In the comments section of another thread, I wrote in response to a commenter:
“. . .it is extremely distressing to me that so many Catholics are willing to make a decision about our fellows, stick a label on them and figure they know all about them and can ever-dismiss them as “that sort” of Catholic, or not as good a Catholic or the wrong sort of Catholic than you know…”better” Catholics.”
To that another commenter wrote:
This is where you completely lose me . . . a broad question in general: Are you asserting that there is no such thing as a heretic?
Is a “catholic” who openly opposes The Church on matters such as gay-marriage, birth-control, abortion, women priests, masturbation….etc, a “good” Catholic, or a bad Catholic? And if we can’t label what is “bad”- then how can we possible recognize what is “good”?
This “no labels” business smacks of the root cause of most of our societal ills. It is (I believe) the calling card of progressive moral relativism. Where am I wrong here?
Anyone who believes that I am either a progressive or a moral relativist is quite mistaking the matter; in a way, though, this commenter helpfully demonstrated exactly my concern; I used the world “labels” and he immediately associated that with something he distrusts, and began to assign the worst possible motives to my meaning. I appreciate, though, that he actually asked for clarification, rather than calling me a name and stomping off, mind all made up. We are doing the latter too much, too frequently, in our society, and it is destroying us.
My point was not about the failed and silly “no labels” movement, but about the ragtag way we dismiss others because we think we know all about them, based (usually) on slender evidence and (often) misunderstanding, just as the reader misunderstood me. I’ve had several people ask me why I have linked to certain writers or websites because “he’s not a perfect Catholic; she admits she struggles with some things, and that’s not a good example of faith; it’s not what you should be promoting here, blah, blah, blah, I thought you were a good Catholic, but you’re not. There are hardly any true Catholics left! Woe! Woe! Woe!”
Okay, that’s a paraphrase, but it’s a pretty accurate reflection of what I routinely see in my emails from “true” Catholics, who seem not to realize that the Body of Christ has many members, each in various stages of formation, understanding, knowledge, detachment and states of grace; each struggling with something because the life of faith is always one of struggle, and — unless you are supremely gifted and graced outside the norm — questioning. God has shown himself, throughout scripture, to be pretty tolerant of questions — he heard them often enough in both testaments. It is perfectly possible to be unsettled on some issues and still be — as both Dorothy Day and Elizabeth Ann Seton called themselves — “obedient [children] of the church.” In Day’s case, where she wondered, and questioned, she submitted in obedience, trusting that the church had the truth and that she would one day comprehend it all, and that, to my way of thinking, is what mattered.
But Day’s obedience was informed obedience, not blind. So, yes, I can see a world of Catholic people who are often uninformed, often undereducated in their faith — so much so that they really don’t even know what it is they don’t know, or what to do with their questions, because they think they do know — and staggering along as best they can, and I can respect the struggle and feel called to atone for it.
And yes, I can resist the urge to cry “heresy.”
Given the woeful state of Catholic catechesis and the fact that (I think we can agree, here) most of the world is not in its right mind, I am extremely reluctant to throw the word “heretic” around so easily, in any case. A large component of sin is “intention.” While some things are obvious to people (we must not murder, we must not steal . . .) much — very much — has become amorphously gray and relative in people’s understanding. We’ve had five decades of blaring media propaganda serving the dictatorship of relativism, and during the media’s ascendancy and domination the church dropped the ball on explaining itself, teaching itself, nurturing right-reason and sacramental awareness. Our schools stopped teaching critical thinking a long time ago, and our church dumbed itself down, not in its official pronouncements (which let’s face it most Catholics do not read) but in its CCD programs and from its pulpits. If one is uninformed — if the only understanding someone has of, say, the abortion issue, comes from what one sees of the extremists highlighted by the press, arguments made in highly emotional states and represented by wild-eyed screamers (you do not see the youthful, joyful annual March for Life covered in the mainstream, after all) and that caricature is played against years of secular indoctrination — do you think that person truly understands the issue enough, or that their uninformed (and probably hardly thought about) opinion can then speak to intention which I believe must be a part (but certainly not the whole) of any heretical pronouncement?
