeply insulting to the Blessed Virgin. Lewis is a devout and faithful son of the Church, a good teacher, and a good man. As Emily Stimpson Chapman writes:

I know the professor in question. He was a neighbor of mine in Steubenville. He is a kind, generous, faithful Catholic man, who also is an excellent professor and an expert in modern American literature. He came to us from the University of Chicago, and truly knows his stuff. He also knows what students are reading in graduate programs across the United States, and he knows what upper-level English majors who may be bound for grad school need to be prepared to deal with. His DESIRE to equip students to respond to virulently anti-Catholic sentiments in literature and the culture is NOT a bad thing. It is quite necessary. At the very least, his intentions are completely defensible.

Lewis understands that the purpose of a Catholic education is not indoctrination into a bubble of like-minded and safe cultists who never engage the culture, never encounter its attacks on the faith, and never think about how to bear witness to the Faith in a world that opposes it. Rather, he grasps that victims of such indoctrination typically wither or remain weak, stupid, and shallow instead of maturing into apostles of the Faith. So he chose to do what a good man, a good Catholic, and a good scholar does: let his students grapple with a novel that challenged their faith.

Cue Church Militant, the online cult run by an ignorant demagogue named Michael Voris. As I pointed out years ago, the trick that Voris and his cult of reactionary know nothings always play on themselves is to lie that they are attacking “progressive dissent” inside the Church when in fact what they *always* do is attack orthodox Catholics (like Stephen Lewis, Bishop Robert Barron, and Pope Francis) and pretend they are bravely defying some “Church of Nice liberal conspiracy”. They are, in fact, nothing but ignorant bullies.

There’s a wonderful scene in Moscow on the Hudson which sums up the creepy projective salaciousness of Michael Voris, Christine Niles, Jim Russell, and the cult of Reactionary Puritan howler monkeys they serve:

Similarly, Church Militant carefully excerpted the most salacious bits of the text used in the class to prove that, unlike the godless Dr. Lewis, they would never expose thousands and thousands of their readers to this awful stuff. No sirree! They would not delectate over this passage they are carefully reprinting for all their readers to savor. Nor this one! Nor that one! I mean, would you just get a load of that thing you should not be reading? Read it again! Ooooooh! Nasty!

Yeah. The problem was totally Dr. Lewis, not the projective cult of rageaholics led by a demagogue looking for somebody to crucify.

That is the crowning hypocrisy: They do the same thing Dr. Lewis did, but stupidly and to destroy and not intelligently and to teach. They complain that Lewis expose his student to blasphemy and then they expose their readers to the exact same texts. Only Lewis was doing it to teach his students how to respond to blasphemy as a Catholic. They do it for one purpose: to savor the blasphemy and then destroy the teacher who was teaching his students how to think as Catholics.

So here is reality: Every person who read the salacious passages in Niles’ article is a hypocrite if they do not demand an act of reparation for CM’s promotion of pornography. After all, the theory is that there can never be any justification for exposing readers to that stuff. But if you are praising CM for publishing that stuff in order to “raise awareness” then you have just granted Stephen Lewis the right to do the same.

This is all about rage monkey idiots and hypocrites looking for a good man to crucify so they can feel holy. Every person defending CM is doing grave evil.

Cult Militant: Repent.

Now Church Militant is Church Militant: a cult of malignant rage monkeys with no brains and nothing constructive to say to the Church. They vend empty aimless anger at malcontents who have lost the good of the intellect and they seek to destroy innocent people as the centerpiece of the business model. There’s no point in expecting them to change. It’s what they have always done and what they keep doing. Instead of offering anything constructive, they do things like argue that prayer, fasting, almsgiving and the works of mercy are not the way to heal the Church. I know. In 2013, that was exactly the proposition Voris tried to argue in a debate I had with him in Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Yes, that’s correct. Voris seriously tried to argue against Jesus Christ himself on a point that is the absolute core of Our Lord’s preaching in the Sermon on the Mount. When somebody’s judgment is that epically wrong, only one group in American Catholic life could clasp a false prophet like Voris and hug him to its breast: American Catholic Christianists at war with Pope Francis and truly, deeply, madly in love with the dimestore antichrist who is Donald Trump.

Speaking of Franciscan University, the Administration, instead of ignoring Voris and his cult of ignorant obscurantists waving torches and screaming for the blood of the innocent, instead offered Lewis as a human sacrifice to that mob. That’s right. The same democraphic that was whinging about “academic freedom” when Charles Murray was denied a chance to speak brayed like donkeys for the crucifixion of Stephen Lewis who did nothing wrong.

So the Administration, to its profound shame, folded like a cheap suit to a malignant hatchet job by Christine Niles, Voris’ sycophant and henchwoman. Indeed, they did more than fold. They removed Lewis as chair of the English department and, most despicably, drove a stake through his good name by means of an absolutely disgusting show of false piety intended to crucify Lewis with public shaming. You want demonic?An ostentatiously weaponized Hour of Reparation Kabuki used to destroy a faithful son of the Church and a good teacher, that’s demonic. I think the Blessed Mother spits on this disgraceful use of her to assassinate the character of a good man. The real act of reparation should be for the vile slander committed by Cult Militant and the vile cowardice of Franciscan University’s Administration in caving to this mob of ignorant bullies.

Sam Rocha, an alum of Franciscan describes what that school was like back when it was an actual Catholic university teaching its students how to think like Catholics in engaging the western intellectual tradition:

When I studied at Franciscan University of Steubenville, I was told by one of my teachers (Fr. Conrad Harkins, OFM) to read *everything* in the New York Times top ten book list that wasn’t a cookbook or self-help. We were exhorted to be worldly.

In another class, “Philosophy of Community,” we read Scheler’s “On the Nature of Sympathy” and other personalist texts (by Mounier and Marcel) in contrast to Sartre’s *Being and Nothingness.* Dr. Crosby asks us to deeply attempt to see the common existential ideas across.

In my Spanish literature classes, I was introduced to Pre Columbian history and the thought of Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz among many others, who added a critical layer of reflection upon our studies of the Spanish Siglo de Oro.

In my admittedly party-obsessed fraternity, we often argued through juvenile but formative considerations of libertarianism, communism, and issues of every kind. I found the Left, in many ways, in that community. We had all read Marx.

In my first philosophy course, “Philosophy of the Human Person,” I had to sympathetically understand and rehearse views of personhood from Hinduism among many other traditions. This was a first for me then and I will never forget the impact it had on my mind.

I read Homer with Dr. Almeida, who when he was asked of an etymology that was derived from Persian, not Greek, he hung his head in shame and apologized to the class. That apology taught me something profound. He also held oral exams outside while smoking a cigar.

What I am trying to say is that my personal sense of scandal at the present (but also, as many have pointed out, the recent past) state of my alma mater is not only from academic principle but also a slap in the face of my own experience and education there.

I faced internal critiques of the University and of my own faith at Franciscan and those critiques were essential for my growth. There was never any fear of the administration with the understandable exception of parties and student discipline (I was on disciplinary probation).

Because of our rather, well, rough, social circle, I also interacted with people from around town who I would have never met before. Sure in many cases these were not exactly positive, but the general exposure was just as essential for me.

Also during that time, the University president took a hard stance against the lay apostolate of the Legionaries of Christ. This was the Bush years, sure the campus was conservative in general, but there was much debate. We also founded the first Latino student group there.

Since then I’ve lectured at my alma mater two times and supported student efforts in various causes with concerts that I played pro bono. I also record in Steubenville, with the great musician friends I made there, above all @danbozek.

Seeing what it has become is truly a personal tragedy. This along with the other revelations of abuse there that have been treated in a cavalier way by comparison, and it just stinks to high heaven.

