Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1237

Now is your Chance...

To contemplate the problem of evil in The Hobbit.

People of Earth!

Give me one millllllion dollars or I will continue to post one William Shatner Vocal Stylings video each day!



You have been warned!

That is all!

Prolife Idolatry

People with a cartoonish view of idolatry often tend to talk as though idol worship is something stoopid heads just get up one morning and start doing out of a perverse desire to prostrate themselves before a rock or something.

But, in fact, idolatry is typically born out of the deep love of something that is genuinely good and great. It is the best things in the world that become idols, not the worst. Nobody idolizes the band that opened for the Beatles (whoever they were). People idolize the Beatles, because they were really good. Nobody idolizes the mediocre ball player, the second-rate artist, or the guy who lost the race to be the first from New York to Paris. They idolized DiMaggio, Leonardo, and Lindbergh.

For just this reason, one of the tricky things about the Christian Faith is that we must always be on guard, not against loving creatures per se, but against loving them more than we love God. Keep God as your first and greatest love and you are free to love creatures (especially human beings) as much as you like. But get those loves out of order and, no matter how worthy the creature, and you are an idolator.

The devil has lots of ways to tempt us to idolatry, of course. One of them, paradoxically, is to get us to crack up and go sappy about the sheer adorable goodness of the Idol. In short, Satan *loves* Love, so long as it's disordered love.

So whether it's a PETA idolator fawning over the big brown eyes of a puppy (while wishing humans and their Judeo-Christian God of Dominion over nature would all die), a lover of one's country putting the glory of the Fatherland above all, or, in our case, prolifers who love babies as the most important things in the universe, the problem is the same: Second things are put first.

Even adorable innocent babies? Yes. Especially adorable innocent babies if that happens to be your weak spot and the place you can be tempted to place the creature before the Creator. And for a significant number of people in our particular time and place, it is the weak spot, precisely because our culture is so hostile to the unborn babe. We start out defending babies for the sake of Christ and wind up worshipping babies instead of Christ.

That's why I will be blunt: it is evil to say things like this to a bishop who is a) documentably prolife and b) quite justifiably within his rights to want to examine the books of Priests for Life and c) quite right to say that a priest's vows take priority over some supposed divine anointing that makes it impossible for him to live out his priesthood when his bishop tells him to:

When you are at last called home to heaven, you don't want a stain on your own record of service - that somehow you interfered with God's Holy Assignment. Fr Frank has been sovereignly called to this unique area and you would do well to permit him to serve his God with support and not obstruction.

Why aren't you out there assisting this good priest?

Please do not interfere with his calling or besmirch his reputation. If you do, you will be aiding and abetting both the Pro-Abortion forces and PP!

The bishops do not have an unfettered right to silence whom they want. When a bishop investigates someone who has done as much good as Fr. Pavone, he should be investigated.

To issue such a public statement, directly involving Fr. Pavone without documented evidence, and restricting his mission to promote life, is TANTAMOUNT TO MURDER ITSELF. What is your problem?

Life is THE MOST IMPORTANT Issue! Why do you choose not to see ? One day your own blood will run in the streets because you refused the time of mercy that has been given to all.

We think the Bishop is politically motivated, and his views are very left leaning for someone in the Catholic Hierarchy!

Who would have thought that the most effective enemy of life and Priests for Life would be within rather than without the church. Reminds me of who Jesus' most effective enemies were -- the religious leaders! You have disgraced the Lord Jesus Christ and the Roman Catholic church, which had stood bravely and consistently for life.

For whom bishop Zurek is working ? For God or for devil?

Whatever action you decide to take, may God almighty hold you accountable for it.

With all due respect, the worship of God the Blessed Trinity is even more important than life. That's not me talking. That's Jesus Christ: "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell." Declaring that there is NOTHING MORE IMPORTANT than life, particularly for a priest, is idolatrous. It places the second greatest commandment (love your neighbor) before the first (Love God). That is not, I repeat, bad because the second greatest commandment is bad. It's bad because the second greatest commandment is second, not first.

