Christine Niles wrote me to say Michael Voris wanted to talk. I asked when would be a good time, but never heard back, so I just took a shot in the dark and called. Turns out they are, as you might have expected, very busy. So we’ll do it on Friday afternoon. Your prayers for that would be appreciated. It’s a positive sign that he made contact.
Erin Manning writes:
Mark, I read your piece on the liturgy today, and you know I agree with you on the substance. For me the lay women thing was cleared up when I learned that in the West the Church divided roles into clergy and lay, so that when formerly clerical roles were opened to lay men and boys there wasn’t a really good reason not to let lay women do them too (except for education and certain customs of not letting men and women mix in public settings, which died out a long time ago).
But the thing that has me worried is the combox tone. Whenever I’ve gotten really angry at commenters and wanted to swear at them (I’m bad at it, so I usually don’t anyway) it’s because I’ve lost sight of their humanity a little–easy to do when they’re telling me why abortion is grand or why anti-gay bigots deserve what’s coming, maybe, but that doesn’t excuse it. I get why the Trads can produce that level of anger–if they would use their faith and knowledge and so on for the good of the Church instead of constantly devolving into Us vs Everybody Else stuff–! One can only imagine. But at the same time, I’m a bit concerned about the spiritual effect this is having on you.
I know, I’ve got no right, etc., but I’ve been saying a daily Hail Mary for you for years now, so when I saw all that darkness today I got worried. Your heart is so much better than that, and the Trads really aren’t thinking with the mind of the Church on a lot of this stuff–which is exactly why the Church in her wisdom is tolerating them at present, something they never really seem to realize (which is maddening, sometimes, especially when you read their triumphant predictions about how the O.F. will be suppressed and women ordered to cover their heads again any day now–but I try to remember that actually they’re a bit insane about this stuff, and that the best thing a sane person can do when dealing with the insane is to humor the insanity without giving credence to it).
Erin, you’re a good egg and I appreciate your loving rebuke. Yeah. I’ve been on a pretty short fuse this week and I’ve been out of line–very out of line. Two hours of sleep in the last 48 haven’t helped. Nor did coming back from vacation to find my mailbox full of pitchfork-waving reactionaries denouncing people I like and respect as gutless cowards and money-grubbing whores, all on the word of a reckless and profoundly self-serving demagogue and hypocrite. Also unhelpful was the parade of reactionary lunacy from Pharisees announcing the End of Days because Pope Francis bowed courteously to a woman. This, piled on top of years and years of
and all coupled, as ever, with Reactionaries blubbering and wailing their victimized wail of self-pity when the whole world fails to accept their arrogant condemnations or recognize their arrogant superiority.
I won’t mince words: I can’t stand those kind of people and it is precisely those kind of people who are the common face of online Traditionalism–often to the horror and embarrassment of sane Traditionalists. Multiplied hundreds and hundreds of times over the years, the nauseating effect of their sin (and that’s what it is) piles up. And coupled with their endless pontifications on who needs to be kicked out of the Church (basically everybody who is not them) it added up to this in the past week:
In short, I chose not only to hate Reactionaries but to regard them with cold and resolute indifference (which is more serious since, as JPII observed, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference). The thing about coming to hate somebody is that you usually have plenty of really good reasons to do so. Lots of hatred is not irrational at all. It is highly rational: you can’t stand that guy or those people because they are a constant source of malice, pain, frustration, pig-headed sin and strained excuses for it all. So when people say things like, “Don’t give in to senseless hate!” you immediately think, “There’s nothing senseless about it. I can give you 20 excellent reasons right now why it makes perfect sense to hate those jerks.”
So you’re thinking, “Some apology, Mark. All you’ve done is say why you can’t stand Reactionaries.” Yes. That’s a feature, not a bug. I don’t know how to work through anger at repellent and unjust behavior without naming it for what it is. I don’t know how to forgive sin by pretending it doesn’t exist. Whereto serves mercy but to confront the visage of offense? And online Reactionary Traddery has piled up a mountain of offenses, not the least being its titanically prideful assumption that every time some Reactionary stabs some innocent in the ribs with a pious shiv he is “speaking truth to power” and the outrage he generates is entirely due to the guilty conscience of wretched sinners recoiling from the light of TRVTH.
