Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 5:36pm

Trading Christ for Caesar

How many faithful Catholics have been alienated from the Church due to the embrace by some of the clergy of left-wing politics?  Science Fiction author Sarah Hoyt writes on the topic:

 

The Catholic Church in America appears to be a schizophrenic entity, possessed of a deep-seated death wish — exactly like all the other mainstream churches and most institutions in our western culture. This week, the Church is celebrating Freedom of Religion week.  You’ll see the little flags if you walk past one of the churches.

I have absolutely clue zero — and in fact am a little afraid to consider — of what other parishes and sermons might make of this, but our priest segued incoherently from telling us that like St. John the Baptist confronted Herod we are supposed to confront and oppose a president who “has had more than one wife” and who “mistreats the least powerful and smallest of our people” to enjoining us to come to church a great deal and have daily mass for the week, to celebrate Freedom of Religion Week.

I didn’t actually facepalm too hard, because I might have knocked myself out and people might stare.

*********************************************

 

Mostly what the church should stop doing is stop running around like a chicken with its head cut off, trying to grow its congregation in all the wrong ways, while at the same time it runs off its more devout members.

As I said, this is a lunacy it shares with other main stream churches, and it’s part of the same lunacy that infects publishing.  It’s a “we’re not here to serve the people but to change them.”  And while the churches have a little more claim to being entitled to preaching than the publishers, say, it’s still a piece of crazy to think they can preach to us on things that are political and in which they have no jurisdiction, besides being naïve and ill-informed as churchmen tend to be. (With exceptions, of course. I’m casting no aspersions on John Paul II.) Or of course, outright political and insane as the American Council of Bishops tends to be.

I beg you with tears in my eyes, stop driving away the devout by pushing a philosophy of state absolutism and open borders which cannot but end in massacres and mass graves. Give to Rome that which is Rome’s and leave it outside the church.

I walked away from the church once already, over a priest spending an hour talking about how Sarah Palin’s use of target graphics had totally caused the Gifford shooting.  I know a devout – and really devout — Catholic who has walked out and can’t force himself to go back over his parish’s continuous pounding of “gun control.”

And not only is none of this germane to the mission of the church, but I can prove with very little effort that the church’s stand is counterproductive and causes objective evil.  For instance, encouraging illegal immigrants to come to the US and stay not only makes it so that entire families live outside the law and in precarious conditions but — because of that and the ripping apart of the traditional structure of their cultures — makes the children more susceptible to fall into criminal behavior and drug use.  We have statistics on this.

It also economically injures the land to which they migrate (yes, we have data on how it hurts wages for the least skilled) and throws any number of people on welfare, which unlike private charity is inherently corrupting of morals and work ethic.

And encouraging Catholics to “confront” and “oppose” a many-times married president only results in Catholics voting for… whom?  Would you prefer abettor of adulterous husband Clinton?  Or Atheist Bernie Sanders? Or Nancy Pelosi whose Catholicism stops at Planned Parenthood doors? Or any number of other people who would remove that religious freedom you just praised?

I do understand the church is a little lost under Pope Che whose friends are heretics and who is a perfect South American Political Idiot.  Theology is after all supposed to come from the Bible and Tradition, and all of a sudden, in the pronouncements coming out of Rome, the Little Red Book has precedence over both.

I walked away from the church once and returned because I needed the sacraments.

But how long can one take sacraments when everything – everything – that comes from the pulpit is, if not the exact opposite of what is supposed to be preached, at least not far from it?

Are there not passages in the Bible about salt that loses its flavor and light that doesn’t illuminate?  You’re corrupting, destroying and losing souls.  All for the sake of what you imagine will be temporal power. This will not end well.

Dear Catholic Church, we already have a DNC. Your mission is not to propagate the message of socialism but the message of Christ.

Otherwise, what good are you?

Go here to read the rest.  It has always been my position that the Church should stay out of politics.  The exceptions are where the Church is coming under attack from a government or where an evil universally condemned by the Church throughout its history is being embraced by a government:  abortion and the mass genocides embraced by the totalitarian governments of the last century come to mind.  Going much beyond this tends to alienate some Catholics in the pews, and for a universal Church that embraces all of humanity, that is a disaster.  The mainline Protestant churches in this country amply demonstrate what happens when a church morphs into a political pressure group:  membership plummets and churches die.  The type of Leftist agenda embraced by Pope Francis puts the Church firmly on that path to extinction.  This is directly contrary to the Gospel and comes close to being the sin against the Holy Spirit as it trades human politics for the Faith.

