The “Great Progressive Propaganda Machine”, Totalitarian Agendas, Incrementalism, and YOU – Wherein Fr. Z rants

I don’t want to know anything about film and stage actors personal lives or, usually, vapid thoughts.  Laura Ingraham had a good phrase for the screeching pop tarts: “shut up and sing”.   If I go to a movie, I just want to enjoy the movie without the background distraction of having confirmed a suspicion that, in real life, the thespian is a moron.

Today at The Catholic Thing there is a commentary on how much progress the corrosive liberal agenda has made in undermining decent mores.   David Carlin watched The Golden Globe awards to see what was going on in film, etc.   A secondary result was surely time off of Purgatory.  He was taken aback at the level of corrosion.

In an ironic twist a notorious lesbian sardonically quipped that she was glad to live in a country which (still) allowed women to choose to have babies.

Here is the peroration from his piece:

[…]

This is not at all strange given that the GPPM [Great Progressive Propaganda Machine] is mostly made up of four institutions dominated by atheists and near-atheists: (a) the mainstream news media, (b) the entertainment industry (which was on display at the Golden Globes), (c) our best colleges and universities, and (d) the Democratic Party.  These are the “command posts” of American culture.

Who will defend Christianity if Catholics won’t defend it?  Shall we leave its defense up to Evangelicals?  Or – who?

Let us keep in mind that God helps those who help themselves.

Surely he is right.

Allow me to end with a couple … what’s the opposite of a bromide?   Aphorism?

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

– Edmund Burke

Perennially verified by our bishops.  It is often quipped that at the consecration of a bishop, while the sacrament is conferred, the Three B’s are removed, which include brains and backbone.   Of course there are some terrific and courageous bishops, even now, in these USA.   They are bright lights in an otherwise obscured and tenebrous churchscape.    What a difference a bishop can make.  As we read in Holy Writ…

“Iron sharpeneth iron, so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”

– Proverbs 27:17

To sharpen something, you need pressure and the right angle.   At first, coarser media are used, then ever finer and finer to put that desired edge on the blade.   Bishops must learn again to cut through the B as in B and S in S, apply the coarse medium to get attention, keep the pressure on, and then refine the bevel.   Without their intervention in the public square and their 100% support of their courageous priests, we will soon arrive at the next stage.  Which is…

“Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”

– Totalitarian Principle

Homosexualists and abortion defenders are, at heart, totalitarians.    My friend Jennifer Roback Morse make this argument, demonstrating how their thought and agenda is, in essence, totalitarian in scope and tactic.   You can start with her book:

The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why The Church Was Right All Along

US HERE – UK HERE

More on her thought HERE and HERE

The totalitarians progress by incrementalism.  It has been an amazingly swift progress.

I wrote a few times about the stages of the homosexualist incrementalism.  For example HERE and HERE   Among which…

[…]

I’ve argued here – often – that the homosexualist agenda has been patiently engaged for a long time and is still reaching for that brass ring.

The brass ring is the lowering of the age of consent.

The homosexualists have slowly been shifting the language about deviant same-sex acts and those who regularly commit them.

Through the MSM and entertainment industry the image of homosexuality as something hidden and unclean was broken by replacing it with victim status during the flaming up of the AIDS epidemic in certain populations.

Then the victim image had to be broken and replaced, which was accomplished through cool and “with it” characters in TV shows and other culture movers.  Think of the absurdly high percentage of homosexuals in TV shows, increasing every year.  You can’t turn on a TV series now and not find it filled with deviants, now doing deviant things in prime time.

BUT!  They are cool and emotionally sensitive, who have answers for the dysfunctional and often less attractive “hetero” characters.

Fuse this culture shift with the rise of no-fault divorce and nearly universal contraception and we have the perfect deadly storm that can rip the sexual act conceptually away from marriage (what’s that?) and procreation (what’s that?).

Shall we mention the near total silence of the Catholic Church?

Now that subcultures are multiplying like viruses, we are just about ready, I think, for the next stage of the assault on the human person and God’s plan.  Not content for legalization of same-sex “marriage”, the next phase of the homosexualist agenda will soon be implemented: lowering of the age of consent (aka the aforementioned the brass ring).

And now they have helpers within the Church who are highly visible and often in positions of authority.   Certain Jesuits are blatant homosexualists, their superiors do nothing to stop them and bishops allow them to speak anywhere.  Bishops themselves in Germany are talking about blessing same-sex relationships.

