FrancisChurch: See No, Hear No, Speak No…Or You’re Evil!

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Who am I to judge?

Who am I to judge?

Pope Francis has often railed against ‘ideologues’ or, in his mind, people who put some lesser belief system above the Truth.  It’s a trick a generic way for him to attack a specific group of people: faithful conservatives.

The Pope actually is an ideologue because he puts his worldy agenda and biases ahead of the Faith.  It’s just that his own ideology is on the far Left, not the Right. There are no real ‘ideologues’ on the right, just Christians.  True conservatism is not ideological.  It’s simply a refusal to condemn good things from the past, a past formed by the Church itself.

Since his faith can be thin, he’s often contemptuous of the ancient Faith and those who cherish it. Pope Francis clings to physical, current realities which are concrete and solid. He sees Christianity as a radical code to overturn the ‘social’ order and upend the powerful in the world, and in the Church. Yes, the Church is part of the problem!

The Pope’s radicalism just needs to be applied for the faith to be lived.  Like Islam, his ‘Christianity’ isn’t truly observed unless it’s militant.  In that respect he is right. The Church Faithful should be militant.  If only he were preaching militancy for the actual Faith.  Instead, he appears to be a true believer in the mold of South American liberation theologist rebels, and that’s not really very Catholic at all.

In his attacks on ideologues, the Pope hopes that all men would begin to view faithful Catholics as stubborn, proud, selfish and petty, so they would then turn to his own ideology and call it the Faith.

Fr. Longenecker is here to help him.

The teacher in my screenwriting class said, “To create a believable villain you have to understand why he thinks he’s good.”

In other words, nobody gets up in the morning deciding to be just as nasty, mean and murderous as possible.

No. even Darth Vader thinks he’s a good guy, and to give George Lucas the credit for what were three pretty terrible prequel movies, at least we learned why Darth Vader is the baddie.

He was just another young guy in love, but for seemingly good reasons (to rescue then avenge his mother) he started to kill. Then he decided that he had to kill some more in order to bring justice to the galaxy. In other words, Darth Vader is an ideologue. He wants to do good, and is willing to do evil to accomplish his ends, and the greater good he wants to achieve the worse evil he may have to use.

Ideologues are bad, but religious ideologies are the worst.

The secular ideologue believes he is on the side of the right because of his belief system. The religious ideologue believes that God himself is on his side and there ain’t nuthin’ that’s going to convince him otherwise. There’s no discussion. There is no dialogue with the ideologue.

There’s a lot of dialogue with FrancisChurch that’s true.  You’d have to be Darth Vader to object I suppose.

So the problem with an ideologue is that he thinks he’s right and he thinks he follows God.  Why is that always bad?  Isn’t that true at least sometimes?  Is it possible to believe what God thinks and to do it, or must doubt be mandatory for all ‘good’ people?  How can a Catholic think like this?

The religious ideologue will slander, mock, attack, exclude, persecute and finally kill the “enemy” and think he’s not only doing the right thing, but doing God a favor.

Yes, I know, we see the ultimate religious ideologue in the monsters of ISIS.

But hang on. Blaming the other person, the other religion, the other political party, the other bad guy is exactly what makes you bad and takes you into the downward spiral of religious self righteousness.

Sure the wolves of ISIS are demon possessed monsters, murderers, rapists and bloodthirsty, angry monsters and “we hates them my precious…”

But to avoid being a bad religious person myself I have to see where I might be turning into Darth Vader.

This is frightening to me. Blame is what you do when you determine who is at fault.  You don’t need to proclaim it, but you can at least reasonably think it, yes?  If we were all angels there would be no blame.  Are we all Angels then?  Well, some of us are ISIS-like Vaders.

So in the new Francis-LongeneckerChurch I can find no fault with a person, a religion, or a political party without being ‘the worst baddie.’  I hope I don’t seem too self-righteous when I say that it will be more convenient for some people, religions, and/or political parties than others.

Father has three pages of this stuff.

Overnight it seems there is only cheap ruthless demagoguery where there once was Faith.  The gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, fear of the Lord , how can you have any of them floating down on your head and still be swayed by this kind of false shepherding?

 

 

 

 

 

German Bishops Continue to Shut Down the Church Militant

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Play glasses on a pretender

Play glasses on a pretender

The German Bishops have just formally announced what many bishops in the U.S. would like to see; we will no longer screen ‘catholic’ employees for faithfulness.

This is generally the case already, but with this official change in Church law, the Germans are making sure that no-one ever fires or refuses to hire someone for a Catholic reason.  It’s a nightmare and it’s coming here quickly.

With potentially far-reaching consequences, the bishops of Germany have voted by more than a two-thirds majority to relax Church labor laws to allow civilly remarried employees or those living in same-sex unions to retain their jobs with Church institutions.

In an announcement Tuesday, the German bishops’ conference in Bonn said the majority of bishops had ruled that immediate dismissal will only be a “last resort” for employees who are divorced and subsequently “remarry” or those living in a registered partnership.

Until now, such employees were required to be dismissed from such employment, although the rules were often ignored. The Church is the second-largest employer in Germany.

“An automatic dismissal may now in future be ruled as out of the question,” said Alois Glück, president of the Central Committee of German Catholics, the country’s top lay Catholic organization. From now on, he said, any public violation of loyalty to Church teachings must be examined on a case-by-case basis.

As limited as his reach seemed to be, can you imagine this kind of thing happening if Pope Benedict hadn’t become sidelined?  It would be unfaithful to lay the blame of any of this on Pope Francis, right?  He’s too holy to let that happen.  It’s amazing how much he’s just like the Pope we would get if they sort of muscled Pope Benedict out, isn’t it?