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Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus
Monday, June 25, AD 2018 4:40am

I have not heard any anti-Trump sermons yet. If I did, then I would put up the biggest stink ever and probably get myself thrown out. I don’t care any longer. I shall not tolerate liberal leftist propaganda from the pulpit and it’s high time we all spoke out against this asininity. And I pray for the day when the Holy Spirit deposes Pope Francis from the Papal Throne. Marxist Peronist Argentinian Heretic!

Mary De Voe
Monday, June 25, AD 2018 7:53am

Sad to say I have heard an anti-Trump homily. The priest died and is not missed by me. I only give money when I am told something about God.

Phillip
Phillip
Monday, June 25, AD 2018 9:11am

I haven’t heard any but my wife has at daily Mass. Also lots of Leftist op-eds in the diocesan paper. Open borders, not cuts of any kind to budgets, end capital punishment etc.

Foxfier
Admin
Monday, June 25, AD 2018 9:48am

Lots of prudential, not much on the binding stuff.

In the comments at Sarah’s article there’s a guy talking about how his parish priest threatened to withhold the Eucharist from any who weren’t open borders.

We need to make sure we tell the next step up about these abuses. Yeah, they might not do anything– but they might, and if they don’t, it’s on them instead of us.

Art Deco
Monday, June 25, AD 2018 2:31pm

Many years ago, the New York TImes Magazine offered a profile of a protestant seminarian named Jeffrey Vamos. Here he is, 33 years later:

https://pclawrenceville.org/staff/

The reporter paraphrased Vamos reasons for seeking ordination. Didn’t have a blessed thing to do with helping people enter heaven or even with real time alleviation of want. It was some inane phraseology on the spectrum which runs between international politics and therapy babble. Find a subset of such people who are content to go through their life unmarried, you get many Catholic seminarians (Jungians, Unitarians, and goofies in the words of Fr. Joseph Wilson).

Most of our clergy cannot even get discrete and readily executable tasks right. Because they cannot be bothered.

Howard
Howard
Tuesday, June 26, AD 2018 1:10pm

“It has always been my position that the Church should stay out of politics.” In the summer of 2003, I stopped for Mass during a long drive to my dad’s place. The priest was also a visitor, having apparently arrived only recently from Ireland. In his homily, he for some reason brought up the US decision to display the bodies of Saddam Hussein’s two recently-killed sons. The priest thought this was inappropriate, but then he made an astonishing mistake: he asked the congregation, “What do you think?” About a half dozen parishioners stood up and told him what they thought. The recessional “hymn” was changed to “America the Beautiful”. It was a complete fiasco. The Mass had ceased to be about the glory of God and came to be about the glory of the United States.

Absolutely, politics should be left out of the Mass — particularly when by “politics” we mean the vices practiced by people outside the parish. There are enough vices within each parish to keep any priest fully occupied every Sunday and Holy Day. He should not preach on whether Trump should be more hospitable, but on how he and everyone else in the parish should practice greater hospitality; he should not preach on how would-be immigrants should obey the law, but on how everyone in the parish should respect the law, and obey it unless it is morally impossible to do so (which is rare in recent American history, but not so rare in world history). Otherwise, the Mass risks becoming a communal version of the Pharisee’s prayer: “O God, I give thee thanks that I am not as the rest of men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers….”

Howard
Howard
Tuesday, June 26, AD 2018 6:47pm

Don’t misunderstand the last part of what I wrote, though. A priest should definitely talk about hot-button issues, including abortion, contraception, pornography, and homosexual behavior, because those affect someone in just about every parish in the USA. The point is, though, that he would be warning them away from sins that they can commit, rather than lamenting sins about which they have no say. He would be encouraging them to take direct action in their own spiritual battles, rather than the very, very indirect action of waiting to vote or writing letters to office holders.

Peter Aiello
Saturday, June 30, AD 2018 9:50pm

The ills of society cannot be remedied by political and economic changes. When the Church gets into the business of promoting these things, it neglects its primary mission which does impact the society in meaningful ways.

Foxfier
Admin
Sunday, July 1, AD 2018 10:11am

Any kind of march for life or even anti-abortion vigils for our parish:
Either a tiny note in the bulletin or nothing. Facebook page silent.

Arrestee not being kept with the minors they were arrested with:
Big sermon (complete with a false accusation), frequent mentions, TWO big activist events, weekly bulletin harangue until this week (asking for money for the parking lot instead)….

Parish is about 50/50 for “Hispanic” ancestry, but most are legal; they “reassigned” the priest that is a non-Hispanic immigrant, we think because he was somewhat less than supportive of supporting known criminal activity, and attendance has gone down. Might be summer, though….

We’ll see.

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