We have a rule in our family: you may disagree and argue with someone on any topic as long as you can first state your opponent’s position to his satisfaction. Most folks cannot state the Catholic position on birth control, gay marriage, abortion or divorce with any understanding beyond crude bumperstickerspeak and caricature. They may say “the church hates abortion and gay marriage” but they won’t be able to articulate an understanding as to why. In this case, the heresy may be rooted in an ignorance that distorts intention, and the fault of their ignorance lies with all of us. In that case, if there is heresy, then we all of us have contributed to it, either by refusing to learn, refusing to teach, or teaching in a manner so off-putting as to foment resistance or dismissal.
Critical thinking contains within it a component of discernment, one that moves beyond keenness of thought and into the realm of transcendent thinking — thinking that weighs all matters of substance and dares to incorporate the language and lessons of faith-orientation, in order to come to one’s fullest understanding. For Catholics, an attitude of “discernment” ought rightly be part of our every undertaking, including our political cognizances, but discernment has the potential to turn our ideas topsy-turvy, and surprise us in where we are led. During the height of the “torture and rendition” debate I struggled to align what I considered a “logical” support for torture with my Church’s position against it and could not do it; weighing feelings and worldly logic against scripture and the deeper reasonings of the church, I had no choice but to finally admit — no matter how resistant I tried to be — that the church’s teaching held the fullness of truth (how inconvenient!) and I could not simply ignore it or will the truth away.
If Catholics routinely applied a mindset of discernment to all of the issues that engage their passions, I do believe they would find that their ideologies would not align well with their theologies, with the “progressives” forced to admit to the Just truths that undercut their feelings, and “conservatives,” likewise compelled to blur the starkest of their hard lines, for the sake of truth’s Mercy. In Christ, Justice and Peace are met, and his church is forever teaching at that line of theological scrimmage, which is why both left and right find themselves alternately applauding and damning the bishops, depending on the issue.
To teach discernment is to teach a depth of thinking that precludes ignorance (which tries to ignore), and that sort of informed thinking would necessarily then clarify and form our intentions. It would force, for instance, a man who believes he intends “good” things for women to ultimately confront the fact that his support for abortion is harmful to a woman’s spiritual (and possibly her physical) well-being, and that it is an absolutely negative act against life and thus inherent and objective evil.
The “concern” or “love” for humanity that so often animates our position may be a genuine feeling of sympathy or empathy, but discernment roots such sentiments into the non-negotiable and solid commitment we must make to the dignity of the human person, which is where the depths of our love is tested and found true or false. It is there, in discernment bound by love, that all of our comfortable assurances can suddenly vanish. And yes, then we’re a bit vulnerable, and in vulnerability, we turn ever-Godward.
Just this morning in my email I got a note regarding a prominent pro-lifer who said of the death of Betty Ford,
“While I empathize with the loss Betty Ford’s family and friends must be feeling at her death, I do not lament the passing of any unrepentant leader of the pro-abortion movement, bluntly speaking. The world is a safer place for children with one less person facilitating their murders.”
That sort of false-empathy and stridency does much more to hurt the pro-life movement than to help it. It is an almost inhuman pronouncement. It takes in to account nothing about Mrs. Ford’s life but her pro-choice stance, and is so narrow in focus and so extreme that it comes perilously close to suggesting that a) the complex totality of a human being’s life is meaningless and b) reducing the worth of human beings to their (often poorly thought out) political positions is acceptable and c) the death of an ideological opponent can be shrugged off for the cause.
Those three suggestions, if given credit, would create a dreadful world for the very children the pro-lifer is intending to save.