Within the Catholic Church very highly placed authorities are working incrementally to detach procreation from human procreative powers and potentials and acts.

If you can successfully detach procreation from the use of procreative acts, etc., then it’s game over for Catholic moral teaching and, subsequently, for all Catholic doctrine.  Once you say that what is true (in nature and revelation) isn’t true, it’s over.

[…]

It has been said many times, many ways, and it is true.  Going as far back as Sophocles, the wise recognize…

“No good e’er comes of leisure purposeless;
And heaven ne’er helps the men who will not act.”

– in Philoctetes

Put it any way you want, Deus audentest iuvat (Ovid), “God helps those who help themselves”, etc.    If we continue to lie prone and servile on the ground before their jackboots, we are going to be left trampled and toothless.

So, friends, I suppose we must bring this to a concrete point.

Pray for your bishops.   Don’t just pray, but urge and encourage.   Hold them accountable if they preach half truths or non-truths or anything inconsistent with our Catholic Faith.  Fast for them.  Truly do pray: Rosaries, Masses, Novenas, hours of Adoration.  Pick a method, but CHOOSE and then DO.

The Demographic Sinkhole will soon open under the Church in these USA.  Start toughening your sinews and fingernails now so that you can hang on.   Help your priests and bishops get into spiritual shape and get their hearts and heads into that mental place wherein they will be able to stand up in the face of our growing challenges.

To this end, we need to advance, swiftly, that priests implement the

TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS

and that people…

GO TO CONFESSION!

The TLM and promotion of the confessional can both be advanced also by incrementalism.   But, as Tolkien wrote:

“It’s the job that’s never started as takes longest to finish.”
– Sam

 

About Fr. John Zuhlsdorf

Fr. Z is the guy who runs this blog. o{]:¬)
This entry was posted in Emanations from Penumbras, Liberals, One Man & One Woman, Our Catholic Identity, Pò sì jiù, Si vis pacem para bellum!, Sin That Cries To Heaven, The Coming Storm, The Drill, The future and our choices, What are they REALLY saying?, Wherein Fr. Z Rants and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

21 Comments

  1. Sandy says:

    His paragraph about the four institutions that make up the GPPM is completely accurate. How disgraceful that so many Catholics are oblivious to the part the Democrats play and vote them into office. I know, neither party is perfect, but……. The sheep and the goats have been divided as never before; the Lord is making it pretty obvious. This is not the country or the Church I used to know.

  2. HvonBlumenthal says:

    His last paragraph is strikingly reminiscent of St John Fisher’s remark quoted by The Astronomer on another of your threads today:

    “We are besieged on all sides, and can hardly escape the danger of our enemy. And seeing that judgment is begone at the house of God, what hope is there left (if we fall) that the rest shall stand!

    The fort is betrayed even of them that should have defended it. And therefore seeing the matter is thus begun, and so faintly resisted on our parts, I fear that we be not the men that shall see the end of the misery.”

  3. philosophicallyfrank says:

    As long as the media, in all of it’s forms, is supported, by us, with our dollars; then how is there going to be any incentive for them to change??????? I dropped my subscriptions to newspapers & magazines and cable/satellite tv years ago. With EWTN being controlled by the Bishops; I transferred my donations to “churchmilitant.com”. [HEY! What about this blog?]
    Even Raymond Arroyo is preparing to either leave or be dismissed from EWTN by showing-up on the FOXNews Channel. He substituted for Laura Ingram and did a very credible job. Don’t keep supporting the enemy (and that includes most of the Bishops and your local parish if they are not in compliance with the wishes of the Holy Spirit) with your dollars. Father “Z”, perhaps you are aware of a DVD of the Ordinary Form of the Mass properly being celebrated; so that people could see how it should be celebrated. [I am not.]

  4. Shonkin says:

    The rot gets into parishes too.
    For years a lot of parishes, including the one where I live, put out photo books. Parish members and families could get their portrait pictures taken for free. Everyone who had it done got a copy of the book and an 8 x 10 print of their picture. What was in it for the photographer was that he could persuade a lot of the families to buy more prints — suitable for framing and/or wallet-sized.
    What killed this program was that a bunch of unmarried or divorced Catholics had their pictures taken with their shack-up partners and their children. In one notorious case the ex-husband posed with his current live-in girlfriend and his children, and the ex-wife posed with her current live-in boyfriend and the same children. Our then-current pastor — a kindly but wishy-washy priest — let it all happen. (Thank God he has now retired.)
    We got a new pastor, one with a moral compass and sense of duty, and there are no picture events any more. It’s unfortunate, but it was necessary.