The irony of all this is that it is taking place in the same sector of the Church that perpetually obsesses about the liturgy and the honor we owe God in worshipping him reverently. And yet, such is the power of Prolife Idolatry for some that, given a choice between worshipping God in the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and doing social activism, the idolator treats the Mass with stunning contempt. Here's a sample a reader sent me:

More "captivity" rhetoric, today from a self-proclaimed "devout Catholic":

"I will request of my listeners that they speak to their friends and relatives in your Diocese and ask them to withhold all donations - on Sundays and to any special appeals your Diocese makes to your members - until such time as Father Pavone is no longer held hostage by the obstinacy of a Bishop who apparently still believes that Bishops are higher in the Ecclesiastical hierarchy than the Laity whose labor supports the Church."

(Maybe because they ARE higher? Thus, hierarchy?)

"We do not intend to sit idly by and allow your Bishop to imprison Father Pavone with your Diocese, thus endangering the mission of Priests for Life and the lives of the children Father Pavone has been saving for so many years."

"The truth is, however, that unless you have specific proof of wrongdoing, Father Pavone is being treated with cruel injustice. After all, even Galileo received a trial - albeit one that was rigged."

The longer the spectacle of the Free Fr. Frank movement goes on, the more bishop Zurek is vindicated in his concerns, because idolators are, with pronouncements like this, making clear that the very good cause of protecting the unborn is quite literally, more important than God, that the priesthood and the Sacrifice of the Mass are "prisons" and that the worship of social activism is more important than the worship of God.

I anticipate this will elicit the usual screams of accusation from the usual suspects, so let me head things off at the pass by simply saying this: As a bought and paid for Professional Catholic[TM] who, I am informed, hates the Faith, babies, America, apple pie and motherhood, I naturally revel in subverting the True Catholic Faith by such sinister means as
a) trusting the Magisterium;
b) urging docility to the Church even on things that do not pertain to abortion and are not infallibly defined;
c) failing to be insufficiently bitter about the Paul VI rite and the Second Vatican Council;
d) opposing abortion, but not worshiping the prolife movement more than Jesus Christ;
e) not subscribing to the theory that opposition to abortion taketh away the sins of the world and constitutes the sole social concern of all Real Catholics[TM];
f) rejecting the perpetual worship of celebrity folk heroes who function as alternative magisteria (And, by the way, merely being well-known does not automatically mean one is trying to assume quasi-episcopal authority. For instance, Fr. Groeschel, Fr. Barron, Fr. Pacwa, Scott Hahn, Jimmy Akin, Karl Keating, etc. are "famous" (within the relatively small pond of American Catholicism) but don't propose themselves as Real Catholic[TM] heros standing up against the heirarchy to "save the Church/Country/Culture");
g) rejecting the wholehearted embrace of consequentialism to support preferred sins done in the service of preferred Good Causes.

Those are, at present, the seven pillars of a coalescing movement of Reactionary Dissent that is helping to foment a schism in the American Church just as surely as Progressive Dissent's exaltation of the Pelvic Issues, Relativism, Consequentialism, and Pride Masquerading as Conscience are doing.

Not all or even most prolifers are doing this, I reckon. Indeed, what has impressed me is how much more circumspect has been the reaction to Fr. Pavone's bridling under his bishop's legitimate exercise of authority than was the wild conspiracy theorizing surrounding Fr. Corapi against brave Bp. Mulvey. The unfortunate lessons of the kneejerk attacks on those who expressed concern about Maciel, Euteneuer, and Corapi seem to have finally paid off in a sober assessment of the issues surrounding Fr. Pavone and a much broader willingness to let the bishop do his legitimate thing. That's real progress.

But we still have a long way to go, as the quotes above (and many more like them in the blogosphere and on FB attest. The prolife movement is a great and good thing that addresses the paramount moral issue of our time. But it is, at the end of the day, still only creaturely and is not more important than God. Healthy Catholic faith sees love of the unborn springing out the Eucharist as a fruit of the kingdom of God. Unhealthy, diseased prolife idolatry sees the worship of God, the Eucharist and the priesthood as prisons and obstacles to "THE MOST IMPORTANT Issue".

