Catholic and Enjoying It!
This time, the shady crank is one Maria Divine Mercy, who issues anonymous, unapproved “prophetic” BS from Ireland about end times rubbish–and so is naturally battened on by the astoundingly discernment-free cadre of private revelation enthusiasts who seem to form a significant subset of those who regard themselves as Truly True Catholics. Jimmy gives plenty of reasons why anybody in their five wits should steer a wide berth around this quackery and points sane people back toward common sense and the actual teaching of the Church. So naturally, the uber-Catholics turn up to announce their superior truly true Catholic cred and denounce him as a one of those half-breed Protestant converts:
Mr Akin, you are the messenger of Satan. I call upon all God’s children to pray for you.
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Mr Akin still writes with the arrogance of a former protestant with no proof that MDM is false.
Pray with the humility of Our Blessed Mother for true discernment.
It’s articles like this that will stop all subscriptions to nc register.
Plus lots of crap about the False Prophet and The Warning and fearmongering about the papal election. What garbage like the “prophecies” of “Maria Divine Mercy” do is prey on the fears of a laity whose faith is already weak. She provides a fertile breeding ground for schism, because if the election doesn’t go the way the paranoid reactionary crank likes, then he can simply declare that this is the End Times, the False Prophet is now on the throne of Peter and the true Pope, or some spiritual Pope in the heavenlies somewhere, or some other projection of the crank’s imagination is now the “authority” to whom are “true Catholics” must submit. What this means in practice is what is known as “Protestantism” or the supremacy of private judgment over the Church’s actual teaching.
This is the judgement for hubris. I seriously cannot believe that anybody, much less roughly 40%-50% of the commenters on Jimmy’s thread could take this incredibly obvious quack seriously. But a good chunk of Jimmy’s readers range between “Let’s not be hasty. She has some important things to say” to “If you question her you are a minion of HELL!!” The deathless tendency of so many Faithful Conservative Catholics[TM] to give themselves over to Folk Heroes begins to appear to me to be part and parcel of its tendency toward holding itself up as the gold standard for truly true Catholicism while slyly saying, “I thank you, O God, that I am not like other men, or even like that damn librul Protestant Jimmy Akin”. I don’t envy Jimmy his thankless task of trying to warn this group of proud ingrates that they are, once again and of their own free will, making themselves complete suckers for a charlatan in their pride. When will they learn?
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