JULY 7, 2017

Muscular Catholicism. Back to the gym

https://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/vortex-muscular-catholicism

By Michael Voris, July 7, 2017

With rare exception, no Catholic under the age of 50 has any real living memory of a robust, muscular Catholicism. What they have experienced because of the feminization of the liturgy and other important aspects of the One True Faith, owing to effeminate clergy, is a wimpy Catholicism.

Imagine the scene in a gym where a bunch of muscular gym rats are standing around grunting and lifting heavy weights and getting stronger. Then there is the wimpy dude, sort of hanging out in the corner, afraid to get in and start building himself up. Wimpy Catholicism — is there anything more repulsive to the soul?

See, the evils of the Left, which have also invaded the hearts and minds of many Church leaders, are represented by gym rats. They’re always there lifting and pushing and straining, getting bigger, stronger, faster. The wimpy guy is intimidated by them, so he hangs back a little, willing to engage them on any topic and every topic other than his gym routine. The feminized or effeminate wimp will not confront anything directly — not himself and certainly not them.

Yet confrontation is the name of the game in Catholicism. You cannot be a faithful Catholic without a spirit of confrontation. You must move from being a wimp to being the biggest, strongest, fastest guy in the gym. And here’s the sad reality: We actually used to be the biggest, strongest, fastest. The gym rats have always been strong, but not as strong as we once were. But Catholics gave up the challenge. We got soft. We started skipping the gym, at first not very frequently, but then more routinely. We got off our protein-rich diet and slowly introduced sugar and bad carbs. Meanwhile, the evil gym rats grew bigger and eventually overtook us.

And too many Catholics have now become terrified wimps. Afraid to get back in shape, they have tried to completely change the game. These girly-man Catholics want to go back to the gym and tell the rats how happy and joyful they are, thinking such news will make the evil rats put down their weights and walk away from admiring themselves in the mirror. Good luck with that gym evangelization technique.

Evil loves the confrontation. Evil loves the fight. That’s why evil is always in your face. And this is true of whatever arena evil holds sway: the news media, the entertainment media, the courts, politics, whatever. They are in a continual state of confrontation. It’s the only language they know because they are motivated not by righteous anger, which the good guys should be, but by rage.

There is rage stemming from their guilty consciences about their gay sex, their cohabitation, their hook-up culture, their devastated psyches — all expressed in the most vulgar terms they can dream up. Kathy Griffin and other Hollywood types with their “kill Trump” message, the Women’s March with their kitty-cat hats, the leftist media with their relentless Russia-Russia-Russia narrative, are some current examples.

But now, because the political Right has found its footing, it’s pushing back, confronting the confronters. CNN and The New York Times, chief among the cultural confronters, have had to retract and apologize for a series of fake news articles. Kathy Griffin is more of a “has been” than she ever was. Johnny Depp had to apologize for his comments in England that he would kill Trump. There are many other examples, but you get the point. You battle bullies by fighting back, not by succumbing.

When we pivot to the situation in the Church, affairs are even worse. Church leaders have dropped on the laity that they must be meek in the wrong sense of the word: accepting, tolerant, non-confrontational and nonjudgmental. Meanwhile, they shove their vile evil down our throats and dress it up as theological. It’s not theological; it’s social justice garbage and rolling over and playing dead to sexual immoralities.

Three generations ago, our grandfathers spoke like men. That doesn’t mean they were rude or vulgar or mean. But it does mean they were men. They spoke clearly and directly, and you never wondered what they meant when they were done talking. But this kind of muscular Catholicism is anathema to the effeminate clergy. They are enormous confronters themselves. They just don’t want you to confront them back. How, for example, could anyone look at Fr. James Martin and Cdl. Joseph Tobin and think these men are not confronting the truths of Jesus Christ? And where are the voices confronting them back?

Unlike the cultural evils, which destroy people on this earth, the evils of these men and many others like them destroy men for eternity. On their current path, they will go to Hell, but they will take millions with them because no one stood up to confront them. Too many Catholic leaders these days are not Catholic any longer, if they ever were. They think like the world, they consort with the world, and they have adopted the tactics of the world. They need to be confronted.

You are a baptized Catholic. Get to the gym. Start pounding the weights of a devotional life. Get back on your diet of authentic teaching, and get ready for a brawl with the gym rats. The eternal destinies of you and your children depend on it.

