I cannot possibly improve on what Pat Archbold wrote at Creative Minority Report:
God, I thank you that I am not like other people”
From the eminently huggable Mark Shea’s “Bed-wetting Reactionary Wusses…”
What ties everything in Reactionary culture together better than any other theory I’ve been able to come up with is that it’s not that Reactionaries think the Church is evangelizing wrong and want to do it better. It’s that they hate the whole idea of bringing new people into the Church at all (except for a vanishingly small sample of like-minded Reactionaries) and seem to be bent on making sure as few are allowed in and as many are driven away as possible.
I agree with Mark. Wouldn’t it be much better if all the Reactionary Wuss –holes in the Church who are not as open, loving, and tolerant as us would just get the the F out.
File this in the “irony is lost on them” department.
Wow, Pat whiffed on that one pretty badly alright. Mark would want the polar opposite of what he says. Weird.
What is truly frightening though is the commenters there apparently have not read even the OP, they were parroting Pat almost entirely (and the iOS update apparently broke their calendars causing them to double up on their snark pill dosing). Also a good reminder to all, esp myself, regarding the Pope’s interview…read it before assessing, read it before assessing, read it before assessing.
“Mark would want the polar opposite of what he says. Weird.”
Not judging from what he wrote Thinkling, which, lacking the charism of mind reading, is the only way I, or Archbold, can interpret his meaning.
Irony and sarcasm are evidently lost on “Thinkling” as well.
I think Pat is off the mark here. Mark did not say, and has never said, that “reactionaries” should be kicked out of the Church. He is simply saying that they will never find the “pure”, lean and mean Church they desire in this world and they need to accept that.
That said, the segment of “reactionary culture” of which he is complaining — people who regard converts from Protestantism like himself as potentially subversive — seems (to me) to be pretty small, even in the bizzaro world of the internet, and confined to a few obscure blogs. Why he spends so much time trying to correct them, I don’t know, unless he’s got a real-life personal problem with one or more of them.
“He is simply saying that they will never find the “pure”, lean and mean Church they desire in this world and they need to accept that.”
He is saying that the strawmen he created in his mind believe that. Shea is very good about creating phantoms and then attacking the phantoms, thus allowing him to put words and arguments into the mouths of people he disagrees with, which is a shoddy and worthless form of argument. I had hoped that he had mended his ways, but alas no. This is of course part of his tiresome more-loyal-to-the-Pope-than-thou routine by which Shea swings into action against anyone who questions anything, and I mean anything, done by the pope of the day, heaps all the scorn that he can muster upon them, and when he is called to account shrugs his shoulders and says “Who me?” It used to be said that John Adams was a party of one. Reading Mark I sometimes suspect that he belongs, in his mind, to a Church of two: him and Pope (fill in the blank).
That said, the segment of “reactionary culture” of which he is complaining — people who regard converts from Protestantism like himself as potentially subversive — seems (to me) to be pretty small, even in the bizzaro world of the internet, and confined to a few obscure blogs.
That’s because you don’t entirely agree with him.
Part of the reason I stopped reading the fellow is because I noticed that his stated description of folks, vs who he identified as being in the groups, was getting further apart. (“You nasty folks” grew from “nasty folks” to “disagrees with me on X” folks, mostly.)
Incidentally– Mr. Shea, if you happen across this, don’t bother responding; you’ve already made it quite clear what you think of me, and there’s no need to waste your time doing so again.
Wow, Shea seems to be everyone’s favorite trampoline lately.
I always stick up for the person who appears to me to be getting the unfair end of a fight, even if it is someone I have criticized freely and plentifully before…this is one of those times. This piece disgusts me as much as any of Shea’s “gay brownshirts” rhetoric. He did not tell anyone to “get the F out.” Good grief.
I would just add that if you yourself haven’t had an encounter with this particular subculture, you will probably underestimate the harm it’s capable of doing. I do not want to exaggerate its importance, but it’s real. Permissive secular culture is not the only thing we have to watch out for.
I always stick up for the person who appears to me to be getting the unfair end of a fight
That’s a “knee jerk reaction.”
Barring further thought, it is NOT a thing to brag about.