Posted on 04/09/2005 6:47:57 AM PDT by vanderleun
TAKE THE TIME TO READ A SCATHING INDICTMENT of the various moves of the American Buttinsky Party to hijack the Papal Succession:
Why would people who hate the Church pose as reformers who know what's best for it? Why would they care so passionately about the direction of a religion to which they don't belong? For the same reason the French philosophes and revolutionaries monitored and pressured the Church: it is a force that they must either neutralize or hijack in order to achieve their designs for the world. Look at the immense, obsessional energy that the left spends on trying to pressure the Church into green-lighting their favorite sexual sins. Why do they care so much about what the Church teaches? The reason is that they know that if they could just get the Catholic Church's imprimatur on the Sexual Revolution it would spread everywhere. A liberal Pope, as far as they are concerned, would be even better than a liberal Chief Justice on the Supreme Court.Neumayr's observation that "Modern liberalism is an acid that burns through everything it touches" is especially telling. Given the spectacles of death that have unfolded over the last month, from the killing of Terri Schiavo, to the tawdry Carnivale of the Johnnie Cochran funeral, to the overwhelming outpouring of affirmation and celebration surrounding the passing of John Paul II, we've had a chance to see the two warring cultures of Life vs. Death exposed at length to direct sunlight. And while the former can only be seen as reflecting radiance, the latter is as dark as the various icons it worships with an almost perverted frenzy.
Modern liberalism is an acid that burns through everything it touches. The Church has shriveled in proportion to its exposure to it. Now those who have long sought its death present themselves, carrying more of this acid, as its healer, and even, as Thomas Cahill wrote in the New York Times, finger Pope John Paul II, who resisted it, as the Church's enemy. "He may, in time to come, be credited with destroying his church," writes Cahill, who blames the Pope for "intellectual incompetents" and "mindless sycophants" in the episcopate. "The situation is dire. Anyone can walk into a Catholic church on a Sunday and see pews, once filled to bursting, now sparsely populated with gray heads." He then proposes a "solution," which amounts to trading the teachings of Jesus Christ for modern liberalism.
-- St. Peter's in Chains By George Neumayr in The American Spectator
As a one-time card-carrying member of the Culture of Death, I've had no little experience with the bile and the acid that is used to burn out the soul and replace it with the dead-end secular totems of possessions, fashion, sexuality, and the self-uber-alles. I've used selfishness to "enhance" my own life and I've had "selfishness" used on me in turn to enhance the lives of others. Commitment and duty have no place in this philosophy -- everything is reduced to "lifestyle" choices in which, since people are only things, they can easily be replaced by other things, other people.
I remember when this acid burned strongly on all fronts and seemed, in the main, unstoppable because it seemed to have become 'the universal solvent' -- something that could dissolve all that it came in contact with. The flaw in that formula was, of course, the flaw that lurks in the ancient alchemical nature of the universal solvent -- it will eventually burn through everything, even its container.
What we've seen in the last few weeks of the last six months is the evidence that the container that holds antiquated liberalism is beginning to be eaten through at last. I've been struck again and again by just how small, mean and trivial the recent "victories" of liberalism seem to be.
Under advanced demographic attack by the rigid and extreme conservatism of Islam across Europe, liberalism in those states seems to be falling back on extending its failed policies of bribes and accommodation -- as if offering greater "police-safe" zones in cities and ever higher doles will cause the swelling future to live in peace with the settled present. But Europe is now on the block and the current controllers are falling so far below replacement that they won't have enough people to outbid the new arrivals when the hammer falls. Instead of perpetuating itself, European liberalism looks to the small still fungible victories of long vacations. In the end, it will get, in the words of the aptly named Grateful Dead, "A vacation for the rest of its life."
Small victories are the order of the day in American liberalism as well. Last month the entire weight of the Culture of Death's selected but unelected power base of the Judiciary and the Media was brought to bear on the Terri Schiavo case. In the end, what did they achieve? The death of one defenseless woman at the cost of polarizing an entire nation -- a nation that for the most part will not forget this spectacle. The cost to liberalism in political capital was immense and the return, once the victory laps are over and the memos are forgetten, was miniscule. In the end, the image that will remain is of a disabled woman killed by the "Law" and approved of by the Media. Say what you will, the final images of this debacle are not attractive. (Please spare me the plaints about the "overwhelming polls" and 'congressional over-reaching'. We are dealing here with something that has entered the realm of myth, and myth lasts longer and is far more potent than any passing poll, I assure you.)
