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?...
[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!]
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.