Let's Get Political

I try -- not always successfully -- to avoid getting too political on this blog, but given the current weirdness in our increasingly violent world, I'll make an exception today and hit a few topics that beg to be addressed.

California Pols want to abolish the Seal of the Confessional. A bill making its way through the California senate would require a priest to report a penitent who confessed a sin of sexual abuse of a minor, thus breaking the seal of the confessional. The bill's sponsor, Senator Jerry Hill, claims that “The clergy/penitent privilege has been abused on a large scale, resulting in the unreported and systemic abuse of thousands of children across multiple denominations and faiths.” And yet, interestingly, he cannot cite a single instance where this has happened. Of course, the Church, specifically Archbishop Gomez of Los Angeles, has strongly opposed the bill. Personally, I view it as just another instance of our secular society's escalating war on religious freedom in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Should the bill become law, I would hope the bishops of California would have the courage to instruct their priests to ignore the law by refusing to break the seal. The coming persecution, already long underway, now intensifies.
 

How did he get to be Goveror? Ralph Northam, the embattled governor of Virginia, has apparently survived (sort of) an "investigation" to determine if he really was in that black-face and KKK photo on his page in his med school yearbook. When it first came to light, the governor apologized; but then, realizing an apology probably wouldn't be well received by all those steeped in identity politics, he took a different approach and pleaded ignorance -- never saw the photo...never even bought the yearbook...have no recollection of such a thing. Eventually he denied being in the photo and blamed others for putting it on his yearbook page. The investigation's only conclusion was no conclusion. And because the governor's a Democrat, that gets him off the hook.

Of course, the entire episode was a wonderfully designed misdirection compaign to bury Northam's comments encouraging legal infanticide. Yes, indeed, the movers and shakers in the Democrat Party were all aflutter about the governor, not because he encouraged killing newborn babies, but because of those racist photos taken decades ago. At first they publicly demanded his immediate resignation, but of course they really weren't all that serious. The governor knew this and told Virginia and the world that he'd never resign. In his words:

"Virginia needs someone that can heal. There's no better person to do that than a doctor. Virginia also needs someone who is strong, who has empathy, who has courage and who has a moral compass. And that's why I'm not going anywhere."

He's quite the healer, this governor. Just think of it. He's a pediatrician who enthusiastically supports legislation that calls for the murder of newly-born infants who might be unwanted. Yes, indeed, the medical doctor who specializes in treating children thinks it's perfectly moral, right, and just to kill these little humans if they happen to be inconvenient. Did you get that? The racist, baby killing doctor is especially proud of his "moral compass." How did he get to be governor?

Politically incorrect...and proud of it. Let's not be PC about being PC. The truth is -- and, yes, boys and girls, there is such a thing as truth -- political correctness has its modern roots in Marxism. 

I suppose PC first took root thanks to the forced ideology of the French Revolution and its effort to annihilate society's foundational values and replace them with the radical values of the revolutionaries. Those revolutionary values certainly sounded good, didn't they? Liberté, égalité, fraternité -- nice sounding words, but of course they were a lie. (The lie is the only way the left can convince the masses to follow them.) They were a lie because they applied only to true believers, while thousands of others, those who refused to accept the lie, went to the guillotine during the reign of terror. And it wasn't just royalists who lost their heads in the Place de la Revolution. They were followed by many of the revolutionaries themselves, men and women who failed to accept the continuing evolution of ideological "truth." Such luminaries of the revolution as Danton and Robespierre come to mind. Even Antoine-Francois Momoro, the printer who threw himself into the revolutionary cause and came up with the phrase, liberté, égalité, fraternité, eventually climbed the steps of the scaffold. Interestingly Lenin and Stalin conducted similar internal purges as they solidified the Communist revolution in Russia.  

But the French Revolution faced a far more dangerous foe than royalists and internal dissenters. Its greatest and most formidable enemy was the faith of Christians, particuarly Catholics. It didn't take long for the revolutionaries to realize that no true believer in the Gospel of Jesus Christ could ever accept the atheistic, murderous values of the revolution. Bishops, priests, men and women religious, and thousands of the faithful were, therefore, led to the guillotine and to martyrdom. (The moving story of Carmelite nuns caught up in the terror is beautifully offered by Gertrude von Le Fort in her novella, The Song at the Scaffold.) 

The Blessed Carmelite Martyrs of Compiègne 

Decades later Karl Marx, inspired by the French terrorists, joined with Friedrich Engels and took ideology to a new level. But it was Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin that implemented their ideology through the Communist revolution in Russia and gave the world's Marxists the hope that global revolution would soon follow. But when Marxist uprisings, especially in Germany, failed to bring about the desired revolutions, the Marxists decided their greatest obstacle was the established culture, specifically Christianity. In other words, Communist ideology was sound, but the workers were enslaved by their culture and religion. 

(This, of course, is reminiscent of Barack Obama's comments during the 2008 campaign. At a fundraiser in San Francisco he spoke of the folks of rural Pennsylvania, claiming that the jobs in their small towns "have been gone now for 25 years...They fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate. And they have not..." Obama then concluded "...it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.")

For the Marxists, this clinging to religion had to change. Two men, the Hungarian Marxist theorist, Georg Lukacs, and the Italian Communist, Antonio Gramsci, independently concluded that the only solution was the "revolutionary destruction of society" [Lukacs]. Gramsci correctly believed that their Christian beliefs would prevent workers from becoming true revolutionaries. 

In the 1920s Lukacs and other Communist theorists formed what came to be called the Frankfurt School to address this "problem." Their solution was multi-faceted:

1. Infiltrate every aspect of the society's infrastructure -- military, courts, press, schools, and of course the government -- to undermine the established cultural norms.

2. Destroy organized religion by attacking its foundational beliefs as myths, thereby making its moral codes irrelevant. 

3. Do whatever is necessary to weaken societal conventions: family, sexual morality, monogamy, patriotism, tradition, etc. 

When Hitler and his Nazis came to power, most of these men fled Germany, many to the United States, where their influence is certainly evident today in the political correctness that has permeated so much of our society.

Political correctness was simply another means introduced by the Frankfurt School to intimidate those who didn't accept Marxist dogma, especially those who resisted it publicly. To accede to political correctness, then, is simply cowardly. That's right, to give in to the PC crowd is to be a coward, to fear the backlash if one speaks the truth.

Political correctness is like a plague, one that begins by infecting prominent, influential individuals and then spreads to the society at large. And the primary carriers of this disease are the media (including social media outlets), academia, the entertainment industry, and our political class. Sadly, the religious community is not immune, and far too many of its most celebrated leaders have caved under PC pressure. Some apparently prefer being praised by the media over speaking the truth. Others, either through economic or historical ignorance, fall prey to the false feel-good ideology of the left. Perhaps our bishops, priests, and deacons should consider the words of the great St. Augustine who lived and ministered in far more perilous times:

“We tend culpably to evade our responsibility when we ought to instruct and admonish [evildoers], sometimes even with sharp reproof and censure, either because the task is irksome or because we are afraid of giving offense, or it may be that we shrink from incurring their enmity, for fear that they may hinder and harm us in worldly matters, in respect either of what we eagerly seek to attain, or of what we weakly dread to lose” — Augustine: City of God, 1.9.