  5. exsquid says:

    When I clean “house” I start with the indoor issues, moving that trash outdoors which I clean last. There is no way we are going to effectively protect the Church from the evils of society until we save Her from the evils within. The next decade is going to be “interesting” indeed as in the curse “May you live in interesting times”.

  6. LeeGilbert says:

    Father, you write: “Today [January 10, 2020] at The Catholic Thing there is a commentary on how much progress the corrosive liberal agenda has made in undermining decent mores. ”

    Carlin is not the only one taken aback at the level of corrosion:

    From the Austin Daily Herald, Austin, Minnesota, December 10, 1951, Page 16:

    Archbishop Warns on TV Programs
    ST. PAUL (/T) — In a letter read in Catholic churches of the St. Paul archdiocese. Archbishop John Gregory Murray warned that television is having “disastrous results, especially on children.”
    It is the “serious responsibility” of parents,” he wrote, “to supervise and limit the presence of children at programs presented so as to safeguard their health and morals.” The letter was read as Catholics were asked to renew the pledge of the legion of decency.

    Wolfram-Alpha, the search engine, informs me that from from December 10, 1951, when Archbishop Gregory Murray issued his statement to January 10, 2020 when David Carlin published his article is 68 yrs and 1 month, or 3552 weeks. 3552 weeks of mostly silent pulpits on the entertainment industry’s effect on our morals or on the presence of secular media in the Catholic home. Seventy years of silence.

    So he is shocked, shocked, shocked. Right. But I am not shocked at the silence, nor at Ricky Gervais’s allusion to Pope Francis and Pope Benedict as pedophiles, nor even at the obscene publicity photo to which Gervaise alludes, nor that he is lionized as a great cultural commentator. Breaking taboos is the way one makes money in the entertainment biz, after all. Netflix’s The First Temptation of Christ is another predictable instance. Nor am I really shocked at ongoing episcopal or sacerdotal silence.

    What does irritate me, though, is the alarm at the “vocations crisis” or at the apostasy of our young people. With three to four hours of increasingly decadent entertainment pumped into the Catholic home every day, what did we think was going to happen?

    A few years after Archbishop Gregory’s statement Pope Pius XII addressed the bishops of Italy in 1954:

    “The painful picture of the evil and disturbing power of the cinema is ever present before Our mind. But it is impossible not to be horrified at the thought that through the medium of Television it may be possible for that atmosphere poisoned by materialism, fatuity and hedonism, which is too often breathed in so many cinemas, to penetrate within the very walls of the home. One could not, indeed, imagine anything more fatal for the spiritual forces of the nation, if these impressive revelations of pleasure, passion and evil, which are capable of shaking and ruining for ever a whole construction of purity, goodness and healthy individual and social education, were performed in front of so many innocent souls, in the very midst of the family.”

    Was he wrong so many years ago? David Carlin is very late to the party, about 65 years late.

    [A little stingy. You seem to think that, because he didn’t write it in the 1950’s, he shouldn’t have written it at all. “Late to the party”? Where are YOUR articles from the 1950’s?]

  7. Semper Gumby says:

    Good TCT article and post.

    Three points though about this paragraph:

    “…the GPPM [Great Progressive Propaganda Machine] is mostly made up of four institutions dominated by atheists and near-atheists: (a) the mainstream news media, (b) the entertainment industry (which was on display at the Golden Globes), (c) our best colleges and universities, and (d) the Democratic Party. These are the “command posts” of American culture.”

    First, one need not consider our “best colleges and universities” as those “dominated by atheists and near-atheists.” That type of university tends to be an igloo for snowflakes, who after four years emerge foaming at the mouth as social justice warriors. Instead, the best colleges and universities would be those that provide a proper education and cultivate virtue.

    Second, those four institutions need not be considered as the “command posts of American culture,” but instead as the louse-ridden encampments of an elitist, globalist and atheist horde.

    Third, much of the “mainstream” media has shown itself to be a bilgewater canal filled with upturned fish.

    A good TCT article, but we need not cede vocabulary and nomenclature to the barbarians.

  8. Dan says:

    I am reminded recently of Bishop Sirba’s funeral. His brother, Father Sirba, did not waste his opportunity to preach to a sanctuary full of Bishops. He also had some strong words for St. Thomas University.
    https://youtu.be/cz5ISqvNFn4 his homily begins around 23:10

  9. ChrisP says:

    All of this is true, but it would behoove many to remember, this blog included, that difference of opinion and the maturity to cope with it, is what sets us apart from the ProgressiveJackboot™.

