Ouch

“I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky”. – Flannery O’Connor

O’Connor must be a librul CINO. Probably a socialist who doesn’t believe in subsidiarity.

Speaking of which, I was utterly amazed to look in the other day on the Defense of Michael Voris piece I wrote (I’d sort of drifted away from the comboxes after they had undergone the usual entropy that afflicts such conversations) only to find this astounding quote from a reader:

I do believe that Rafe’s one of these “so called Catholics,” in name only. His creative fiction belongs in Hollywood where he’s sure to make a hit. True Catholicism/Christianity is NOT after the big bucks, but in exposing the “Truth.”

So now, not even a worker at RCTV who has labored tirelessly to spread the Faith, who has written an apology filled with sorrow, contrition, and a firm purpose of amendment and who was filled with anguish and wrestling with his conscience even as he was experimenting with writing a role-playing game–even he is not pure enough for the Truly True Secret Catholic Preservation Society. He is “one of these ‘so-called Catholics'”. A fifth columnist! A fake! Catholic in Name Only! He must be purged! We must remain perpetually vigilant because the Impure can worm their way even into the inmost interior of the purest apostolate on planet Earth!

Sheesh!

Also, where do such Inquisitors get the idea that somebody writes an RPG in order to make “big bucks” or go Hollywood? Must be the same place they receive their information about how “bloggers” are “in it for the money”. Yeah. Blogging. Your ticket to boundless wealth. And don’t forget the power and the hot chicks that go with it too. Once I was nothing. Then I discovered blogging and now I stride the corridors of riches and power with a smokin’ hot babe on each arm. No more of that Jesus and the Church stuff for me. Give me the Mammon and Eros that only a blog can bestow on puny mortal flesh. Faustus, thou art my tutor!

This sort of rubbish illustrates everything I was trying to say here about the tendency of this small but growing subculture in the Church to eat its young. The notion that Simon Rafe–Simon Freaking Rafe–is a CINO who cares nothing about the Faith and is a sinister fifth columnist bent on Mammon is a classic example of what I mean when I say that the inquisitorial culture Voris is fostering is not primarily attacking Progressive Dissent. It is teaching Catholics to attack faithful struggling Catholics and label them as enemies of the Faith–and teaching them to feel proud of themselves for doing it. It will come to no good and Mr. Voris had better be extremely sure to memorize and internalize the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant. Because his inquisitor fans, not his Progressive Dissenting enemies, will eat him alive when (not if) it is found that he is as sinful and weak as all the rest of us mortals.