Lacking real power and finding its support among the ordinary people of America waning with every passing election, American liberalism has had to withdraw into its armed hamlets of academia and the media where it is existing on thinner and thinner gruel as time goes by. "Victories," if you would call them that, have recently been limited to the shaming of a Harvard president, and the support of a fraudulent Dime-Store Indian in a professorship at the University of Colorado. On the one hand, you've got a poster child for how little liberal academia thinks of free speech, and on the other you have probably the worst argument for continuing tenure that can be imagined. In both cases you can see the acid eating its way through the walls of the containers.
None of this is to say that the dark culture of death is soon to be a sad historical episode -- although its stock and trade seems to be one sad historical episode after the other. This culture and the people who promulgate and promote it are far too entrenched in the fabric of America -- in our schools on all levels, in our media, local and national, in our politics, local, state and national, and, most insidious of all, in our "approved" national arts and entertainment -- to vanish like a choking fog at break of day. It is to say that the American demographic, at its roots, has changed and that, in time and perhaps not such a long time, this increasingly sad hodge-podge of half-baked new-age nostrums, impoverished politics, and intellectual insanity will prove to confirm its own well-worshipped social Darwinism, and travel the path to American extinction. Small victories are no way to win a war.
Bump
The Left hates the church because they know that a strong, traditionalist Pope is their worst enemy. Their dreams of a communist world were shattered when John Paul II and Ronald Reagan presented a force too powerful for them to overcome.
Moral absolutism is their worst enemy. A wishy-washy, milquetoast morally relativistic world is their goal.
Just this past week I heard Chrissy Mathews put in his request for a more 'progressive' pope. And of course the impeached *Bubba Squirt threw in his worthless two cents on the subject.
I thought the best idea for the church could be a really young, more conservative pope - just so the remnants of the 60's hippie leftists never get to see their wish granted...
Wow - this is exactly right! This same thing has happened to much of traditional Protestanism. I would recommend Gary North's Crossed Fingers for the story of the fall of the Northern Presbyterian Church in the early 20th century. It is available in its entirety online.
I would be willing to bet that most leftists don't even think it through that far. They just do what comes naturally. Secular humanism, in the end, is about hedonism, chaos and ultimately death. Harsh words but I think accurate.
Not to put the two on comparable footing, but let's remember this principle the next time one of the talking-head lefties talks about how the Republican Party needs to "moderate" its stances.
My in-your-face pejorative for death-cult Leftists: Death f**kers. They really flip out when you hit 'em with that one.
Beware of any group, or institution or religion which spends 98% of its time, its wealth, its psychic and physical energy not nurturing the virtues and values it holds dear, but tearing down the very existence of others.
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Good point.
Good point also now is that we all have a true modern day 'Life of a Saint' Story with which to reflect on in our own lives...
...just like the 'Lives of the Saints' Stories of Old we were treated to in our youth..?
Teaching us to:
Praise GOD that...
LOVE is the Only Reality and that...
GOD is LOVE..?
.
I've read some of your articles in the past. For some reason you are not in my favorites. You are now. Excellent analysis!
Hey Char...over here!
FMCDH(BITS)
Thanks for the ping, Ronnie. In 1979 if someone had told me that the Berlin wall would fall in 20 years, I would have said "it would be a miracle." Why did I lack faith that it would happen?
And it fell in 10... It's still hard to believe.
Bump....
To learn the art of self defense and apologetics.
http://www.catholicanswers.org/
It's a great phrase. I heard Rush use it a couple of days ago on air, just after Neumayr's piece first came out. I think it's a phrase that's going to make it into the "Top Ten"!
This is true mostly in liberal dioceses headed by liberal, mush headed bishops and in parishes pastored by the same kind of 'Spirit of the Council' type aging hippies.
In parishes pastored by men guided by orthodoxy and tradition, where there is an abundant Sacramental life, you don't see this. You see lots of young families...and many with more than the 1-2 children that dominated the last generation. This is why John Paul the Great placed so much emphasis on youth throughout his Papacy. He didn't openly oppose the Vatican II renegades, he simply worked around them and went directly to the next generation. And my generation was the first to respond ( I was 18 when he was elected).
Because! ...er... well... just .... Because! Because they said so? Because they're smarter than everyone else? because...? They're not riddled with 'narrow minded religious bigotry' ... because....er uh...hmmmm
(ahrrrm hrrm... cough cough...) /sarcasm
yeah, it's sickening.
bttt
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