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?

 

 

 

 

 

Christendom is Dying of Selfish Cowardice

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Chair warmers

Chair warmers

At the Remnant, Hilary White’s title says it all:

Vatican OK with using force as “last resort” against ISIS, on the off chance we might come to it some day

In our world today there is nothing detectable whatsoever in the way of Christian power. We have numbers, but we are completely enervated, sleeping, smothered, choked – you choose the descriptor. We are like an enormous man dying.

Are we to give a sigh of relief, or a cheer, that the Vatican seems finally to be noticing that Christians are being systematically wiped out en masse in the cradle of Christian civilisation? Or that they are telling the UN Human Rights Council that the use of force “may” be used as a “very last choice,” to defend them?

Some news services are reporting that the Vatican “says military force should be harnessed,” in response to the growing threat of ISIS, but I think this might be a bit strong. I’m pretty sure the word “should” was a bit of journalistic license. At the press conference, Time quotes the Vatican’s UN delegate Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, saying, “We have to stop this kind of genocide.”

“Otherwise we’ll be crying out in the future about why we didn’t do something, why we allowed such a terrible tragedy to happen.”

Alright, but the official joint statement says… well, what, exactly?

The Middle East is living in a situation of instability and conflict that recently have been aggravated. The consequences are disastrous for the entire population of the region. The existence of many religious communities is seriously threatened. Christians are now especially affected. These days even their survival is in question.

Efforts to build a better future for all are frustrated. We witness a situation where violence, religious and ethnic hatred, fundamentalist radicalism, extremism, intolerance, exclusion, destruction of the social fabric of whole societies and communities are becoming the features of a non-viable political and social model, endangering the very existence of many communities, the Christian community in particular.

Why is it necessary that our Holy Church in it’s officials acts and it’s application of doctrine must be entirely passive, even declining to use words on behalf of Christianity itself?  In short, what good actually does the Vatican do? Isn’t diplomacy just what happens when nothing is really happening?

We are talking about ISIS, of course, as everyone knows. ISIS, the Islamic supremacist group that grew, with the help of US backing, out of the “rebels” fighting the Assad government in Syria, and has now declared itself the new “Caliphate” to fulfill the command of Mohammed to dominate the whole world. ISIS, only one of the group’s acronyms, stands for “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” and the motivation for its goals is the issue that is being so carefully avoided with such determined diplomatic use of the passive voice.

And all the world knows what ISIS is doing: mass slaughter, mass rapes and enslavement of captives, mass deportations, child soldiers, beheadings, crucifixions, burning captives alive, bulldozing and setting fire to churches, monasteries, towns and villages, jackhammering away any cultural or historic trace of anything that is not specifically Sunni Islamic. But diminished and chest-less modern men, apparently even those representing the Vatican, seem incapable of forthrightly condemning this monstrous Old Testament scenery.

Instead we have from the ostensible leaders of Christianity, an apparently unbreakable habit of dainty, non-committal, UN committee-approved terms like “terrorist groups,” the “so-called Islamic State,” who are creating “a situation of instability and conflict” by committing “human rights violations, repression and abuses.”

In the statement’s strongest language – still doggedly retaining the passive voice – it admits that Christian communities are subject to “barbaric acts of violence: they are deprived of homes, driven from their native lands, sold into slavery, killed, beheaded and burnt alive. Dozens of Christian churches, and ancient shrines of all religions have been destroyed.”

But there is no expression of normal, human outrage, no horror at this, no booming demands for international military intervention. Instead, the situation “raises deep concerns.” This is always coupled with the continued insistence that force can be used only as a last possible resort, and no hint at all how many have to die before we may divine when that point has been reached.

The only force that will be insisted upon for the moment will be the force of dialogue, the force of ‘encounter’ – you know those contemporary pseudo-Christian imperatives which honor and elevate the dishonorable and deadly.

Perhaps most depressing in this minimalist and insipid declarative sentence is the meticulous avoidance – by the Catholic Church – of any mention that the Christians in the Middle East were there first. This and gaping eloquent silence on the long history of Islamic conquest and brutal subjugation – is all the acknowledgement they get from the pope’s representative for 1700 years of suffering.

