Tradition will not save us. We must save tradition. We do this by attaching it to a more adaptive social technology. This is the truth behind Vatican II.
We need cameras on priests recording every second of their lives. The discipline of celibacy can never be relaxed, because a family must be afforded some privacy.
Current Catholic myth and hagiography are counterproductive; they must be scrapped and rewritten. All saint stories are about one guy who’s holy and starts nagging all the other Catholics about their laxity. Or about fertile-aged women refusing to marry. Is there a single story about a band of heroic Catholic men standing together and prevailing or heroically falling? That’s what we need, to give people aspirations that don’t involve peacocking virtue at the expense of the tribe.
Most devotions and ascetic practices are too individualistic, encourage Catholics to imagine that they have some private account with God independent of the Church, making the latter disposable. If Catholics want to punish themselves, they should do it in a productive way, like the Protestants do, by throwing themselves into career advancement or charity, thus enhancing their social status and accruing glory to the Catholic Church.
We should each ask ourselves at the end of each week, “What have I done this week to enhance the power and glory of the Catholic Church?”
Am I an asset to the Church or a liability? Avoiding sin is not enough (not that any of us manage even that). I may still be confirming infidels in their belief that Catholics are lazy and stupid. Because I am an embarrassment to the Church, I should keep a low profile.
One should make sure that whenever possible the Church gets credit for our charitable donations.
We must be like all other peoples and devote the indoctrination of our young primarily toward belief in the superiority of Catholics to non-Catholics, and hatred of the latter, and only secondarily to theological concerns.
This is not hard. The secular world truly is despicable–a cesspool of murder, debauchery, and hypocrisy. Our superiority is obvious.
Always remember: when they attack the Church, attack the clergy, they are attacking you (rather, the part of you that is more important than your individual self).
The clergy are stationary targets, “sitting ducks”. We need a complementary elite, intellectual rather than sacerdotal, trained to attack. An analog of the secular world’s journalists and public intellectuals.
A Jew who loses his faith often retains his loyalty to his people. A Catholic who loses his faith immediately makes himself an enemy of the Church. Why do you think this is? Are our people so much less lovable than theirs?
We need some kind of derogatory attitude for unbelievers, something like “infidel” except that this word often connotes a formidable, worthy adversary. We need something that invokes distaste, contempt. A number of ethnic slurs provide good models.
Ours is an incarnate God. He puts His fortunes in our hands. God = Christ = Christ’s body = the Catholic Church.
Saint Paul regards it as shameful for Christians to sue each other in secular court. He was right.
There is a bright side to the tendency of Catholics to become de facto universalists. If everyone goes to heaven, then the personal afterlife is not worth thinking about. The future survival of the tribe is the afterlife we must earnestly seek.
Anti-clericalism is worse than pornography. I have deleted my blogroll.
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