Photo Source: Mark Shea<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>Mark Shea is a nice guy. And while he\u2019s truly brilliant, he\u2019s also brave to the point of not-so-smart.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMark lives his writing life on the edge of a razor. He never flinches from saying what he thinks, even when what he thinks flies in the face of what a lot of other people think. He expresses himself without censoring his thoughts through whatever politically correct sieve his readers might be using.<\/p>\n
Make no mistake about it; both right wing-nuts and left wing-nuts have their own version of political correctness that no one may violate without facing all sorts of approbation and personal attacks. Catholic right wing-nuts have their own layers of right wing-nuttiness slathered on top the standard version.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nMark is fearless in railing against the shibboleths of both sides of the political divide, and he\u2019s got the rabid enemies to prove it. I\u2019ve spent a good bit of time, talking with Mark in backdoor writer\u2019s channels, and I can say that he\u2019s not only a passionate, committed Catholic who believes what the Church teaches right down to the ground, but that he\u2019s far more generous toward his attackers than I would be.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI was aware that there was a group of nut jobs out there in the hustings calling themselves \u201cBanned by Mark Shea.\u201d I assumed they were hissing and spitting in their little group, but I in no way imagined the kind of direct calls to acts of violence, Hitlerian anti-semitism and evil to the point of being satanic that they were actually engaging in. What they\u2019re saying isn\u2019t just the verbiage of a bunch of nuts. It\u2019s evil.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI came by this knowledge when I was putzing around on the internet and bumbled into reading a blog post by my fellow Patheos writer, Scott Eric Alt. Mr Alt reproduced conversations from \u201cBanned by Mark Shea,\u201d including comments from a well-known right wing Catholic priest. The thrust of Mr Alt\u2019s writing was to admonish this priest that, because he is a priest, he should not be part of this group.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019ve heard, but not verified, that the priest in question has left this group. But he has a history of engaging in vicious personal attacks against Mark that goes back several years that I know of. He\u2019s very active in the pro life movement, but that doesn\u2019t excuse this kind of behavior. In many ways, it makes it worse.<\/p>\n
A lot of people believe that priests speak for Christ. When priests engage in evil behavior, they lead other Christians to do the same. They also turn others away from Christ. They make the devil\u2019s case that Jesus is nothing by how they behave.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nIn my opinion, the fact that these folks haven\u2019t driven Mark out of the Church \u2014 and they have certainly tried \u2014 is due entirely to his love of Christ and the help he must receive from the Holy Spirit. It would be so much less painful \u2014 and more profitable \u2014 for him to abandon the Church and turn his back on Jesus. But he sticks, despite the attacks.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI can attest, because he and I have talked about this a number of times, that he still, in spite of these attacks, loves and respects the Catholic priesthood. Mark\u2019s faithfulness to the Church is, without consideration of the action of the Holy Spirit, confounding.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m not going to reproduce the verbiage from \u201cBanned by Mark Shea\u201d here. But I\u2019m glad Mr Alt put it on his blog. I would never have imagined it was this evil if I had not read it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nI don\u2019t think that this behavior is merely evil. I think it is satanic. I also want to caution my readers to think carefully before they step on the down elevator of public excoriation of people they disagree with.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nNo two people ever agree with one another about everything. Two well-intentioned, intelligent people who are both trying to find a solution that will benefit everyone will look at exactly the same problem and come up with diametrically opposed solutions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThis does not make either one of them evil. It makes both of them human. What\u2019s more, this ability to think differently from one another is not a weakness of humankind. It is our greatest strength. It is what has led us to the achievements we\u2019ve made in human progress.<\/p>\n
Most of the time, when people are forced to sit down and talk with one another, and then work out compromises between their two positions in order to fashion a workable solution, they come up with something far better than anything either one of them would have created alone. That is the strength of democracy. It is the power of human thinking.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nFar too many of our religious leaders have abandoned their role as spiritual and moral shepherds to take on flash-trash, no-morals, anti-Christ politics. Sadly, the race to the bottom in our national discourse is oftentimes led by men of the cloth who, if they were followers of Christ, would be leading us in the opposite direction.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhat I hope is that Public Catholic readers will take a look at themselves and back off from this sort of behavior, both in their thinking and in what they say. If you find yourself sinking into this kind of blackness, stop, pray, repent, and change. You are walking on the edge of evil, and the urgings you feel to hatred and vituperation come from the devil.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nAs a final thought, I am going to say that the folks at \u201cBanned by Mark Shea\u201d should get down on their knees and pray that nothing happens to Mark Shea. Because if anything does, all the police have to do is look at this hate group and their calls to violence to find their suspects.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nHere is Mr Alt\u2019s column: Father Peter West, You Must Leave Banned by Mark Shea.\u00a0<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mark Shea is a nice guy. And while he\u2019s truly brilliant, he\u2019s also brave to the point of not-so-smart.\u00a0 Mark lives his writing life on the edge of a razor. He never flinches from saying what he thinks, even when what he thinks flies in the face of what a lot of other people think. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1155,"featured_media":31994,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5392,6475,1],"tags":[8084,1651],"class_list":["post-31991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-christian-leadership","category-human-dignity-2","category-uncategorized","tag-banned-by-mark-shea","tag-mark-shea"],"yoast_head":"\n
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