Charity, Properly Intended.

One of the signs of the stupidity and ignorance of our times is the total forgetfulness of what charity is. Charity is the love of neighbour that springs from the love of God, which comes above all things. It is love properly ordered and properly directed. It is love for neighbour going in the same direction as God’s love for him. It is not a childish, purely emotional “support” and “affirmation” for whatever it is other people are doing.

The mother “affirming” her homosexual son is not charitable. The father approving of her daughter living in sin with her boyfriend is not charitable. The colleagues at the office “supporting” the peer who has decided he “wants to be a woman” are not charitable. What they are is accessories in the sin of another.

An awful lot of people, nowadays, do not understand how easy it is to go to hell out of sheer, unadulterated, worldly, utterly godless, utterly uncharitable niceness.

No one should know this better than a priest, which is why the decision of the bishops of New Zealand, who not only allow, but force a priest to either “accompany” to hell a suicide or find another one who does it for them, is a very special kind of evil.

The situation is a sort or perverted echo chamber. The godlessness and demand for niceness of the (un)faithful is met with the acquiescence and complicity of cowardly and – unavoidably – godless priests. This in turn feeds more radical demands for “niceness”, which is met with more cowardice. In the end, you have priests and laity marching together to hell, but feeling very holy in the process.

I don’t know who is more culpable here (likely the priests, but you should ask a theologian); what I know is that the laity can’t be excused by the cowardice of their priests. Every adult person has the duty – particularly in this day and age, when literacy is so widespread, technical knowledge so easily acquired, and resources so readily available – to instruct himself about how things really stand; nor will anyone be able to say, on judgment day, that the rants of Father Shrill McFaggot and his calls to “accompaniment” rang so true. God gives to everyone enough sense to understand fake currency. Anybody who accepts the Devil’s currency to the end will have to spend eternity in the Devil’s economy.

Your grandma knew this. Your grand-uncle would have looked at you in a strange way – if particularly charitable, perhaps he would have slapped you – for even trying to defend this strange religion of niceness. Every illiterate peasant, 150 years ago, would have understood all of this without any difficulty. It is only today, in an age of unprecedented wealth and access to information, that people actually choose not to know it. This includes countless oh so dumb, and I mean d.u.m.b., PhDs with a total lack of common sense and basic decency.

The fake currency of niceness is all around us. Don’t be fooled by it, because it leads to spiritual ruin.