The statement by this woman, who earnestly believes that she is all about life, is ultimately all about destruction. She creates another extremist caricature that the media can use against pro-lifers; she reduces our church’s extremely nuanced and reasonable teachings about the nature of sin, human understanding and God to a stark and merciless pronouncement that — in a profoundly ironic way — strips Mrs. Ford, and the pro-lifer and her whole movement, of precisely that dignity of the human person she says she is devoted to. Further, she distorts and misrepresents the whole idea of a loving and merciful God.
Seen in that light, her pronouncement seems so harmful to the faith, to life, and to the Body of Christ that it could be counted every bit as heretical as the pronouncements of excommunicated women who ordain other women and then call themselves Roman Catholic priests.
But I don’t think the pro-lifer’s intention was to dehumanize Mrs. Ford or to misrepresent God or life or sin or mercy, and that is why I neither provide her name, nor fling the charge of heresy in her direction. I think she is simply so caught up in what she is doing (and perhaps in her media outlet) that she was thoughtless, and not calling on all she does know about her faith, about her own sinfulness, her own imperfect understanding and the mercy of God.
And we all do that, from time to time.
Heresy resides in all of us, in one way or another, and increasingly I am coming to realize that the corny old song “Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me…” is speaking a truth. Pope Benedict XVI has said, “God does not force us to believe in Him, but draws us to himself through the truth and goodness of his incarnate Son.” This is for all of us; its truth belies all of the divisions we create, and negates all of our excuses; it calls to the stabilization of all our excesses and the righting of all of our intentions, through discernment. If we want to change the world, we begin here, allowing ourselves to be drawn to Jesus Christ, sitting at the Master’s feet and taking his instructions to heart.
Perhaps if all of us turned off the TV, shut down the internet, silenced the iPods and spent 15-30 minutes a day taking instruction in his presence or beneath his Cross, our humility would be such that we could never cry out “heretic” without first proclaiming it for ourselves.
UPDATE:
By the purest of co-incidences, Max is touching on a little of this, as well.
Gerard Nadal on Betty Ford
James
I guess most of us are heretics. Peace.
This is one of the best blog posts I’ve ever read, and on an issue that is really important for Catholics today, and that also applies to the broader culture of judgmentalism we constantly encounter in America (even from people who decry judgmentalism). I’m going to put a permanent link to this post on my own blog, because it expresses my own thinking so well, even better than I could, in fact. Thank you!
So we all become wet noodles and be nice. Great.
(Manny said – “James I guess most of us are heretics. Peace.
”)
Probably, yes.
At least at some point in our lives. I know I certainly have been. And I have to constantly remind myself of that when I point out the heresy of others. In fact, in my youth I forced a young woman into an abortion. I carry that scar with me always. I can never forget the fact that I was responsible for another human beings death. So when I point out the heresy of abortion- I point the finger at myself for my past aggressions first and foremost.
The timeless words of St. Paul have a very significant meaning for me at this stage of my spiritual development:
“So then, my beloved, obedient as you have always been, not only when I am present but all the more now when I am absent, work out your salvation with fear and trembling. ”
If there is one simple lesson in all of this- I believe it is this:
LOVE.
Love the heretic- because most of us have been the heretic.
Peace Be With You also Manny.
Pride is the vice that infects all. Its pride that makes the heretic not see his/her error when it is pointed out.
It is pride that makes the uber-traditionalist to see heresy in everything not agreeable to them… though what they disagree with is not necessarily heretical.
The Temple in Jesus’ time is a microcosm of the Church… overall. There were many sects within its walls; Sadducees who believed in no resurrection of the body (let’s call them the Protestants analogous to their denial of the Real Presence), Pharasees who were uber-mosaic traditionalists seeing blaspheme in all things not of their liking to the point they could NOT recognize their God in their midst because of their pride (do i need to make the connection?), the Essenes ( probably where Jesus’ family belonged since they tended to be more humble), the Scribes. this doesn’t even mention the converts of Hellenistic descent.
