How To Lose Your Post, And Other Reflections.

How do you lose your post? If you are Cardinal Burke, perhaps you do (and you did) it just with this interview.

The interview is, in my eyes, significant for many aspects; including the ambiguity of the V II mentality, a defect from which Cardinal Burke is not exempt.

Let us see more in detail the important parts:

1. We make judgments all day concerning what is right and what is wrong.

Very fine. Best part of the interview. A hammer blow on the genitals of “who am I to judge?”. Well said, Your Grace! For the record, I think you would have lost your post anyway, so it is better to go after some straight talk after all…

2. We can’t say that a particular person is in mortal sin. He might not be conscious etc…

Well, we can’t judge the interior forum; but we have no right to be blind and stupid, either. It’s not that the Pope does not know what fornication is. It’s not that he does not know the concept of complicity in another’s sin. It’s not that a sodomite does not know the biblical episode, and what Christianity says God has in store for him unless he repents. As we remind ourselves of the rules, we keep our brains switched on.

Curiously, I never hear the Cardinal, or anyone else, applying this very merciful reasoning to Hitler.

“Oh, but he knew! He knew! ‘ course he knew!”

He knew, uh? What about Elton John? Is he under an evil spell?

3. He (Burke) is not intolerant of people with same-sex attraction; but hey, they do endanger their soul.

Can we stop with this PC talk of “same-sex” attraction? Is incest called “same-family attraction?” Is bestiality called “family pet attraction?” Is pedophilia called “child-attraction”? (yes, I know what it means in Greek; but the first word has a negative connotation the second one waters down). It’s called homosexuality, and the act is called sodomy.

It never ceases to amaze me that old bibles have words like “sodomite”, “whore”, “harlot”, and we think we must say “same-sex attraction”. Screw that. Call perverts with their name. It will do them a lot of good. It might, actually, lead them – by God’s grace – to save their souls.

The Cardinal does express the concept here, but he is too cautious. He walks on eggs. He is too V II.

4. The lesbian daughter of the old harpie isn’t evil; merely what she does is.

As the Gipper would say, “here you go again!”.

“Stupid is as stupid does”, says (if memory serves) Forrest Gump’s mother, and the entire world embraces the tautological truth of it. Strangely, it seems not to apply in case of evil acts. Evil acts are not committed by evil people. Who are we (cough) to judge?

One gases 300,000 people, or sends them to millions in gas chambers, or lets them die in horrible Gulags. How can I know he is evil, then? I am not in his brains, right? Repeat with me: “internal forum”.

Really? Really?

“Oh, but in Saddam’s case it is obvious!”

Fine. Saddam’s evil is obvious, and the unnatural evil of sexual perversion, celebrated in public for all the world to see, isn’t? Can any of these people say they do not know perfectly well what Christian teaching on the matter is? On the contrary: isn’t it so, that they are so angry and so militant exactly because they know it? What could be more obvious, than their knowledge of Christ’s rules, and their rebellion to them?

Truly: must Satan spit directly in our face before we recognise his work, and his minions?

By the by, I have always been told that in what gravely goes against natural law no one can hide behind ignorance, because one’s God-given conscience will always rebel to it, and an insisted, substantial, evil effort will be required to become deaf to its voice. Which is why no one can massacre a village, of screw a dog, or his sister, or his school pal and then say “I’m fine, because I wasn’t told it was wrong”.

This is so darn obvious, I wouldn’t have to even write it. But hey, we live in the “age of mercy”, where TMAHICH is in power, and the official reading is that the Blessed Virgin might have thought “Lies! I have been deceived!” under the cross.

Let us say it once again: where I come from there was this strange expectation that the brains are kept switched on. This idea that everyone is always innocent even when he screams to the world day and night that he isn’t just wasn’t there.

Evil is who evil does. Forrest Gump gets it. Let’s try to do the same.

We should, I think, go back to the basics of sound thinking. We do not know whether anyone, even Elton John or Stephen Fry, will go to hell; and we wish them from the heart that they may, by the grace of God, avoid that terrible destiny, as we hope the same for ourselves.

But we can’t just pretend to be such fools that we can’t see the open rebellion to Our Lord even when openly advertised and boasted of. Particularly so, when this rebellion happens in matters of natural law, which God has written indelebly in everyone of us.

Yes, we prudently consider that we do not know the people’s internal forum, whenever there is room for reasonable doubt. But we don’t say the same of Hitler and Stalin, because common sense tells us that when one goes around screaming to the world that he is the enemy of Christ, well he damn well is. If this is true for Pol Pot and Lenin, then it must be true for all those perverts who give scandal of their perversion, in open defiance to God’s laws.

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All in all, then, a typical Burke. Laudably orthodox and brave in the intent, but in the end weak in the delivery, and with the usual, unsavoury V II undertones.

Still, I can’t avoid thinking TMAHICH read the interview and the part about the judging, and… judged Burke worthy of swift punishment.

M