Of dragons, unicorns and boggart-Gods

Image source: clipartpanda.com.

Your next door neighbor appears in your doorway. His clothes are burnt to a crisp, his eyebrows and eyelashes are singed off, his hair and face are carbonized, and he is oddly enough close to hysterical panic. “There’s an invisible dragon in my garage!”

No. There can’t be. Dragons don’t exist. But he’s clearly not himself, so you say soothingly, “What did it look like? How tall was it?”

“It was invisible,” he reminds you.

“Then how do you know it was a dragon?” you persist reasonably.

He rolls his eyes. “Take a look at me. Does this look like a cat scratch?”

You try again: “But you must realize what this looks like to me. For all I know, you could have been playing with a stick of dynamite, or fooling around with your blowtorch, or you could have tripped and fallen face-first into a fire ….”

He interrupts you shortly. “But I wasn’t playing with dynamite; I don’t have a blowtorch or a fireplace; there were no F-16s backed tailpipe-first into my garage or any other dumb thing you want to drag in. I was attacked by a fire-breathing dragon.”

 You try one more time. “But if you didn’t see the wretched thing, how do you know it was an invisible dragon?”

“He told me.”

So you try to keep him calm while you try to figure out a way to call the men in white. He’s obviously delusional because it’s so unlike him to play such an elaborate practical joke; of course, he must have somehow set himself on fire, then convinced himself that he heard and spoke to ….

Your mind yammers a thousand different explanations for your neighbor’s extraordinary behavior. But how would you respond if he suddenly demanded of you, “How do you know there’s no such thing as an invisible dragon?”

Spirits in the material world

There’s been a couple of nights this last year that I’ve had the creepiest experience ever: At the end of a dream, I’ve felt the presence of an Evil One, just over my shoulder and chuckling in my ear. Both times I woke up praying the Hail Mary, and sat on the edge of my bed smoking a cigarette to calm my nerves because the experience scared the bejabers out of me.

Anxiety dream? Perhaps; I wouldn’t rule it out.

“Hell … [is] as much a fact of the universe as is Heaven.” So Scripture attests;[1] so the Church Fathers taught;[2] so the Catholic Church maintains.[3] “… [T]he evidence we have is beyond the reach of the empiriometric sciences,” because: 1) by definition and design, the natural sciences study the material universe, and therefore have tools that only work within the scope of materiality; and 2) because the bulk of natural scientists rule out the immaterial a priori, and therefore aren’t willing to spend time, effort and resources trying to make it detectable, far less measurable.

Demons are real, too. Father Dwight Longenecker has posted a fascinating reflection on possession and exorcism, beginning with the story of his first — and to date, only — experience of a possession. I also recommend to you An Exorcist Tells His Story by Fr. Gabriele Amorth, who was for many years the chief exorcist of the Diocese of Rome. I tell you this, not to convince you that I’ve been demon-haunted — heck, I’m not even convinced — but to underscore the fact that for many people the immaterial is not only real but a living, waking nightmare.

Our Heavenly Grandfather and the BK Theory of Christianity

The National Catholic Reporter, that haven of mostly-dissident Catholics (with the saving exception of John L. Allen, Jr.), has a regular section called “Eco Catholic”. The most recent installment—a hysterical screed against the doctrine of hell—shows that writer Carol Meyer has trouble distinguishing conservation from nature worship.

I’m writing about hell because it is an unthinkable, horrible, destructive concept that can’t possibly be true. I frankly can’t even imagine how anyone came up with something so horrific. Could any wrong merit the terrible pain of burning in fire, while fully conscious, for a week or a year, much less eternity? What kind of a monster would inflict that on anyone? How could such cruelty and sadism be consistent with a God of love? I don’t buy it for a minute.

I don’t care if scripture mentions hell or Jesus talked about it, if saints had visions of it, or if it’s a time-honored Catholic teaching. It simply can’t be justified on any level. [Emphasis mine.—TL]

Sic volo, sic iubeo: the perpetual chant of what Kate of Australia Incognita calls “the Magisterium of Me”. So Martin Luther said when asked to justify throwing out certain epistles from the New Testament: “Thus I will have it, thus I order it, my will is reason enough. … Doctor Luther will have it so, and … he is a Doctor above all Doctors in the whole of Popery.”[1] We can call it the Burger King Theory of Christianity, where you can “have it your way”.

Another day, another revelation ..

I just got done saying yesterday that faithful witness to Christ means suffering for those who fail to live up to the demands of Christian discipleship. And now here we are again, with a 1984 letter from the Congregation for the Clergy, this one to the late Bishop Manuel Duran Moreno of Tucson, advising him to turn over personnel files to civil lawyers “under no circumstances”.

To give then-prefect Cdl. Silvio Oddi his due, he remonstrated with +Moreno that the unnamed priest “should have [been] removed from his pastorate immediately upon completion of the process outlined in n. 20 of the motu proprio Ecclesiae Sanctae, of 1966. The signed testimonies about his drunkenness, outrageous language, liberties with women, etc., are too numerous and convincingly articulate to leave any [doubt] that Father’s ministry is both harmful and inefficacious and should therefore have been terminated long ago.”[1]

The cost of witness to Christ—UPDATED

In a prison cell in Kabul, a man named Sayed Mussa awaits trial for apostasy, as he has for nine months. Mussa was arrested after videotapes showed him among other Afghans praying at a private Christian baptism. At a previous jail cell, Mussa had been beaten with sticks by a guard, and assaulted and raped by two inmates at the encouragement of Taliban prisoners.