5 of 201 readers’ comments

1. Feminization is the death knell of any religion or institution. Women have been allowed far too much influence, even as the Bible admonishes the idea of them participation. Here’s a tip, ladies. Happiness and joy are signs of failure. Aggressive combativeness is symptomatic of a winner.

2. It is terrible that many Catholics want to ignore the Spiritual Works of Mercy, and are only interested in The Corporal Works of Mercy. It’s very strange.

3. One of the things which is most responsible for the growth of this ‘wimpishness’ was the emphasis on ‘ecumenism’ which was presented to Catholics as meaning: be welcoming and nice to everyone (and, most importantly, to their ideas) who had previously been the ‘separated brethren’. The confusion of being told that the truth ‘subsists’ in the Catholic Church but that ‘aspects’ of the truth are to be found in, for example, the various Protestant sects, translated into ordinary language as: the Catholic Church is not the one, true Church: it is only a ‘denomination’ along with all the others. The people who had been strong and secure in their faith did not know how to deal with this Brave New World and went back into their shells. I would go so far as to say that this post-Council ‘ecumenism’ in challenging, whether consciously or not, the Truth of the Church, was almost solely responsible for all that followed.

4. They need to be confronted, indeed. Moses confronted Pharaoh; St. John the Baptist confronted Herod. St. Dismas confronted the bad thief. Our Lord confronted the Temple authorities, money changers and market merchants for desecrating His Father’s House. Our Lord confronted the Scribes and Pharisees, calling them a brood of vipers, whited sepulchers.

4. Is confrontation the best method for conversion? Or is witness the best method?

5. Good question. Witness is fine but what does it mean? Being good and hoping others learn to be good by your example? Jesus told his Apostles to go and teach – confront people with a truth they did not have. Is there a way to confront without being rude? Of course. We give up all teaching because we haven’t thought this through – you CAN share the truth with anyone even when they will ‘get’ that you mean they don’t have the truth, or they have a twisted version of it.

Jesus doesn’t water down his teachings

https://onepeterfive.com/jesus-doesnt-water-down-his-teachings/

By Eric Sammons, July 6, 2017

Editor’s Note: The following is adapted from the recently-published book The Old Evangelization by 1P5 author Eric Sammons, published by Catholic Answers Press.

One day, back when I was a diocesan director of evangelization, I was meeting with a pastor and some of his staff about launching evangelization efforts in their parish. The pastor had a sincere longing to bring people back to the Church, and he lamented the large numbers who had abandoned the Faith in recent decades. But during our discussion he repeatedly blamed the Church itself for this mass exodus, insisting that evangelization should consist primarily of apologizing to disaffected Catholics.

At first I assumed he meant apologizing for the clergy sex-abuse scandals, and naturally I agreed with him about that. After all, I knew that even lesser wrongs committed by priests can drive people away from the Church. Only after some further discussion did I realize that he wanted to apologize not only for the sins of Church leaders but for some of the Church’s teachings, particularly the most countercultural ones, such as those prohibiting contraception, abortion, and divorce.

Hardness of Heart

Unfortunately, this pastor’s attitude is widespread among Catholics—both lay and clerical—far too many of whom downplay or even deny certain Church teachings to keep the pews full; they want to lighten what they see as an impossible burden.

Things were similar in Christ’s day. Although in our day the word Pharisee is used to characterize a harsh “right-winger,” the Pharisees of Christ’s time in fact advocated relaxed laws regarding divorce and remarriage. In Matthew 19 we see them challenge Jesus on this issue, looking for ways to trip him up. According to the law of Moses, it was permissible for a man to divorce his wife (Deut. 24:1–4). But Jesus supersedes this law, harkening back to the time of Creation: “Have you not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one’? So they are no longer two but one. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder” (Matt. 19:4–6). As for Moses’ permission for divorce, he explains: “For your hardness of heart Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so. And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery; and he who marries a divorced woman, commits adultery” (Matt. 19:8–9).

It’s important to remember that when the Pharisees challenged Christ, they did so as publicly as possible, hoping to discredit him. So when they asked him about divorce, they likely did so in front of a crowd, including Jews who were themselves divorced.