I know I’m not exactly being chronological, but when I saw that the translator of Marion’s *The Erotic Phenomenon* was from my alma mater, I beamed with pride. It was amazing to feel in a small way connected to that work and it also helped me find my way back to phenomenology.

I will always carry the education I received there as a part of who I am. I cannot sever that sacred bond of formation. And for that very reason, its descent into the muck of anti-intellectualism and right-wing ideology is my own hell to bear, too.

Those days are over. And given the trajectory of the Cult that now holds sway there, sucking up to Know Nothing demagogues like Voris and morphing into a hatchery for larval Trumplings where honorable men like Lewis are subjected to Stalinist purges, I don’t see it coming back any time soon. I have heard from a good number of Franciscan alum who have registered their profound dismay at this betrayal by Franciscan, but I will let two stand for the rest:

I agree, Mark Shea. I am all about reparations and prayer, but this struck me as being way, way wrong. My husband and I have supported FUS for decades and were very pleased with the education one of our daughters received there. I feel pretty much done with the school after this.

There are far worse ways to scandalize the young than expose them to the wormy thoughts of strayed Catholics. I hope and pray none of the FUS students are so turned off by this manifestation of weaponized piety that they give up on the Church.

I have a sister who came back to the Church a few years ago after decades of being away. I was so happy. She recently became a catechumen in the non-uniate Greek Orthodox church. In part it was her confusion over the internecine Catholic internet wars that caused her to conclude it was Rome who went wrong in 1054. It’s hard to feel too bad about it, because she has the Eucharist and a very fine local faith community. But it hurts.

This latest from FUS discourages me more than any recent development in our broken society.

Jenn Morson adds:

I am so ashamed of my alma mater today. The president of Franciscan University of Steubenville apologizing publicly to the Blessed Mother because a book of literature was taught but he publicly thanked the staff members who mishandled sexual assault cases and gave one a financial bonus. Where is their letter?

As countless commenters demand reparations be made and demand a(nother) professor fired, where are the calls for rosary walks to re-consecrate the campus now that is fully known all of the places where Father Sam Tiesi molested women?

If the Cult remains true to form in its vacuum-sealed Pharisaic arrogance it will regard the horror of its alums with pride. More of the Impure weeded out. The triumph of the Elect. All very Calvinist. Not very Catholic or Christian. And when the aging mob of Republican Rite Christianists that is left there dies, then what? When there is nobody to replace them in the donor base of Trump Cultists who chose to sell their birthright for a pot of message, Franciscan will have their reward from men, not from God.

Or they can repent the wrong they have done Stephen Lewis and their students and take control of their school back from thugs like Voris and Know Nothings like Niles who gin up mobs to destroy good men like Lewis and good women like Rebecca Bratten Weiss and who will not be satisfied but sharpened in the appetite for innocent blood now that Franciscan has gone the route of appeasement. While they are deciding whether to commit intellectual and moral suicide my sole advice to anybody looking for a Catholic university education is “Send your kid to a Catholic university, not to Franciscan.”

It’s not a secret that I admire Bp. Robert Barron

December 19, 2018 By Mark Shea

I’m strongly motivated by the Church’s call to evangelize. I think Pope Francis is the bee’s knees because he has tried very hard to place before the Church the imperative to evangelize. That’s why he launched his papacy by issuing Evangelii Gaudium. I have said since the start of his reign that you can basically sum up everything he has to say in the words, “He has preached good news to the poor.” What so many find “confusing” about him is as obvious as an open book to me: Evangelize fearlessly and do so in a way that places the good of the poor before our own good.

The trouble, of course, is that the former makes him anathema to Reactionary Catholics and the latter makes him anathema to American Conservatives (and these are often the same people). Reactionaries hate evangelism because it brings riff-raff into the Church and their vision is of a smaller, purer Church in which the riff-raff are both barred from entering and those riff-raff in the Church are driven out and purged. To give you a taste of the mindset, I give you a reader who recently wondered aloud how gays had gotten into the Church. It never occurred to him that they were born and baptized here and that wondering how they “got in” was like wondering how they “got in” to Times Square. The Church is the biggest public space on the planet. Anybody can come in and it began with the mandate, “Go therefore into all the world.” It’s catholic. Universal. It proposes the salvation of the whole human race as the project. Riff-raff especially included.

But Reactionaries hate all that. They see the Church as a fortress keeping out invaders, not as Jesus created it: a missionary society fearlessly invading the world with the gospel just as God invaded the world in the Incarnation. Jesus, speaking prophetically, said, ““Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (Mk 16:15–18).

His point was not that Christians should be Appalachian snake handlers. It was to use several different images to communicate the basic point that we are not to stay in the Fortress, not to cower in fear, not to huddle and hide and live in perpetual terror of impurity, contamination, defeat, and on the defensive. We have the grace of the Spirit to beat the devil, to speak to the whole world, to fight the powers of hell, to digest and use whatever the world flings at us and turn it to good, and to overcome the sickness of sin. That’s the point. That is what the apostles believed and lived, doing things like “becoming all things to all” and preaching to Jews, Gentiles, barbarians, slaves, free, men, women, and everybody else the early Church encountered. That’s what the Church is supposed to do: engage the world.

And that is what most Catholics do not believe and Bp. Robert Barron attempts to model. I respect that.

Funny story. When I debated Michael Voris a few years back, Michael kept bringing the conversation back to what he clearly regarded as one of the gravest threats the Church faces in our lifetime: then-Fr. Robert Barron. I was amazed by this and even more amazed that the roomful of 600 men in which we debated clearly agreed with him for the most part. What it came down to was Barron’s attitude of hope and his agreement with Benedict XVI that it was legit to hope (not know, but hope) for the salvation of most people.

It is an opinion well within the pale of Catholic orthodoxy, but not within the pale of Reactionary desires for the damnation of most. But since Voris and his audience could not pour out their wrath on the real culprit–Benedict XVI–for holding an opinion identical to Barron’s, they had to do what such people always do: vilify the messenger. (Now that Benedict is gone and the hated Francis is here, they can direct their malignant hatred directly at the Holy Father).

For my part, I was astonished at the malice directed at Barron, whom I have always regarded as the best evangelist working in the English-speaking world. I finally responded to Voris and the crowd by saying, “The Church has a thousand huge problems. Pope Francis and Fr. Robert Barron are not among them.” (It was October of 2013 and the cult of Francis-hatred was already rapidly germinating.)

Of course, that has not slowed Reactionaries down. In 2017, newly-minted Bishop Barron went on The Rubin Report with a gay Libertarian named Dave Rubin to talk about the faith:

Surprisingly, he went over well with a number of atheists and gays (his target audience for that interview). Sadly and unsurprisingly, he was vilified by Voris and by Lifesite News, which banned Brandon Vogt from its comboxes for the crime of not denouncing him. His “spiritual poison” (as Voris called it)? Failing to denounce his host for being gay. Because, as everybody knows, people who totally do not share Christian and Catholic presuppositions will definitely change their minds if you scream at them like Michael Voris.

So anyway, the other day, Bp. Barron had another conversation, this time with Ben Shapiro, a Jewish right winger and culture warrior. I posted the the clip on the Book of Face and commented that I agree with ever word Bp. Barron said:

Now, I full expected an assault from the Usual Suspects declaring (if they were Reactionary Catholics) that he is a heretic who denies all non-Catholics are damned and (if they are Fundamentalists) that he is a heretic for denying all non-Christians are damned. (In fact, he does neither. He affirms that all who are saved are saved through Christ and that no one comes to the Father except through Christ–and therefore is in union with the Church, his Body, whether they realize it or not in this life).

