Fr. Z's Blog

You will want to watch this before it is expunged from on orders from high atop the thing.  Tucker Carlson’s opening monologue on 31 August 2022.  He goes over the many ways in which the left, fully in charge, is weaponizing government and demonizing resistance.

If you swap out some terms and name of players, there is a parallel with what is going on in the Church today.  Try it as a mind exercise.  One to one parallels?  No.  But they are close in a way that is creepy.

Does this surprise?  No, it does not.  The same players are on both playing fields, secular and sacred.  Hence, their bed-sharing with the one world government crowd, people pushing population control, forelock-tugging in the direction of China for the sake of money, and determination to crush what they perceive as a threat.  For the political left in these USA the new threat to everything is anyone who didn’t vote for them.  For the ecclesial left pretty much everywhere, anyone who clings to whatever was before their interpretation of Vatican II.

You can see the two streams cross over today at Fishwrap (aka National Schismatic Reporter).  The Madame Defarge of the Fishwrap, Michael Sean Winters, provided an exemplary piece of high-level brown-nosing of the breathiest sort about the elevation of San Diego’s Bishop to the College of Cardinals.  See if you don’t get the same impression.  Take note of how he exposes his priorities and expectations:

As you can imagine, I am not often speechless. But when I finally reached the end of the receiving line at the U.S. ambassador to the Holy See’s residence to greet Cardinal Robert McElroy on Aug. 26, I couldn’t find the words. It has been three months since the news of his elevation to the cardinalate arrived — three months for it to sink in — and I was still not sure what to say.

Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, knew what to say. “Ecstatic” was how he described what so many Catholics were feeling at this moment. Wester spoke at a dinner for McElroy’s family and friends after the Mass of thanksgiving on Aug. 28. In discussions with pilgrims from San Diego, friends of McElroy’s from San Francisco or from college and seminary, and his brother bishops, “ecstatic” was the exact word.

For progressive Catholics, McElroy has been one of a handful of bishops who would go the extra mile, make statements of support for gay Catholics, push back against conservative efforts to hijack church teaching for political ends and participate in conferences on climate change. The Catholics whose hearts have been warmed and encouraged by McElroy’s leadership for many years were among those “ecstatic” at the appointment.

[…]

• FIRST AND FOREMOST … support for the homosexualist agenda (“support for gay Catholics”)
• Silence – not “push back” – those who defend the sanctity of life (“hijack church teaching for political ends”)
• Embrace population control and the Bill Gates “cricket diet” (“climate change”)

No?  Did I get that wrong?  Read that last paragraph and tell me what he meant.

For decades we have heard from the catholic Left about the dichotomy of intellectual v. pastoral.  Rather… pastóreal, as some agents of the Left pronounce as a matter of proving their point.  For Madame Defarge, however, all things ascend and converge in their church’s newly acknowledged wunderkind:

Massa added, “McElroy has the intellectual firepower that can use Murray’s insights in a pastoral way.”

Cathleen Kaveny, who teaches both law and theology at Boston College, agreed. “Most people think there is a sharp divide between the intellectual life and the pastoral life. Cardinal McElroy is living proof that this is not necessarily the case,” Kaveny told me.

He’s so dreamy.

And he’s ready to put on his garb (rarely worn cassock) in intellectually pastoral humility and fight against the enemy.

McElroy has articulated the teaching of the church in ways that some traditionalists abhor, but his arguments were always grounded in our Catholic teaching, not in some bizarre, Americanist interpretation of that teaching. This is one of the outstanding challenges facing the English-speaking wing of the Catholic Church in the United States, to rescue it from the misinterpretations and misrepresentations of Catholic teaching that have been foisted on the laity for the past 40 years.

Create a fiction and fight against it.   Just like what Biden has been doing lately: call anyone who isn’t knuckling under to the new plan a “fascist” and then violate their civil liberties at will.

FORTY YEARS of “misinterpretations and misrepresentations of Catholic teaching”.

What side of the spectrum has been in charge for the last 40 years?

This is perfect nonsense, of course, because the catholic Left has been in control.  This is code for the magisterium of John Paul II and Benedict XVI.

What does “standing up to” look like for the Biden catholic Left?  In 2018 Winters wrote this:

Normally, when I get into a debate with a conservative friend and we are at an impasse, with no hope for resolution, I try to ease the tension with levity, and say, “Well, when the revolution comes, I will put in a good word for you and your family.” To my friends in the Republican political and legal establishment who have not stood up to Trump: When the revolution comes, you are on your own, and I will be clamoring not for mercy but for a seat next to the guillotine, where I can do my knitting.

As the French Revolution descended into the Reign of Terror, the women of the streets and markets who had been active were sidelined from politics.   In sullen protest, they parked themselves near the guillotine and did their knitting.  Thus, Tricoteuses … knitter women.   In literature, you might remember the ghastly figure of Madame Defarge in Charles Dickens’ A Tale Of Two Cities.

And HERE Defarge thinks that converts shouldn’t be allowed to voice an opinion… because they are conservative.

But Card. McElroy!  Ecstasy.

Winters’ sycophantic peroration:

It is remarkable to me that the Holy Father is so well informed that he was able to make this choice. The pope has pointed the way forward for the U.S. church with this appointment and the future is looking brighter today than it has in a long, long time.

Build Back Better!

UPDATE:

How do we Build Back Better in the church of the Left?  Celebrate Communists, of course!

Archbp. Paglia of the Pontifical Academy for Life, who recently divulged that the Church’s teaching on contraception is up for grabs (i.e, will change to allow intentionally sterile sex) swooned over Michael Gorbachev recently when giving him an award in Terni (where he was bishop and where there is a homoerotic fresco in the cathedral which he sponsored and in which he is depicted). In ANSA. L’Osservatore Romano and Avvenire of the Italian Bishops Conference were right there to swoon along.

In case you didn’t know, it was Gorbachev – who tried to save the USSR – who ended the Cold War, never mind Reagan, Thatcher and John Paul II. Never mind the tanks he sent to repress Georgia or the Baltic, dissidents he put into psychiatric prisons, funding of global terrorism and the spread of Communism.

BTW… the other day in an interview, Paglia said that the current abortion law is now a “pillar” of society.

Remember… 40 years of foisting a false narrative! Gotta “push back”!