For every Christian life and village taken today there will countless generations of hopelessness and suffering.  Islam, engendered in terror, blackened what was once the great ancient and Christian world well over a thousand years ago.  What will it make of Europe now?

So, why is it a bad thing to violently wipe out the remaining shreds of the (native) Christian civilisation? Well, because, Diversity!

In our globalized world, pluralism is an enrichment. The presence and the contributions of ethnic and religious communities reflect an ancient diversity and a common heritage. A future without the different communities in the Middle East will run a high risk of new forms of violence, exclusion, and the absence of peace and development.

A journalist friend in Rome told me that he has occasionally interviewed high-ranking representatives of the Vatican’s diplomatic service and confronted them about their habitual diffidence and addiction to UN-speak. He said that he asked why in none of their official statements they ever actually come out and say anything Christian. That they never forthrightly proclaim that Christianity – that Christ – is the solution to all this. The reaction, he said, was one of blank incomprehension.

In fact, the statement says little about anything, and nothing the world needed to be told about the Middle East, Islam or ISIS. But it does certainly say a lot about its authors and about the deeply engrained culture of diffidence, passivity and, frankly, relativistic weakness – of an absence of belief – that rules all the institutions of the formerly Christian West, and, perhaps particularly egregiously, is the favoured language of official Vatican pronouncements. Certainly there is nothing here to upset the sensitivities of the internationalist bureaucrats, the “aggressive secularists” at the EU who famously refused to acknowledge even the historical existence of Christendom.

Why do we throw our hands up while a feckless, faithless hierarchy destroys the Church?

Much is made today of the danger of sexual sins, of the reality of Hell, and the widespread disregard for chastity.  We also hear volumes at the moment (even if only to advocate for statist policy) about the sin of neglect for the needy.  But I don’t think Our Lord or Our Mother in Heaven will lament those sins the most when they have the final say on our generation.

I think they will wonder at our cowardice, our failure to do like Peter and Paul: to stand in the Temple and defend the Faith.  They will be pleased with our Rosaries said outside abortuaries, but they will wonder why we let so many die in sin or at the hands of killers who hate Truth.

 

 

Catholic College Student Suspended for Not Going Through with ISIS Funding Scheme

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Unnamed honor student who did not show sufficient trust or respect

Unnamed Laura who failed to sufficiently honor Catholic College’s mission

Hemingway started out as a reporter with no college degree.  Student Laura X at a Catholic College in Miami might want to do the same.

Barry University has suspended a student reporter for her participation in a Project Veritas video that featured a university coordinator assisting in the creation of an ISIS club on campus.

The student journalist, identified only as Laura, recorded her efforts trying to launch a “Sympathetic Students in Support of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,” student group last week.

This morning, she received an emailed notice from Maria Alvarez, the university’s associate vice president and dean of students, stating she had been suspended over allegations that her reporting violated the university’s Code of Conduct.

“In response to complaints filed by members of the University community on Wednesday, April 3, and received by my office this morning, April 6, 2015, your alleged actions were the cause root of disruption of the University community and the creation of a hostile environment for members of the University staff,” the notice read. “Because these alleged actions violate Barry University’s Code of Conduct, effective immediately you are placed on Interim Suspension from Barry University.”

The university’s Code of Conduct demands that “[m]embers of the campus community must act out of mutual respect to establish an atmosphere of trust,” and that enrollment at the school “presumes an obligation on the part of the student to act at all times in a manner compatible with the university’s purpose, processes and functions.”

Of course, in order to have trust and be respected you have to be trustworthy and respectable, yes?

If I had to be part of an organization which demanded I “act at all times in a manner compatible” with it’s “purpose, processes and functions,” I’d run for the door.  That’s because I would be not in the bosom of a Catholic school, but the grip of an Orwellian network which cared nothing for my life nor the lives of victims anywhere.

During the suspension, Laura is forbidden from visiting the Barry University campus or attending classes.