What I did not expect was that he would now be chewed out for associating with Ben Shapiro. But that’s what happened. His mere willingness to talk to the guy was attacked, again and again, because, in talking to him, he no more flung the table over and denounced him for being a right wing Libertarian than he denounced Rubin for being a gay Libertarian. And so, various of my readers, including friends I respectfully disagree with, denounced him for “letting himself be used” in a way I watched him get denounced for “letting himself by used” by the “gay lobby” a couple of years ago.

I have mentioned it before but I will point it out again. When the centurion approached Jesus about healing his slave, Jesus (despite knowing that slavery was gravely and intrinsically immoral and an affront to the dignity of both the owner and the slave) did not take that opportunity to ream the Centurion out for owning slaves, nor to attack him as the tool of an occupying power oppressing not only his fellow Jews but peoples all over the ancient world. Instead, he looked for the growing edge and commended the Centurion for his faith, praising him as having greater faith than even his fellow Jews. That’s how evangelism works.

This conversation with Shapiro is, very obviously, a conversation, not between a bishop and a culture warrior, but between a Catholic Christian and a serious Jew, addressing an issue that has been a bone of contention between Jews (and many Protestants) and Catholics since interreligious and ecumenical conversations began. Barron handled it with grace, intelligence, and theological accuracy in a way that I can only dream that Catholics in social media could emulate. Yes. Barron did not take the opportunity to denounce Shapiro about a hundred matters unrelated to the topic at hand. Jesus did not denounce the centurion for owning slaves either and instead commended him for his faith. Was he “letting himself be used” by an occupying power? Barron simply answered his host’s questions. Not everything has to be about culture war 100% of the time forever.

The irony, for me, is that what lies behind both denunciations is the conviction that the main thing Catholics have to do is fear contamination, not confidently proclaim the gospel. The idea that the paramount goal is to seize opportunities and proclaim the gospel, not fearfully hold back lest we be seen talking to the Wrong People is nowhere in sight in this complaint against Barron. Might be he perceived wrongly be some in speaking to Shapiro as to Rubin? Sure. I guess. Jesus was perceived wrongly for talking to tax collectors and sinners. But the mandate of the gospel is still to invade the world with it, not hide it under a bushel. Of all the thousand problems the Church has, too many intelligent and articulate evangelists willing to go anywhere and talk to anybody is not among them.

Go Bishop Barron!

The National Catholic Reporter is simply right

November 13, 2018 By Mark Shea

So when the Right Wing Noise Machine (Catholic edition) has been so wrong about so much so many times for so long that only a fool would continue to unquestioningly trust their judgment, it is prudent to consider the possibility that the people who saw and reported accurately on the problem of priestly abuse nearly 30 year ago might, despite the denunciations of the Lie Machine, have something to say worth listening to. The National Catholic Reporter is exactly such a paper and, despite the reflexive booing and hissing from the Francis-hating, Trump adoring Cult of Wrong about Everything, I believe in prudence. Here is their recent, devastating, and spot on editorial to the bishops:

Dear brothers in Christ, shepherds, fellow pilgrims,

We address you as you approach this year’s national meeting in Baltimore because we know there is nowhere left to hide.

It’s over.

All the manipulations and contortions of the past 33 years, all the attempts to deflect and equivocate — all of it has brought the church, but especially you, to this moment.

It’s over.

Even the feds are now on the trail. They’ve ordered that you not destroy any documents. The Department of Justice is conducting a national criminal investigation of how you’ve handled the clergy sex abuse scandal. It is a point in our history without precedent. We want you to know that you aren’t alone in this moment, you’ve not been abandoned. But this time it must be different. This time it won’t be easy.

We need you! Support independent Catholic journalism. Become an NCR Forward member for $5 a month.

From fable to sacred text, we know how this goes. The point is reached where all realize the king wears no clothes, the righteous accusers read the writing in the sand and fade away, the religious authorities receive the Master’s most stinging rebukes. As a class of religious rulers, the loudest among you have become quite good at applying the law and claiming divine authority in marginalizing those who transgress the statutes. The prolonged abuse scandal would suggest, however, that you’ve not done very well taking stock of yourselves.

We have no special insight into why this moment — the Pennsylvania grand jury report, the downfall of Theodore McCarrick — has so captured the public imagination and pushed the church to this outer limit of exposure and vulnerability. There are theories, not least of which is that the opportunists among us are attempting to use this moment to bring down the only pope who has actually dethroned bishops and a cardinal for their crimes and indiscretions.

But that’s an issue for another time.

The reality, we all know, is that it has been going on for a long time. The first national story appeared across four pages of this publication in the summer of 1985. The worst of it occurred during the pontificate of the hastily sainted John Paul II, a giant on the world stage, but a pastor who let wolves roam his own flock. His idealized concept of heroic priesthood apparently left him incapable of hearing the truth from credible witnesses, including the few bishops who dared disturb that idealized world with troubling reports. He promoted to the end Marciel Maciel Degollado, founder of the Legion of Christ, and a persona who came to represent the worst of the abuse scandal. Maciel, an accomplished sycophant, kept scrutiny at bay with his ability to spread a lot of young priests and a lot of money around the Vatican.

The point beyond dispute is that we are at a moment in U.S. church history — and perhaps in the history of the global church — without precedent. This is not about debatable matters — celibacy or the filioque clause, or the primacy of Scripture or whether the Earth is the center of the universe or whether women should be allowed ordination or any of the hot button issues that have kept us roiling and at each others’ throats these past decades. This, instead, is about a rot at the heart of the culture entrusted with leadership of the Catholic community. A rot so pervasive that it has touched every aspect of the community’s life, disrupting all of the certainties and presumptions about who we are and who you are that helped hold this community together.

Those who worked so ardently in the past to enable you — the faithful, so betrayed, who just couldn’t believe you would engage in such a deliberate cover up; the likes of George Weigel and his blind, uncritical hagiography of Pope John Paul II; Dr. Mary Ann Glendon and the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus and their naive celebration and defense of Maciel; the rest of the chorus at First Things and like publications; the telling silence of so many other Catholic outlets; the absurdity of charlatan William Donohue and his silly “Catholic” League — they helped sustain your weak narrative as many of them denigrated those who raised the tough questions and pursued the truth.

It’s over.

None of them any longer has a persuasive case to make. Some of them now try to blame the crisis on gay priests. You might be tempted to latch onto that diversion, but it will only prolong the already intolerably long agony.

Gay priests and bishops are certainly among us — probably a greater percentage of gays in the Catholic clergy, if anecdotal evidence and the private chatter of seminary rectors and heads of orders is to be believed, than one would find in the general population.

The clergy culture is in deep need of serious conversation and education about that issue and much more regarding sexuality. That discussion is unlikely on any significant scale because too many bishops and too many priests, if they were honest, would have to admit to an orientation that the church still calls “disordered.” Unless the preponderance of credible experts has suddenly flipped its understanding of things, however, sexual orientation is not one of the topics that match with sexual abuse.

Detail of Page 20 of National Catholic Reporter issue date June 7, 1985, jump page of Jason Berry’s article “Pedophile priest: study in inept church response”

Orientation is not a determining factor in abuse of children. If it were, we’d have to be investigating heterosexual orientation as a cause because a lot of abuse is perpetrated by heterosexual men upon boys and girls. So, take that path if you’d like, but be prepared to lose whatever bit of credibility might be left in the tank.

It’s over.

You’ve been ensconced in a culture that has for too long protected you from the consequences of your worst instincts. The boundaries that once kept your culture safe from scrutiny have become as irrelevant today as the moats and walls of previous centuries. There is no hiding any longer. You’ve been imbibing the excesses of power, authority and privilege that have accrued over centuries and, like the addict who hits bottom, a fundamental decision for recovery is essential to your survival.

It’s over.

