Posted on 08/17/2011 12:27:44 PM PDT by markomalley
From a reader:
Why do these liberals and people like in the LCWR stay in the Church? Wouldn’t it make sense for them to go to the Anglicans? They could be wymynpriests there and do all the crazy stuff they like instead of forcing it on faithful Catholics.
Good points. And you may remember my facetious post about Romanorum coetibus.
I have often pondered this very thing. If they are so unhappy with the present state of things, why not just go?
But I think we have to change our lens when we look at them. They see themselves as righteous agents of change. They view many issues in the Church through the lens of politics and political agendas and strategies.
To understand them, it might be helpful to review Rules for Radicals by Saul D. Alinsky. Alinksy, who would have given Machiavelli doubts, wrote this book to give tactics to community organizers and others about how to defeat in people their nature inclinations to commonsense, conservatism and tradition, and drag them through emotion and disinformation over to a leftist agenda.
Alinsky dedicated his book to Satan. That dedication appeared in the first editions, but I understand that it was later removed.
Here is a quote from Rules:
There’s another reason for working inside the system. Dostoevski said that taking a new step is what people fear most. Any revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people. They must feel so frustrated, so defeated, so lost, so futureless in the prevailing system that they are willing to let go of the past and change the future. This acceptance is the reformation essential to any revolution. To bring on this reformation requires that the organizer work inside the system, among not only the middle class but the 40 per cent of American families – more than seventy million people – whose income range from $5,000 to $10,000 a year [in 1971]. They cannot be dismissed by labeling them blue collar or hard hat. They will not continue to be relatively passive and slightly challenging. If we fail to communicate with them, if we don’t encourage them to form alliances with us, they will move to the right. Maybe they will anyway, but let’s not let it happen by default.
It might be helpful for some of you to read Rules. If you can get it used, that would be better. Otherwise, if you want to buy a copy, use my link and I will get a percentage of the sale. That might take the sting out of it a bit. I think we have to study the tactics of the enemy in order to recognize what they are up to.
I found a great summary of Alinsky’s pointers here. Here are the first set of summarized rules:
Rules for Power Tactics:
1. Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
2. Never go outside the experience of your people.
3. Whenever possible, go outside of the experience of the enemy.
4. Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules.
5. Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.
6. A good tactic is one that your people enjoy.
7. A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.
8. Keep the pressure on with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
9. The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
10. The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.
11. If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.
12. The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.
13. Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.
Consider now what you read in liberal catholic web sites and publications. Do those points sound familiar? They may… they may not. You decide.
In my first look at St. Augustine’s commentary on the 1 John, we saw that Augustine has three levels of love, the most perfect of which is that charity which is love of enemy. We can reprove, correct, remonstrate, and even do so with great energy and harsh words. But we cannot stop trying to love them. For Augustine, we try to love our enemies in order that, some day, they might have fellowship with us.
We have to resist them and call them out when they harm the Church and the Faith. But when we do so, we should check ourselves and self-edit so that what we write and say is not done in hatred, and is not personal.
Let’s not become them in calling them out.
A woman I knew once explained to me “that the best way to corrupt the church was from within’, I am paraphrasing but these were her own words though she was saying it as if that wasn’t what she was about but that others had told her this. She went to church though regularly. Not much later I had heard that her two sons were taken from her because she was found to be molesting them, from what I was told she tried to accuse the pastor at her church for this and claimed she was innocent.
I have no way of knowing if she had any direct intention of attacking the church or if she had other plans of corrupting the church. She was very much a left-wing liberal though. My only point is that these type of people do exist. I would not assume that the majority of left-wingers who stick around churches they disagree with are there to be righteous agents of change. They very well may hang around with ill intentions.
Gee! I wonder why.
Why leave it when your intention is to destroy it?
They won’t leave because their intention is to destroy it from within. They don’t want the change they say they want...there’s a whole list of mainstream protestant denominations that have accepted their ‘new orthodoxy’. If they were really interested in change they could easily find a new home there that would welcome them. they want destruction.
Lucifer didn’t just leave either. He had to be driven out.
I don’t think many Anglicans would want them either. Let’s find another denomination for them....they can maybe start their own denomination.
Their basic mindset is that they are right and have the power of right on their side so you must change or leave not them.
The fact that their ideas in no way line up with 2 thousand years of history doesn’t matter. They have probably listened to people all to willing to scratch their itching ears and they know that they are good at heart - better than you “hardline conservative” so they must be right - Don’t you see!
I have talked to too many liberal Christians and know that you can never win an arguement with them because they are better people than you and me!
Mel
What about the guy who lived with his step-mother. If someone is openly living in sin, saying they are Christian, they have no place in the church as far as I can tell. When I slipped, for years, I didn’t step foot in the church. How could I? I just told a friend a couple of days ago, I almost always know when I am doing something wrong.
I don;’t want to understand them I just want them to leave the church and quit calling themselves Catholic.Liberals are never happy with something that works they have a deep need to change things to suit themselves then complain bitterly when it does not work.In other words they are perpetual adolescents.
Forty or so years ago, there was a lot of discussion about why the Reformation failed. That the friends of Erasmus ought to have won, as the “middle way” between the Lutherans and the Catholic reformers who prevailed at Trent. John Dolan wrote a history of the Rerormation along those lines. They were also determined to reverse the course set by Pius X during the modernist controversy. But Luther—God bless his stubbornness —saw that Erasmus more or less identified the faith with morality, was at best a Pelagian. Of course IMHO, to call some liberal Catholics today “Pelagians”is to give to little credit to Pelagius and his disciples.
The problem is that these people are less to be blamed than their relgious teachers. Some of the he Kennedys were devout but naive souls whose faith was corrupted by the likes of Fr. Drinan.
Further, it is not right to wish that they leave the Church because it is the same as wishing their eternal damnation. Our desire is to reform them in the Church.
But also remembering that everyone has free will and they and only they have the choice to make.
Also realizing the importance of free will.
They are not protestants, they don't put shaking the dust off their sandals above all other ecclesiological principles, the Church is their mother and you can't divorce your mother.
Why some of the worst corrupters are not excommunicated by a formal act is a more interesting question.
But, for true cradle Catholics, there's no such thing as leaving.
True. Can’t help it; I am a stubborn optimist. ;) But you are right.
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