Saturday, June 23, 2012

On Loudmouthed Tough Guys in the Church

By Ann Barnhardt at Barnhardt.biz:

To open this post I wrote up this whole brilliant allegory about how sometimes you gotta be Paul Scofield, and sometimes you gotta be Ernest Borgnine, and if you put the two together you get Marty, but then I realized that all of three people reading this would have any idea who or what I was talking about, so I skipped it. But trust me, it was brilliant.

Here is Voris, clearly edified and energized by his new digs and new name, ChurchMilitant.tv, knocking it out of the park. I have pasted the key quotations he cites below, in case you want to copy and paste them into a file for future reference.

Since, in order that the deceits of the enemy may be avoided, it is necessary first of all that they be laid bare; since much is to be gained by denouncing these fallacies for the sake of the unwary, even though We prefer not to name these iniquities "as becometh saints," yet for the welfare of souls We cannot remain altogether silent. - Pope Pius XI
We’ve had enough of exhortations to be silent! Cry out with a hundred thousand tongues. I see that the world is rotten because of silence! -  St. Catherine of Siena
If people are scandalized at the Truth, it is better to allow the birth of scandal, than to abandon the Truth.  - Pope St. Gregory the Great
Let me add two more from the Church Fathers:
Everyone who can speak the Truth, yet speaks it not, will be judged by God. - St. Justin Martyr, died A.D. 165
Anyone who conceals the Truth for fear of some authority calls down the wrath of God upon himself, because he fears men more than God... Both are guilty: he who conceals the Truth and he who speaks falsehood, because the former does not wish to make the Truth known and the latter desires not to refute it. -  St. Augustine, died A.D. 430
I have heard a priest relate an anecdote regarding "prudence" that makes my flesh crawl. It goes something like this:

During World War II, the priests and bishops in Italy kept fairly quiet, and did not preach with fire and zeal against Mussolini or Hitler - their efforts against the Axis were more clandestine and underground. In the Netherlands (correction here: I originally said Denmark - I was wrong), by comparison, the priests and bishops were vociferous in their preaching against the Reich. As a result, nearly the entire Jewish population of the Netherlands was exterminated, while a far higher percentage of the Jews in Italy survived the war.

This argument is specious. It sounds good on the surface, but it is terribly flawed. The Dutch clergy did the right thing - they were the truly PRUDENT actors. They did what was right in those circumstances, which is to preach the Truth without hesitation, and with as much zeal and fire as they could muster. The failing in prudence was on the part of the other clergy in Europe. Had the clergy of the entire Church stood tall and railed without ceasing against Hitler, Mussolini, and the rest of the players, had they made clear that ANY cooperation with these governments was a mortal sin, and thus laetae sententiae excommunication, which means automatic by virtue of committing the sinful action itself, and not requiring any official juridical action of a bishop; if they had told the people of Europe that it was either friendship with Christ, which meant the total rejection of the Reich and the Fascist Italian regime, or eternal hellfire, perhaps a war which killed 70 million human beings could have been avoided, or drastically reduced in scale. Comparing survival rates of Jews in one country versus another makes the terrible assumption that the situation in Europe could not have been any better, and could ONLY have been worse. Considering that 70 million people were killed in World War II, it is lunacy to argue that "it couldn't possibly have been any better."

This is why I am doing what I am doing now with regards to Obama. I have, for my entire life, marveled at the people of Germany, in particular. Why didn't anyone say anything? Why didn't anyone do anything? If you had the chance and ability to rhetorically destroy Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s, if you had the capacity to reveal Hitler's insanity, homosexuality and unspeakable fetishes and perversions, and also the lies of National Socialism, wouldn't you do it? Wouldn't you do everything you could to rhetorically destroy Adolf Hitler? Wouldn't you expose his depraved homosexuality in order to utterly discredit him in the eyes of the German people so that they would never come to regard him as some sort of savior in the first place? Wouldn't you try to derail the train before it caused a war that killed tens of millions of human beings?
If not, WHY NOT?

How is NOT speaking the truth in any way prudent, much less charitable?

Expect God's wrath all you who fear MEN more than you fear God, and thus willfully conceal and stifle the Truth through silence and passivity. And don't you dare call it prudence.

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