Yet Christ didn’t hesitate to uphold the stricter law of marriage, and made it clear that to remarry after a divorce is “adultery” (Matt. 19:9). Such a “hard teaching” was surely difficult for some in the crowd to hear, and no doubt Jesus lost followers by insisting on it.

So, just as Jesus didn’t soften his teachings about divorce and remarriage in his own time, neither should we in ours. We have already seen how the modern acceptance of divorce has led to widespread suffering, especially on the part of women and children. So, while obeying the “hard teachings” of Jesus may sometimes be painful, obeying them is necessary to prevent even greater pain.

Make Disciples

The logic behind avoiding the “hard teachings” while evangelizing is simple:

1. We want to evangelize and bring people into the Church.

2. The “hard teachings” will drive people away from the Church.

3. Therefore, we must minimize, ignore, or even reject these “hard teachings.”

On the surface this logic is impeccable. In reality it leads to the Episcopal Church. No denomination has done more to soften its teachings and make itself socially acceptable than the Episcopalians. How did that work out for them? According to the Episcopal Church Annual, in 1965 there were 3,615,000 baptized Episcopalians. Every year following showed a decline, and by 2014, there were only 1,956,042 baptized members, a 46 percent decrease. The conclusion is inescapable: making its teachings more attractive led to a mass exodus.

Perhaps counterintuitively, then, the result of avoiding Christ’s “hard teachings” isn’t flocks of people coming through the church doors, but the opposite. After all, why would someone make the sacrifice of getting up early on Sunday and spending an hour sitting in a pew to hear a message they could hear 24/7 from the mainstream media? If a church says—either explicitly or implicitly—that the vows of marriage can be broken, what distinguishes that church from everyone else? Why bother listening to it?

This does not mean that proclaiming the “hard teachings” boldly will result in a massive number of conversions and full pews. After all, they’re called “hard teachings” because they are hard. Many people will find them too hard and reject them, and reject the messenger who preaches them. But what is the goal of evangelization? Just to have full pews? No, the real goal is making disciples. In his final words to his apostles, Christ said, “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you” (Matt. 28:19–20). Note these words carefully, for they are the marching orders of every Catholic evangelist:

1. Make disciples. We’re not trying to get people to join a club; we’re inviting them to make a radical commitment that will change their lives dramatically. This makes evangelization fundamentally different from any membership drive or marketing program.

2. Baptizing them. Becoming a disciple means entering the Church and living a sacramental life, which entails certain prohibitions. For example, one cannot receive any other sacraments until one is baptized, cannot receive Communion if not in a state of grace, and cannot get married if there are any impediments to marriage. To live a sacramental life, then, requires abiding by some strict rules.

3. Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. Note that Jesus said “all.” None of Christ’s teachings are superfluous; in no instance do we find him allowing his disciples to pick and choose which teachings they will follow. He knows that we will find our true fulfillment only if we submit to all he asks of us.

What Catholicism teaches is far deeper, far more meaningful, and far more joyful than what the world does. Yes, it often demands more of us, but it also bears more and better fruit. By undercutting Church teachings to make them more like the world’s, we paradoxically make the Church less attractive, not more. When I was first exploring Catholicism, a Catholic friend compared it to a delicious seven-course meal: it has everything to delight the palate and satisfy your hunger. Anything less is a poor substitute—more like fast food. As Catholic evangelists, then, we should always follow Christ’s lead and proclaim all of his teachings—even the hard ones—with joy and confidence, knowing they are the path to eternal happiness.

Something sinister at play. Just say it like it is. What’s the problem?

https://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/vortex-something-sinister-at-play

By Michael Voris, July 6, 2017

Something is very weird at this Convocation of Catholic Leaders. There’s a lot of confusion and disagreement among the delegates over exactly what the whole purpose of this is. Each day, we just sit in the lobby and wait for delegates to stroll out of the various sessions, and we just talk to them privately.

If you were looking for some unified interpretation of what’s happening inside, you’d be hard pressed to find it.

And there is a definite dividing line between those who are all caught up in the emotion of the event versus those who taking a more probing view of things. For example, the delegates, who are more concerned with the crisis and feel the fix is to return to our roots, aren’t very impressed.

They oppose the whole lurch toward a more Protestant approach, which has been prevalent in the U.S. Church for decades but has become more solidified in the past, say, five years or so. They’re telling us that the conferences are largely dominated by the language of theo-babble with the words — peripheries, encounter, margins, experience, meeting people where they’re at — being used so much that a religious sister said privately that it was nothing other than verbal diarrhea.

