A dreadful thought: will there be no persecution?

I have been more than usually anguished by the state of the Church lately, and I feel a need to ramble.

The idea had been wiggling around in the back of my head for some time, but it was only a couple of weeks ago that it really struck me with its full awful plausibility.  There will be no persecution of the Catholic Church in the West.  We’re going to give in to the sodomites without a fight and then congratulate ourselves for our sophistication and pastoral sensitivity.  Take a good look at your bishop and tell me this is unlikely.

“Where is the Roman Catholic Phil Robertson?” Jim Donald asks.  Where indeed?  The most painful thing in all of this is the shame.  If Catholic businessmen or clergy were being threatened with torture or the Gulag and they all betrayed the faith, one could understand while still disapproving.  But we are such cowards that mere social disapproval is enough to make us effectively renounce our Savior.  (And make no mistake:  accepting Leftist sodomy affirmation in defiance of scripture, tradition, and natural law certainly does mean switching teams.  It shows who your true master is.  If you give in on buggery, the Left owns you completely.)

At least the professional religious conservatives have Phil’s back, right?  Well, certainly not at Catholic-dominated First Things, where the responses were to criticize Robertson for his crudity (and, of course, “racism”) and to chide Christians for not agitating for sodomy rights in Africa.  (By the way, it seems that the Catholics at First Things are all abuzz pursuing an exciting new development of doctrine in which the inclination to buggery is not objectively disordered.  Thank goodness the Church has her conservative intellectuals, huh?)

Meanwhile, the question on the minds of our Church’s leaders is “How can we bend the rules so that unrepentant adulterers can receive communion?”

Fortunately, one Cardinal in all of Rome had time to support a demonstration in favor of the natural (patriarchal) family.

Father Z has a good idea:

Today we begin the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

Let’s work together with out Protestant sisters and brothers in a common cause!

Let us be one!

In this light, I note with interest an article at Newsmax.

Oregon: Cake Refusal Violates Gay Couple’s Rights

A bakery in suburban Portland, Ore., violated the civil rights of a same-sex couple by refusing to bake a cake for the women’s wedding, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries said Friday.

These bakers are Christians, right?  They are separated brethren, right?

What better week to show our resolve and zeal for our Week of Christian Unity than for the bishops of these USA to line up behind the bakery in support of and defense of their religious freedom?

We welcome the support of Protestants in our own struggle for religious freedom, don’t we?

This is a time for robust ecumenism!

You have to hand it to them:  the conservative Protestants have really come through for us on the contraception mandate battles.  Even aside from any concern for the cause of Christ, one would think that any Catholic prelate, from the Pope down, with the least ability to feel shame would be eager to support Protestants being persecuted for their loyalty to revealed and natural law.  But in fact our leaders are utterly shameless.  No doubt in diocese across America, bishops are patting themselves on the back for being so pastoral as to avoid any unpleasant confrontations with their sodomy-indoctrinated flocks.

Why do I say Catholics should support Protestants under assault from the sodomo-tyranny?  Certainly not because I believe in some abstract principle of “religious freedom”, much less that government can or should be “neutral” in matters of sex, marriage, and religion.  I do however believe that people have the right and duty to speak the truth (not “the truth as they see it” but the real truth, and the sovereign can’t help but take a stand on what that truth actually is) and live consistently with it, and the truth is that sodomy is an abomination, and the androgynist ideology that promotes it is wicked and inhuman.

Mr. Donald likes to mock Catholics for optimism about the Church:

In the bay area, places that once were churches are now meeting places for lesbian feminists, bookstores for Marxist books, and such, and no one recollects how what once was church, is now no longer a church. The same will in due course happen to the Vatican. The pope’s letterhead for speaking ExCathedra will wind up on the desk of some Harvard functionary, who will, over time, use it less and less until it is forgotten and thrown out with the rest of the dead white male stuff.

I know I should argue with this, but really, what has the Vatican II Church done to warrant the slightest respect from anyone?

I remember I was sitting in Mass a year ago, listening to an old priest give a homily about how the Church has fallen on rough times and what we need is yet another round of diluting Catholicism and accommodating evil (not, of course, that he called it that, but this was the gist of it).  All I could think was, “How can you sleep at night, after what you and your kind did to the Church?”  How can that generation of priests (active c. 1960-1980) be so God-damned self-satisfied, given that they’re such complete and total failures?  They failed in the one thing that every other generation of the Church accomplished–passing down what they received.  Couldn’t they at least have the decency to be ashamed?  (Yes, I know I shouldn’t be so charitable as to assume the outcome they got isn’t exactly the one they wanted.)

No doubt the cause seems already lost, and yet we must fight on.  I remember what I once wrote about the denial of Saint Peter:

Peter was no coward.  He was ready without a second thought to die defending Jesus from the crowd at Gethsemane.  But Jesus wouldn’t allow it.  And so it was:  the Master was in the hands of His enemies, the populace had turned on Him, His disciples had fled ignominiously, the movement–whatever it was–was over.  Nothing left for Peter to do but wonder whether he’ll be able to get that fishing gig back.  Then a servant girl sees him and says, “Hey, aren’t you one of the followers of that lunatic they just arrested?”  Peter was ready to be a martyr, back when it might have made a difference.  Now the fight is over.  Standing with Him now won’t help the Master; He’ll never even know.  Why throw my life away now, for nothing, he thinks.  “I do not know him.”

Afterwards, Peter remembered what Christ had predicted.  When Peter had professed his loyalty to Jesus, what Christ had cared about was not Peter’s loyalty when it mattered, but his lack of loyalty when it didn’t matter.  The latter was the kind of loyalty Jesus really wanted.  That was the real test–will you stick by the Savior when the cause is already lost and as far as worldly eyes can see your sacrifice will do nobody any good?  Not just loyalty unto death, but loyalty unto pointless death.  Can you sacrifice to God purely out of devotion to Him, not to advance the Cause?  The Cause you place entirely in His hands.

All Christians owe Peter their gratitude for his subsequent heroism in service of the Faith, not least in his making sure that this story of his own weakness would be preserved for our benefit.  Its application to 21st-century reactionaries is apparent.