Against Restraining Our Rhetoric

As if Germany hasn’t inflicted enough pain on the world in the last 100 years, their Catholic bishops have now spoken: “Victims of the Sexual Revolution, you don’t matter. We know what’s good for the world, and it’s more orgasms no matter how they are gotten. We are now the Political Church, and we are with the world, God be set aside.”

In light of the extremity of the German bishops’ message, why is so much discourse around Catholic doctrine and departure from it surrounded with so much politesse and restraint? I do not share some of the kind indulgences recently written in these pages. 

I think of an allowance made in Michael Warren Davis’ excellent The Conformist Cardinals, which, overall, was decidedly unflattering of some prominent prelates: “For all I know, Their Eminences would die for Christ’s love.” This is an allowance I am not prepared to make: I do not see Their Eminences dying for Christ’s love. I do see them letting the rest of us die, sacrificed on the altars of the Sexual Revolution. 

I am not inclined any further to believe that those bucking Church teaching are perhaps, maybe, and possibly in some way, men of good intentions, deserving of our kindnesses to the point of naïve foolishness. These men are evil, and there is an easy way to prove it:

By their fruits ye shall know them. (Matthew 7:16)

Ask anyone raised in the moral morass of the 1970s and 1980s who, by dint of God’s grace, found their way into the Church because of good, faithful Catholics who did not bend on the truth or the Truths. 

Left to the example of a father who publicly lived out his adultery (in the socially acceptable form of remarriage) and sacrilege (by striding up to Communion with no compunction whatsoever, and all with the complicit silence of churchmen, lay and religious alike), I came to the same conclusion that so many of today’s youth do: if this is what the Catholic Church allows, this is a religion for idiots. 

Thank God for the holy Dominican I met at NYU in 1990; and for my now-wife of 27 years (a Providence College alumna, back from the days when they still taught the Faith), who confirmed for me my nascent faith that was telling me something was seriously out of order in my life. Speaking of confirmation, she quite literally was at my confirmation when I was 25 years old. Such is the power of faithful Catholics.

But the spiritual and psychological carnage that had followed from my youth is still being undone…again, because of faithful Catholics.

Too much of the conversation in our Church is controlled by those doing the damage and their secular media allies, but the responses are far, far too muted from Faithful Christendom. It’s time to take the gloves off when it comes to our rhetoric.  Too much of the conversation in our Church is controlled by those doing the damage and their secular media allies, but the responses are far, far too muted from Faithful Christendom.Tweet This

There is no need for viciousness, but let’s not talk in terms of “disorder” and talk in more plain terms that people can understand: this is about pushing the desire for Church sponsored adultery, for anal and oral sodomy, destroyed bodies, and orgasms in any shape or form. And let’s start talking that way. The Left seems to have no problem forcing their explicit garbage in our faces…let’s do the same—more tastefully, but with matched vigor. 

The German bishops and the pretend and muted opposition (or silence) from Rome might remind one of the vote on the so-called Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, when then-President Clinton and various other Democrats pretended to care about marriage and the moral sense of the nation. Of course, they were in the tank for gay marriage, and we all knew it. 

To borrow a phrase from the Left, Lechery is Lechery. The so-called gay marriage plum fell to the out-of-control Supreme Court in Obergefell. But, of course, it was the incremental pretending and silence from men who ought to know better (and who did know better) that let that mess of toothpaste out of the tube…including scores of prelates. 

And this is precisely the problem in the Church today. So much of it is, as Eric Sammons recently noted, operating like a UN Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), a mere political apparatus, like the three branches of our American government.

At this point, things are so bad that might we wonder that while God promised never to flood the earth again, might He instead just turn on some giant, divine fire hose Augean-stables style?

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.

[Image Credit: Synodaler Weg / Maximilian von Lachner]