Once upon a time, I wrote a piece about “Truth Cancer“: the odd way heresies have of mutating into their opposites. So, for instance, 17th century New England Calvinism, so passionate about the glory of God the Father, mutated into Boston Unitarianism, which is skeptical about the very existence of God and horrified at the patriarchy of calling God “Father”. Similarly, Arianism (likewise so obsessed with the glory of God that Father that it denied the deity of the Son... Read more
Heresy is not so much a lie as an infected, inflamed, and cancerous truth. It takes one or two things out of the Tradition and then, like a metastasizing cancer attacking healthy tissue, attacks all the rest of the Catholic faith. Chesterton, writing nearly a century ago, describes the process: Now, it was just here that, for me, the business began to be odd and interesting. For, looking back on older religious crises, I seem to see a certain coincidence,... Read more
It’s called “Open Borders” and the Conservative Tradition: The Salamanca Scholastics” and is the first in a series documenting that support for open borders is the historical norm, and was embraced by all the intellectual giants of the conservative tradition before very recently, when the popular right went full xenophobic. By natural law and the law of nations everyone has the freedom to move wherever they wish, as long as they are not enemies or causing harm. — Domingo de Soto... Read more
When you object to the sexual abuse and torture inflicted on kidnapped children in ICE custody, you swiftly meet MAGA types (“prolife”, doncha know) who love to ring the changes on this bare-faced lie: The parents who are bringing their children on a dangerous journey from Central America to the USA are to blame for sexual assault. In addition to exonerating the sex predators who, you know, are the guilty parties, they also lie that refugees had some choice to... Read more
I offer thanks to all vets and apologies from a graceless and ungrateful country whose cowardly draft-dodging leader insults Gold Star families, slimes decorated war heroes as traitors, and deports them for being brown after they put their lives on the line for us. We do not deserve you and you do not deserve such appalling use at the hands of such a vile man and his vile cronies. Tommy by Rudyard Kipling I WENT into a public ‘ouse to... Read more
A reader sent me this since I’m working on a book on the Creed: So I had fun. Plugged the Creed in Church Slavonic through Google Translate… Welcome to heresy, enjoy: They only believe in God the Father almighty, the creator of heaven and earth, I see all the time and invisible. And in the only Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, the only one born of the Father is born all the time. Holy Light, true God true, true,... Read more
Unlike an awful lot of “prolife” Catholics and other conservative white Christians, they are on the front lines when it comes to abolishing the death penalty, rather than fighting for this barbarity even against Holy Church herself. Here, for instance, is a statement from Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty (a nationwide group of conservatives questioning whether capital punishment is consistent with conservative principles and values due to the system’s inefficiency, inequity, and inaccuracy. Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty... Read more
As we saw yesterday, people who chatter about the Magisterial development regarding the death penalty seem oblivious to the really huge development of doctrine surrounding the Church’s extremely recent denunciation of slavery. What is notable to me is that all the Church has done with the death penalty is call it “inadmissible”. It does not declare the death penalty to be gravely and intrinsically immoral. It just says, “Don’t kill people if you don’t have to–and you don’t have to. ... Read more
…seem to me to be utterly oblivious to the Church’s development of doctrine with respect to slavery. Reader Raphael Winters chronicles this development: The Catholic Church from the time of the Apostles tolerated the practice of slavery. Was there critique? Yes. Was there regulation? Yes. Was kidnapping eventually outlawed? Yes. The classical liberal (conservative) will attempt to make the case that the catholic church universally condemned slavery since the beginning, and seize upon a few critiques or summaries in order to... Read more
Sez he: I’m nine years a convert to the Catholic Faith, three years a ‘tradvert’, and currently thick as thieves with those Fr Z/Steve Skojec/Taylor Marshall/Cardinal Burke-loving characters who cause you and your readers such grief and distress for the future of the Church in America. The rules of tribal combat would indicate that I should join them in grinding your heart and soul into the dust and doing my level-best to drive you out of the flock once and... Read more
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