Then there are others who seem a little less clued in on the depth of the crisis who are all excited about going to the peripheries and meeting people where they are so they can have an encounter. But when you try to nail them down on what does that mean, exactly, things become pretty vague, pretty fast. Different people have all kinds of different interpretations of it; and they don’t seem to be getting any real direction in concrete cases. Even some bishops we’ve stopped and chatted with are kind of all over the map about what all this vocabulary means.

We’ve asked some more astute delegates what troubles them the most, and their answers have been that there isn’t a lot of clear decisive language about saving souls and getting them to convert. Those words are offered here and there, but the vocabulary dominating the discussions is the mushy “theology of encounter” out on the “peripheries.” And peripheries seems to have a very elastic meaning, but more importantly and worrisome, is that various delegates here seem very uncertain or unsure of what they’re supposed to do or say when they arrive at the peripheries, wherever those peripheries are.

There seems to be an overall sense of Catholics need to talk to non-Catholics or former Catholics, but what they are supposed to say or, for that fact, what they are actually trying to accomplish in the discussions seems to be up for grabs. Some delegates were troubled that the very clear notion of the need to convert or revert to the Catholic faith for your salvation has not really been articulated in any meaningful way. The express doctrine of the necessity of the Church for salvation doesn’t seem to have been brought up explicitly, at least not with any frequency.

And this issue, the necessity of the Church and adhering to Her teachings, seems to be the shaky ground issue because it’s not entirely clear, which it should be at a conference like this. It’s not clear that there is any real unity of that single issue, among the delegates or even the bishops. Some are clearly in that camp. No doubt about it. They’re inside the conferences and the talks, and they are concerned. Others are just caught up in the event and the emotion of it and seem a little clueless about the larger issues.

And then there is a third group, also good hearted and well-intentioned, who seem to understand the problems in the Church and are yet unwilling to take that last step and grapple with the hard reality that this has all been orchestrated in such a way so as to deliberately have the Church in chaos. It’s a very difficult reality to come to terms with, that there are some bishops who are perfectly content to use the language of inclusion and encounter and peripheries and meeting people where they’re at in order to advance a decidedly uncatholic agenda. But that is the reality. For example, while this event was happening, the bishop of San Jose, Patrick McGrath, issued a letter essentially attacking Bp. Thomas Paprocki of Springfield, Illinois, who recently issued a letter of his own, instructing that practicing homosexuals be barred from the sacraments and without having shown any signs of repentance for their sins, be denied a Catholic funeral. Homosexualist Fr. James Martin savaged Paprocki in a tweet storm and then McGrath wrote this letter of his own.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl has had a looming presence here, and you will recall that he was one of the leaders at the synods in Rome, making sure that the language was as elastic as possible and non-judgmental sounding and all that. Wuerl has been one of the out front cardinals about okaying sacrilegious Holy Communions under the cover of all are welcome and inclusion and so forth. At the synods, he was front and center about promoting the theology of “encounter” and the need for a new vocabulary in the Church, which just happened to be more accepting of homosexuality and the gay agenda.

And of course, there has been the steady stream of social justice chatter about immigration and so forth. Not any real discussion about, for example, should divorced and civilly remarried Catholics be admitted to Holy Communion — seems to be a great big topic in the Church right now — so it’s more than strange than it’s not on the official agenda; I mean, talk about going to the peripheries. Why wouldn’t that be on the agenda? Seems like it should be front and center, as a matter of fact.

Where’s the solid discussion and pointers about meeting former Catholics on the peripheries of, say, the contraception issue for example? Where is the discussion about encountering these people and inviting them to fix their lives and come back to the Church or is that even really the goal of the organizers of all this? See, this is what we mean, there’s nothing concrete, nothing solid here. It’s all verbal blather and bluster, which never gets around to making a clear statement. In the end, no one we’ve spoken with, regardless of where they fall on the spectrum, has been able to really articulate what the precise point of all this has been.

When the 3,500 delegates leave here, what are they supposed to head home and do? We’ve spoken to quite a few of them, again, including some bishops, and we’ve yet to hear any kind of articulation on what’s next. There’s not really any concrete discussion or conferences on the meat of the Faith, just the need to go out and be missionary disciples, whatever that means, but about what remains cloaked in language of mystery.