You’ve hit bottom not because the latest gush of bad news resulted from a resolve to come clean and tell the truth. It resulted from yet another investigation. In short, you were moved to words of contrition because you were, once again, caught. Yes, most of it is old news. Yes, the coverup was engineered mostly by bishops who are no longer in office or have died. News organizations once reluctant to take you on for fear of being labeled anti-Catholic are no longer reticent.

You’ve become certain clickbait. And you will continue to be as, in diocese after diocese, more documents are released and revealed and more grand juries look into the inner workings of this institution over the past 50 years or so. It is self-inflicted pain.

And please stop asserting that you did not know what was going on before 2002. If the scandal exploded in 2002, it was because a long fuse had already set off explosions in city after city and state after state and been chronicled widely for 17 years before the spark hit Boston. In the aftermath of those explosions, you were certain enough about what was going on and its potential consequences that you employed individually and corporately legions of lawyers. You knew enough to keep secret files under lock and key. You knew it was evil enough that you had to hide it.

It’s over.

There is no denying you’ve done a lot of adjusting to the bad news. You put together a charter to protect youth. (Fair to note that it’s taken you 16 years to get around to considering including yourselves among those to be held accountable.) You’ve instituted a national office, paid for elaborate studies, instituted national and local review boards, held reconciliation services and required child protection training and background checks, and paid billions in settlements. The church is indisputably a safer place for kids for all of that effort. But it was all done in reaction to outside forces.

The only thing you can’t be forced to do is what you would say our sacramental tradition requires: a deep personal examination, telling the truth, begging forgiveness and a resolve to amend.

The examination begins with the question that only you can answer, individually and as a group: How did we and our brothers in the past, as leaders of this clerical culture, reach the point where we could rationalize turning our backs on children who had been sexually tortured by our priests to protect those priests and our culture? One of your brothers, Chicago Cardinal Blase Cupich, has already laid out some appropriate steps. Bishops must “cede authority,” he said, to allow for greater accountability to outside authority. He also said that “privilege, power and protection of a clerical culture” have to be “eradicated from the life of the church” or “everything else is a sideshow.”

Those are worthy points to consider. The retreat you’ve scheduled for January would be the perfect place to do just that as a body. A suggestion: attend in mufti and leave all the trappings, the collars and black suits, all the silk and lace and pectoral crosses at home. God will recognize you. Take that little step in humility and actually meet as brothers. Seek out those among you who have suffered, who have known what it means to come through pain or addiction or illness. Ask them to help lead you out of this dark moment. They would know the way.

When it is over, and here we make a suggestion that runs contrary to journalistic interest: Be quiet. No grand pronouncements.

In the months to follow, as the federal investigation likely forces out more documents and that burning fuse continues to set off explosions, some of you may pay dearly for what you have or have not done in the past. We’ll know how your retreat went by how you act in those moments.

We’ll know whether you’ve really hit bottom and are on the mend with the best interests of the community at heart or whether you’re still in search of cheap grace and the easy way out.

It’s over.

In the name of the child victims, the families torn apart, the parents who know no end to their agony, the body of Christ subjected to relentless humiliation for decades, it has to be over. This time has to be different.

We pray for you,

Your sisters and brothers, your fellow pilgrims, the church.

I can’t find a word to disagree with here. Meanwhile, conservative Christianist Catholics continue to refuse to think or open their eyes because they have swallowed an ideology that demand they believe the problem cannot possibly involve them–the people who blindly cheered for Maciel. The suckers who defended Euteneuer. The gullible chumps who backed Corapi and who cheered for Michael Voris and Church Militant when those dunces attacked Corapi’s bishop. And the gullible suckers who have now swallowed hook, line, and sinker the narrative of Vigano, Liesite, 1Peter5, EWTN, and the Register that the sole issue is gay and liberals, who must all be purged from the Church, starting with the pope. These people have no interest in victims except insofar as they are useful for advancing the Power Struggle. The towering pride of the Greatest Catholics of All Time has rendered that cult utterly unable to consider the reality that the problem is abusers, gay and straight and enablers, liberal and conservative–and that the only people who matter in this are victims, not conservatives clawing their way to power.

Nope. The Cult of Conservative Pride knows that they and they alone are the saviors of the Church and they and they alone are qualified to purge and destroy the Enemy: anybody who is not themselves. The hubris is breathtaking.

Meawhile, the evil National Catholic Reporter has a pretty sound grasp on what the problem is and what the first steps toward healing are. But we must not listen to them because we will incur ritual impurity if we do. As I have done, by praising them here.

Oh well. I was expelled from the ranks of the Righteous by the Combox Episcopacy a long time ago:

For the bodies of those animals whose blood is brought into the sanctuary by the high priest as a sacrifice for sin are burned outside the camp. So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. Therefore let us go forth to him outside the camp, bearing abuse for him. For here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come. (Heb 13:11–14).

The Incredibly Sketchy Abp. Vigano and Church Militant Have a Bridge to Sell You

September 13, 2018 By Mark Shea

When last we heard from Church Militant they were absolutely certain that shadowy forces were just about to spirit Cdl. Wuerl away to Rome in a super-secret clandestine operation, never to be seen again! It was all breathlessly reported by that other bastion of Total Reliability, Liesite News:

Church Militant claims Cdl. Wuerl fleeing to Rome to avoid U.S. arrest for abuse cover-up https://t.co/yThlfqHxGa

— LifeSite Catholic (@LSNCatholic) August 30, 2018

Voris declared that “final plans for sneaking him out of the country are executed” Liesite added that

“They are trying to sneak him out of the nation under Vatican diplomatic secrecy,” said Voris, noting Wuerl has backed out of a number of public events after the Pennsylvania news broke, and speculating he may be hiding at a hotel in the nation’s capital. Voris said priests of the archdiocese received a letter from Wuerl saying he was looking forward to seeing them during Labor Day weekend.

That prophecy was uttered on August 30 and Behold! All was as Church Militant foretold!!! Wuerl did go to Rome!!!!!

And then he came home again.

But the great thing about being a Faithful Conservative Catholic is that no matter how many false prophecies you utter, you never have to apologize or admit you were wrong.

We stand by our report. At the time it was unclear whether the departure was imminent or for the future, but we now know it's for the future in the case of a federal investigation, which would likely incriminate Wuerl.

— Church Militant/St. Michael's Media (@Church_Militant) September 11, 2018

You just go on saying whatever comes into your head next and your audience, as full of righteous pride as you are will never ever admit that they could be wrong either.

So, for instance, suppose some con man priest with a load of cock and bull stories about his phony military record and life of wicked, wicked sinfulness (before his transformative conversion) is caught with his pants down and tries to auction off his priesthood to his cult of personality once the jig is up? And suppose his bishop does exactly the right thing and demands his obedience? And suppose that con man priest is a right wing culture war hero who fits your constant narrative of right wing culture war while the bishop does not fit that narrative? What do you do if you are Michael Voris? Examine the facts and try to be fair to the bishop or the people pointing out that your culture war hero priest is betraying his vows?

Poppycock! You fire off a stupid video in which you first admit you do not know what you are talking about and then press on to talk about it with standard conspiracy theory nonsense. You cast the whole thing in your standard Culture War template and suggestively tell followers who the real villains and hero in this drama were. Eulogizing your con man, you declare:

He unabashedly talked about the angry homosexual subculture that controls so much of what goes on. He blasted unfaithful bishops … meaning not only the obvious ones but also the ones who quietly and cowardly sit back and let heterodoxy and heresy spread unchecked. It isn’t a stretch of the imagination to conclude many of the enemies he made and noses he got out of joint among the bishops and their lapdog media lackies are glad to see all of this going on.

And when it is shown that your con man is a scoundrel and his bishop did the right thing, and your con man’s critics where right to warn that he was ditching his priesthood and disobeying his bishop, do you apologize?

Of course not! You are Michael Voris and it is impossible for you to err! Just ask your Premium Subscribers!