    In difference of opinion, charity.
    In essentials, unity.

  10. Semper Gumby says:

    “Bishops must learn again to cut through the B as in B and S in S, apply the coarse medium to get attention, keep the pressure on, and then refine the bevel.”

    ChrisP: You have a fair point, but recall there are many matters far more serious than “difference of opinion.”

  11. LeeGilbert says:

    Father, I gave my piece a bad ending, obviously, and I am re-sending without it.

    My ire is not at all with Carlin, but with the 70 years of silence by the entire Church. Is that overstating it? Honestly, I don’t think so. We have been very exercised about many things, but hardly with the entertainment industry, which is arguably the origin of the many things we are worried about: abortion; homosexuality, the collapse of vocations, the mass apostasy.

  12. Kathleen10 says:

    “A house divided against itself, cannot stand.” These words given us by Our Lord remind us that no organization of any kind can survive if there is not cohesion to basic agreed-upon tenets. We no longer have that in the Church, so how long can this “organization” possibly continue.
    Yes, I know, the church is supernaturally led, but we presume too much when we fantasize there is no longer a need for any foundation upon which we all agree. The house may be built on rock but it is now fractured rock, with stones missing. Our house is utterly divided. We are refusing to say the words that have been too obvious, we are already in schism, we have two divided camps that do not agree on much. We are led by men who appear to hate what we are, and being in the power seat, are well able to abduct the house, put in on wheels, and take it wherever they want to.
    I don’t pretend to know the specific answer to this at all. I certainly don’t. What I do feel is true is that until something major happens, probably brought about by Cardinals or bishops, only God can divert this course. This church and the culture look more and more like the ugly brat of a marriage between a Bosch painting and Circue de Soleil. How long can it go on.

  13. HvonBlumenthal says:

    I share LeeGilbert’s point as expressed in his second message. In a desire not to appear square or uncool, absurd energies have been expended in efforts to look tolerant and understanding, laughing with the rest at shows that are not funny, looking duly unshocked at the shocking. And those of us who knew better are most at fault.

    The time has come to try to make amends in all the millions of small opportunities offered. That is how the secularists did it – by never failing to raise their voice in their own cause.

  14. robtbrown says:

    ChrisP says,

    In difference of opinion, charity.

    I prefer St Thomas’ description of the Son, Verbum spirans amorem (The Word breathing forth Love)

  15. LeeGilbert says:

    Father you ask, “Where are YOUR articles from the 1950’s?” Admittedly, I cannot produce anything from my early teen years in the fifties, but by 1971 I had an article in Triumph which of course I cannot lay my hands on now. Not by way of self-justification, but to illustrate the utter obviousness of the step we needed to take long ago, here is the same argument which I re-launched in a blog comment in 2010 . . . .

    Someone had written, “The world, on the other hand, is constantly teaching its impoverished and erroneous version of these things through television and popular culture and everything else.”

    So I responded:

    That’s right, so ala James Dobson of Focus on the Family, let me role play with you for a moment.

    Our [fictional, we’re role playing here] family of five children, two of them adolescents, live near a college campus and provide room and board to a very interesting and personable young man. He has an incredible fund of funny stories and magic tricks. He’s good looking, very athletic, plays the guitar, and my two teenagers worship the ground he walks on.

    But here’s the thing, whenever he is entertaining us or interacting with us, there is ALWAYS something that’s a little off, just a little. Perhaps it’s a little laugh at the expense of the Church, a story that’s slightly off color, or thinly veiled amusement at our going off to Church on Sunday morning. It is dramatically affecting my family. Only since he arrived have my children started asking me why we have to go to Mass on Sunday. How can I harness his incredibly winsome personality to bring the message of Christ and His Church to my family? What should I do? I am at a total loss.

    Any Catholic father saying that over a beer at the Knights of Columbus would have everyone looking at him in complete disbelief. Somebody would finally say, “What, are you kidding me? Throw the bastard out!”

    Now, this is what I don’t get, the complete lack of animosity from the pulpit against TV and the other media. Switching metaphors, if the media is coming like a jaguar for our souls and the souls of our children, it seems tactically mistaken to deal with each paw separately, and argue against abortion, homosexuality, fornication, heresy, etc., etc, rather than go for the throat and kill the whole animal. Of course, we have to answer those arguments, but why not go for the throat, and have the word go out from the pulpit insistently, “Kill your TV.”

