From Under the Rubble…The Persecution Complex
In early April, Pope Francis warned Catholics that proclaiming the Gospel comes with a price, the price of persecution. “There will always be persecutions, misunderstandings,” he said. “But Jesus is Lord and this is the challenge and the Cross of our faith. May the Lord give us the grace to go on His path and, if it happens, even the cross of persecutions.”
One doesn’t have to preach the Gospel to attract the persecutor’s attention. Merely standing up for Gospel truths eight years ago got the wealthy CEO of Mozilla fired. On every front, the very mention of reality (and what is more real than the family?) is offensive to the Thought Police who are the Vanguard of the Culture of Death.
Word seems to get around fast. Colleges around the country are instituting “triggering” policies, requiring professors to notify students of any assigned material that might offend them. Like everything else in Big Brother’s arsenal, this draconian salvo turns reality upside down: what was once academic freedom is now an intellectual straitjacket. After all, if truth is anything we want it to be, so is falsehood.
Enter the Persecution Complex – strong-armed enforcers intent on relentlessly punishing anyone who dares “trigger” their outrage.
Ideas have consequences, Richard Weaver famously observed – and bad ideas often have very bad consequences. Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., Archbishop of Chicago, observed to his fellow priests a couple of years ago that, while he expected to die in his bed, his successor would die in prison, and his successor would die a martyr in the public square.
That last phrase should prompt some reflection. Cardinal George did not suggest that the future Archbishop of Chicago would be shot by some fanatic like Giuseppe Zangara, who killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in 1933.
No, Cardinal George predicted – and later reiterated his view – that Chicago’s future archbishop would be publicly brought to trial, convicted, and executed under the color of law, with broad-based acclaim, solely on account of his preaching of the Gospel.
The members of the Persecution Complex take such offenses very seriously. The prediction of Cardinal George, one of the Church’s most able theologians, makes a subtle point: yes, today the Persecution Complex merely hates. Eventually, however, they will attain the political power to execute those whom they hate.
To be clear: they’d be killing today, if they could. They just don’t have the power yet.
Bill Maher, a cable TV personality, recently affirmed Cardinal George’s observation. “I think there is a gay mafia,” he said. “I think if you cross them, you do get whacked.”
Members of the Persecution Complex see themselves in a different light. They consider themselves to be Apostles of righteousness, so fervently devoted to their particular perversion of truth that they feel compelled to impose it by force, if necessary.
And their number is legion. Maher perceived a seething desire for vengeance in the “gay mafia” (combining, curiously enough, two of Pope Francis’s condemnations – of the “gay lobby” and of the Italian mafia).
But the gays are not the only ones whose triggers are being pulled. When Pope Francis speaks of persecution – and he does so often – he identifies victims worldwide who are being persecuted, and yes, killed, by a broad assortment of miscreants, merely because they are Catholic.
At the heart of his message lie two realities: sin, and Satan.
Pope Francis warns about Satan all the time. And well he should. Satan hates Christ, who is inseparable from the Church until the end of time. And so Satan attacks the Church, and its visible leader – known as the Vicar of Christ – with an eternal vengeance that Maher’s “gay mafia” can only envy.
Enter sin. There are as many reasons to sign up with Satan as there are sins. John’s epistle sums it up it well: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the “pride of life” – superbia vitae, the love of fame and glory (1 John 2:16; Augustine adds the lust for power, libido dominandi, [C.D. I, Preface]).
Well, these days, the sum of those lusts is the way of the world. It might seem to have the upper hand at the moment, but that is only temporary.
When Cardinal George addressed the widespread response to his sobering observation, he was hopeful (a theological virtue) – even if he wasn’t optimistic. “What is omitted from the reports” he said, “is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: ‘His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.’”
And so the call goes forth.
“May the Lord give us the grace to go on His path and, if it happens, even the cross of persecutions,” says Pope Francis.
Pope Francis can boldly bcall on all of us to evangelize – to confront the trigger-happy Persecution Complex, confident that we are paving the way for future bishops who will slowly help rebuild civilization on the blood of the martyrs.
Even if that blood be our own.
This article, From Under the Rubble…The Persecution Complex is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
https://bellarmineforum.org/from-under-the-rubble-the-persecution-complex/
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May God keep me strong! Our Lady,…my Lady, pray for me!
“I think if you cross them, you do get whacked.” So true!
I do not think we are aiming at the solution in posts such as these but rather simply exploiting the drama. We do not have an independent political position. We are locked into the approaches of either the Republican or the Democratic parties, and both endorse the separation of Church and state as defined by the Americanist heresy,and therein lies the heart of the problem. (Both support gay freedom, by the way.) I put Americanist heresy twice and erased it once. There are lots of definitions, but let’s say the endorsement of secularism–religious freedom for all, none officially recognized in the government–as a viable social platform. Vatican II came on board in the sixties (pushed more than we realize by the Cultural Revolution in China and around the world) and made the Church’s capitulation official, which began with the first false peace made with protestantism. There is simply an incompatibility between the social, economic, and cultural life required by Catholics and all other “faiths” (as Belloc pointed out often enough, all more or less rapidly and more or less deeply descend to paganism). We see it now in the gay movement, but it is also true of the divorce movement, the contraceptive movement, and the Tea Party movement.
If you dismiss my comment on the basis of it being somehow unrealistic, I do not say that we must dominate all countries, but that we must maintain an independent political position favoring the society that helps us Catholics get to heaven, and calling ultimately for the recognition of God–the Trinitarian one, the Only One–in every nation including our own. (If the thought of a Catholic nation makes you gag–so undiverse!! so uncool!!!–then get used to gay life. I hope you can now see the clarity of the choice.)
To now, we have not fought one damn thing, on the basis of tolerance and the basic rightness of secularism. Now here are the results. More moaning over it and most especially more calls for ‘religious freedom’ will not help at all. Call for constitutional reforms and interim policies favoring the formation of families–although now that we’ve allowed things to roll on this far, it will surely cause violence. But it will push back, buy us some time to work toward an ultimate Catholic state, the only stable one, as Pius XI taught. When St. Paul said to run the race so as to win it, we must realize that means us, the race is for dominance, or death.