So you press on for years until you finally arrive at this moment in history, when you convince yourself you have been chosen by God Almighty to spread this lunatic rumor:

Sources confirm Viganò has activated the death switch, meaning if he winds up dead, a whole cache of documents incriminating Vatican cardinals, bishops & the pope himself will be revealed.

Pray for Viganò. We can confirm he lives in legitimate fear of his life. pic.twitter.com/PXdMabn0vL

— Church Militant/St. Michael’s Media (@Church_Militant) September 11, 2018

Think about this.

This means that either:

a) Vigano could have documented everything he claimed but simply refused before he ran away from the press that was requesting precisely what he now threatens to release. Indeed, it means that Vigano said to himself, “I know I could provide documentation of grave wrongdoing to the authorities and the press that could potentially save children from abuse, but I have selfishly decided to hide it and use it for blackmail against Shadowy Papal Forces that are, trust me, totally real”

b) Vigano is a drama queen who has nothing and is continuing to use the absolute worst right wing crackpot conspiracy theory nuthouse fake media to spread lies and gin up suckers who will believe anything in their hatred of Pope Francis.

I pick b. If you have all this stuff, Abp. Vigano, and if you know what it is and where it is and where he is, Church Militant, you absolutely owe it to us to release it right this second. Evidence. Documentation. Fact. You now assert it is in your possession or, at any rate, easily obtainable.

Why then have you not released it?

Do so, now. Or I call you a liar to your face, Abp. Vigano. And I call you accessories, Church Militant.

Now the amazing thing is that the people who have been screaming RESIGN!!!! at the Pope (led, never forget, by Vigano himself) are suddenly full of excuses for why the accuser should not provide the documentation that he himself now is openly claiming to have. They cut Francis no such slack, even though it meant demanding he produce evidence that, a few days ago, even Vigano was saying did not exist and may have just been a faulty memory.

More than this, the crowd of arch-conservative Super Catholics who, 20 years ago, spent their time in on-line apologetics laughing to scorn garbage like this:

Image result for alberto rivera

…are now the chief promoters and gullible suckers who totally believe the preposterous claim that Pope Francis is trying to murder Vigano. Indeed, some of these lunatics were ardently promoting the claim that he murdered the two dubia promoters who died of old age (as those of us in the Reality-Based Community call it).

What Russell Moore said of his Baptist communion is even truer of Church Militant and the nutty Apologetics-Turned-Francis-Hater crowd: “The Religious Right are the people the Religious Right warned you about twenty years ago.”

Nothing, of course, will change the minds of the True Believers. But for those of us interested in assessing facts, there is only one conclusion. Church Militant is either a pack of liars or they are complicit in the attempt by Vigano to hide from our sight documents that both the people of God, the press, and (very possibly) legal authorities need in order to determine what may well be crimes. This makes CM (O Rich Irony) the moral equals of the bishops who likewise cooperated in concealing evidence.

If this tweet is accurate, why are they assisting Vigano in this coverup of evidence pertaining to sexual abuse? They and Vigano owe it to us to fork over these documents right now or to tell us where they are and where he is.

Or they need to do something unprecedented for the Righteous: admit they were wrong.

Pete Vere has an interesting argument

June 7, 2018 By Mark Shea

…with Fr. Dwight Longenecker about “Warrior” Christians that gets me thinking of a tangent.

His argument is about the concept of the “warrior priest” and you can read it here.

I don’t really have a dog in that fight, but it does remind me of something I’ve thought about in the past: namely, the idea of filling pagan forms with Christian content vs. filling Christian forms with pagan content.

One of the many things that anti-Catholic Fundies get wrong about the faith is the notion that if something in Catholic life has some pagan antecedent, that means “Catholics are pagan”. So we are forever treated to pictures of holly at Christmas with the dire warning that Catholics are secretly Druids. Or we hear that the winter solstice celebrations of pagans mean the same thing as those of Catholics. (Funnily enough, nobody ever says that the Feast of St. Matthew (September 21) is proof that venerating Matthew is somehow a pagan equinox celebration.)

And if you ask a Fundamentalist what day of the week it is, nobody calls him a Thor worshipper when he answers “Thursday”.

Why? Because in reality what matters is not the ancient, dead significance of a thing to ancient, dead pagans, but the living Christian content poured into it. As Chesterton remarks, the last thing ancient pagans did was ask for baptism. Whatever a tree meant to a German pagan a thousand years ago, it has long since been filled with Christian content and refers to the Tree of Jesse, the House of David, and the evergreen promise of grace in the birth of Jesus now. Whatever halos may have meant to pagans, they now mean that the Holy Spirit rested on that saint and illumined her soul. The pagan form has been filled with Christian content.

But sometimes the opposite happens. Christian forms get filled with an alien, pagan content. So a friend of mine grew up in a household of Fundamentalists who listened intently to some guy name Col. Bob Thieme. She vividly remembers him insisting that “Christians should be the best killers.” He achieved this dementia by taking the Christian form and, instead of reading the Old Testament in light of the New, subordinated the gospel to the darkest and most brutal texts of the Old Testament.

Something similar is going on when Gun Cult zealots try to turn Luke 22:35-38 into a prot0-Second Amendment. It’s just not. The reality is that Jesus did not teach, “If somebody strikes you on the right cheek, that’s assault. Stand your ground and blow his head off.” Nor did he say, “If someone compels you to go one mile, that’s kidnapping. Blow his head off.” There is, in fact, nothing in the New Testament authorizing the use of violence in self-defense. The Church will later work out such matters in Just War doctrine once the duties of the Christian to the common good merge with the duties of the citizen to the state. But the current mania for vigilante gun nuttery as somehow the True Meaning of Luke 22:35-38 is paganism filling a Christian form.

Which brings me back to the whole Manly Warrior Priest thing. Yes, Paul takes the image of the soldier and fills it with Christian content in Ephesians 6. Now and then–and very rarely–other military imagery gets used by Jesus or the New Testament authors, as when Jesus says he comes to bring not peace, but a sword. But the New Testament is terrifying in its fundamental call to non-violence. Peter, told to put up his sword after his outburst of vigilantism never takes up the sword again. In his letters to the Christian community he never calls them to fight back against Neronian persecution even when they are being used to light Nero’s gardens. His essential counsel is this:

Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal which comes upon you to prove you, as though something strange were happening to you. But rejoice in so far as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed. If you are reproached for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or a mischief-maker; yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God. For the time has come for judgment to begin with the household of God; and if it begins with us, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God? And
“If the righteous man is scarcely saved,
where will the impious and sinner appear?”
Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will do right and entrust their souls to a faithful Creator. (1 Pe 4:12–19).

To a community being murdered by vicious persecutors, his only counsel is, essentially, “Be sure to die well.”

Today, toxic masculinity is a million miles from this. And it is everywhere in the Church as well. The Warrior Christian is praised, not for the transformation of literal warfare into the weapons of the Spirit, but for his willingness to get out there and kill. Fr. Wilson Miscamble writes excuses for the murder of civilian populations the Church describes as “a crime against God and man which merits firm and unequivocal condemnation” and is the go-to hero for Warrior Christians like the American Catholic and Michael Voris’ Church Militant (which loves to depict Voris with his sword). Without a trace of irony, Church Militant describes the defender of the nuclear mass murder of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as “pro-life” and “one of the most vocal defenders of orthodoxy” at Notre Dame. Imagine them saying this about a priest who defended the abortion of hundreds of unborn children. On second thought, you don’t need to, because hundreds of children, born and unborn, were in fact murdered at Hiroshima and Nagasaki by bombs that deliberately and indiscriminately targeted civilians.