The other somewhat vexing issue is this — the delegates at this event were personally handpicked by their respective dioceses, recognized for their leadership in various areas. It needs to be asked, how are these people leaders then, if they haven’t already been trying to go to the peripheries and have encounters? What exactly have they been doing, ensconced in the chanceries and their various areas of work?

There are lots of questions coming from this event — lots! And the troubling thing is, there don’t seem to be any solid answers — murky, unclear, make it up as you go along kind of approach but not much in the way of concrete. A more critical analysis of this very expensive gathering, which has raked in a lot of money, might go something like this: There has been a deliberate attempt to not be clear about very much — to keep the discussion ethereal and murky as possible so as to plant this loose vocabulary in the minds of various lay leaders so that they may carry this language back to their diocese and establish it as the new vocabulary. In that sense, it’s been like a re-education camp — a massive theological sensitivity training seminar.

Many of the more simple folks here, to put it mildly, are being used by more clever people to prepare the ground for a more aggressive approach that will be coming down the road. An aggressive approach aimed at further watering down clear Catholic ideas, principles and teachings to make the somewhat more orthodox Catholic laity ready to accept sacrilegious Holy Communions to divorced and remarried and same-sex couples. It will all be ushered in under the guise of accompanying these people on their journey and meeting them where they’re at and encountering them and so forth.

There is something sinister behind all this lack of clarity. Catholic vocabulary is very clear. It always has been. Lack of clarity is related to the diabolical. As we said to one bishop, why not just print up 100,000 Baltimore Catechisms and instruct the missionary disciples to teach the Faith using that language? He stopped and said, yes, you know, you’re right. It worked for me. And then he shuffled off to the elevators.

It’s clarity versus mushy vocabulary. And whenever there is a deliberate lack of clarity, something sinister is always at play.

Readers have left 195 comments

The Church of Nice (and easy). Love doesn’t always win

https://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/vortex-the-church-of-nice-and-easy

By Michael Voris, July 5, 2017

This Vortex is coming to you from the Convocation of Catholic Leaders at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando Florida — lots to report but no real surprises. First, moments, and we do mean just moments, after our crew arrived and went into the convention area, we were approached by 57-year-old Robert Yates, the designated head of security for the U.S. Bishops’ Conference, who asked me if I was Michael Voris and then said, “You have to leave.” This was roughly 45 seconds after we walked into the area.

Yates was of course under orders from his bosses and is a former military man hired by the bishops a few years back to oversee the implementation of their strategic plan. Clearly part of the “strategic planning” for this event involved keeping Church Militant as far away as possible.

The next morning we were handing out fliers to some delegates, which simply said save the Church and make sure evangelization involves speaking the hard truths. Again, the security team, this time many of them, were chasing us down and ordering us to not hand out anything to anyone. At one point, they even told us we can’t even speak to any of the delegates.

Now, as you might imagine, we were a little taken aback that the Church of Nice, which is all about dialogue and tolerance demonstrated neither to us. I can’t understand why we keep getting thrown out of events, even threatened to have the sheriffs called on us. Yates and his gang, with their strategic plan to prevent Catholics from speaking to fellow Catholics about the need to properly address the crisis in the Catholic Church, got hotel security in on the act. They came over and said the convocation people were feeling “harassed” by us, and we needed to stop talking with whoever would willingly stop and chat with us or they’d call the sheriffs. They were very cordial, just doing their job, at the request of course of the Robert Yates goon squad put in place by the bishops’ conference.

The idiocy of this running off a group of Catholics talking about evangelization — like it’s North Korea — is ridiculous on its face. And they wonder why so many leave the Church. The hilarious aspect of all this is that the theme of the convocation is “The Joy of the Gospel in America.” They simply can’t stop yammering on about how joyful they are until Church Militant shows up and wants a serious dialogue, then all the smiles go away.

And here is the heart of the matter. That a conference like this, with the bill largely footed by the social justice agents in the Church, would be happening at all completely overlooks the reality. The crisis in the Church is not owing to a lack of joy and evangelization but a lack of catechesis.

