Will the intolerance and ideology of chauvinistic Catholics help bring about persecution?
In the months since Aleteia was kind enough to publish “Illiberal Catholicism” and republish “The Shame of the Catholic Subculture”, the phenomenon of illiberal Catholicism has been recognized in many other places – and a number of personalities have seen fit to align themselves with the movement, ranging from pseudonymous bloggers to a Notre Dame professor — who went so far as to argue that Hobby Lobby deserves to lose its religious freedom lawsuit against the feds because it’s part of the corrupt capitalist order . (The professor in question is not named Douglas Kmiec – although you should look for him as President Hillary Clinton’s ambassador to the Vatican or Malta.)
So I thought it was time for an update, addressing the main points that have been raised by self-proclaimed illiberal Catholics, in the form of a dialogue with a barely dramatized representative of this trend of thought, which rejects the religious, personal and economic freedoms championed by America’s founders, in favor of a politicized version of the faith – a Catholicism which is truly an “ism”, much like socialism or fascism, which gives to some disaffected or disenfranchised American Catholics an excuse for their failure to defend and advance the Faith when and where God saw fit to place them.
Q: Who makes you angry?
A: People who disagree with me make me angry.
Q: Why do they make you angry?
A: Because they offend the integrity of eternal truth and lead souls to eternal damnation.
Q: No. Really. Why do they make you angry?
A: Because they represent the face of modernity that places human rights above the honor of God.
Q: Seriously. There’s no one here except the two of us. turn it off Catholic Bull***t Generator for a moment. Why do they make you angry?
A: Because they have much more influence than me, lead a more entertaining life and have more leisure opportunities.
Q: And that is a grave injustice.
A: Pleasure, wealth and cultural power are radically misdistributed, and it is time for the Philosopher Kings to intervene in the anarchic free market space of Darwinian materialist neoconservative Adam Smith Adam Smith to redistribute these goods, which according to Thomas Aquinas , are the common property of mankind. , to those of us who have been deprived of our just wages by the Americanist Judeo-Masonics and the military-industrial complex. That’s why I consider myself a distributor.
Q: By that you mean… you borrowed $41,000 to get a liberal arts bachelor’s degree, and you’re still living with your parents at 28, and you’re tired of haunting Catholic “young adult” events. in vain. the hope of finding a mate?
A: This is a completely irrelevant ad hominem attack, which ignores the substance of my criticism. If you were to read my blog, you would see that your heretical notions derive from the decadent late scholastic embrace of the notion that man’s earthly good can be separated from his eternal destiny….
[Note: To be fair, not all Illiberal Catholics owe $41,000 for bachelor’s degrees in the liberal arts and still live with their parents. An increasing number owe $82,000 for doctorates in the liberal arts, and live with their spouses and children, teaching as adjuncts and relying on public assistance.]
Q: Do you have a job?
A: Currently, no one is willing to offer me what I consider to be a fair wage for my work. I therefore produce apologetic works through social media and other online sources, and solicit contributions to support my apostolate.
Q: So you blog all day in your pajamas and think you deserve $80,000 a year?
A: The value of my work should not be arbitrarily determined by the blind forces of a materialistic market, which allows the subjective evaluations of outsiders to set the compensation for my work. In a truly Catholic community that has recognized the social reign of Jesus Christ as King, the proper authorities would know how to weigh my efforts against those of the secular pornographers, empty entertainers and rude commentators who are currently being rewarded at an obscenely disproportionate rate for their work, which rends souls instead of building them up.
Q: So a good government would pay you a solid salary for your philosophical writings, whether people want to read them or not?
A: What people want and what is healthy and beneficial to their soul are different things. Or are you in favor of legalizing heroin?
Q: There are many types of opiates. I think the one you’re peddling is a niche variety, with limited appeal.
A: Ah, so you echo Marx, by calling religion the opium of the people?
Q: Not at all. I wonder if what you are peddling is religious in any significant sense.
A: I oppose the apostasy of the post-conciliar embrace of classical liberalism and demand that society submit to eternal Truth.
Q: Or are you just fighting on the table to demand your own piece of the pie, that if the people don’t give it to you freely, you want the state to take it away from them and hand it over to you?
A: You have a disordered love of freedom.
Q: As opposed to a disordered love of power.
A: Power must serve eternal Truth. No one who has not studied philosophy, like me, has commercial power.
Q: With the HHS mandate threatening to shut down Catholic institutions, do you think it’s safe to denounce the one constitutional principle, religious liberty, that Christians use to try to preserve themselves?
A: I support the efforts of Catholic apostolates and non-profit associations to preserve their freedom. But I have no patience for Protestant businessmen opening box stores in seedy strip malls in barren housing estates, profiting from the ungodly capitalist order, claiming their businesses are entitled to the same protection as the one true Church of Christ.
Q: Do you think Vatican II taught heresy when it said that the use of state coercion in matters of religion is a violation of natural law – you know, like sodomy or (worse again) contraception?
A: Vatican II was only a pastoral council, which must be interpreted in the light of sacred tradition, and not in a hermeneutic of discontinuity.