The amendment, when enacted by a bishop, explicitly overturns a 2002 ecclesiastical law, which stipulated that all Church employees need to be loyal to the magisterium. Glück said the change “represents a substantial paradigm shift in the application of ecclesiastical law,” adding that the new regulation will “open the way” for decisions to be made in accordance with “human justice.”

The lack of unanimity among bishops means the new regulation is left to Germany’s 27 bishops to implement the reform in their dioceses. But in practice, it could be unlikely that any bishop will be able to resist the new measures. According to the official statement, the bishops’ conference is setting up “an additional working group” to examine the question of whether the Church’s labor law can be “more institutionally oriented” in a bid to make it a nationwide and uniform labor structure. The bishops’ conference has also instructed dioceses to publicize the changes in their diocesan newsletters. This is required to formally enact the law.

“I expect and hope this will happen everywhere,” Cardinal Rainer Woelki, the archbishop of Cologne, said in a May 6 interview with Katholisch.de. The cardinal, who headed the committee that drew up the new law, said the first objective of the amendment is to ensure “compliance with lived practice,” but denied the amendment in any way undermines the principle of the indissolubility of marriage.

Caritas Germany, which employs 591,000 staff, welcomed the change. President Peter Neher said Church institutions need a “broader understanding of the concept of loyalty” and that ecclesiastical labor law should reflect how the Catholic Church “stands alongside” those who live broken lives.

Everything is always about Caritas.

The erasure of the Faith is never an organic thing.  It’s always a top-down leveraged affair.  The Christian Faith is natural.  It functions and it lives.  Murder, on the other hand, requires some force.

 

 

Liberation Theology Has Never Been Catholic, Until Now

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'Martyred for the Faith' just because he defended the poor and oppressed

‘Martyred for the Faith’ just because he defended the poor and oppressed

John Zmirak responds to the recent revelations by a powerful KGB defector that Liberation Theology, so emulated and resurrected by the Franciscan Pontificate yet suppressed until now, was formulated in Soviet Russia.  After recapping the story and some well-known responses, including John Allen’s accusation that the United States exported forms Protestantism south, he writes:

Whatever problems one might have with Pentecostalism, it is genuinely Christian, which Liberation Theology isn’t. It’s scarcely theology. And it doesn’t liberate. In Latin America, it served or serves as the pious fig-leaf for nasty dictatorships like the Sandinistas’ in Nicaragua, and the Chavistas’ in Venezuela. Its watered-down American version — popular among leftists who still claim to be Catholic — offers political cover for pro-abortion, anti-marriage lawmakers, who hope they can buy back their souls by dispensing some extra food stamps and reducing their carbon footprints.

Much worse than Liberation Theology’s worldly effects are the spiritual poisons it trades in: toxic envy, gut-gnawing resentment, a craving for the chance to mete out violence, a scorn for thrift and honest work and an acid cynicism that reduces every human relationship to a swap of money or power. All this in the name of Jesus.

These old lessons should be well-remembered in our time.

It doesn’t seem that Communism or Liberation Theology have waned today.  Instead they have quickly become so pervasive in the world and in the Church that a free faithful alternative no longer exists with which to compare them.  The Faith is so rare and the propaganda machine is so vast, we are now almost entirely immersed in calculated lies.

Put briefly and starkly, Liberation Theology treats Jesus as a proto-revolutionary who came to save the poor from social injustice. The Kingdom of God is the earthly paradise which we will construct from the ruins of Satanic capitalism. The church serves the role of the Party, as the vanguard of the sacred class chosen by History (oops, I meant to say “Jesus”) to overturn the wicked “structures of sin,” and put the Sermon on the Mount into action at the point of a bayonet. The meek shall inherit the earth, once we’ve rounded up all the non-meek into gulags and confiscated their land. You know, the way the Soviets saved Ukraine from greedy farmers in the 1930s.

It sounds like thinly veiled Marxist theory, and that’s exactly what it is. As Norman Cohn and Eric Voegelin showed, Marx himself seized the Christian vision of a New Jerusalem after the Second Coming, dragged it into politics, and dressed it up in a white lab coat as a “scientific” prediction of a this-worldly utopia. Instead of the Second Coming, he inserted “the Revolution,” and in place of the Christian church he plugged in the proletariat and the Party. For decades, idealists around the world were willing to conspire, betray their country, go to prison, die — and wherever they came to power, to kill their fellow men by the tens of millions, and imprison millions more, to force Marx’s kingdom to come.

Leftism is always relentless, not because it works, but because it’s evil. They never learn or give up.  There is no reason to stop trying and hating when you have an eternity before you.

The sordid failure of materialist Marxism to fulfill any — even one — of its messianic promises posed a problem for people who were still, for their own reasons, drawn to revolutionary fantasies that entailed gaining power, confiscating other people’s property and silencing them by force. History, it is perfectly clear, is not inexorably driven to produce a dictatorship of the proletariat. It took Soviet tanks to remind the workers of Hungary and Poland of what was good for them. It demanded concrete walls and barbed wire to stop the common people from fleeing “people’s” regimes by the millions, to live instead in wicked capitalist lands where they would be exploited. What to do, if you still find reality intolerable, and crave a revolution?

You turn to magic. You create a “god from a machine.” You twist people’s faith in Christ into the self-confidence of a conquering social class. You drag down their hope for heaven, and rope it to wishes for cheaper gas and more cassavas. You teach them that real love, tough love, amounts to a cold-blooded calculation about maximizing utility: To make that liberating omelet, Jesus wants you to crack some heads. Perversely, as Marxism by natural means began to collapse all around the world, liberation theologians tried to revive it by calling it Christian.

Look for this in the Pope’s goals, in his allies, and in his rhetoric.  You won’t have to look hard.