“They can always hurt you more.”

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.

HERE

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…