Can anyone explain this mystery to me?
God to Arab Muslim: Strap a bomb to your chest and blow yourself up in a crowded space.
Arab Muslim: God is great!
God to Catholic couple: Have unsterilized sex and have lots of cute babies.
Catholic couple: But, but, but….our freedom!!!
Am I just fooled by (a particular strand of) Muslim devoutness being so much more spectacular than Catholic devoutness? But there are an awful lot of young Muslims who, although not signing up for suicide missions, are fired up over the same causes. The population of Catholics of suicide-bomber-age who are fired up for fighting the Church’s fights and making babies seems to be just nonexistent.
Spirit of Vatican II: We just need to ask even less of them!
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Throne and Altar 
[…] By Bonald […]
Sort of off topic, but Vox Day the ex-libertarian just outed himself as a reactionary in firm denial.
http://voxday.blogspot.ca/2016/02/a-pernicious-influence.html
Read the second paragraph below the quote, and the denial directly after. “I might fundamentally agree with them….b-b-but, I’m not one of *those* losers, I swear”.
I dunno, my home parish (NO) has a bunch of burgeoning young families, and so does the mixed NO/EF parish about a half hour from us. I think the common thread is that both parishes are full of transplants – most of the “residential” parishes in the two dioceses involved aren’t doing as well.
And I suspect the message not being accepted has more to do with nobody bothering to preach it than it being presented and rejected. If anybody’s hearing the Church’s teaching about marriage and human sexuality these days it’s because they read an article about it on Catholic Lane or wherever, not because it was preached in a homily.
Zeal spreads from the pulpit. You can’t expect troops to line up for battle if their officers are weak, craven and cowed. You can’t expect them to risk their lives if they have come to doubt it will matter in the long run.
I was at Mass a few weeks ago, and the (visiting) priest, from the pulpit, denounced the entrance hymn, opining that it was “horrible.” I forget now which horrible hymn it was, but it involved us singing the Church into existence or some such atrocious nonsense. Then he went on to explain that the Church was the Body of Christ and it would go on existing if nobody ever sang another note ever again. I was like Duuuuuuuuuuuude!
Of course, the ecstasy is pretty depressing when you think about it. The only reason I was excited is that noxious heretical hymns are routinely sung to no objection whatsoever from priests.
The zealous Catholics in my parish express their zeal by flying off to third world countries to build shacks and operate travelling clinics and whatnot. These activities are the activities loudly and repeatedly praised by the pastor. So, I agree with JMSmith and Peasant that the problem is the preaching.
The thing is, if you imagine a Catholic who believed as I do but was not a cringing coward, then he would be apt to do things like blowing up abortion clinics. How do we defend not blowing up abortion clinics, anyway? It’s especially odd in light of the universally acknowledged obligation the German people had to violently oppose the murder of Jews.
Anyway, the point is that zealous Catholics would inevitably be at war with the US government. So, that’s probably the reason the Church works so hard to tamp down Catholic zeal.
@Peasant
Where are the non-contracepting people transplanted from?
I can answer this mystery for you. Today’s would-be Catholics are never really presented with the body of revealed truth; much more importantly, the secular culture, and the desacralized culture prevailing within most of the Novus Ordo movement’s rites and churches, foment in the faithful a profoundly humanistic view, which, if anything, views doubt and “thinking for yourself” as a sacred and honest activity in itself, rooted in human dignity and the “mystery” of the “religious experience.” Neo-Catholic prelates speak of non-Catholics, and even non-Christians, as “people of faith,” when this is entirely contrary to even the most basic Catholic sensibility on faith.
Thus, everywhere, Faith itself is undermined. Faith is not the vague belief that God exists. That is at most a wish. “Faith, considered in its formal object, is nothing other than God, the first truth. For faith assents to no truth except in so far as that truth is revealed. Hence the medium by which faith believes is divine truth itself.” And, “The formal object of faith is the first Truth, adherence to which is man’s reason for assenting to any particular truth.” (Both quotes from the Summa). This is why eminent Catholic thinkers have pointed out that the Catholic Faith is not so much the True Faith amongst many other faiths, but is actually the Only Faith, the only thing that merits the title of Faith, because only it has the infused virtue of Faith and the True God, along with the entirety of His revelation, for its object.
Realistically, is this presented to the people by the modernist “pastors?” Those who call themselves Catholics, in large part, believe what seems probable to them under their own lights. This is almost the inverse of faith; it is free thought, private opinion. The kind of absolute trust in the Church, let alone the conviction that all truths believed, are believed first because we are confident of the infallible veracity of God, the first Truth, is viewed as childish or “extremist,” or whatever.
So, the answer: today’s would-be Catholics do not adhere to truth with Apostolic fervor, because they do not have Faith. They do not know what Faith is, they are everywhere discouraged from developing it, an emotional and syncretistic substitute for actual Faith is everywhere proposed, and they would be horrified by the “extremism” required by actual Faith. Because they do not have Faith, they literally lack the capacity to adhere to the rest of the body of revealed truths.
Whenever I am tempted to despair at the weakness of our times, I remind myself that this is the Passion of the Church. We are to imitate Him. This hymn always uplifts me:
With the merits of the saints, let us, o brethren, sing
Their far-famed joys and all of their mighty deeds:
Keenly the mind unfurls, with chants to publicize
The best tribe of conquerors.
These indeed abhorred the prison of this world:
Indeed this desert bare, of withering flowers did they
Inwardly spurn, and rather followed Thee,
O Christ, Thou goodly Heaven-King.
These for Thee did trample o’er the ragings,
Yea, o’er men’s fierce and savage beatings.
The hewing blade indeed yielded rather to them,
Nor did it rend their inmost parts.