No. It’s not. Very often–in fact, usually–it is normal people reacting to the disgusting pride of Pharisees tying up heavy burdens and not lifting a finger to help, or straining at gnats and swallowing camels, or compassing land and sea to make a single convert and making him twice the son of hell that they are. Online Reactionary Catholics are the single most toxic subculture I have ever encountered in the Church. Reactionary Catholicism spends its wasted time on legalistic trivia. It gets off on evil power trips by cruelly inflicting guilt on scrupulous people who are already staggering under heavy psychological burdens. Reactionaries pose as courageous defenders of the Faith while huddling in bunkers and attacking people who have made genuine sacrifices and suffered huge losses for Christ. One can only stand to listen to the threadbare “You have to understand how much they’ve suffered” excuse for so long and the sellby date on that one expired years ago. So, no: I don’t much feel like I owe those people an apology for saying that their wretched and evil behavior offends and angers me. Injustice is pretty much what anger is designed for, according to Thomas. I owe God the duty of forgiveness to those people and I do apologize to him for letting my anger and cold contempt for them get the better of me. But I don’t owe nasty Reactionaries an apology for being angry at the way they act. They owe their victims apologies, most recently the decent people they smeared as gutless money-grubbing whores. And I have not heard one syllable of an apology from them for that or much of anything else, though I have heard plenty of self pity from them because normal people take offense at their behavior–which just adds to my anger at them.
So what do I do? Well, the command is that if you have anything against anyone (penitent or not) you must forgive (Mark 11:25), which I did not do. Instead, I added to the toxicity, both in my heart and in cyberspace by choosing to lash out and freeze up with contempt. So I begin with the fact that Erin’s still right: my anger is toxic too and dangerous to the soul and harmful to innocents. Therefore, I also start with where I have sinned: namely, letting my fury and contempt float off and start affecting my relationships with innocent bystanders. So, for instance, I owe reader Stu an apology for lashing out at him. There are a number of other comboxers in that cross fire whose names I can’t recall. I apologize also to them. I likewise ask forgiveness of the various good and decent Traditionalist friends I hurt with my anger.
Perhaps the worst injustice I committed by giving in to anger, hatred and contempt was summed up by a sweet kid of a sweet family I know who wrote, “I’m sorry this is what you think of me.” Ouch. His family was the one persecuted and threatened by a local SSPX chapel when they left and re-established communion with the Church. They paid dearly for that decision at the hands of vicious Reactionaries and I’ve always admired them, as well as just flat liking them as the good and joyful people they are. And ironically, by giving in to anger and contempt, I gave in to hurting those guys, which is pretty low in my book. So my profoundest apologies to them too and to all my many other decent friends in Traditionalism who caught shrapnel when I blew up at Reactionaries. I was wrong to choose anger and hatred. Mea culpa.
As to the Reactionary offenders remembered and forgotten in the (partial) list of repellent Reactionary sins above, I was also wrong to refuse forgiveness to them. Given the gravity of Jesus’ warnings about that, I therefore extend forgiveness for the Reactionary sins chronicled above (and those I fail to mention or remember). I do it unconditionally. I don’t do it because I think it will be received by the people I forgive. Based on past experience, I find that offers of forgiveness extended to Reactionaries are almost certain to be seen as lah dee dah acts of condescension from somebody who should be ashamed to so much as call himself a Catholic. But I can’t help that. My job is not to make sure people who have sinned against me and people I like and love accept my forgiveness. It is to forgive whether they do so or not–indeed especially if they don’t repent.
Why? I extend forgiveness for a simple reason, because Jesus commands it and I don’t want to go to hell. That’s not really a very spiritually superior reason, since I should do it because I love my neighbor. But the truth is, I don’t love these people. I can’t stand them. So I start with the truth of where I am: with the fear of the Lord that is the beginning, though not the end, of wisdom. It’s the best I can do. I also ask for the grace to grow in love for Reactionaries so that I can someday forgive for a nobler reason that the fear of hell. But that’s going to take some work for a jerk like me.
I also ask for forgiveness for any other readers hurt and offended by the ugliness of my actions. I know at least one reader wrote to say it was too toxic for him. I assume there are others. I’m sorry. Forgive me.
