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From Under The Rubble
May 1, 2014
The Persecution Complex
by Christopher Manion
fitzgerald griffin foundation
FRONT ROYAL, VA — In early April, Pope Francis warned Catholics that proclaiming the Gospel comes with a price, the price of persecution. “There will always be persecutions, misunderstandings,” he said. “But Jesus is Lord and this is the challenge and the Cross of our faith. May the Lord give us the grace to go on His path and, if it happens, even the cross of persecutions.”
Members of the Persecution Complex ... consider themselves to be Apostles of righteousness, so fervently devoted to their particular perversion of truth that they feel compelled to impose it by force, if necessary.
One doesn’t have to preach the Gospel to attract the persecutor’s attention. Merely standing up for Gospel truths eight years ago got the wealthy CEO of Mozilla fired. On every front, the very mention of reality (and what is more real than the family?) is offensive to the Thought Police who are the Vanguard of the Culture of Death.
Word seems to get around fast. Colleges around the country are instituting “triggering” policies, requiring professors to notify students of any assigned material that might offend them. Like everything else in Big Brother’s arsenal, this draconian salvo turns reality upside down: what was once academic freedom is now an intellectual straitjacket. After all, if truth is anything we want it to be, so is falsehood.
Enter the Persecution Complex — strong-armed enforcers intent on relentlessly punishing anyone who dares “trigger” their outrage.
Ideas have consequences, Richard Weaver famously observed – and bad ideas often have very bad consequences. Cardinal Francis George, O.M.I., Archbishop of Chicago, observed to his fellow priests a couple of years ago that, while he expected to die in his bed, his successor would die in prison, and his successor would die a martyr in the public square.
That last phrase should prompt some reflection. Cardinal George did not suggest that the future Archbishop of Chicago would be shot by some fanatic like Giuseppe Zangara, who killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in 1933.
No, Cardinal George predicted — and later reiterated his view — that Chicago’s future archbishop would be publicly brought to trial, convicted, and executed under the color of law, with broad-based acclaim, solely on account of his preaching of the Gospel.
...Cardinal George predicted ... that Chicago’s future archbishop would be publicly brought to trial, convicted, and executed under the color of law, with broad-based acclaim, solely on account of his preaching of the Gospel.
The members of the Persecution Complex take such offenses very seriously. The prediction of Cardinal George, one of the Church’s most able theologians, makes a subtle point: yes, today the Persecution Complex merely hates. Eventually, however, they will attain the political power to execute those whom they hate.
To be clear: they’d be killing today, if they could. They just don’t have the power yet.
Bill Maher, a cable TV personality, recently affirmed Cardinal George’s observation. “I think there is a gay mafia,” he said. “I think if you cross them, you do get whacked.”
Members of the Persecution Complex see themselves in a different light. They consider themselves to be Apostles of righteousness, so fervently devoted to their particular perversion of truth that they feel compelled to impose it by force, if necessary.
And their number is legion. Maher perceived a seething desire for vengeance in the “gay mafia” (combining, curiously enough, two of Pope Francis’s condemnations — of the “gay lobby” and of the Italian mafia).
But the gays are not the only ones whose triggers are being pulled. When Pope Francis speaks of persecution — and he does so often — he identifies victims worldwide who are being persecuted, and yes, killed, by a broad assortment of miscreants, merely because they are Catholic.
At the heart of his message lie two realities: sin, and Satan.
Pope Francis warns about Satan all the time. And well he should. Satan hates Christ, who is inseparable from the Church until the end of time. And so Satan attacks the Church, and its visible leader — known as the Vicar of Christ — with an eternal vengeance that Maher’s “gay mafia” can only envy.
..the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop ... “will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.”
Enter sin. There are as many reasons to sign up with Satan as there are sins. John’s epistle sums it up it well: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the “pride of life” — superbia vitae, the love of fame and glory (1 John 2:16; Augustine adds the lust for power, libido dominandi, [C.D. I, Preface]).
Well, these days, the sum of those lusts is the way of the world. It might seem to have the upper hand at the moment, but that is only temporary.
When Cardinal George addressed the widespread response to his sobering observation, he was hopeful (a theological virtue) — even if he wasn’t optimistic. “What is omitted from the reports” he said, “is a final phrase I added about the bishop who follows a possibly martyred bishop: ‘His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history.’”
And so the call goes forth.
“May the Lord give us the grace to go on His path and, if it happens, even the cross of persecutions,” says Pope Francis.
Pope Francis can boldly call on all of us to evangelize — to confront the trigger-happy Persecution Complex, confident that we are paving the way for future bishops who will slowly help rebuild civilization on the blood of the martyrs.
Even if that blood be our own.
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From Under the Rubble is copyright © 2014 by Christopher Manion. All rights reserved.
Christopher Manion is Director of the Campaign for Humanae Vitae™, a project of the Bellarmine Forum. He served as a staff director on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for many years. He has taught in the departments of politics, religion, and international relations at Boston University, the Catholic University of America, and Christendom College. This column is sponsored by the Bellarmine Forum.
See a complete biographical sketch.
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