The night before we arrived, a somewhat well-known blogger, who is speaking at the conference, started screaming at us on our website, saying we were mean and all that nonsense and that we cause division and so forth. He said we hold on to our pet topics of abortion, same-sex marriage and sacrilegious Holy Communion and need to let them go — that they aren’t the most important things. He said they have no place at a conference on evangelization, which should be about joy. And in a roundabout way, he proved our point. We’ve been saying for weeks that a conference on evangelization, without addressing the horrible state of catechesis, is pointless.

This convocation is pointless because it completely ignores the actual crisis. In fact, it sidesteps the hard work that needs to be done, talking about the Cross, and makes it all easy — just babble on about how much joy you have. People are not going to give up their sexual immorality because you’re telling them how much more joyful they will be without their pornography.

Every survey and poll conducted in the past three years shows that the young leave the Church because they think none of it makes sense, and the culture has more solid explanations — more logical. You know, love wins — equality, coexist and all that. Schools explain those things to them, and without a logical counter argument from the storehouses of Catholic glory, they leave the Church. That’s why this utter nonsense of placing your bets on appealing to emotion and not the intellect will be the death knell for the Church in America.

We are at a crucial, last-chance crossroads. Every social indicator there is says the Church is about to completely implode in the next five to ten years. Even enough of the leaders understand that. It’s why they are having this conference, in spite of its incorrect solution to the real problem. They recognize the impending doom. The problem is the Church of Nice is going the easy route and not preaching the Cross. And having cast their lot this way, they will reap what they have sown.

There will be no reversal of the current crisis, no mass conversions to the Faith, no steady rebuilding. They have made an incorrect diagnosis and written a prescription for the wrong disease. The sad note is, with a little self-honesty and biting the bullet, it might have been very different.

2 of 523 readers’ comments

1. Next time book a couple of rooms at the hotel where this is taking place. They will not be able to force you out. You can also call on your followers to be outside and hold up signs requesting the Bishops do their job in teaching the faith.

2. Hi Michael. I believe they should have invited and included you in the list of speakers, and let you express your ideas because you have never rejected the Bible, the Holy Tradition, and the Magisterium. But, in face of their reaction, I’m concerned that some of your readers would think of creating a new church or something like that. The USCCB is reacting so badly to you that they may make it impossible for you to manifest your beliefs within the Church. So my request to all: please, don’t ever consider that possibility!

Destroying innocents. Break out the millstones

https://www.churchmilitant.com/video/episode/vortex-destroying-innocents

By Michael Voris, June 30, 2017

Anyone and everyone who teaches the Catholic faith, most especially any clergy, need to revisit this particular warning from Our Blessed Lord. It’s found in all three Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” That is the Son of God speaking — the Eternal Word, the Logos, God Incarnate.

Now, let’s fast forward about 2,000 years to an interview I gave to the well-known, conservative YouTube commentator, Steven Crowder. A week or so earlier, he had made an announcement that he would welcome someone on his show who could talk to him about the Catholic Church. He was holding out the possibility of converting, if he could be convinced, now or in the future. Sometimes conversion takes a while. Not everyone has a “road to Damascus” experience.

After a large number of Church Militant supporters contacted the show and suggested we go on, Steven got in touch with us, and voilà, there were Steven and I talking about the Catholic Church and the One True Faith. The interview went way over because, well, that’s what happens when deep subjects are discussed. Not everything can happen in a tweet.

During the interview, in the back of my mind I was thinking, wow, he’s got some really odd notions about the Church, his understanding of the Church. He was jumping from one point to the next without ever sufficiently discussing it — almost like he was being tutored or coached on the fly to just keep rattling off one point after another. No one single point was ever developed, and these points do take time to develop because, well, you’re talking about things of eternity and the supernatural, not recapping a baseball game.

For anyone who has been involved in any of these type discussions, you know that they generally go one of two ways — rapid fire, machine gun points being made from the Protestant side that generally don’t make much sense because their underlying logic and principles are completely flawed or the person has a genuine interest and wants to know, not just challenge. Generally speaking, our interview, which was longer than 90 minutes, fell into the first category.