Finally, a word of thanks to the various folk (many of them very sweet and nice Traditionalists) who have written encouraging things reminding me that while virtually all Reactionaries are self-proclaimed Traditionalists, noi all Traditionalists are Reactionaries. Your patience with me when I fulminate is deeply appreciated. Not to go all bumper stickery on you: Please be patient. God is not finished with me yet. I shall try to remember the same with Reactionaries.
Part of apologizing for sin is to make reparations. The trick, of course, is figuring out how to do that. Reparations are supposed to, in some way, signal and incarnate a willingness to undo damage done by the sin. Sometimes they can consist of something obvious (“Give back the bike you stole”). Very often, it has to be a token act of reparation since the possibility of “full reparations” is not possible. You cannot dig up the old man’s grave and tell him you are sorry you wished he was dead when you were seventeen. That ship has sailed. But you can do something–like tell your son you love him–that makes amends.
So it’s a stretchy concept. In the case of the business with Live Action I think that since my principal sin was against the people of Live Action, it naturally follows that Live Action and I should talk and they should let me know what an appropriate sort of reparation should be. To that end, I’ve written Lila and asked that we might speak. Till that happens, I don’t think it will help anything for me to continue to talk about Live Action publicly, nor to run around inventing some penance for myself that may either help nothing, or worse, exacerbate the problem. Some readers have written to prescribe various penances on behalf of LA, all of which I politely decline on the theory that is the person affected by my sin should make that call, not a crowd of strangers.
In addition, as I have learned in the past, internet mea culpas are moments when some people take the occasion of your admitting to sin in some area to try to force a confession that everything you have ever argued for, particularly against them, is wrong. I also decline to do this. I repent the sins I confessed here (as well as others I confessed in the sacrament that are none of your business). I do not repent opinions I did not confess to be sinful and my refusal to do so does not constitute impenitence but conviction. If I have refused to acquiesce to your demand that I renounce my views of, say, torture or gay “marriage, that does not mean I offered a fake repentance. It means that I don’t repent of things I don’t think are wrong, such as my opinions. If I thought I was wrong, I would not hold that opinion.
Finally, as I noted in my apology, what I said was intended to stand as an apology to many people over the years to whom I have been bitter or treated as means to ends or otherwise dealt with unjustly, not just Live Action:
Finally, those patterns have played out repeatedly in other arguments over the years: take your pick, you guys know better than I do. Again, the point is not who was right or wrong about the point being argued, it’s that I have been wrong in the way that I argued, very often reducing people to means. Again, mea culpa.
Most people, looking back over their lives, can have a general sense of “Things I wish I’d done differently” and try to make amends in the case of specific incidents. But most people are not generally in a position where literally dozens and dozens of people they do not know from Adam and Eve will show up in their mailboxes, demanding all sorts of reparations for things they have no memory of and no confidence are related to anything like reality. I do. I have angry strangers show up in my comboxes and mailbox all the time, demanding reparations for everything from my imaginary support for Islamic terrorists, to my sympathy for Jewish Masonic conspirators and their nefarious plans to destroy the Church, to my censorious refusal to allow them to hold forth on what a disgusting fat pig I am. The other day I got an email, along with a bunch of other people, declaring me under judgment because somebody at the Register apparently said something nice about Fr. Andrew Greeley. No idea. I have people mad at me about lots of stuff–some of which are real grievances about real sins I have committed. I can make a good faith effort to try to cover the bases and say “I acknowledge the grievance you have” but there is absolutely no way I am going to “make reparations” satisfactory to every person out there with an ax to grind.
So I can, for instance, say I’m sorry I have treated Michael Voris and his defenders with flippancy and mockery. It was wrong. I think that, despite our very real differences, Michael is basically on the side of the angels. I regret the hurt you guys told me you have received from my mouth. As reparation, here is a link to Church Militant TV.
I can say that I’m sorry for allowing my distrust and disbelief of the Medjugorje “seers” spill into flippancy and contempt toward those who find the phenomenon nourishing. I’ve known many very good people who have benefited from it and I regret hurting you with my flippancy and know that my words have hurt you because you’ve told me so. As reparation, here is a link to a fine musical Rosary sung by my friend and fellow parishioner Donna Cori Gibson.
