00 14/08/2017 20:42

Mundabor's illustration of the Christian perseverance necessary in battling for what is right, for the truth of Jesus's Gospel.

On August 11, Steve Skojec who runs the very commendable site 1Peter5, published a column that I found surprising - nay, shocking!
onepeterfive.com/quo-vadis/
because I was not expecting any such declarations from him – in which he sort of throws in the towel about reporting and reacting to all the objectionable
things taking place in the Church today, and saying he will take another tack. He begins the post this way.

You may have noticed that posting has been light this week. I’ve noticed too. What used to take me a few hours to write seems to be taking several days. My reserves are tapped out. Every day is starting to feel like deja vu all over again — the same stories, or some variation on the same stories, again and again and again until you’re not sure if you’ve seen this one before. I’m not sure how many more beatings this dead horse can take.

Is there any honest Catholic left on earth who doesn’t recognize the utter insanity of what is happening in the Church? When I started this gig, defenders of this papacy and the steps being taken in its “program of reform” were legion. The challenge back then was waking them up. Now, the challenge is keeping the people who have woken up from jumping ship… [The challenge continues nonetheless to wake up those who are still asleep or persist in feigning to be asleep.]

For my part, I don’t want to tell you the same bad stories day after day anymore. I don’t want this to be the place where you go to hear the latest outrage, to stoke the fires of discontent, to lose your peace of soul. I asked recently if you’re in this fight. But what I think I’ve been coming to understand is that the battle has actually shifted to a different front, and it’s time we did too.

Scandal is addictive. We do not manufacture it here, but we have put it on display. We believe that the faithful have the right — and even the duty — to be informed. But at some point, we have to draw a line. We have to make choices about where to place our focus. We have woken up about as many people as we can hope to wake.
[No, what an unrealistic view!] So what do we do now? Where are we going?...

Can you really flog a Pope's anti-Catholicism enough? It's like telling the pro-life movements "You've been flogging your cause for decades now – what's the point of carrying on with it?" Can one denounce evil too much and too long because 'your reserves are tapped out' and 'every day is starting to feel like déjà vu'?

I did not expect someone like Skojec, who can marshal Catholic apologetics arguments very well, to give up this way. And even if he decides to stop his 'flogging' of this pontificate, is he going to stop the other writers for his website from doing so?

He says he will concentrate instead on the stated mission of his website which is "Rebuilding Catholic Culture. Restoring Catholic Tradition", and says the site had let this slip behind in its priorities. But rebuilding Catholic culture and restoring Catholic tradition begins by pointing out constantly and as often as necessary whenever that culture and that tradition are betrayed and/or violated by statements and acts of the man who happens to be the elected leader of the Roman Catholic Church, not just anybody - and setting these anti-Catholic notions right. It is the duty of Catholics who have the mind and the means to disseminate and inform such consciousness.

On the other hand, Skojec tells two stories which point out what can be done by the rest of us 'conscientious objectors' to this anti-Catholic pope but who are in no position to make or shape the opinion of others on the scale that someone in media could:

[In the first story, a friend says he asked his confessor] “What would happen if we had a bad pope who was really damaging the Church? What would we do?”

The wise old confessor said to him, “What do you think people did in the middle ages when popes were accusing popes and fighting over the throne and there were antipopes rivaling real popes? They put their heads down, they prayed, they studied, they taught their children, they lived their faith, and they protected those who would become the next generation of priests, bishops, and cardinals.”
[Which is one way of expressing what I have always said I am doing in my own life about 'dealing with the Bergoglio problem" – simply to go on living my life in the way I was taught to live a Christian life by the Church and by the elders and teachers who raised me, because this is something I do regardless of who is pope.]

[In the second story, the same friend recalls the words of] a wise bishop who was faced with great challenges in his diocese. Loss of faith, disinterested people, parishes a mess…just a range of seemingly unsolvable problems. “What can you do?” My friend asked. “Focus on becoming a saint,” the bishop replied. “Taking action can only accomplish so much, but one saint can convert an entire country.” [Which is, of course, a more explicit, if more demanding way, of expressing God's call to each of us to be holy. Each of us can try our best to be holy, to emulate the saints, which a bad pope can in no way keep us from doing!]


Today, Mundabor responded to Skojec without mentioning him by name – and I think Mundabor speaks for all those who, like the pro-lifers who never tire of speaking out against abortion, will never tire of pointing out where this pope is wrong when he is wrong. Making allowances, of course, for Mundabor's characteristically intemperate expressions when referring to the reigning pope…

Mundabor is not turning

August 14, 2017

I have already written a couple of times about how tiring it is to have to write the same things about the same idiot again and again. However – I reflected every time – the idiot does not get tired to spread his idiocy; therefore, I will not get tired to fight it.

Nor can it be said that scandal is addictive. Scandal is scandal. No priest or layman worth his salt would tell you, after seeing a persistent scandal in his village, that at some point it is better not to denounce it anymore.

Blogging can be tiring or repetitive. So is life. What we do is soldier on with the lights that God have given us, asking him for the energy and resolve to never give up the fight.

Countless martyrs have died for the faith; shall I get tired of some blogging?


If an 80-year-old heretic can go on and on and on, I can do the same, too. God willing, I will see him in his grave. When the situation improves and we have a Catholic hierarchy doing their darn job, I will reconsider whether I want to spend the time blogging. But that time is, sadly, a very distant fantasy and now we clearly live an “all hands on deck” situation.

When the Clergy betrays their flock and Christ calls the laymen to the fight, I do not say “it's boring”, much less “Dear Lord, scandal is addictive. Shouldn't we rather pray?”.

No. I shout “presente!” loud and clear. Well I pray, too, but honestly I think blogging comes close as it helps others to live a life of Catholic sanity in an age of utter and complete insanity.

Of course, blogging is not only about that. I write a number of blog posts that are not about the scandal of the day, trusting that my readers will not forget that we live in horrible times if I don't remind them of the fact three times a week.

However, the fundamental point remain: When it is time to fight you don't get tired, or even say that fighting heresy is making the work of the devil. This would be one of the most extraordinary inversions of truth ever stated by anyone, Catholic or not.

Yes be prayerful. Yes be in good spirit. Yes pray for your enemies (as you pound on them with your keyboard). But for heaven's sake, never think that it be bad to defy heresy and heterodoxy, no matter for how long you have to do it.

In the end, you know what? You turn if you want to.
Mundabor is not for turning.

As Fr. Schall reminds us in the preceding essay:

Dickens wanted to keep alive 'the idea of combat, which means, of necessity, a combat against something individual and alive.'... The world can be made beautiful again by beholding it as a battlefield. When we have defined and identified the evil thing, the colors come back into everything else. When evil things become evil, good things, in a blazing apocalypse, become good.


[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 14/08/2017 20:46]