Fr. Z's Blog

I just saw an interesting movie called “Don’t Look Up”.  The central idea is that there is a massive, planet killing comet on a collision course with Earth and by the time this global extinction fact penetrates the fog of today’s distracted collective social-media and comfort addled idiocy, it’s pretty much too late to do anything about it despite the efforts of the deeply flawed but earnest central characters.

I’ll get some blah blah out of the way here.  There’s bad language, sinful behavior, and some coldly unappealing nudity with a rather darkly comic results.  Sounds like much of the fallen human condition.

What’s my point?

I couldn’t help as I watched, looking past the facile subtext that it’s global warming that’s the killer comet and that the real bad guys are … guess which political party (with a couple of distracting rattles of the keys and pointings at a squirrel or two just to keep you guessing) … that the movie could be a metaphor for what is going on in the Church.

There is, as I call it, a demographic sink hole opening up under the Church, accelerated now by prelatial malfeasance and supine cringing before COVID-1984 and woke-virtue signaling.

We are in a world nearly totally dominated by a few, now.  Long prepared by the slowly chugging engine of leftist ideology through academia (thank you Gramsci), rendering several generations now incapable of finding their way out of a dark room with an EXIT light over the door, there is now a near perfect storm of social-media, a certain political party with atheistic materialist underpinnings, the MSM, the entertainment industry and big pharma, etc. etc. etc.

And the Church?

I maintain, and I will continue to maintain, that we are our rites.  (There’s a poignant haunting reminder of that close to the end, but I really hate to give spoilers.  WARNING: There will have to be some, through the combox.)

For decades, our rites have been undermined.

Now, in the most open and blatant way possible, those who have sold out our brethren to the CCP, which also happens to be ground zero for a certain virus, and who have fawned over the likes of Paul Erich and Jeffrey Sachs, whose messaging seems to condone things expressly forbidden by God in unmistakable divine revelation, are attacking not only our cherished rites, held as sacred for centuries, but also the people who desire them.

Thus, I return to the movie I just saw and its chillingly familiar treatment of those who raised awareness of the oncoming threat.

Your thoughts on this movie and my nudge of it out of the puerile sphere of climate change ideology and political smearing towards being a metaphor for what’s going on in the Church would be illuminating.

A key element is that there are concrete signs that the comet really is coming, but people are too distracted to pay attention and allow the ramifications to sink in.  Then, when the comet becomes visible in the sky, and the people doing the warning are saying “Just Look Up!”, those fighting back, with down-arrow pins fight back with “Don’t Look Up!”

It’s like… trying to preserve the perfect storm of Immanentism 2.0 that grips the majority of Catholics (a huge percentage of whom don’t believe in transsubstantiation).  Gotta keep Communion in the hand going at all costs lest people think about what they are doing.

It’s like… trying to forbid ad orientem worship because you can’t allow a sliver of the transcendent into that immanentist closed circle.  Gotta keep the priest distracted by being the “host” and everything resting on him in the liturgical action, everyone with the distraction of eye contact that shields people from having to spend time in their own skull.

It’s like … attacking the Traditional Latin Mass lest anyone sense the need for propitiation, understand the urgency of a thorough examen, have a concern for the Four Last Things.  Gotta keep everything chipper even though… there’s a comet… a sink hole… and it is not going to stop.

This is a bit of a downer, I suppose.  But a wise bishop once gave me the perfect answers to my two questions.  First, what is the state of the Church?  “Terrible!”, he growled.  Next, what do we have to do to turn things around?  “The first thing we have to do,” he rumbled, “is stop blowing sunshine up everyone’s….”

Hence, my comparison with the movie, entitled “Don’t Look Up” with it’s politically correct and facile dimensions, and yet powerful depiction of the state of play in our society (Church) today.

Save the Liturgy – Save the World?

I’ll turn the moderation queue on for this.