The point is that it is best to leave the cries of heresy to the Bishops, and Cardinals (with the help of canon lawyers) since they are the ones charged with leading US, the flock. In my experience, those most willing to cry out “heretic”, are those who feel it in their right to create schism in the name of the Church. As Jesus said as I paraphrase, “take out the beam in your own eye before you take out the splinter in your brother’s”.
Look to your own reverence and understanding before you look into others. And when correction is needed… provide it with love and understanding because you are going to be judged the way you judge others and I know for myself, no matter how many times I think I got it all correct, there’s always something that I get wrong.
I know I’ve posted far too many times on this thread, and for that I apologize to everyone. But I just wanted to say, that even though I may disagree with a few points of the Anchoress on this topic, overall I believe she is spot-on.
And I feel she has done a truly admirable job of stating the vital balance of orthodoxy and love. After all- what good is orthodoxy without Christ’s compassionate love? The love of Christ is the singular thing that fulfilled the Law by giving Spirit to the Law.
Thank you for a wonderfully profound post Anchoress. Everyday you demonstrate that you are one of the best Catholic Bloggers around.
Peace.
Thank you. And thanks to the Concord Pastor who took me to the article and to your site. Your wisdom is seed that has fallen on fertile ground and I will do my best to share its fruits.
Michael Voris says it best in:
“What Crisis?” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0Iwv6q4BYI
Or see”Obamagedden”..about the decaying of morality.
Well done, Anchoress. Quite a bit to chew on there (and in the comments as well).
James, don’t apologize for adding substance to the conversation. I suspect you are correct. There is far more heresy around us and in us than we should care to admit. Modern culture is a dangerous and powerful current and even those who strive to swim against it can tire and get carried along before resuming the effort.
One thing is proven by the post and following comments. The Catholic Church itself has done a very poor job over the last hundred years or so of defining exactly what heresy is and the consequences of being a heretic in real terms. It has turned tolerance into a core element of the Church which has of course fostered things like the priest abuse scandal, the widespread use of birth control which kills babies and leads to what Pope Paul VI warned about in Humane Vitae. It has given the Democratic Party room to allow Katholic politicians to keep abortion alive and well in our country leading to 54 million babies killed in the womb. There was a reason the church had for defining teaching and for the use of words like heresy and for excommunication. It showed the boundaries one could go to as sinning Catholics and where we would be cut off from Jesus Christ Church in very clear terms.
When Christ said you had to eat His flesh and drink His blood, many said this was too harsh, to had to believe, to hard to follow. But Christ did not flinch and run after them saying “wait, those words might have been to harsh for you. Let me phrase those differently so that you can in the end do as you please.” He turned and asked his apostles as to step up as well or if they wanted to leave along with the rest. He also said those who follow must pick up their cross and that they would be persecuted. Those who persecute are those who have denied Christ and the teaching of His Church. When the priests and lay Catholics who signed the page in the Wall Street Journal against the Catholic teaching Humane Vitae were not immediately called to Rome to repent or face removal from our Church in a very public way, we started down a very bad road.
What the Church needs is leadership with strong faith and belief that they shout forth boldly and for the layity to choose to follow or to leave. Dissent has its place, but not when souls are lost in the process. Many complain the Church has not done a good job teaching, but if there is nothing done when the students stand up and shout down the teacher day after day, you have no ability to teach in that environment. There is room for questions and clarification, but not outrigh open dissent. That is heresy and needs to be removed for the cancer it is within the Catholic Church. Not removing it has given us what we have today so demostrated here for all to see. Nothing wrong with naming heresy and with public excommunication from the Church. Christ would approve. If there is public repentence, Christ and the Church would also welcome them back with love.
