The Sheer Orwellianism of Crisis

For months I’ve listened to this sleight of hand from the “prolife” Right:

Black people protesting the latest murder of some black person by the cops: Black Live Matt…

Good White Prolifers: ALL LIVES MATTER!!!

Consistent Life Ethic Advocate: Very well. All lives matter. Then let’s listen to the Church and protect *all* life from conception to natural death.

Good White Prolifers: NO! YOU ARE REDEFINING WHAT IT MEANS TO BE PROLIFE! Only innocent lives matter! We must make open war on the Magisterial teaching against the death penalty!

No, bub. You are the one redefining what the Church says. Here is sinister modernist perverter of the faith Pope Francis Benedict XVI calling for protection of human life (all of it, not just the innocent) from conception to natural death:

Like his predecessor and successor, Benedict called for the abolition of the death penalty.

And by the way, “fair is foul and foul is fair”? Seriously? You guys invoke the witches of Macbeth to suggest the Francis is somehow monstrously evil to assert that we should not kill people when we don’t have to? This is a serious and Orwellian perversion of language. But then Crisis has been going down an Orwellian rabbit hole for years now in its increasing hostility to the Holy Father.

It’s really not complex. Don’t kill people if you don’t have to. The mere fact of their guilt does not mean that you “get” to kill them. We never “get” to kill people. Sometimes, on occasions now so rare that there is no point in maintaining it in law, we *have* to kill somebody. But the Church does not treat the taking of human life–even guilty human life–as a treat. It treats it as a tragedy and begs us to spare even the life of the guilty whenever possible.

Everywhere on earth Catholics are able to process the simple fact that unnecessarily taking human life inside the womb is obviously related to unnecessarily taking it outside the womb. The only people who have a problem with that are Communists, Muslim despots, and American conservatives.

And only one subset of that demographic–American Conservative Catholics–stubbornly persists in pitting the unborn against the Church’s teaching on capital punishment and using them as human shields to rationalize its war on the Church’s teaching to such a degree that it now uses the language of witchcraft–witchcraft!–to describe the Church’s teaching when it opposes the Culture of Death’s love of the death penalty.

Update:  Pete Vere, a canonist up in Canada and a Byzantine Catholic, who has been watching the bizarre disintegration of Francis-hating American conservatives in the thrall of Trump remarks:

The real story is in the article’s comments section, which reads like former SSPX bishop Richard Williamson’s newsletters minus the anti-semitism. We’re talking everything from accusation of Francis being an anti-pope imprisoning true pope Benedict in the Vatican basement, to allegations Francis is a communist conspiracy to overturn 2,000 years of Catholic teaching.

I suppose I should not be surprised. Crisis Magazine, at one time the reasoned voice of American Catholic political neo-conservatism, has in the era of Pope Francis and President Trump morphed (aka jumped the shark) into a Republican Rite Catholic equivalent to Utah Mormonism’s White Horse Prophecy, proclaiming Am Church the saviour of Catholicism held hostage by everyone else in the Church because of their loyalty to Pope Francis.

As I have said all along, the strongest apologetic for Pope Francis are the words and actions of his critics.