I can say I’m sorry for the hurts I’ve inflicted on Traditionalists over the years and that I forgive them the hurts they have inflicted on me. As reparation, here is a link to Corpus Christi Watershed to bring a little liturgical beauty into life.
I am sorry for the hurts I have inflicted on conservatives and liberals over the years. Here is a link to Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World, which sees and honors all that is best about both philosophies and supplies what both philosophies seek in ways that I failed to do.
I can say I’m sorry for the mockery and flippancy I have directed at people like Bob Sungenis, E. Michael Jones, and those in their circle. I deeply and profoundly disagree with some of the things you’ve done and said, particularly with reference to your comments about Jews, but that’s not an excuse for treating you with contempt. I’m not sure what an act of reparation should look like since I cannot, in conscience, recommend your work. So I will remember you in my evening prayers.
This is a necessarily rough stab and overlooks (because I don’t know what to do) about people I just don’t remember, as well as people who just, well, hate me and for whom no act of reparation will ever effect repairs.
As to the rest, I ask you to remember that there is just one of me and thousands of you. I have to do life and can’t spend it tracking down the reality of every single angry demand that I get from somebody claiming I offended them and owe them reparations. I’m doing the best I can.
Finally, your prayers. That’s really all. Nothing more to add.
Turns out that when somebody gets upset because a priest with a legal agreement to never be around minors is allowed to be around minors, that’s not because they care about the safety of minors. It’s because they are sinister lefties who want “to bring down a bishop–any bishop”.
Kevin O’Brien opens a can of whupass on this nonsense. Rebecca Hamilton then delivers some well-deserved kicks to the corpse of this nonsense as she describes the bishop’s action to a T: straining at legal technicality gnats and swallowing the camel of child sexual abuse.
Donohue’s behavior here is Exhibit #349873987 in what I call the Faithful Conservative Catholic Anti-Charism of Discernment. With a sort of preternatural persistence, a huge percentage of the Faithful Conservative Catholic subculture seems to batten on the wrong side in controversy after controversy–Maciel, Euteneuer, Corapi, siding with Michael Voris when he suggests good bishop Mulvey is part of a shadowy gay conspiracy to destroy Corapi, attacking the bishops of Medjugorje, laboring for years to defend torture and war crimes, comparing Randian corporate stooge (and now gay adoption supporter) Paul Ryan to St. Thomas Aquinas(!) and denouncing all who would not vote for pro-abort Romney as enemies of the Faith, defending the shocking behavior of Bp. Finn and now this. And they do so with the cocksure certitude that they are “defending the Church from enemies”. And more often than not, it’s massively wrong, not just a boo boo. And massively wrong in a way anybody of common sense could see. And when the hero of the Faithful Conservative Catholic is shown to be massively wrong, the Faithful Conservative Catholic learns nothing and remembers nothing and the next time he manages to side with the wrong side again and blame it all on shadowy forces trying to destroy the Church and never take responsibility for all the other times he was massively wrong.
The amazing thing is that, typically, the people sounding the alarms are, themselves, conservative Catholics like Kevin and Rebecca. They speak because they love the Church. And for gratitude, they get told they “aren’t really Catholic” by excommunicating Inquisitors with a sort of anti-charism of massive wrongness who can’t seem to hear themselves.
Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me over and over and over, and it’s time to do a system diagnostic on the subculture of Faithful Conservative Catholics[TM].
As she writes of, “An evil not even tolerated among the pagans”
She warns:
I would like to continue to urge other concerned lovers of the Extraordinary Form (traditional Latin) Mass to speak out so that the world does not judge us by those who spew hatred against Judaism and the Jewish people.
In that, she says from *within* the ranks of Traditionalists exactly the same thing I was trying to say from outside those ranks yesterday when I concluded a post about the umpteenth eruption of anti-semitic nuttery from self-styled Traditionalists by saying:
Sane and healthy Traditionalists have far far more to fear from the public scandal created by these people than they have from anybody singing “Anthem” at some suburban OF Mass.