    There are several secular organizations behind such a move for secular reasons, White Dot among them, but we who have eternal motives say virtually nothing. Would it be “too extreme” or what? The media, certainly, have no fear of going to extremes and they are absolutely killing us.

    Sent to Minor Friar Jan 17, 2010

  16. Dan says:

    “ complete lack of animosity from the pulpit against TV and the other media”
    Mother Teresa once referred to the TV as “The Devil’s tabernacle” if that is true how much damage is done by almost every person on the planet carrying that tabernacle in their pocket?
    Priests and Bishops love their TV and stories as much as the rest of us. How many times do we have well meaning, good priests trying to reference popular tv from the pulpit to engage us? Saying things like “Vikings is the most Catholic show on television” never mind the pornography scenes.
    I fear that many of us take those types of homilies as license time watch shows that at the very best put is in a near occasion of sin.
    Sometimes we have to be much more conscience of the words we don’t say as the ones we do.

  17. Pingback: MONDAY EDITION – Big Pulpit

  18. chuckharold says:

    After four-score and more, I’ve experienced lots of Masses in both forms. None that I can remember was done other than in a holy way. The priests who could not sing thankfully didn’t, but other than that the red was done. The TLM is not the cure for our ills. Lousy sermons, poor catechists, and worse music are among the culprits. Change never results from doing more of the same that got us in a mess in the first place.
    If you want to change the church, you must start with the seminaries. The best of the formation programs result in priests who don’t know how to be pastors, how to manage an organization, or how to relate to the people in it. We could learn a lot from the Evangelicals about not just faith, but how to “do” church. (I know, I hate the term too, but … ) Most Masses I’ve attended in the last year are boring, and the church isn’t the center of family life as much as the soccer field on Sunday.
    We need more “Rants” about the process and less about the color of vestments and speaking in a dead language.

  19. Semper Gumby says:

    In his novel “Sophia House” Michael O’Brien tells a tale of totalitarianism, how symbols function in the mind, sexuality, good and evil, redemption and love.

    Pawel Tarnowski is a young Catholic boy living with his family in Poland at the outbreak of WW I. During the war his dear father is away in the army for several years, during which Pawel is molested by a great-uncle. This, of course, deeply affects Pawel. When his father returns from the war Pawel, to his father’s confusion and disappointment, is suspicious, anxious and distant.

    Eventually in 1931, in his early twenties, Pawel decided that he must sever all ties to his past to become a stronger person. He wants to be an artist, so he leaves a note for his family and boards a train for Paris.

    There he rents a room, meets other young artists, Picasso, a Russian Orthodox priest and others. These encounters do not go well. After a year Pawel is penniless, homeless and still angry. At one point he stands on a bridge over the Seine, contemplating suicide. Finally, he wanders into a cafe and while eating bread crusts meets a well-known French novelist named Goudron and his friends.

    Goudron and his male companions are discussing European politics, Pawel is asked for the opinion of the “younger generation.” An exhausted Pawel, normally reticent, declares that Hitler will conquer Europe. Goudron’s friends laugh, but Goudron stares at Pawel with interest.

    When the group breaks up, Goudron invites the obviously homeless Pawel to stay at his mansion in the Montmartre district. At the mansion, Pawel cannot believe his good fortune: Goudron is the friend Pawel always wanted, bright and articulate, a benefactor who provides him with a room of his own, new clothes, art supplies, and occasional invitations to group outings at the theater and parties. Pawel insists on helping with the gardening to earn his keep. The garden has a view of the basilica of Sacre-Coeur.

    ______

    He was raking leaves one day and stopped by the iron fence to gaze at the white dome floating above the “holy hill”, as it was called in the neighborhood…He felt an indescribable longing to go there, to see if it were possible to return to the lost peace of his earliest childhood. It seemed to him that a great heart dwelled in that place, and that it was calling him.

    Suddenly, Goudron was standing beside him. He took the rake from Pawel’s hand, dropped it to the ground, and handed him a glass of dark red wine. He smiled at Pawel, looking intimately into his eyes. Then, gesturing to Sacre-Coeur, he said in a tone of gentle amusement, “Sic transit gloria caeli.”

    It was a strange remark, its meaning obscure, so Pawel said nothing in reply.

    “Paint it if you wish”, Goudron said. “Everyone else does. But do not be seduced by its charms.”

    Thus, Pawel never went there.

