One of the things that depresses me most about the Catholic blogosphere is the (thankfully small) number of blogging priests who triumph their Americanism, even at times above their faith, so it seems. It gives me no joy to point this out, and it’s not about scoring points. It’s about a sense of sadness and frustration.
Anyway, see this post from Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, apparently one of the more popular of the blogging priests (he seems to attract the all-our-problems-will-be-solved-with-the-tridentine-Mass group). He is practically gushing over a a warship (“gorgeous lines”, “graceful”, “incredible firepower”) and then comes the kicker: “She was revived for the Gulf War, and her huge turrets educated Iraqi targets”. That would be the Iraq war that John Paul II opposed, was it it not? And they would be Iraqi human beings being “educated”, would they not? How does this statement of bellicose nationalism square with the the memory of Jesus the Christ, a memory preserved by the Church? How does It square with the passionate anti-war message laid out by the same John Paul in Centesimus Annus? How does it square with the notion that war is always a failure and something to mourn, given it is last resort? How does it square by recent Vatican statements on war? It doesn’t. He is bowing before an idol, an idol of the nation state, an idol of war. And that holds whether I say it in English or Latin, by the way.
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