Greta,
Very well said. A perfect compliment to the point I was trying to make. Heresy is well defined. Within the Catholic community, there are too many “Catholics” who like to call themselves such yet would be more comfortable within another denomination. I am Catholic because I believe the Church has the COMPLETE FULLNESS of the faith. Not all can say that. Your points on excommunication are spot on. I would say though, correction and even excommunication can still be accomplished compassionately. The stridency of many is the bigger turnoff and accomplishes nothing except promulgate a “holier than thou” attitude. The Cardinals and Bishops must find their courage in accomplishing their roles in this regard but its not the first time many Cardinals and Bishops ran from their Master. I recall one Thursday evening when 2 betrayed Him, 9 ran away. One stayed but kept his distance until the end.
BTW- Yes Peter betrayed Him too, but he repented.
This may be my one point of agreement with Greta, ever, sort of. The Church is in this state because it tries to have it both ways. It wants the power and prestige that apparently come from being able to claim 1 billion members, knowing full well that perhaps only a quarter to a half of that number are true members, ie believe and follow the key teachings with any semblance of orthodoxy.
A big part of that problem is the fact that being Catholic is not a conscious choice for most people. You’re baptized often out of cultural and ethnic momentum, and there’s no real provision for becoming an “ex” Catholic. One in 10 adults in this country considers themselves to be an ex-Catholic. On paper, they’re all still counted as members. Is it any wonder there’s a lot of heterodox views out there?
(archangel said – “and even excommunication can still be accomplished compassionately.”)
a point of clarification here: Part of the premise of excommunication IS compassion. It’s purpose is not only punishment, but to prevent the heretic from inflicting further damage to their soul by receiving communion in a state of fallen grace. Hence the term Excommunication (Latin ex, out of, and communio or communicatio, communion — exclusion from the communion)
@kenneth (62) True on all counts. All very valid points for all Catholics to consider.
@Doc Thank you.
When I was still a pagan, I was pro-choice. One day I went to church with a friend and her mother and saw pictures of dismembered babies. Wait a minute. Those are babies! Those are people! I didn’t become pro-life right away but I never forgot that day. It is one of the reasons I believe in using graphic photos of abortions, similar to my school days when they made us watch films of the concentration camps. Look! Look and see what was done. Don’t turn away but look! See the reality of what people can do.
I didn’t understand before that. I really don’t think I could have been held accountable for being pro-choice. Our Lord really meant it when he said, “Father forgive them. They don’t know what they are doing.”
I think Mrs. Ford and so many of that era where duped into thinking that abortion was good for women and not killing. I like to think they were duped. Because if they are fully aware and keep to that to the end, I can’t image that God wouldn’t honor their freedom of choice. It may sound rough, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately on heaven and hell, free will and mercy, and it doesn’t look as good as I originally thought. (Matt 7:13-14). Makes me want to stop looking.
It’s odd that with R v. W, the movement in this country to include people (end of slavery, women’s voting rights, civil rights movement, etc.) turned a corner suddenly demanded to exclude people (unborn). The desire to include everyone is something that many pro-choice people have. It is maybe one of the best points on which to begin a discussion with them.
I’ve also seen those same pictures. I met the people picketing a well traveled road with these giant posters and talked with them at length. Spiritually speaking, they were the ugliest souls I’ve ever met. They were motivated not by any true love of life but by righteous anger and a hatred of women that was seething from their very pores.
Then they went after my job after I wrote a story which mentioned in passing that they had suffered a minor legal setback from a court ruling about clinic protests etc. They were absolute psychos who did a great deal to convince me that I could never make common cause with the “pro-life” movement. I’m still quite happily a pagan for reasons which have nothing to do with the abortion issue one way or another.
Yes, Holly, a lot of women were duped into thinking abortion was all about being liberated, and free, and being able to have sex-without-strings-attached, just like a man.
It wasn’t.
Many women were duped by the media, and proggressive-think; some of them only realized the depth of the deception when they had children ourselves. Some of them probably new only too well what they were doing—but managed to convince themselves it was for the good of humanity. Or something.
‘And yes, I can resist the urge to cry “heresy.”’
