{"id":220,"date":"2011-12-30T11:13:00","date_gmt":"2011-12-30T11:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2011\/12\/church-militant\/"},"modified":"2011-12-30T11:13:00","modified_gmt":"2011-12-30T11:13:00","slug":"church-militant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/standingonmyhead\/2011\/12\/church-militant.html","title":{"rendered":"Church Militant"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><head><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><meta http-equiv=\"content-type\" content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\"><\/head><body><p>I\u2019m a few days late commenting on the broom brawl in the Church of the Nativity. It seems this sort of tussle breaks out quite often this time of year. I\u2019m not surprised. I mean, what would it be like if I had to share a church with the Baptists and Episcopalians?<\/p>\n<p>A good old scrap like this doesn\u2019t worry me too much. I would prefer it to the polite ecumenical discussions we used to have when I was an Anglican cleric. We\u2019d all sit around and eat cookies and drink tea and pretend we liked one another, and then when it was all over we\u2019d sit down and have a pint of beer with our mates and slag off the other side\u2013and that was just among the Anglican clerics\u2026<\/p>\n<p>Seriously now, while I\u2019m not in favor of broom fights, I am in favor of a bit more honesty and open ness in our debates with other Christians. We shouldn\u2019t beat around the bush quite so much. If we truly believe that the Catholic Church is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church we say it is, then we should stick up for our side and, (in holy charity of course) defend the faith.<\/p>\n<p>One of the biggest problems with the Catholic Church today is that we are the Church milquetoast rather then the \u00a0Church militant. The problem with being the Church militant is that we cannot wade out into battle without being armed with humility. If we fight in humility then there is a certain insouciance about it. I\u2019m talking about fighting in foolishness\u2013like Don Quixote or St Francis.<\/p>\n<p>If we stand up and fight with self righteousness we shall surely lose, but if we stand up and fight as fools we might just win\u2013for all the world loves the impudent clown (except for the self righteous\u2013who are the enemy after all)<\/p>\n<p>Because of this I have a smiling respect for the clerics who threw brooms at each other and had their foolish humanity broadcast to the world. I\u2019d rather have them than the nauseating scrubbed and smiling army of self righteous Christians who want to impose their smiling \u2018success\u2019 on the whole world.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I\u2019m a few days late commenting on the broom brawl in the Church of the Nativity. It seems this sort of tussle breaks out quite often this time of year. I\u2019m not surprised. I mean, what would it be like if I had to share a church with the Baptists and Episcopalians? A good old [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":557,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.1 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Church Militant<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I&#039;m a few days late commenting on the broom brawl in the Church of the Nativity. 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