    [Several months passed, Pawel painted: the parks of Paris, barges on the Seine, Notre Dame in a snowstorm- typical subject matter.]

    Goudron told Pawel that his work was good technically, that it had “soul”, but was unfocused. Above all, it needed more experience. If Pawel were to make a total break with the past, he suggested, and immerse himself in the ethos of the new Europe, great things were sure to come from him.

    “What are you suggesting?” Pawel asked.

    “Do not look so alarmed, my young friend. I am merely saying that if you wish to be an artist of this century, one who will illumine our age, you must unlearn what you have been taught. You are angry and bitter because you are very much a child of the Old Europe, and the Old Europe has failed you. Of course, it is natural enough that you would feel a certain dismay over this. However, you must understand that a new world is being forged by men of culture. Hitler and Stalin will make some noise for a time, but they are the death rattle of the old age. They will soon be gone.”

    Pawel said nothing. He felt that he was not entirely in agreement, though he could not have explained why this was so. In the face of Goudron’s great intellect he felt pathetically shallow.

    “The very foundations of life are being overthrown”, Goudron went on. “He who would be a creator must know how to destroy.”

    “Destroy?” Pawel replied nervously.

    “Yes, destroy. To destroy old values- false notions of good and evil- is to clear away the cultural rubble of millennia that is choking us, so that a new thing might be built. For us- me with my novels, and you with your painting- the destruction of artistic norms is the necessary precondition for acts of purest creation.”

    [More months passed. There were more parties and more discussions with Goudron’s friends. Ennui and Acedia. Pawel’s painting turned to themes such as “Notre Dame burning under a hail of bombs.”]

    “Formidable!” Goudron said. “You are breaking through to your own language. This, at last, is original!”

    [Eventually, at a nightclub in Berlin Goudron revealed his ulterior personal motive to Pawel. Disgusted, Pawel left Berlin immediately, returned to the mansion in Montmartre, hurriedly burned his paintings and collected his meager belongings, and returned to Warsaw. There he encountered new challenges, such as owning a bookstore in Warsaw in 1942 and encountering a Major Kurt Haftmann- a well-bred German professor of literature and a well-mannered Nazi officer of the Reich Culture Chamber in occupied Warsaw. At the same time, Pawel was hiding in his attic a Jewish boy named David Schaefer, who would become the Father Elijah of O’Brien’s novel “Father Elijah.”]

  20. philosophicallyfrank says:

    A previous poster commented how the Masses that he has experienced followed “the Red” properly. If so, he has experienced a rarity. I would suggest that the vast majority of priests and Bishops ignore what the Missal that they are celebrating Mass(every day) with is based on. The Missal assumes the “ad orientem” position. “Do the ‘Red’ and say the ‘Black'”. So read the “Red” #29, #127, #132, #139, #141 and #144. They don’t make any sense if the Celebrant is already facing the people. It is difficult to believe that of all of the priests and bishops; that so many haven’t noticed those 6 instructions in the Red. It says a lot when priests are afraid of their bishops and bishops are afraid of their “brother” bishops more then they fear Jesus. St. Pope Paul VI’s “Smoke of Satan” is so thick that it gags a seeker of Jesus. Oh, where is the smoke of incense to clear the senses? If we experience more and more discrimination of our practice of our Catholic faith; then we will have nobody to blame but ourselves and I suspect that Jesus will us accountable for our tolerance of the profane.

  21. Semper Gumby says:

    Last week the philosopher Roger Scruton died at the age of 75. Two quotes from his writings:

    “Through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home, and in doing so we both amplify our joys and find consolation for our sorrows.”

    “Beauty matters. It is not just a subjective thing but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert.”

    Two items relating to recent creativity in entertainment and technology. The first is a scene from Game of Thrones, as described by a commenter here in a 14 April 2019 post:

    “A knight in the thick of battle sees the dragon land and the “maiden” (well a young woman; but there are no maidens in GOT I guess) is not far away…But this is GOT, so the knight does not charge in to kill the dragon to save the “maiden”, he aims his lance for the “maiden” (’cause she is the commander of the opposing army and the dragon), and the dragon saves her.”

    The second item is a Snapchat filter that alters photos from male to female and vice versa. Newsweek published an enthusiastic May 14, 2019, article with examples: “Snapchat’s New Gender Swap Filter Will Make You Question Your Identity.”

    There is artistic creativity that inspires and enriches, then there is creativity that- over time and repeated viewings- deforms, corrupts and destroys.

Comments are closed.