+++++++++++++++++++++++++
A Catholic ought to be as vigilant against heretics as St. John the Evangelist was…
“St. John was within the public baths of Ephesus and a heretic came in from the other end…. Word of his presence got to the other side to St. John. Now this is the Apostle that preached Love, right? St. John, the one who said God is Love. In his old age, the only thing St. John could say was ‘Love God….’ He got word that a heretic had just come in the building, he leaped up, grabbed his clothes and ran out of the building yelling ‘run for your lives, the heretic just came in the house.’ That was his attitude.”
“Perhaps if all of us turned off the TV, shut down the internet, silenced the iPods and spent 15-30 minutes a day taking instruction in his presence or beneath his Cross, our humility would be such that we could never cry out “heretic” without first proclaiming it for ourselves.”
Pure gold. Well said.
Kenneth: I”m sorry you were treated so badly.
I was run off the road once, along with an elderly couple, when a car with a couple of pagan women turned their car into us as we were standing at a legal place praying the rosary near an abortion clinic. We had to jump on the grass or get hit. Do I think all pro-choice people are like that? No. Do I hate all pagans or all pro-choice people because that? No. Do I think they have hatred oozing from their pores and that they are homicidal maniacs? No. A few people will do bad things, that’s all. Most people aren’t like that.
My point was that pro-choice people are motivated by wanting to help women. That is common ground as far as I’m concerned. We just need to get them to add the babies to their list of people who also need their help. The pictures show just how much they need that help.
On women being duped..nope, don’t buy that. It is as old as Eve and Satan in the garden. What women and men for that matter wanted was sex without responsibility. Freedom is not to do anything we want, but to freely choose to do what we are supposed to do taking up the reponsibility for our actions or taking up our cross. Too many think abortion is all about women. It has at least as much to do with men who have gone along willingly for obvious reasons.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn certainly had face to face contact with evil built around a godless socialist state which the left is trying to create in the USA. A one time supporter of the Marxist ideas, he came to see that Christianity is man’s only hope and salvation. He estimated that between 1918 and 1959, 66 million people died in the soviet gulags, roughly eleven times the number which perished in Nazi death camps. We have lost 54 million babies to the holocaust of abortion. I cannot accept letting anyone off the hook who does not do everything possible, including being vocal and in other faces or showing the impact of what the baby has gone through who supports this evil or who is indifferent. Solzhenitsyn says that what happened in the soviet union had more to do with those who did not want to stand up and say anything or to offend anyone else or were too busy to get involved. While living in the West in Vermont, he wrote about his sadness about what he saw happening here. I have so often been disappointed by our “Christian Leaders” and finding Solzhenitsyn was very important in my life. When awarded the Nobel Prize in 1970, he was not able to leave Russia to recieve it but sent this message. He contrasts two kinds of artist writers: one who “see himself as the creator of an independent spiritual world” and a second who “recognizing a higher power above, gladly works as a humble apprentice beneath God’s heaven” of which he counted himself in the second camp. His works always include the triune of creation, fall, and redemption. His view of America, a country that had lead the fight to his freedom and who had given him home and wealth, was that we were in decline due to the loss of a sense of the distinction between good and evil. “I am a critic of the weakness of the West. I am a critic of a fact which we can’t comeprehend: how can one lose one’s spirtual strength, one’s will power and , possessing freedom, not value it, not be willing to make sacrifices for it, not be willing to speak out frankly and boldly even in the face of criticism. Tolerance of evil just might be greater than the evil itself.”
