Judasgate: Let’s Talk About “Empathy”

Empathy is defined as, for what interests us:

the psychological identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of another.

I can vividly picture Rick “Judas” Santorum sitting at a table together with rather nervous “advisers” after Judasgate. They were, no doubt, the same people who had previously advised him to “open” to the “LGBT community” and “broaden his appeal”.

They therefore sit all there, and ask themselves: “how can we explain Judas to Christians in a way that makes him look acceptable?”

Apparently, they could not come out with anything better than “empathy“. This means that they are telling us that when Rick “Judas” Santorum is confronted with sexual perverts of the most atrocious sorts, and of the most hardened variety, what he does is not to admonish the sinner, or be concerned about the danger of hell for others. He does not think his duty as a wannabe leader to state very clearly – for the benefit of the pervert, and of everyone else – what terrible consequences this behaviour has.

No. When confronted with such a behaviour, Rick “Judas” Santorum has nothing better to do than to vicariously experience the feelings, thoughts, or attitudes of these perverts.

Congratulations, Mr Santorum. You have shot yourself straight in the balls for the second time in a row. You deserve your advisors, and they deserve you. Who knows, Judas possibly felt empathy for the plight of the Pharisees. It's a pity such delicacy of character was so long overlooked.

Now the leftists shoot at you because you aren't still quite like them, and the Catholics are disgusted by you because you are, well, Judas.

I have suspected for quite some time that modern democracies select boneheads, and quite shameless ones at that. There will be rare exceptions; but they will be, as stated, rare.

Rick “Judas” Santorum isn't one of them.

M

 

Contra Mundum

The Traditional Catholic Priests has one (actually, two) posts about St Athanasius.

St Athanasius did not declare the Pope deprived of his office. He did not start any “Athanasian” church. He did not care about precedent, either.

St Athanasius did the Catholic thing, and kept doing what had always been done to the end; irrespective of how mad, or weak, or evil the Pope of the day was.

We look today at those years and see a coherent development: Satan tries to destroy the Church. Faithful Catholics react. Satan loses.

However, in those times things were certainly not so linear. For many years, actually a couple of decades, vast part of Christianity must have looked like a nuclear wasteland, the air full of Arian nuclear fallout. It was, certainly, not so easy in those days to believe in the Indefectibility of the Church as we do now.

We do now. We know now. We can now look at two thousand years of history and see the Church surviving every crisis.

Whatever happens in October, do not lose faith. Most importantly, do not expect that a solution must arrive very soon. We may face many years, and perhaps decades, of nuclear wasteland. We live nowadays in times of instant response and instant information, but the Lord does not seem to think in this way. When the Blessed Virgin of Quito says that she will intervene when everything seems lost, this certainly does not mean “a couple of days after a devastating announcement”.

This is not how it has worked in the past.  In the past faithful have been expected to live in die in their faith, no matter what; and to trust in the Divine Help for the church on earth, when God finds it fitting. 

If the Kasper hits the Synod, we may be asked to do the same: live and die in our battle.

But how better our situation will be than the on in which the contemporaries of Athanasius found themselves.

Athanasius famously said that if the world was against him, then he was against the world.  He had no precedent. Never had a crisis of such magnitude presented itself in the life of the Church. 

We have at least this big precedent, and we must prepare ourselves as October nears; then never was the good Roman saying si vis pacem, para bellum as fitting as it is in this situation.

If the world goes against us, let us answer like Athanasius.  

M

Not Much Of An Apostolate

 

 

I must have written (indirectly, at least) about the initiative in the UK of the hundreds of priests who have signed a petition to urge the Synod Fathers not to sell out in October (no matter what pressure they get from the Evil Clown; that’s not in the petition, but take it from me). 

A similar initiative has been launched in the USA in the last weeks. Father Z has the story and the updates. 

The updates make for very interesting reading. As the number of priests rapidly swelled to 775, as I write this to the 775 priests only correspond four bishops. With around 40,000 priests in the US, we are moving towards 2% of the priests. But if we consider that there are around 440 bishops  (including the retired and the auxiliaries, none of them prevented from signing the petition) we see that bishops have been very slow to join the campaign and below 1% at the time of writing. More interestingly, we see that when there is an initiative meant to draw a line in the sand concerning Our Lord’s teaching, US priests are, on the whole, (bad as their average quality probably is) around double as zealous as their own bishops, who are supposed to be the successors of the Apostles; and one wonders of which one many of them are the successor.

It will be interesting to follow this statistics as October nears. Of course, the petition does not mean that those who do not sign are Kasperites, but it certainly means that very many of those who sign are not going to comply with whatever nonsense is going to come out of the Synod. It might also mean that many priests or bishop do not see the danger of a nuclear explosion in October, which is frighteningly naive even assuming it is not disingenuous.

We must intensify our prayers that Francis will not push the nuclear button in October. But the more priests and bishops show him what is what, the better it is for everyone. 

M