To be sure, *some* of the readers responded to my words in the vein that Dawn does: they simply and plainly agree that, yes, Jew-hatred is evil, belittlement and denial of mass murder is wrong, and… period. Nothing else, because nothing else needs to be said. Some of them can be seen in other fora simply and plainly making war on this filth. They can tell from the fact that Dawn is herself a lover of the EF and that I make an extremely clear distinction between “sane and healthy Traditionalists” and the Jew-hating lunatics flying under cover of Traditionalism that neither of us are saying “Traditionalism = anti-semitism.”
But, an *awful* lot of the responses to the denunciation of anti-semites poisoning the image of Traditionalism consisted, not of denunciations of anti-semitism, but of stuff like this:
Mark Shea, I don’t understand why you attack Catholics wanting to respect, glorify, & revere the Sacramental presence of our Lord Jesus at His Holy Mass Sacrifice (as our ancestors of our faith did before us). Why don’t you instead expose those who want to use Holy Church for their own selfish political ends (like “Catholic” supporters of women “priests”, liberation theology socialism, pro-War, pro-Abortion, etc.)? Traditionalists aren’t anti-Semitic.
Multiply responses like this by a factor of a hundred and you get *most* of the responses to the filthy spectacle of Holocaust Denialism on display from Rorate Coeli’s “cherished friend”. Instead of seeing the filthy spectacle of rationalization for Jew-hatred as the problem, lots of respondents declare the person pointing out the Jew-hatred to be “sowing division”. In other words, “don’t make us look bad by commenting on the lunatics in our ranks” is more important than denouncing the lunatics.
Add to this are such head-shake-inducing responses as:
There are two sides to this fight. Jews get all upset when holocaust deniers come along and shout out their BS and rightly so, but why is it a sin to point out that the Talmud says Jesus was a demon possessed sorcerer who is boiling in his own feces and that Mary was a whore? I have never understood why Catholics are supposed to change our beliefs yet the Jews can keep their anti-Christian trash. double standard much…?
To which the sane reply is: “Do feel free to let me know where, in this entire discussion–except for anti-semites themselves–-any person at all has said, “Well, we *do* have to consider the reality that medieval Jewish polemicists really have a point about Jesus being a demon possessed sorcerer who is boiling in his own feces and that Mary was a whore.” In short, *nobody* is citing medieval Talmudic polemics except people looking for excuses to hate modern Jews and justify or belittle murdering them.” It’s *only* Catholic anti-semites who are paying attention to these footnotes from obscure medieval sources. It’s like the mentality of anti-Catholic fundamentalists who believe that all Catholics are carefully poring over the salacious details of the Malleus Maleficarum, searching for rationales for burning witches. It tells us much more about the mentality of the anti-Catholic than it tells us about how the average Catholic lives his life. Incredibly, the vast majority of Jews do not pore over obscure Talmud passages so they can spit in Catholic eyes and call Jesus a sorcerer and Mary a whore, just as Catholics don’t ruminate on the best ways to dismember suspected witches.
Again and again, I am told that anti-semitism is a fringe phenomenon in Traditional circles. And at the parish level, I have no doubt this is true. Hence my reference to “sane and healthy Traditionalists.” But the pretense that Traditionalism is not profoundly rooted in and enabled by the Internet is just that, a pretense. The truth is that, on the Internet, Jew-hatred and self-identified Traditionalist Catholics are like peas and carrots and it is leaching out into the bloodstream of Internet Catholicism.
Again, not *all* Traditionalists subscribe to this filth. But on the internet, if you meet a Jew-hating Catholic, odds are in the high 90th percentile that he will tell you he is a Traditionalist. Odds are also very high that he is a warmly welcomed (“cherished” is the word Rorate Coeli used to describe their Holocaust Denier) contributor to a Traditionalist web.community. You *constantly* run into it all over the place all the time. And the absolutely worst way to deal with it is to shout “Stop talking about it” at their opponents when these people invade your comboxes, or get mainstreamed by puff piece interviews conducted by massively-popular-with-Traditionalists Real Catholics[TM] in which we are encouraged to roll our eyes about those silly “liberals” who think your interviewee’s conspiracy theories about Jews are toxic and dangerous. That’s called “mainstreaming” and it’s the dead opposite of keeping this filth on the fringe.