Atheist Dogma

In which we discuss how the dogmatic faith commitments of evangelical atheists compel them to not look at evidence for miracles. Almost instantaneously, an atheist shows up in the combox to explain, "Shut up."

Mike Flynn has a serendipitously/providentially relevant post on how our faith commitments (including, especially, those who worship the intellect rather than using it) affect our ability to reason.

If you want to see a spectacular example of the sort of hermetically sealed arrogance and ignorance which can result from the particularly cramped bubble that is cyber-atheism, go here and watch the embarrassing spectacle as Flynn ("Ye Olde Statistician") tries to educate the herd of independent thinkers in Jerry Coyne's comboxes. Eventually, Coyne, as is the custom with such fundamentalist dogmatists, explains "Shut up!" to Flynn for his crime of reasoned and dispassionate dispatching of the primitive fundamentalist tropes that pass for "rationality" among his acolytes, toadies and hangers-on. Because, you know, self-proclaimed "rationalists" are all about reasoned discourse, while theists are ignorant obscurantists who fear reason.

NY Times: Irrelevant Old Guy Drowned out by Hip and Cool Euros of the Future

The Usual Coverage from the Grey Lady on recent events in Deutschland.

The Epitaph of a Consequentialist Culture

"As soon as men decide that all means are permitted to fight an evil, then their good becomes indistinguishable from the evil that they set out to destroy." - Christopher Dawson

Big News!

After nearly a decade at this URL, Catholic and Enjoying It will be moving to the Patheos site (alongside such fine folk as Elizabeth Scalia, Deacon Greg Kandra, Frank Beckwith and Max Lindenman).

The move is prompted by two things: a) the fact that I respect the work the Lizzie Scalia and the gang do and am confident that I will be allowed to continue to express whatever thoughts I like, no matter how stupid (while they bring up the grade curve with much smarter and better copy--thereby making me look good); and b) the ongoing struggle to keep the family's nose above water financially. This move (made possible by a gracious invitation from Ms. Scalia and gratefully accepted after some long thought and prayer) will open a quite modest but consistent revenue stream which we at Chez Shea desperately need. I wish I could say for sure that means the end of my (frankly hated) tin cup rattles (and I fervently hope that it will). But I don't know how that will pan out, so no promises.

Meanwhile, the main thing is this: On Monday, God willin' and the crick don't rise, Catholic and Enjoying It will cast off the trappings of Blogger (to which I bid a fond farewell and say thank you) and take up residence at a link which we have yet to nail down, since web elves are still busy migrating my archives and other stuff over to Patheos. As soon as I know more, I will post it. The only difference you will notice is that the site will have a somewhat different look, as well as a lot of the same stuff on the rail and exactly the same stuff in the blog entries as here, cuz I'll be writing it. I do hope you will traipse over there and join us for more scintillating chats, arguments and whimsy. I'm excited about the move and hopeful that this will not just continue to make youse guys informed, challenged and amused, but open up new audiences to this curious watering hole for gabbing about the Faith and its intersections and collisions with post-modern culture. Look for the launch Monday morning, October 3. Be there! Aloha!

By the way, speaking of nose above water labors, I would appreciate your prayers as I slog through two giant editing/writing projects I am working on, as well as finishing up two books and doing various other projects. Also, your prayers that I am able to pin down another possible steady source of income would be appreciated. God is good and has provided for us every single day on this 6+ year highwire act of trust in Providence. But there are days when I feel like Peter looking down and thinking, "What am I doing? I can't walk on water!"

Finally, thank you all again so much for your incredibly kind generosity in the Tin Cup Rattle. I don't know what to say, so I will say, "May God bless you fourfold through Christ our Lord for your kindness to the Fambly Shea."