If only the people had said not to Hitler, no to Lenin and Stalin, when they started to propose evil, how many millions could have been saved. If only we who are supposed to be Christians had stood up when Roe was made law and said that this will not stand and any politicians who supports this evil, any party that supports this evil against God and humanity will never be elected in this country again, how many babies would have been saved? If we said no to judges who decide to legislate from the bench removing our freedom of speech and our freedom to vote in a land of the people, by the people, and for the people in one nation UNDER GOD, we would not be in serious trouble and decline today. Stand up and shout for out lives, our liberty, and our sacred honor are being lost in the form of tolerance of evil. Read the works of one who suffered in a godless state of socialism where atheism is the state religion and the government tells us everything we are supposed to do and believe and who decides what rights we will have in this country. Europe is almost lost and the godless in this country are trying to do the same here. The Anchoress is a gifted writer who can do so much with her talent. Maybe she needs a heavy dose of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn to put that talent to work combating evil over preaching tolerance with evil. When one quibbles over something being a heresy or not, we might be losing the way. I think what our government has become and is trying to reach for is a pure heresy of the Constitution and the idea of all our rights coming from our Creator and I think those who claim to be Catholic should follow the clear teaching found in the documents of Christ Church. If someone does not practice the faith and accept the teaching as defined and seek out those teaching on our own every day, whether they are a heretic, an apostate, or a sinner, they have sepeated themselves from Christ and His Church. He gave the keys of the kingdom to Peter and down through the years all the way to Benedict XVI. Go for the apple if you want, but it is filled with worms.
Greta, excellent post!
mmmmmm……Apples! (in Homer Simpson voice)
Am with you Greta.
Kenneth from his posts certainly seems to love the worm filled apples. I find it interesting that someone who does not believe in God spends so much time on a Catholic blog site. Could be those worm filled apples are not digesting very well in his life and he has to try to find a way to try to get adam to go along with his diet…
Loves abortion, loves homosexual special rights, and does not believe in God. You might need to find a way to Christ as He is the only thing that will ever settle your insides ken…
Greta, what is happening here, on the Anchoress’ blog, is something I see happening all over the non-Leftwing blogsphere.
It seems to me that there is, at the moment, a desire to retreat from the very real problems of this world; a desire to turn inward, to focus on ourselves, and our own sins (a process that seems to be less about repentance than it is about simply focusing on ourselves); to sigh, “Both sides have sinned!” and then become obsessed over the alleged sins of some other group—any other group; it can be Palin supporters, and/or haters, people who are “intolerant”, who are too “judgmental” or some other Christian denomination we don’t happen to approve of. (Look at the way some Protestants constantly tear into the Catholic Church.)
Except Islam. Islam is something we’d really rather not talk about.
We’re hoping for a spring—not just an “Arab Spring”, but for one to break out all over. It’s not happening. We’re stuck in a long, hot summer. Meanwhile, militant Islam is on the rise, our country is in dire straits economically, Christians and Jews are being persecuted worldwide—but, isn’t Mitt Romney a Mormon? Isn’t that dreadful? Is it good? Are Mormons the other? Or are they just one Other? Are we being too judgmental about abortion? What about gay marriage? Let’s talk about gay marriage some more! It hasn’t been talked quite to death yet, has it?
(No, I’m not saying the Anchoress does all these things; these are things I’ve noticed on blogs in general; a general inward turn, rather than one that’s facing outward.)
(As for Kenneth, I’ve asked him before why he bothers posting here, and never got a really satisfactory answer; he said, as I recall, that he wanted to see views other than his own—but considering how little he likes the ones he sees here, I don’t really know what he’s up to.)
Speaking of the Pope….
Here’s a thought…. “Nor does it have to do with love if heresy is allowed to spread and the faith twisted and chipped away, as if it were something that we ourselves had invented.”-PBXVI
“Roma locuta est, causa finita est.” St. Augustine
I’m with the guy who learned that when left to his own ideas and methods, and his own way of doing things, disorder and narcissism are the end result.
We’ve had a large blessing over the last 100 years, at least, in that our Popes have all given us great example. A shame that, given such a grace from God, we so often have chosen to ignore it, and listen rather, to our own clever little ideas.
“Nor does it have to do with love if heresy is allowed to spread and the faith twisted and chipped away, as if it were something that we ourselves had invented.”
Another gem from yet another shining Pope!