Nobody is asking sane and healthy Traditionalists to “rid the Internet” of anti-semitic nutjobs who run around spewing this stuff in the name of Authentic Catholic Tradition. I’m just saying that when such nutjobs turn up and somebody tells them they are enemies of the Faith, a scandal who disgrace the Church, and in grave danger of their souls–it would really help if Traditionalists would not choose that moment to throw a pity party and denounce the person opposing the anti-semite as “divisive” but would instead tell the anti-semite to repent. Neither Dawn, nor I, nor Fr. Anthony, nor any other faithful Catholic who opposes the infestation of anti-semites in Traditionalism is your enemy. The Jew-haters are your enemy and they do more to damage and destroy the Benedictine reforms than anyone on planet earth.
April 1 and Easter Monday both being days for giddy hilarity–and reader Victor Lams really enjoying oddities like this, I offer the following:
For those who, like me, are out of the loop on quirky music, this is, I am informed by my son, a specimen of “Chap Hop”. Why they don’t call it “chap rap” he does not understand.
Update: Somehow, I manage to plug in a Michael Voris video instead of the above, which is ten times more hilarious. Error fixed.
Good to see some discernment being exercised.
Ironically, the author, who is basically a Latin Mass Traditionalist, is getting savaged as a Damn Librul[TM] in some quarters (notably on Facebook) for pointing out the very serious dangers of this demagoguery, which pretty much illustrates what I’m talking about in terms of lack of discernment on the Tribal Right and the tendency of the Cult to attack, not progressive dissenters, but faithful Catholics. In fact, her critique is spot on.
If a priest is a Sacrosanct Cult Figure who misbehaves, then the screams are “Touch not God’s Anointed!” If, however, the Sacrosanct Cult Figure is a lay Real Catholic blowhard who spends *virtually all* his time bashing bishops (who are, you may recall, priests too), then we are to understand that any questioning of his demagogic methods is an attempt to crush a Prophetic Voice who is bravely speaking truth to corrupt power.
If you are a visual learner, Tom Kreitzberg provides this useful graphic:
So when Fr. Corapi betrays his vows and tries to grift his flock after a decade of lying about his military exploits (among other fabulisms), any attempt to point this out is an Assault on a Holy Priest by a layman who is not worthy to untie his sandals.
But when Michael Voris accuses Fr. Corapi’s bishop (and a nameless and numberless host of other bishops) of being part of a shadowy gay cabal bent on destroying Fr. Corapi, that’s not attacking God’s Anointed. That’s courageously speaking truth to power and confronting those wolves in shepherd’s clothing who have betrayed the Faith!
Some of my readers think that the point of posts like this is to be mean and pick on Corapi and Voris.
No. It’s to try to get Discernment-Free Conservative Folk Hero Worshippers to get a clue about the folly of their Folk Hero Worship and its highly selective and inconsistent approach to tribal loyalties.
Suggestion: Pray even for Thems. Exercise discernment even with Us’ns.
A reader sez:
Mark, one could very well make the same argument about you and the little cult of personality that has grown up around you– since apparently all one needs to be a “cult of eprsonality” is to have an audience. Such a judgement would be unfair to you.
To be precise, my reader’s words can best be described as “not accurate, but entirely fair.”
That is, merely “having an audience” is not the same as a cult of personality. Rather, it is having an audience that adores you and hangs on your every word and assumes that any criticism that the object of the cult of personality receives can only be due to unreasoning hatred, malice toward the Faith, or some sort of other wicked cause.
And the reality is that, for some of my readers, that is exactly the case. That’s why I’m so sensitive to and worried about cults of personality: I have readers who have made me the object of their uncritical and undiscerning veneration. It is an *extremely* dangerous thing to do, both for the object of veneration and for the soul of the idol worshipper.
And it is a pattern that has played out in Faithful Conservative Catholic[TM] circles again and again and again and again over the past decade, with Faithful Conservative Catholics[TM] either repeating the same dumb mistake of latching on to a new Folk Hero to replace the old one and circling the wagons whenever the Folk Hero is challenged, or else whipsawing to total cynicism and rejection of the Faith because their Folk Hero let them down.