This and other fetishizations of war can and do lead to the tendency to fill Christian forms with pagan content. Take Fr. Richard Heilman’s “Spiritual Ammo” stuff. St. Paul says that we wrestle not against flesh and blood. Human beings are not the enemy of the Catholic priest and especially not human beings who believe all that the Holy Catholic Church believes, teaches, and proclaims is revealed by God. Such people are called the “flock”, not the enemy, of the priest.

Fr. Heilman, however, full of the Warrior Priest Spirit, ginned his cult of personality into a really gruesome celebration of the firing of me and Simcha Fisher from the Register. He and his cult of Spiritual Warriors took it for granted that their “spiritual warfare” prayers–directed not against “powers and principalities” but against me and against a faithful Catholic mother of ten children, had been heard by God and that gloating over his entirely flesh and blood enemies was a fit liturgy for him to lead his cult in. It was as pagan and barbaric as it gets, and all the more so since, sinners though his victims are, they remain members in good standing of Holy Church and people trying their best to follow Jesus. He could have been a father to us. Instead, he was an avenging warrior–“Trump’s prayer warrior” as he describes himself.

This is filling Christian forms with pagan content indeed. The spectacle of a priest praying, on behalf of some politician, for the destruction of a faithful daughter of the Church and for the destruction of the children who depend upon her livelihood is about as profound a perversion of the Tradition as you can ask for.

A friend of mine has remarked that one of the surest signs of a kook on the web is this: Do they marinate their web presence with Knight/Paladin/Crusader imagery? I have found that to be a good rule of thumb. Sure, there are rare occasions when I meet Catholics who use the military imagery of Scripture or the Tradition in a way that is actually Christian: filling the imagery with Christian content about the weapons of the Spirit. But, overwhelmingly, what I usually find is that those who talk constantly of “spiritual warfare” and “ammo kits” and “crusades” and “battle with the forces of evil” and so forth mean to use Christian imagery to dress up their desire for the destruction of human beings by means ranging from character assassination to economic warfare to torture to war.

It’s ironic, because I am keenly alive to the reality of real spiritual warfare with the powers of hell. I believe more deeply than I ever have that the demonic is real and that Christians must take up precisely the weapons of the Spirit Paul describes. It’s just that most of the people in conservative Christianity who talk about such matters deeply impress me as knowing the words, not the tune. So many of them, like Fr. Heilman, show by their actions that they are not defending the gospel or the least of these. They are defending a grab at power and making war, not on devils, but on Catholics who fail to be sufficiently Republican. And the more power they get, the more surely the least of these will suffer at their hands as they fight to defend such heinous acts as ripping children from the arms of their parents at the border. Those children are, in their telling of things, the enemy and the Warrior Christian must fight them since Amnesty Equals Abortion in the infamous words of John Zmirak.

War infamously creates fog. When your dominant view of the Faith is one of warfare and you forget that Jesus is the Prince of Peace who made peace by the shedding of his own blood, not of somebody else’s, you become fatally ready, willing, and able to destroy anybody who gets in the way of the Millennium you think, this time for sure, will come.

Secular Messianism is Alive and Well in the Age of King Donald I

June 6, 2018 By Mark Shea

Remember when Christianists were warning that Obama’s base thought he was the Anointed of God? What a bunch of maroons them Lefties were! What a bunch of ignoranimouses!

Fast forward to now:

Liberty University students and faculty are helping produce an 85-minute feature film that will be shown in over 1,000 theatres nationwide highlighting one man’s “Trump prophecy” and a movement of prayer that led up to the election of President Donald Trump.

The film, titled “The Trump Prophecy,” will be shown at select cinemas nationwide on Oct. 2 and Oct. 4 and is a production led and funded by producer Rick Eldridge and his Charlotte-based ReelWorks Studios, which also helped produce the 2015 documentary based on the book Four Blood Moons by megachurch Pastor John Hagee.

About 56 Liberty University students and several staff members from the Virginia Christian school’s cinematic arts department will also work on the project as part of the department’s spring semester film project.

The film focuses on the prophecy of a retired Florida firefighter named Mark Taylor, who claims that God told him in April 2011 that Trump would one day become president. Although Taylor initially thought that meant that Trump would become president in 2012, the prophecy was ultimately fulfilled in November 2016.

Taylor’s prophetic claim was described in his 2017 book, The Trump Prophecies: The Astonishing True Story of the Man Who Saw Tomorrow… and What He Says Is Coming Next.

Yeah. But that’s just some nutty Evangelicals. Thank God that Catholics don’t fall for this nonsense!

Yeah. About that, here’s manly priest of manliness, the aptly named Fr. Richard Heilman, pausing briefly from hawking his Roman Catholic Man “Spiritual Ammo Kits” to declare to us the revelation that Trump is God’s Anointed and Constantine Redivivus in his prophetic utterance: “Yes, I believe Trump was an Answer to Prayers”

Monica Crowley, at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2017 Restoration Weekend (Nov. 16th-19th), gives a stirring speech that identifies all of the forces President Donald Trump has faced and is facing. It’s mind-boggling when one sees it all laid out like this. As Monica lays out so clearly, the seemingly invincible ruling class has met up with a formidable opponent in Donald Trump, and they are scared to death. Could it be that we may be freed from the stranglehold of “Secular Satanism” by way of President Donald Trump?

I am not working for the cause for President Trump’s canonization, but I do believe, through the prayers of hundreds of thousands of people of faith, we may have been delivered a Constantine.

The theme of Trump as the New Constantine is a common one with Catholic Trump supporters. Liesite promoted it. So did Mercatornet. So did Zmirak at The Stream. So has Michael Voris. And the True Believers got the message:

Image may contain: 1 person, car and outdoor

It’s a way to say “Trump is our secular messiah” without the messiness of the charge of blasphemy that clumsy Protestants incur when they call him the “fulfilment of prophecy”. But it comes down to the same thing in the end, as the driver of that car understands. Trump is the Suffering Servant, despised and rejected of men. Like sheep before his shearers, he opened not his mouth, and by his stripes, we are healed. He is, we are to believe, God holy anointed king, chosen to, in his own words, see to it that “Christianity will have power again.” And that’s what these people are all about: power. Not, of course, the power of the Spirit. Just raw, earthly power to punish enemies and enrich themselves and achieve domination.

That’s why they spend their time worrying about a Pope who humbles himself and calls us to do likewise while saying not a word about a King who claims he can kill people in cold-blood and pardon himself for doing so. These people are enemies of the gospel of Jesus Christ. They want tyrannical power, not the humility of Jesus. And as the photo above makes clear, they dress that drive for tyrannical power in biblical jargon and imagery.

Here’s reality: throughout history we are offered a choice: join the antichrists big and small who crucify Jesus in the least of these or join Jesus with the least of these.

675 Before Christ’s second coming the Church must pass through a final trial that will shake the faith of many believers. The persecution that accompanies her pilgrimage on earth will unveil the “mystery of iniquity” in the form of a religious deception offering men an apparent solution to their problems at the price of apostasy from the truth. The supreme religious deception is that of the Antichrist, a pseudo-messianism by which man glorifies himself in place of God and of his Messiah come in the flesh.

676 The Antichrist’s deception already begins to take shape in the world every time the claim is made to realize within history that messianic hope which can only be realized beyond history through the eschatological judgment. The Church has rejected even modified forms of this falsification of the kingdom to come under the name of millenarianism, especially the “intrinsically perverse” political form of a secular messianism.

677 The Church will enter the glory of the kingdom only through this final Passover, when she will follow her Lord in his death and Resurrection. The kingdom will be fulfilled, then, not by a historic triumph of the Church through a progressive ascendancy, but only by God’s victory over the final unleashing of evil, which will cause his Bride to come down from heaven. God’s triumph over the revolt of evil will take the form of the Last Judgment after the final cosmic upheaval of this passing world.