As they fell to swords, of double-bladed style,
Neither made they a sound; nor let they slip a cry.
But with silent heart and keenly knowing minds
They held fast in long-suffering.
What voice or tongue indeed, could hope to tell in full
The gifts Thou hast prepared, for these Thy witnesses?
Yea in this crimson flow of blood, they are crowned
With laurels bright and comely.
Now we ask of Thee, One and Highest Deity,
That Thou wouldst wash our faults, and remove our hurts;
Grant peace now to Thy slaves; for our part we to Thee
Ascribe unending glory.
It’s better in Latin, of course.
@Senghendrake
I’m confused about what I am supposed to see in that post. He’s a reactionary in firm denial. What is he denying? Oh, when he says “I’m not a reactionary.”
You know what he sounds like? He sounds like a certain kind of Protestant who says things like “I’m not a Protestant. I’m not protesting anything.”
Just as the Protestant-who-isn’t-protesting-anything can give you 100 reasons the One True Church isn’t, VD-who-isn’t-reacting-to-anything freely admits that the reason he is whatever-he-is is that liberalism has failed. He, in fact, seems to spend his days getting into arguments about these failures, so uninterested is he in reacting to anything.
There is no way to know how long he is going to spin round and round the teacup his mind has fallen into. Once you start saying things like “I don’t go in for anything that comes wrapped as a formal ism.” and then almost immediately “I’m not much interested in what past thinkers have thought, I’m more interested in working from first principles in order to accomodate the new developments” then anything can come out of your mouth.
I sure hope nobody ever names either the “first principles” or the place his reasoning leads with an ism. Cause then he’d have to be uninterested in it. And also uninterested in reacting to it.
Or, maybe I’m missing something. When VD denies being a reactionary, is he denying he is an NRx type? Why would he do that? How is he different from an NRx type? It hadn’t occurred to me before that he was anything other than a fairly libertarianish NRx type. The easiest thing in the world is to imagine David Friedman, Curtis Yarvin, and Theodore Beale living it up at an SCA event.
As I recall, Beale had a great post once in which he was explaining that the mark of a true gamer was acknowledging the hierarchy of games. Advanced Squad Leader was at the top and things like Depression Quest were at the bottom. You see, what he doesn’t like about girls is that, not only don’t they play the same games as him, they don’t even acknowledge that the games he plays are inherently superior.
Because I have blue eyes and spent most of my teens playing ASL, Beale and Hitler both acknowledge my superiority over the mass of humanity. I’m not Beale’s superior, of course, because I don’t go to conferences where they put together hundreds of ASL boards in order to reenact the Normandy invasion—all of it. Plus, I didn’t name any of my children Ender. (Or maybe this is an inside joke? Who can tell?)
Is the Josh in that comment thread “our” Josh?
VD was a libertarian in the past, but has de-facto (and as of late, formally) renounced it. I don’t think he’s ever been NRx, but it’s clear that, in practice, he is a small-r reactionary of some kind as much as he pretends he isn’t. Contrast him to William Briggs, who in the course of my readership of his blog, transformed, like Vox, into a reactionary but at least had the gonads to openly admit it and hoist the black flag. Not that I’m ripping on Vox, who otherwise is a useful blunt instrument for triggering SJWs and to whom I sincerely wish well.
DrBill,
The ones in both parishes come from all over – the NO parish is located near a large university and thus gets a lot of families of grad students and other folks who are somehow connected to the school and generally in town for a few years, and the mixed NO/EF parish gets people coming from about a 45 minute radius for the TLM and the TLM-lite NO Mass they offer.
My church is pretty good. We are a latin mass parish, so it attracts a particular type – but most of the young families have a lot of kids! The largest is 13, but there are several families with 5+ kids.
Bonald:
I’m not sure what’s the difficulty: in both cases people are doing what they believe will lead to sexual pleasure.
I would think the catholic equivalent of a Muslim suicide bomber would be an ascetic monk.
Dr. Bill.,
Not me. I’ve read VD before, but never regularly.
One would immediately suspect, walking into my hideous “worship center”, that those in charge do not take their religion seriously. The dress of most of the parishioners, the half-asses ugly music, follow suit. Why should anyone take any of this seriously?
You’re comparing the most devout 3% of Muslims with the least devout 97% of Catholics.
NBS:
That’s true, but also not quite the whole story; from my understanding.
In comparing would-be Muslim bombers with would-be Christian parents there are extreme differences in soteriology, and differences in targets.
According to my formerly Muslim step-father: Islam teaches that each person is judged and weighed according to their earthly deeds. Unlike Christianity, this measurement is not thrown out on account of Jesus’s grace extended to us (I’m simplifying, here.) who are in communion with Him.The only sure way to avoid being found unworthy is to die in jihad.
What jihadi clerics do then is prey upon those Muslims who have been, or currently are, the most Westernized; the most decadent; etc. Went to a stripclub and snorted cocaine of a stripper? My son, only death in jihad can outweigh that. You’ll notice that the facts surrounding who blew up what, where they were raised, how much money their family had, etc. supports this.
In contrast, virtually all Christians are called to marriage and procreation. What is not rare is often not valued, so marriage and children seem to many like humdrum aspects of Christianity; such as candles or modest clothes. Like those things: Marriage and children aren’t even peculiar to Christians alone. It’s a case of Christians starving to death in the middle of an supermarket because supermarkets are bourgie, yo.
We’re all hipsters, now.
[…] Bonald asked: […]
@Cane: OK, well maybe “devout” was not quite the right word. “Crazy”? “Overly credulous in a religion (or selective interpretation thereof) that makes literally zero coherence with natural law”??