I was looking around on the blog for things I had written about Doctor of the Church St. Bernard of Clairvaux. Today is his feast. I found something I wrote in 2022 about the FACT that…
“They can always hurt you more.”
As I re-read what I wrote, I thought I should re-alert the readership to it. It applies to what we are experiencing today… perhaps even more now than then for reasons that are increasingly obvious.
Excerpt:
Effeminacy is not the jesuitical limp-handed lisping of a confused boy-man with a streak of sullen teen-age girl purple across his half-shaven skull full of mush. Women can be effeminate, too. We want women to be feminine, not effeminate. We want men to be neither, but rather, both virile and masculine. Get the distinction?
There is another kind of effeminacy, by the way. It’s the sort whereby, in defiance of their wiring, they relate to others more as women might than men, thus leading to one of the wisest premonitory insights I ever received from a bishop about clergy: “There are old women of both sexes.”
Another analogy about how some of clergy with power work is: high-school mean-girls in the bathroom.
In any event, they can always hurt you more. Get ready for another blow upon the bruise.
But that’s okay. We have to have the fight. When St. Bernard of Clairvaux (+1153) at Vézelay preached to men to raise troops for Second Crusades, he said…
They can only hurt you if they have authority, which is the wielding of power in accordance with ecclesiastical and divine law.
Since they violate both laws, they are powerless. Let them rage.
@Cornelius – I’m afraid they can hurt you whether they’re legitimately wielding their authority or not. Since the bishops are, in many cases, the sole property owner in their diocese, they can sell your parish church right out from under you and you get absolutely no say in the matter whatsoever, “synodal” nonsense sessions notwithstanding. Since they can cancel your pastor with a finger snap, or transfer him to the hinterlands of the Diocese, or yank his housing, his health benefits, and his salary for being “disobedient”, and, since any recourse to Rome takes time, money, and is certainly no guarantee that anything even resembling justice will ever be done – he’ll probably do whatever the bishop tells him to, no matter his personal convictions. We saw this happen in real time during COVID lockdowns and then again during the implementation of T.C. Heck, the ICKSP even owned their own church building in Chicago and they STILL got thrown out of it.
We live in the real world, not the ideal or abstract one. The fact is, legitimate or not, just or not, charitable or not, and all other factors notwithstanding – they absolutely can and WILL hurt Traditionalists more, and the only practical leverage against them is, whether one likes to admit it or not, the SSPX.
It’s partly why I find it so bewildering that so many Traditionalists are so quick to jump on the anti-SSPX dogpile – truly folks do not understand how the practical side of Church politics (or, likely, any politics) works. And I suspect they underestimate the hatred and ruthlessness of the Enemy and his many minions within the Church.
They say that perfect is the enemy of the good. At this point, I think “wishful thinking” is the enemy of the good. Where’s Mithrandir when one needs him?
Quid est autem nequius aut turpius effeminato viro? (Cicero: Tusculanae disputationes)
#WVC, I go to a local SSPX chapel.