Pious Hogwash: Love.

 

 

“At the evening of life, we shall be judged on our love.”

This phrase of St. John of the Cross is, at times, misused by the usual cafeteria Catholics.

By mentioning it, they state or imply that love saves. I am sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but love doesn’t save.

Every monster is capable of love. Every serial rapist and killer can have people whom he loves. Most of them certainly have. Therefore, love is not the key opening the gates of Heaven. 

Nor is that kind of love that translates into “doing good”, but with no faith in God behind it. It has always been Catholic teaching that salvation is the fruit of the works that come from the faith. Faith with no work will yield no salvation; but so will the works without the faith.

If you reject Christ until the end, Christ will reject you in the end. He that believeth not shall be damned. It follows that even being, say, an atheist Mother Theresa will be of no avail for he who believeth not.

Certainly, we can and must hope that Christ will help those who do good to others (which isn’t charity in the proper Catholic sense, but is still doing good deeds) to reach faith in the end. But we cannot say that their ability to love, or the good deeds this ability engenders, will save them. Certainly not if, as this is always the case, this “love” is meant as purely earthly, and the good deeds are made because it’s good to be good. If this were true, then fornicators, idolaters, adulterers, effeminate, abusers of themselves with mankind,thieves, covetous, drunkards, revilers, and extortioners would all inherit the kingdom of God, provided they love and do good. Which most of them assuredly do.

This “having one’s heart in the right place” nonsense is one of the most dangerous pieces of rubbish spread in modern times.

In the end, everyone has his heart in the same place, and most people love others. Even the Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Obama, and Sebelius.

I can’t imagine countless atheists do not love their offspring to distraction. Will this save them from hell unless they repents? Assuredly not. Not if Christianity is truthful, and makes sense.

Beware of pious hogwash.

Mundabor

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charity Taking

Easy emotionalism

The Internet initiative and site “charity giving” has just been suspended by the Charity Commission.

Apparently, no accounts have been filed for three years (probably whilst the Charity Commission was fast asleep) and now no less than £250,000 might have been used by the organisation to feed … itself rather than those charities the money was meant to be given to, giving to the expression “charity begins at home” a novel meaning.

Yours truly observes these events and notices how the progressive, in the Anglo-Saxon country very advanced process of de-Christianisation has caused money traditionally given to religious organisations to be channelled to fully secular outfits instead. In fact, chariteeee giving being the substitute of religion for so many, this is not surprising. Even Atheists need to feel good about themselves. They generally need to shout it, too.

So, what was once done pretty efficiently and without clamour – then the left hand must not know what the right hand does – is now done in an extremely wasteful way – expenses ratios of 30, 40 or more percent aren't a rarity – whilst every nincompoop feels the need to shout to the world how good he or she or it is. “Help my chariteeeee” must be, surely, the most pronounced phrase after “good morning”.

Atheism begets selfishness, which in turn begets stupidity. Giving money to a church is just old-fashioned. Better give it to people you don't know and have never heard of.

Very smart.

As the donors of the missing £250,000 have just discovered.

Mundabor

 

Three Cheers For The Wall Street Journal

Jacques Blanchard, “Allegory of Charity”

Seldom have I read such pithy exposition of Catholic thinking from a non-specialised media outlet.

Try this (emphases always mine):

Wealth and poverty are catalysts for bringing the rich and the poor together in community, and community is the hallmark of the church’s mission on Earth. Government is not community. Government is one of community’s tools, a coercive one we use when it is necessary to force people to behave in ways they would not otherwise behave voluntarily.

Already these three lines are of devastating effect for all those – very many in old, tired Europe – identifying Government with “good”, and the vehicle through which every “good” must be, well, coerced.

It goes on:

But that word—voluntarily—is key, and it’s where Mr. Ryan’s religious detractors go awry: Charity can only be charity when it is voluntary. Coerced acts, no matter how beneficial or well-intentioned, cannot be moral. If we force people to give to the poor, we have stripped away the moral component, reducing charity to mere income redistribution. And if one really is as good as the other, the Soviets demonstrated long ago that it can be done far more efficiently without the trappings of church and religion.

This is another good dollop of sanity which would (I assure you, oh fortunate American readers) surprise many a European, because they have been trained to think basically from the cradle – and from elementary school at the latest –  that coercion is the way to achieve an outcome considered “moral”. This is at the root of the oppressive Nanny-ism present in particular in the English society, with an army of busybodies intent in trying to crucify perfectly normal drinkers and smokers out of the completely bonkers persuasion that they must be saved from themselves. 

We see an extremely disquieting reflex of this thinking – Government legislates about morality, therefore morality is the monopoly of the Government – in the more and more automatic desire to ban whatever the Government does not approve of. For example, once Government has given sodomites official recognition, the questioning of their perversion should be made illegal  – under the guise of “hate crime”, “homophobia”, or “discrimination” – because if the Government has decided for the morality of a behaviour, this morality cannot be publicly questioned without being subversive. 

The article mentioned echoes this with the following words:

All people have the moral obligation to care for those who are less fortunate. But replacing morality with legality is the first step in replacing church, religion and conscience with government, politics and majority vote. 