As it went along, again, I couldn’t help but think to myself, something’s wrong here. Here’s a young fellow, an almost 30-year-old kiddo, who is demonstrably bright on most things political and cultural or at least has an intuition of the rightness of a thing. Yet here, there is this blind spot. None of the usual logic was present or connecting of the dots etc. And then he said something that brought everything into focus:

Steven Crowder: “I’ve heard this spoken a lot. I went to Catholic school, public school. And this is one thing we can say is going well in the Catholic Church …”

Michael Voris: “You went to Catholic public school in Quebec?”

SC: “Yes. I was admonished for not being Catholic. See, this is the thing you don’t understand being outside in the United States. Most people have it intertwined with their state power. And a huge, huge benefit of the First Amendment because of this. But yeah, I went to Catholic public school in Quebec. I also went to immersion school, because they thought I was retarded until the fourth grade because I had to learn it in French.” 

MV: “That’s because they thought you were conservative.”

SC:  “Yes, exactly. Well, again, Catholic schools, everyone’s Catholic, everyone is pro-abortion, you have liberals and liberal separatists.”

MV: “They are bad Catholics.”

SC: “Yes, they are.”

MV: “By the way, what years were you there?”

SC: “I was there from age three until age 18. From 1990 to 2008.”

MV: “You were there for the first generation after the collapse of the Church.”

SC: “Yeah, certainly a rough go of it. My family was involved in the Church.”

MC: “My apologies for all the bad Catholics who gave you bad information about the Church. They will have to answer to Jesus Christ for that.” 

Steven Crowder, this innocent little kid with, I’m sure even at that age a bright young mind, had fallen victim to the evil of traitorous Catholics in the Catholic education system right in the heart of the crisis years. At one point of the interview, he even said something like the leaders of the Church support things that both he and I rail against. And he’s right. Most of the hierarchy is in love with the political, social justice agenda of the Left and fall silent on the moral evils which the Left ignores: abortion, contraception, homosexuality, etc.

Steven Crowder was exposed for his entire youth to the perversity of false Catholicism presented by bad “Catholics,” who had an agenda other than the salvation of his soul because bad Catholics don’t believe in salvation or damnation, nor do they care about people’s souls.

Here, we have in huge living color a pre-eminent example of the utter failure of many Catholic leaders who no longer believe the Faith or have invented their own version of the Catholic faith, making them at least philosophical Protestants. Steven Crowder is exactly one of those little ones who has been led astray, deprived of authentic Catholicism, and has fallen into the trap of Protestantism somewhat understandably.

He is the theological equivalent of so many American public school students who know nothing of authentic American history, for example, because their teachers lied to them and deceived them about the truth, even if only through omission. They are deceived on purpose to pervert an entire generation into accepting lies as truths because those entrusted with their intellectual care desire that they no longer live lives rooted in honesty and truth but misunderstanding and misinterpretation. The less they know and comprehend, the better for the forces of darkness. So they get them while they are young, never being square with them.

Steven Crowder is the theological product of the Church of Nice, not authentic Catholic truth. And he doesn’t know it. Do those offspring of the devil who wear robes, the wolves in shepherds’ clothing, understand the terrible fate that await them when they die? Do they understand that they will have to pay dearly, for eternity, for putting up roadblocks to salvation for bright young children like Steven, who grow up into bright young men but have no real touchstone to the only truth that matters in the end — Catholic truth?

Think of Steven Crowder while you are thinking again of what Our Blessed Lord said: “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him to have a great millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.”

The men and women who have twisted these young minds are jackals, feasting on the innocent. Their continual stream of social justice, liberal vomit becomes equated in young minds with Catholic teaching. When some of them, like Crowder, grow up and see the sham that liberalism is, they mistakenly but somewhat understandably associate that evil with Catholic teaching, and then make the uninformed conclusion that what the Church teaches can be flawed. No one is there to tell them that what they are hearing from theological dissidents is not Catholic teaching. Somewhere along the way, they need to be able to recognize that the two are not related. Ah, but there are a host of protestant liars and self-styled experts out there, willing to pounce and take advantage of their impressionable minds; and they have been handed ammo by bad Catholics, chief among them Judas clergy.

Venerable Abp. Fulton Sheen, on his way to being declared a saint, once famously said if you send your child to a Catholic school, he will lose the Faith. And if, we may add, he never had the Faith, he will find it that much more difficult to come to the Faith.

There are going be a whole lot of millstones getting passed out on the Last Day for all the little ones who have been led into sin. 

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Categories: The Catechism of the Catholic Church