To be sure, the object of cultic veneration has a choice to make: he can encourage the cult and thereby incur his share of guilt in fostering idolatry, or discourage the cult to the degree he is able to do so. So, for instance, my friend Scott Hahn is perfectly aware of the fact that he has worshippers–and does everything he can to discourage that while continuing to do his job as a lay teacher of the Faith. That’s perfectly reasonable. If the worshippers continue to confuse him with The Voice of the Magisterium, that’s not his fault since he tries very hard to do do what a good theologian does: distinguish his theological views and opinions from what the Church defines as dogmatic. And he tries very hard to discourage the Cult of Hahn.
Which brings us to the main point: that the idolator also has his responsibility too. He can go on being the sort of dependent personality who immaturely looks for some Hero to keep him safe and tell him what to think, or he can mature in Christ and learn how to distinguish the personality and private views of his admired Hero from the Magisterium, from the Church, and from Jesus Christ. That is the wise course, because there is no Folk Hero who is not going to let you down sooner or later.
So: stop worshipping Folk Heros–including me. Learn to think with the Church. Put on the mind of Christ. Was Shea crucified for you? Were you baptized into the name of Hahn? Or Voris? Or Corapi? Or Euteneuer? Or Maciel?
People write me from time to time and ask me what’s up with Fr. Corapi. There hasn’t been much news since the Blacksheep Dog scheme to grift his fanbase fell apart and he disappeared from sight. After that, no longer presenting a source of danger to the flock as his cult of personality waned, I haven’t paid any attention. But people still write me now and then wondering. The closest thing to news is this little thingie that popped up, but it’s not really anything substantiated or even all that interesting. Mostly what it tells you is not anything about Corapi that you wouldn’t already surmise from his silence, but it does tell you a lot about Folk Hero worshipping conservative Catholics, in the comments. These reveal that there remains a small nucleus of worshippers of the Corapi cult who imagine that he was the Only Man on Earth who spoke The TRVTH, that The TRVTH consisted of regurgitating a few Catholic-flavored GOP Red Meat Culture War Talking Points, that Michael Voris has now taken up this mantle and is Elisha to Corapi’s Elijah, and that the basic pattern of battening on some Folk Hero to save us and lead us to the Light instead of becoming mature Catholics who learn to think with the Church and pay attention to the Magisterium (commonly known cafeteria conservativess as “the damn Librul bishops and gay cabal who persecute Michael Voris and plotted to destroy Fr. Corapi”) is alive and well in discernment-free conservative Catholic circles.
Folk Heroes and demagogues are the unpaid bills of our episcopacy’s failures over the past few decades. Their popularity is a clear sign that Catholics flat do not trust their bishops and are looking for somebody to keep them safe. It’s the same dynamic that attracts fatherless young men into gangs headed by strong charismatic figures. And it will–and has–resulted in the same sort of chaos as cults of personality form around figures who make up for their lack of knowledge (Voris) or integrity (Corapi) with certitude and command. The Church’s traditional solution to the human urge to have a cult of personality around a hero is to say, “Knock yourself out. But just be sure the object of your cult is dead and canonized.” In America, however, Catholicism drinks deep of the cult of celebrity and confuses that with the cult of the saints. Result: we keep canonizing Living Saints before it has really been established that they are saints and then we circle the wagons to defend them from Forces of Evil that often just turn out to be people saying, “Your Idol has feet of clay.”
Moral: Grow up. Stop worshipping Folk Heros. Learn to listen to the Church. And let those who adored and trusted in the Folk Hero pray for the poor soul they burdened with trust and adoration that should only have been placed in Jesus Christ.
UPDATE: Welcome, Pewsitter Flying Monkeys! Since the anonymous cowards at Pewsitter have ordered a little code red on me again I just thought you should know that you are in for some especially stiff competition in the Gettin’ Catty for Holy Faith competition this time. So far, my absolute favorite Flying Monkey combox entry comes from “Sister Mary Pantsuit”, who writes, “’Great Article Mark!!’ – Me, Fr. Effeminate, & Satan”. That cracks me up good. I doubt any of you Pewsitter guys can top that.
Because nothing says “manly courage resisting the feminization of the Church” like anonymously posting as a nun.
*Do* that Dana Carvey thang, you gutsy Real Catholic!
Catholic and Enjoying It!
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