Afghanistan's new US-sponsored constitution is supposed to protect freedom of religion. However, a loophole allows judges to apply Shariah, Islamic law, in cases of conversion; under a fundamentalist interpretation, that can mean death by hanging for Mussa. But even if he's released to rejoin his wife and children, who fled to Pakistan for their safety, he is still a martyr.
 

Those awful Catholics!

In a recent post about married priests, Simcha Fisher included a delightfully droll aside about some of the commentors that frequent Fr. John Zuhlsdorf’s blog What Does the Prayer Really Say: “The commentors he attracts always make me want to hide in the catacombs, to get away from those awful Catholics.  Brrr.”

Since I show up there every now and again, I know what she means. They’re not just on Fr. Z’s blog … those awful Catholics are everywhere.

On this blog, I occasionally throw stones at crypto-Protestant organizations like Young Catholics for Choice and Rainbow Sash; there is a valid distinction between the merely unconventional and the heterodox. (Reject the authority of the Pope and bishops? Substitute your own interpretation of Scripture for the Church’s? Get in line, right behind Martin Luther and John Calvin—you’re a Protestant.)

But while I agree with traditionalists on many points, some of them have a tendency to be “more Catholic than thou” in their remarks. If you don’t attend traditional Latin Masses exclusively, if you don’t sneer at Vatican II, if you don’t home-school your kids, if you don’t have an open admiration for the Society of St. Pius X (a schismatic traditional sect), they tend to treat you as barely worthy of the Catholic moniker. Brrr.

Stop with the whining!

Does eating “Jesus chicken” make you a homophobe?

On February 11th and 12th, the Pennsylvania Family Institute will hold seminars in Camp Hill and Reading on “The Art of Marriage: Getting to the Heart of God’s Design”. The organization’s president, Michael Geer, asked the local independent operator of Chick-fil-A to co-sponsor the event (i.e., provide the sandwiches).

Chick-fil-A is a big deal down here in the South. A family-owned company, they’ve been embraced by the free-church Evangelicals because of the Christian ethos promoted by the owners … they’re the only QSR chain that closes on Sunday. However, even secularists love what they call “Jesus chicken”. I’m not a fan myself; must be the same cultural thing that exists between New Mexicans and Blake’s Lotaburger (the only chain that offers chiles for your burger), or the East Coast and Krispy Kreme.

Now, as you can probably guess, PFI is a political group which takes a definite stand on one side of the culture wars. Chick-fil-A’s Christian orientation goes beyond being closed on Sunday; employees gather together for prayer, and the owners contribute to a variety of Christian political and social organizations. So when the franchisee agreed to the co-sponsorship, Geer exulted to Kim Severson of the New York Times, “It’s a win-win situation.”

Not for the gay community, though. PFI’s pro-marriage, pro-family, pro-life orientation includes opposition to same-sex marriage and gay adoption. The Cathy family, who owns the chain, contributes frequently to groups which oppose same-sex marriage initiatives. To gay activists, the alliance is a match made far south of heaven.

(Belated) New Year's writing resolutions

This is a very personal post, one that perhaps shares too much, so please forgive the many instances of the vertical pronoun which follow:

Yesterday, in congratulating The Crescat on getting into the top 30 Catholic blogs, I half-quipped, half-whimpered that neither of my blogs had broken into the top 200 yet. Poor, pitiful me.

Then, today, I ran across this article from the late philosopher and novelist Ralph McInerny, “On Being a Catholic Writer”. Among the interesting insights he shared, he left a bit-slap for me (and for hundreds of other would-be pundits):

“The dilettante writes to amuse himself, an easy task, but the serious writer seeks to interest a reader. … No one owes you a reading. It has to be earned.”

Ouch.

The loss of Catholic culture

One topic that has broached the surface of the Catholic blogosphere in the last week is the loss of Catholic identity. The issue has appeared in First Things, in Fr. John Zuhlsdorf’s What Does The Prayer Really Say and in Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s Standing On My Head.

I touched on this topic back in October; however, I treated it solely as a doctrinal issue, as part of my general “close the cafeteria” rant. While the various attempts to water down or actively corrupt Catholic doctrine is part of the problem, and no small one either, it isn’t the whole problem.

A lot of the focus is on regular Mass attendance. There’s been no end of despair in the last forty-three years over the difference in number between those who claim to be Catholic in national polls and those who actually have their butts planted in the pews every Sunday and holy day of obligation.[1] The primary cause of this disparity, however, is depressingly simple: Lousy homilies.

Do we have a right to miracles?

Occasionally, amidst the dreck and smut of modern culture, you get glimpses of truths retained.

The late comedian Sam Kinison had spent some time as a revival-tent preacher; even in his last years, as his mind was sinking into a morass of drugs, sex and nihilism, he retained some elements of his Evangelical Christianity. The example I have in mind is an exchange he posed between Jesus and his disciples at the Eucharistic miracle of the loaves and fishes (Mt 14:13-21):

“Hmm … five thousand people, and nobody brought a sack lunch. Well, I guess you expect ME to get it!”

“Well, you are the Son of God.”

“Yes, but I didn’t come down to Earth to be ‘Jesus the Miracle Caterer’!”