Christianists have made their choice clear: they crave the power of antichrist. What is your choice?

From Russell Kirk to Milo Yiannopolous…

January 6, 2018 By Mark Shea

The spectacle of the decay of American Conservative Catholicism from this:

to Milo Yiannopolous will be the subject of some future history.

Here are just the editorial comments on his ridiculous book Dangerous, made by some poor sod whose job was to try to make this glob of junk into a book. It’s hilarious:

I didn’t read the manuscript. Just the comments. They’re…amazing. Even better than the excerpts in the filing.

And a pretty good summary of the book I imagine. pic.twitter.com/2kPESxAlA9

— Sarah Mei (@sarahmei) December 28, 2017

It goes on and on.

“Don’t make fun of school shooters- and certainly don’t try to compare them to Liberals.”

“Let’s leave “fecal waste” analogies out of this chapter.”

“This entire paragraph is just repeating Fake News. There was NO blood, NO semen and there was NO Satanism. Delete.”

“Stick with virgins. “Perverts” is unnecessary.”

“Attacking speakers as ugly diminishes your credibility. Actually- it ERASES it.”

“Absurd name calling.”

“No need to drag the lesbians into this! And DON’T use lesbian as a slur!”

“The way you casually bring up the KKK makes no sense.”

“Abortion is off topic here- too hot-button an issue for a stray comment. And the Nubian harem joke is inappropriate here.”

“This rant is off the point.”

“The use of a phrase like “two-faced backstabbing bitches” diminishes your overall point.”

“Are you seriously telling the reader that you advocate SMEAR CAMPAIGNS?”

“Paris Hilton is NOT the best authority to quote here.”

“Don’t use “trannies” here- it just derails your argument.”

“This is not true.”

“This is not true either.”

“It’s always a mistake for an author to say “I can think of no better explanation…” It’s your job to think of a better explanation. It’s what we paid you an advance for. THINK HARDER and replace this long anonymous internet post with prose of your own.”

“This entire section is the most poorly thought out section in the book. If you want to make a case for gay men going back into the closet and marrying women just to have children, you’re going to have to employ a lot more intellectual rigor than you use here.”

“This is definitely not the pace for more of your narcissism.”

“Your ego gets in the way in this paragraph. Delete.”

Then it seems that the editor lost all patience with Milo.

“DELETE UGH.”

“NO MORE REFERENCES TO YOUR BOOK ADVANCE OR THE PUBLISHING PROCESS.”

“NO!”

“DELETE ENTIRE CHAPTER!”

“NO. IT. HAS. NOT.”

(This one’s my favorite)

“All this pop psychology is hogwash. You can’t say ugly people are drawn to the left. Have you ever seen the people at a Trump rally?”

“This is a stupid way to end a terrible chapter. DELETE.”

“This joke is not worth making.”

“This entire argument is ridiculous.”

“So much inappropriate humor is irritating.”

“You will need to develop a stronger argument against feminism than saying that they are ugly and sexless and have cats.”

This guy was the doyenne of the Catholic Christianist Alt Right. Damian Thompson hired him to blog for the Catholic Herald. Breitbart published his “Guide to the Alt Right” that help promote the work of Nazi Richard Spencer. Christianist rabble rousers and enemies of the Church like Michael Voris and Church Militant treated him like some kind of prophet sent by God to rebuke and chew out evil Pope Francis.

Eventually, he fell out of favor with that crowd. But as long as he was useful to them, they played the game of pretending that he was a brilliant clown prince who, gosh darn it, spoke the truth about Trump and our horrible pope.

This is the quality of “thought” that has come to characterize the absurd noise machine of the Catholic Right, which takes seriously people like Yiannopolous and Voris as long as they tell them what their itching ears want to hear and shout down the words of Pope Francis and the Magisterium.

Measuring Fruit

August 2, 2017 By Mark Shea

One of the many reasons I don’t buy the attempt to graft Libertarianism on to Christian teaching is that it does not do what it promises and it constantly contradicts itself.

Libertarians tell me they are brimming with burning generosity but that when the state takes a nickel out of their paycheck for a social safety net, they somehow cannot find it in their heart to be charitable in vengeance for being “robbed”. They tell me they are full of disinterested love for the least of these, but by their actions make clear that what really matters is that they get the credit for being “charitable”. It matters more to the Libertarian that they get the credit than that the poor family whose daughter has leukemia get the help they have to be forced to beg for (assuming the Libertarian finds the sick person “truly worthy” and not a parasite who needs to die for his sins).

Likewise, I hear from Real Christians that the purest expression of deep Christian love is to look refugee children from Syria in the face and tell them “you can’t come” abandon them to their fate.

All the very best Christians love this policy, I am told, because the people who love this all describe themselves as the best Christians. Way better than “liberals” like me (who voted for Reagan twice) and the pope (who is, I am informed by the Alt Right white supremacists who somehow got my email and will not leave me alone, a “cuck”). Not that there are no Catholics working to help Syrian refugees. Catholic Relief Services, for instance, are in there pitching. But the very best Catholics in the world, such as Michael Hichborn of the one man Lepanto Institute, as well as, of course, Michael Voris and the gang at Church Militant are busy tying up heavy burdens of accusation against CRS while not lifting a finger to help. Oh, and Voris assures us that Trump is Constantine, so leaving children to die is practically a work of mercy.

Meanwhile, godless damned Hollywood liberals who lack the grace of the Holy Spirit and know nothing of the true love of God in Jesus Christ or the gospel plot to make Real Christians look like ice cold heartless monsters by seeking ways to build schools for Syrian children. Good White Christian prolife conservatives spend their time and energy working overtime to explain why nothing can or should be done to help these children and cheering the Dear Leader who leaves them to die. Wicked heathen like George Clooney, out of pure spite and just to make Real Christians[TM] look selfish and cruel, take the wounded children, poor oil and wine in their wounds, and pay for their care.

“Which of these do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?”

The expert in the law replied, “The one who had mercy on him.”

Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. – Jesus of Nazareth

A reader is troubled with me

May 16, 2017 By Mark Shea

He writes:

I’m a casual reader of yours and a fan of much of what you have said on many topics. With all due respect, however, I think you’re finding it increasingly difficult to see the difference between a differing opinion from your own on public policy and heresy. Even when I agree with you on a particular topic (like your recent post where feeding kids at school should clearly trump a so-called “principled” stand on public spending), I find myself thinking about how similar you are to Michael Voris, whom you seem to despise, at least publicly. If there are two people that more perfectly exemplify the boy who cried heresy, I can’t help but find myself hoping they never gain the audience that the two of you have.

First things first, I hear you. What you are hearing (and it has been a focus of intense prayer and repeated confession by yours truly) is anger. It’s a huge struggle for me (and for Voris by the way, who I do not despise and for whom I feel an increasing sense of empathy and pity since we both are faced, in different ways, with anguish). The issue for me is not, typically, that I think the people I argue with are heretics. It’s something a bit different: I sense a deep and growing hostility to the Spirit from Trumpian Catholics and I don’t know what to do about it.

I’ve talked about this in the past, but perhaps you’ve missed it, so let me try to explain. The Church calls us to docility. In other words, our first response to the Church should not be “Prove it!” or “What’s the least I have to do in order to be saved?” but an eagerness to listen and obey. I used to believe that “faithful conservative Catholics” were characterized by this and, since I wanted to be that way, I self-identified in that way. But the past 15 years (and especially the past four years and even more especially the past year) have been a traumatizing voyage of discovery that this is a lie for the bulk of so-called “faithful conservative” Catholics. I watched for years as “faithful conservative Catholics” labored to defy the Magisterium on such issues as Just War and, most especially, torture. And the curious strategy they used was a) to declare that “prudential judgment” meant you could ignore the plain teaching of the Church and b) you could always appeal to your Precious Feet Pin as a talisman granting you immunity for blowing off the Church’s teaching when it got in the way of your politics.