  When you replace morality with legality, you give the legislator – and in modern terms, the Government – the monopoly over morality. A dictatorship of government-given oppressors ensues, because this mentality unavoidably tends to make opposition to one’s own moral positions illegal. It there is a menace to freedom nowadays, it is this tendency of thinking and legislating in terms of “hate”. 

Then the hammer falls directly on the genitals of the US Church hierarchy, so short-sighted and enslaved to easy populism for many decades and now about to pay the price of their inanity. The WSJ authors put it in these words: 

 The bishops dance with the devil when they invite government to use its coercive power on their behalf, and there’s no clearer example than the Affordable Care Act. They happily joined their moral authority to the government’s legal authority by supporting mandatory health insurance. They should not have been surprised when the government used its reinforced power to require Catholic institutions to pay for insurance plans that cover abortions and birth control.

The Church asked the government to be the coercive enforcer of morality, and now the enforcer wants to do the same with them. In a last beautiful warning, the article states:

To paraphrase J.R.R. Tolkien (a devoted Catholic), the government does not share power. Paul Ryan knows this. The bishops would be wise to listen to him.

Three cheers for the WSJ for hosting such enlightened minds on their columns.

Mundabor

“What Would Jesus Cut”: Catholicism vs Welfare State

Jesus: never a word about "welfare state".

Brilliant, and brilliantly short, blog post of Tom Crowe on Catholic Vote.

Mr. Crow exposes in just a few lines the falseness and hypocrisy of Socialism (in one of his milder forms) masked as Catholicism. The socialist attitude betrays the mistrust in human charity, and the belief in the inherent evil of human nature, that is so typical of the ideology. The socialist believes that if it wasn’t for the public hand, people would starve on the streets. How very unchristian.

I have written about the matter in the past, but I am far away from possessing the admirable conciseness of Mr Crowe.

The rhetorical question is : “what anti-poverty programs would Jesus cut?” Now, you could read a 1000-words answer from me to this extremely cretinous statement or, more practically, you can read this:

one potential serious answer would be, “Well, none. Jesus wouldn’t cut a single program.” The rest of that answer is, “but, of course, Jesus didn’t advocate for the government dole in the first place; He advocated for mutual support born of charity.”

Charity isn’t charity if the money used to help the poor is taken against the will of the one who has the money originally. Even for programs that no one has a problem with at all, the money is still taken by the government through statutory taxation, i.e., coercively.

The parable of the Good Samaritan didn’t end with Medicare picking up the tab.

The multiplication of the loaves and fishes wasn’t a call for food stamps.

The healing of the paralytic lowered through the roof wasn’t followed by an impassioned plea for government-run healthcare.

Note that Mr Crowe makes very clear that this doesn’t mean that solidarity has no place in the life of a Catholic. In fact, the exact contrary is the case!

To make it even clearer, the author of this beautiful blog post concludes with these words:

I suggest that rather than ask ridiculous loaded questions, the people at Catholics United seek ways Catholics can unite in true charity to pick up the slack when the dole is cut (as it *must* be) to help those who may need to find alternate ways of financing needed health care.

It isn’t unchristian at all to believe that the private initiative can do pretty much everything more efficiently than the public hand. It is, on the contrary, very Christian to believe that charity must come from – as the word itself says – charity rather than from expropriation. Expropriation creates an entitlement mentality and fosters resentment among both the expropriated “has” and the demanding “has not”; charity creates a bond between them instead.

It goes without saying that private initiative also has inherent advantages of slim and efficient organisation the public hand will never have. If you were called to pick up the bill for the people in need of your small city, be assured that there would be no superfluous layers of administration, no suffocating bureaucracy, no countless committees and regulation against every perceived discrimination, and the like. In the end, by same expense there would be not one ounce less of help; more probably there would be better help, at lesser cost, and given out of love.

Socialism is nothing to do with Christian solidarity. Christians have been admirably helpful to each other from the beginning, with no need of socialism whatsoever. The entire construct of solidarity by way of forced expropriation is a fraud; an expensive one, and a very unchristian one.

Mundabor

You can’t be both “charitable” and “nice”. A Michael Voris video.

Jacques Blanchard, "Allegory of Charity"

Here are eight minutes worth spending at the computer. Michael Voris does a very good job of bringing the point home: too often charity is confused with niceness, but if you want to be “nice” you will avoid saying anything which might upset someone. As a result, you’ll stay silent in front of whatever sin, whatever scandal, whatever heresy, whatever abomination.

This is a fairly accurate portrait of what has been happening in the last decades: “nice” people wherever you turn and Christianity slowly disappearing from the scene. If someone dares to point out to one or two truths of the faith, he is immediately branded as uncharitable, inflexible, a Taliban, arrogant, “judgmental” and a lot of other things. If you want to be “nice”, if you want to be popular, you just can’t be charitable.
Most people choose to be popular and “nice”. This makes their life easier and even provides them with the cosy feeling of their own “goodness”. In the meantime, secularism advances.

In beautiful contrast, Michael Voris has a couple of uncomfortable truths to say:

“Our Blessed Lord was not nice, not by the conventional understanding of that word; he was, however, charitable”.

Or try this:

It is not charity to be polite and nice when others are tumbling into hell.

The “quotable” parts of this long and perspective “vortex” are too many to report. Please follow the link and listen to the video, I have linked to the youtube one so that not even registration on the internet site is necessary.

Mundabor.