Vicious Cattiness for Jesus

So I take off for the holidays and leave a little piece on Thanksgiving that I wrote for OSV. In the comboxes below, this utterly irrelevant bit of nastiness ensues:

Check this out. Harsh.

http://arturovasquez.wordpress.c…hahn-superstar/
Grace | | Email | Homepage | 11.29.09 – 11:27 pm | #

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What?
you’re not interested in hearing his conversion story for the umpteenth time?
Debra | | 11.30.09 – 12:07 am | #

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Debra:

In a word: No!
Anonymous

So many things strike me about it. There’s the sheer irrelevance to the topic, of course. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s the glorying in maliciously landing some punches on Hahn for no reason other than that he was asked to speak somewhere and spoke. There’s the snotty contempt so illustrative of the old saying that no good deed goes unpunished. And, of course, there’s the sheer chickenhearted nastiness of “Anonymous”.

It’s all so perfectly small, nasty and puerile. The man does everything he can to bear witness to Christ with as much integrity as he can and he just gets it in the teeth from people who make it exceptionally clear that, if they could have things their way, there would be no troublesome converts to the Catholic faith at all.

The most hilarious thing, to me, is how the nasties live in such a vanishingly small bubble of internecine viciousness. Step outside the Bubble of “We Hate Converts” Tradism and you find, not that Hahn is a Superstar, but that Hahn is, like most people involved in Catholic evangelism, still a complete unknown to almost everybody in mass culture. You could stop a hundred people on the street and the odds are very low that they would have the slightest idea who he is. But inside the Bubble, he looms very large for the folks whose fondest wish is to tear down converts and contribute nothing but griping in its place. There’s something so nihilistic about it.

Hahn tells his story because people want to hear it. That’s more or less what St. Paul does too (three times!) in the book of Acts. Indeed, that’s pretty much how the tradition gets passed on. There is no gospel according to Jesus. Just the gospel according to the apostles, who tell what Jesus did. Nothing wrong with telling one’s story, particularly since it seems to scratch were so many Protestants itch and help them come into full communion with Holy Church. Only, that’s the problem, ain’t it? We Hate Converts Tradism resents and dislikes all those converts. I’ve met few people as dedicated as Scott is to surrendering himself to the teaching of Holy Church. No doubt he does so imperfectly. But he does it with an earnest will.

And he does not engage in the catty practice of badmouthing other Catholics behind their backs, nor the cowardice of shredding their reputations without giving them a chance to respond.

Despicable.