With the election of Pope Francis, this ramped up more and I began to notice something else. Again and again the claim was that the Five Non-Negotiables should occupy all our time and energy, not “social justice warrior” stuff (meaning “all the rest of the Church’s social doctrine”).

Fine, said I. Let’s focus our energy on abortion and such like. But here’s the thing: in practice, that’s not where the time and energy go for the allegedly prolife Catholic conservative in most cases. Instead, that time and energy goes to fighting the Church and, in particular, to fighting Francis, not to defending the unborn. Just as the bulk of the time and energy ten years ago went to defending a war that met no criteria of Just War and to sneering at two popes and the bishops of the world for their “ivory tower” thinking, so an enormous amount of energy now goes to defending a draft-dodging sex predator who mocks POWs, spits in the face of a Gold Star family and, most recently, openly confesses to obstructing justice. Why is defending any of that filth (or the literally hundreds of other lies he has told) the #1 priority of “prolife” Catholics? Because the real #1 priority is not stopping abortion but defending every lie, cruelty and incompetence of the Party of Trump. Indeed, one of the most beloved strategies of the “prolife” Christian is to use the unborn as a human shield in defense of every culture of death priority the Right advocates.

And the result is already being felt. The Church is bleeding to death as Millennials–who see what a whorehouse Trumpian Christians have made of the Faith–are fleeing. It’s why the ranks of “Nones” are swelling. Trump took the Religious Right to the top of a high mountain and showed them all the kingdoms of the world, saying “All this will I give you if you bow down and worship me” and they went for it in droves. Indeed, they are still over the moon for him as his AG stuffs the world’s largest gulag with more prisoners and profits from it personally. The adore that the Party of Trump wants to kick 24 million people off health care. They think it is fantastic that the EPA is gutting environmental protections. Cruelty is a feature, not a bug for these people. And so is stupidity. Truth is not a matter of words corresponding to reality. Truth is simply and solely a matter of what approved Culture War Leaders saying it is. It’s a triumph of nihilism. And yeah, it makes me mad as hell to watch it and watch supposed disciples of the Way, the Truth, and the Life leading the charge for lies while they spit in the face of the Holy Father and call him a Commie.

That’s not to say I don’t have a lot of respect for you as a writer. I do, and I think you’re spot on in a lot of your criticisms. In my view however, admonishment and public excoriation are two different things and when I read your stuff it makes me put my defenses up even when I agree. I think it’s the constant feeling of anger that I’m sensing that turns me off, whether that’s how you mean it to sound or not. With all of that said, I’m just a young, pro-life, conservative, Catholic never-Trumper who is just trying to learn so I have a questions that I hope to get answered. I just want you to know that despite the above criticism, I know that I may be utterly wrong (or at least mildly ignorant) and I am truly interested in learning from your answers if you have time and are willing to give them.

I appreciate that. I’m a work in progress here and I’m flying blind. Nothing prepared me for the reality we face: that all the stuff about the dictatorship of relativism and post-modernism that was discussed as *theory* by the Left 20 year ago is now being implemented in reality by the Right–and especially the Christian Right–in this hour. I know that anger has limited success in reaching people on the Right. But at the same time, I don’t know how to speak the truth about the filthy lies Christians are telling in their defense of this liar without hurting feelings and I don’t know that I think feeling don’t deserve hurting. The Trumpian subculture in the Church is a massive stain on the her witness and the insult and affront she presents to the Least of These in the name of Jesus is a colossal scandal. The main reason I write is not to affirm butthurt narcissists in their okayness when they blithely send a Honduran mother and her five year old to their doom. It’s to tell people rightly scandalized by the casual cruelty of Good White Christian Trump supporters that the Church that is actually in union with the Holy Father denounces and detests this evil done in the precious Name of Jesus and that not all Catholics consent to this second betrayal of Christ in his little ones.

How would you describe your method of evangelization as far as your online presence goes and how would you describe your success in evangelization in general? I don’t necessarily like the worlds “method” and “success” because they seem too formulaic but I think you’ll understand the question regardless. I ask this because I’m trying to shape my own way of going about the universal call to mission so I’m curious as to what you think works and doesn’t as you do it for a living.

My method is to leave the ninety and nine Good White Christian Trump supporters and, following the lead of Pope Francis, to go to those on the peripheries: the poor whom Christ blessed being trampled by the brutality of Christians in the thrall of the Party of Trump as they kick millions off health care and lie that there is not even a right to health care despite the clear teaching of the Church to the contrary; Catholics of color scandalized by the thumping racism of their Trumpified brethren; non-Catholics and non-Christians stunned by the cruelty and selfishness of the Trumpified Church and yet attracted to the witness of Francis and trying to make sense of the Church’s teaching and the mystery of those who announce themselves Real Catholics[TM] while spitting on almost all of that teaching in favor of a lying sex predator and crook.

I really struggle with all this because I am perfectly aware that anger is a sin and I am flummoxed by stuff like Paul’s advice to “be angry and sin not”(whatever that means). I take it to confession constantly and and ask for advice and counsel because, as a I say I feel like I’m flying blind. I find it extraordinarily hard to endure the sort of people who, in one breath blithely tell me that families ripped apart and deported over some jot or tittle in paperwork had it coming but the really serious thing is how butthurt they feel because somebody said a cross word to them about their casual inhumanity. I’m aware–acutely aware–that contempt is a sin and a gravely serious one. I’m also aware that I feel it deeply and have succumbed to it repeatedly. It is a frequent subject of my prayers, because I feel torn between no giving in to it and wanting to say honestly to God what I feel and not lie to him. I honestly don’t know what to do. My goal is to change minds of those who advocate what I regard as vile evil but, failing that, to at least console those who are scandalized by such evil that they are not alone and that the Church is with them, not against them, as they face it. I try to get feedback (and letters like your are part of how I navigate). But it’s hard.

Thanks for reading this and for whatever time you’re able to share with me.

I hope this blather helps give some sense of where I am. God made man to serve him wittily, in the tangle of his reason. Mine is pretty tangled.

The Tom Kreitzberg Formula for Tribalist Intercessory Prayer

September 26, 2016 By Mark Shea

Several years back Tom Kreitzberg formulated this handy metric for how to pray for culture war friends and foes:

I am now being informed that though Trump is a confessed fornicator who dodged the draft and spent years dodging STDs as his personal Vietnam (but is still qualified to mock POWs and spit on Gold Star families), a man so vengeful he punished an infant nephews with cerebral palsy in a spat over daddy’s money and has never apologized for it, a Christian who has never seen any reason to ask God for forgiveness, and a massively documented liar whose lies dwarf Clinton’s, nonetheless we must pray for his victory since “the heart of the King is in the hands of the Lord” and God can, as with Cyrus (the anointed of God) use him for His own good purposes. Indeed, Michael Voris informs us that Trump is like God’s Chosen Vessel Constantine:

Therefore churlish unforgiving Christians are simply mean-spirited and heartless if they will not cut slack for this admittedly-rough-around-the-edges-but-golden-hearted hero king. We have to be willing to see what God could do with him if he converts, which God is capable of doing, you know!

But, of course, there is zero point in praying for Hillary. She is “pure evil”. Satanic. Irredeemable. Sure, she’s a baptized Christian and practicing Methodist, but there is no hope at all for her. God is powerless to convert her heart. Prayers for her are a waste of time and a vote cast for her in the hope that God might change her or use her in some way is perverse stupidity. God can only change Republican hearts. Nothing she has ever done and said or will ever do and say is good in any way. Praying for her is just wilful self-blindness. It really just reveals how perverse and stubborn the person praying for her is. Probably they should be avoided as apostates too.