Fr. Z's Blog

Provocative reading met my eyes this morning, fresh from Mass, office, coffee and two of those little biscuit things which I like, not to sweet, not too dull.

First, there is a great offering at Crisis by one Jason Morgan, once here in the Diocese of the Extraordinary Ordinary but now with ties in Japan.  Cool.  Anyway, he drills into the present – deeply stupid but oxygen consuming and yet symptomatic – controversy about standing or “taking a knee” in protest during the national anthem.  My personal view is that they who show decadence engendered disrespect to the flag and country for which men fought and died so that we could have a good life and liberties should be drafted… and not in the football way.  But I digress.  Morgan’s piece, which is about “virtue signalling” has a good paragraph:

Long before Tim Tebow was born, of course, the takeover of America’s institutions by cultural Marxists and dyed-in-the-wool atheistic communists was well underway. By now, no one should be surprised to hear that most mainline churches are in full, fawning thrall to homosexual “marriage,” for instance. Recently, to take just one example, Fr. James Martin, a Jesuit who has made a career out of bending his own knee to the idols of the age, published a book which surely charts a course toward the homosexualization of even the Catholic Church. But it isn’t just churches. Academia, print media, broadcast media, the armed forces, the courts, the intelligence services, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, the medical profession, the public schools, charities, large corporations, and every last labor union in the country—all have been swamped by politics. And politics, for the cultural Marxists, is a way of freezing natural human interaction and paralyzing resistance to infiltration. The strategy has worked everywhere it has been tried.

Read the whole thing there.  That was well-written, wasn’t it?  That “freezing interaction” observation was dead on.  Who else describes that tool for the Left to neutralize opposition?  Yes, of course, that was too easy.  Saul Alinsky in his Satanically-dedicated Rules For Radicals [US HERE] recommends this technique:

• RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.

That’s what the Catholic Alt-Left is doing to, for example, me right now.  For example, the quacksalvers at RNS have this:

[M]artin was disinvited from speaking at Catholic University’s Theological College and a couple of other places, thanks to a campaign by what we might call the Catholic Alt-Right — specifically the websites Church Militant and Father Z.

One of the things that this shows is that I must be pretty powerful.  Right?  HAH!  This is pure Alinsky.

Quaksalvers.

UPDATE:

Marco Tossati touches on the point of “freezing” with a label. HERE in Italian.   I don’t often link to Rorate because of their seeming unwillingness to close ranks for the sake of unity but… over there you can find an adequate English rendering of Tosatti’s good remarks.  It’s time to stop fooling around, folks.  Divisions just keep us all weak.  Once again I apply the “Olive Branch” tag.

___

Another interesting piece comes, surprise, Jesuit-run Amerika Magazine.  While I don’t subscribe to everything that the writer offers, I do underwrite the general sense of the piece by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry entitled:

Do our fights over Pope Francis have to be this dumb?

Gobry sides with the libs… it’s Amerika after all… but he’s right, isn’t he.  I’ve read mind-annihilatingly dopey stuff lately on the interwebs on both sides.   

Please, people, do us all a favor and …

GO TO CONFESSION!

The old adage is “Sin makes you stupid.”  I am pushed to the conclusion that some otherwise bright people out there are in need of stepping back into their closed rooms, making an examination of conscience, and then seek to be shriven at the earliest possible opportunity, ideally before putting fingertips to keyboard again.

I know that I won’t miss my regular date with the confessor.

Back to Gobry.  Again, I am not signing off on everything he proposed.  However, he’s on to something when he says:

I am not being acidly sarcastic for its own sake. There is a serious theological point, which I will make despite my distinct lack of theological degrees, which is that nothing could be further from the spirit of the Christian faith than the idea that faith and morals are accessible only to the learned and or that the best way to divine them is to tally up the views of the powerful.

In the future we will hear more and more about the sensus fidei fidelium and about “reception” of doctrine.  The faithful have a sense of the Faith.  But remember that you have to be faithful to have that sense of the faithful.  Be wary of those who suggest that if you don’t have various degrees on your Ego Wall, you can’t have a clear-eyed view of faith and morals.

Having suggested these articles for your consideration, I’ll offer another point.

There is a fight going on, and the fight is worth the fighting.  The stakes involve the salvation or the damnation of souls.   Hence, the necessity of the fight.  But, please, can we smarten up?

ON is the moderation queue.