Sunday, August 26, 2018

Let All the Poisons

This is a time when cesspits of corruption are being laid bare, both in the secular world and in the Church.  Now we are seeing exactly where that awful smell we have been coping with for so long has been coming from.  For decades, the hirelings among the Church’s appointed shepherds have held the ascendancy.  They have publicly palled around with leftist, pro-abortion celebrities and politicians.  They have preached heresies from the pulpit, or declined to take action against heretical priests under their purview.  They have stood silent in the face of secular encroachments onto the Church’s turf.  They have lived posh lifestyles.  (Question: why does a cardinal archbishop even have a beach house or a penthouse suite?)  They have fattened themselves on their flocks.  And now all of these scandals stand aside in awe at the monumental scandal that underlies them all, the scandal of sexual perversion and complicity in sexual perversion among not only priests but also bishops, and the revelation that the collaborators include even the Bishop of Rome himself.

For many, many years, the “progressive” wing of the Catholic Church has been slamming and making fun of Catholic teaching on sexual morality.  Why, then, should we be surprised to find members of this wing not behaving in accordance with the teachings that they publicly despise?  Now we are seeing that these teachings, so far from raining on our parade, are really our first line of defense against the predations of the powerful.  And since the powerful have for decades been assiduously knocking down and discrediting the last line of defense — canonical penalties — we see that now, humanly speaking, we have no defenses.  The wolves have free run of the sheepfold.

So is the solution to leave the Church?  I guess one could argue that that depends on whether we can expect to find greater purity, greater morality, and greater uprightness in the world outside the Church than we find inside the Church.  But it is the world outside the Church that has been telling us for so long that chastity is stupid, and that we should be free to decide for ourselves what is “normal” and what is “moral,” instead of trying to live up to objective standards.  At least within the Catholic Church there subsist the principles — unshakable even when ignored — that lust is a sin, using other human beings as objects is wrong, and lewd conduct is a damnable offense.  Will we find a safer refuge in the world, where those principles do not subsist?

Are we now ready, at long last, to accept the thorough discrediting of the colossally stupid idea that the Church needs to “modernize” and “get with the times”?  Modernity is thoroughly bankrupt.  “The times” that too many in the Church have been so anxious to get into line with over the last hundred-plus years have been filled with fratricidal wars, genocide, lawlessness, deceit, sexual deviancy, murder, and the powerful preying on the defenseless.  It is not the Church that needs to get with the times, but the times that need to get with the Church.

2 comments:

  1. It's time we as faithful Catholics made the hierarchy of the Church accountable for their illegal and sinful actions. Massive defrocking and jail sentences are called for. All the way to the top.

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