There's no Conspiracy

A reader writes:

i have seen you on ewtn, and have some of your books. thanks for your great work.

i just realized that both Fr. Corapi and Fr. Frank Pavone spoke to the people on that fateful day at Notre Dame University, where Pres. Obama was being honored. thought it was interesting to note...

i truly hope that things turn out well for fr. frank.....he is a powerful voice for the vunerable and the unborn. i have never seen anyone else out there quite as passionate to champion that cause..........

i also just hope this is not a deliberate shakedown of television priests....... perhaps there should be a diocese just for public media clergy and religious....... how the heck is the Church going to evangelize with media, if they are taking them out one by one?

probably i am just letting my imagination run away with me..........

keep up the good work!

Thanks for your kind words. Thanks be to God for his goodness to us.

Re: Corapi/Pavone and others. There's no conspiracy. These guys have destroyed themselves. Nobody's "taking them out". They are taking themselves out by various means, but all having to do with pride in the end, expressing itself in different self-destructive ways. Instead of looking for non-existenT conspiracies, we should take a good hard look at the lack of discernment *we* have displayed in repeatedly anointing folk heroes and defending them from legitimate concerns and investigation. From Maciel to Euteneuer to Corapi to Pavone, what has tended to happen is that legitimate concerns are raised and then we laity go to work blaming the person raising the concern as part of some supposed effort to "take them out" instead of looking at the concerns being raised and assuming the good faith of the person raising those concernS. We are so enamored of folk heros, we even do this to a good bishop like Mulvey who insisted on investigating Corapi (and got torrents of abuse and false accusation for his troubles) and the bishop of Amarillo, who is being vindicated in his concerns about Fr. Pavone with each tweet and protest Fr. Pavone makes. The priesthood is not a prison, shackle or inconvenience and for Fr. Pavone to keep treating it as such only makes the good bishop's point that he has allowed the prolife movement to supercede his priestly vows.

It is notable that nobody is criticizing Fr. Barron, Fr. Pacwa or various other fine priests on the tube. That is because, again, there is no conspiracy. Just an unfortunate tendency for us humans to fail in our fidelity in various ways. These guys are living their priesthood well, so they are not encountering the difficulties that priests who do not live their priesthood well encounter.

Please pray for all these men. They need it. As do we all.

Thanks for your thoughtful concern for our priests.

More Insanity from Jesuits

A reader writes:

Gonzaga U has hired a practicing-lesbian Jewish rabbi to teach Hebrew studies in their theology department, they say she is on track for tenure. I suppose hiring a devout, straight rabbi to teach impressionable young minds would have been too tame. Matthew 18:6-7 comes to mind...

Where would Jesuit education be without fealty to the most uber-trendy fads?

Catholics should pull their kids out of such schools and write letters informing the school that they will not see a dime of alumni money till they actually start giving a Catholic education. I know of profs at Seattle U who *relished* the though of destroying the faith on their incoming freshmen. Unsuspectin parents who send their kids thinking that these vandals of the intellect are their friends are being doubly betrayed. In a more civilized era, such traitorous frauds would be challenged to pistols at dawn for the way they have wrought destruction on the faith of the children of trusting alums.

He's right, But it Sure Doesn't Telegraph Happy News About Bp. Cupich

Yet another reader who used to live under Bp. Cupich echoes the other traumatized prolife readers who have written to describe the wreckage wrought on the prolife movement by this shepherd everywhere he has gone:

Spokane prolifers should prepare to stand strong without the leadership of their priests who are bound to respect and obedience. It is only going to get worse in the upcoming election year when priests will want to support prolife candidates. The prolife movement survived here due to the steadfastness of the laity. You can do it. Nothing is impossible with God.

I have not heard one positive word from people who attempted prolife work under Bp. Cupich. It looks like the prolife movement in Spokane is not merely on its own: it is facing opposition from its bishop. Sad. On the bright side, as my reader says: nothing is impossible with God. It's not the end of the prolife movement in Spokane. Just a setback. There are still ways to do God's work there, particularly for laity. Time to get creative! Start by doing it with love for Bp. Cupich and not in an atmosphere of polarized media circus as in Amarillo. Perhaps he will finally see that the prolife movement is on his side and not a liability.