☨
J.M.J.
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Why ROMAnce?
Only the common man is equipped to perceive the immense pleasure of orthodoxy.
Chapter 2
“The Naked Bible[1]”
Still hazy on how Catholics should view Sacred Scripture? Drift no longer.
by J. P. F. McGuire
a| In chapter i of Why ROMAnce? we basically established that “dissecting” Mary[2] from the Holy Spirit[3] ends—always ends—in Gnostic-flavored tears. “ ‘[W]hat God has united a man must not divide.’ ”[4] Seriously. And hopefully we also were able to read into it[5] that theologians who’ll sell truth down the river for cheap, trendy human approval ought really to be shunned, pitied and, wherever possible, loudly, clearly and unapologetically denounced.[6] In Chapter II we are going to leave Dr. Scott Hahn alone for awhile[7] so that we may speak of actually another uninspiring attempt at Gnosticesque “dissection,” only this time the fission is between God’s Word[8] and that Word’s Bride the Church[9]. In other words, we are going to expose for all to see what is really behind the masks of the markedly Protèstant Christian “Bible Alone” and “Bible First” attitudes, why the latter is just more of the same as the former[10] and how they, too, if followed far enough, end irrevocably in spiritual death.
b| But first a word of common sense, friends: never let a man[11] who makes a habit of expressing his “grave misgivings” about “reason”[12] become the center of attention, but, oh dear, particularly when that attention is religious in nature. Here’s why I say this: you may be damn sure the “reason” he’s questioning is not his own but everyone else’s: the Magisterium’s first, the faithful’s second and then invariably that of his followers. Whatever abuses he may decry he will live to be ten times the abuser; whatever reforms he may champion you may be very sure he is a ready-made cult personality and a consumer of persons, truly a demon in human clothing—this is what history shows us. No one who questions reason, whatever his intention, is capable of valuing the freedom that is essential—yes, I said “essential”—to our calling to be sons in the Son.
c| So firstly, what in Gahanna does reformation[13] mean?[14] Reform can mean two deeply opposite things: renewal or revolution. Notice how renewal is challenging my heart in light of the Faith whilst revolution is what the implacable wolves of humanity agitate for. Anyone who has a problem with the Church’s traditions, doctrines and even authority, for the good of his soul but firstly perhaps his mind, had better start by challenging himself with those very things he diagnoses the Church with: When you point your finger at someone else there are three fingers pointing back at you. You’d basically better be Jesus—or someone equally innocent—if you’re going to replace Jesus’ earthly vicar. If Reformer X cannot do this—cannot claim to have a higher moral standard than what he decries—you can bank on his being neurotic, sociopathic, psychopathic or psychotic. If this principle for finger-pointing we all grew up knowing holds true for everyday human dealings, how much more with the Church’s Apostolic Teaching Office? So-called “tradition fatigue” and “doctrine fatigue,” as people used to know, say far more about an individual’s mental state than they do about the value of traditions or doctrines. Reform that is refinement, revival and renewal never—but I do mean never—call for chucking[15] traditions but in going to the sources of the traditions to see whence they stem and renewing them to the spirit of their founders! Jesus called for something morally higher but also more freeing than the version of Mosaic law the Jews were largely living. Everything but sin! That’s Catholicism!
d| Yet I’m sorry to report that Reformers X, Y and Zwingli have taken the polar opposite stance from the aforementioned, lowering the moral bar and the sense of freedom with it, on the excuse that we’re somehow irreparably corrupt and we’re better off as sheep to some tyrannical religious dictator who is truly an unflattering caricature of Jesus. The paranoid schizophrenic revolutionary—who doesn’t believe in miracles or holiness, not really—thinks nothing of leaping to the conclusion that everyone except him is to blame, that corruption is latent, waiting to pounce, in every gesture, intellectualization and object of religious outgrowth. All is darkness to him. He projects this fundamentally gloom-based, darkness-based spirituality[16] of “total corruption” onto Jesus. So I’ll not tire of saying it: “ ‘If, then, the light inside you is darkness, what darkness that will be!’ ”[17] But this Buddhist-like hapless neurosis[18] of the soul really sums up the history of the Protesters[19] of Christianity: it is—if it is anything—it is the religion of endless whining and scrutinizing and ultimate gloom—eternally skeptical of culture and history—spurning the Church Jesus founded and soon reaching out in their full-blown despair toward Masonry, nationalism and eventually Jung for that cultural and mystical angle they just can’t seem to contrive convincingly outside the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Undoubtedly what I describe is the modern Prodigal Son. We should deal with Christian Protesters pretty much the way Jesus dealt with Samaritans. And here’s a chunk of irony: in pretending to loathe culture, the Protester-Revolutionary is unconsciously demonstrating his repressed contempt for Faith as well as Scripture. In contrast, the sane man realizes that traditions, even when done in rote, far from being somehow insidious or pernicious or needing blind abolition, have this crazy property to hold something over for any saint who may come along and resonate with it, and in every age saints do just this, out of the woodwork, unexpected, uninvited and always unprecedented.
e| In their unmasked essence—irony alert—in their unmasked essence “Bible Alone” and “Bible First” antidoxies do not so much demolish[20] Sacred Tradition and Magisterium as they do Sacred Scripture. What do I mean by this? When Catholics hear[21] the Scriptures in their full “grandness” and context and thematically arranged and authoritatively sermonized, we first hear who said or wrote it to whom, because it matters to us that some dude addressed some dude or dudes in God’s name bearing God’s Word to them within time and space, not the ever-crass and exploitative “God said it” approach that always transmits a human agenda and accordingly never succeeds in sending the full impact of God’s message into the heart’s deepest chambers, echoing in the whole being in its sane, functional, common sense, transformed, radiantly transfigured, incarnational glory as God originally intended: “Your words, Lord, are spirit and life.” The Muslims and the Mormons[22] tell their followers that an angel gave extrabiblical texts to a prophet.[23] The meaning of such objectively sordid movements, the unifying meaning of the very real foregoing tenets, eludes those who seek for meaning because, obviously, both Islam and Mormonism[24] are philosophically nominalist, fideist and probably any -ist[25] provided it reject[26] reason. Moormonism is a religion not of passive-aggressive whining like many of the lesser Christian cults[27] but of mystical impatience[28], and the only difference here is of degrees. What promptly fills the void left by the balls-to-the-wall “simplification” of Catholic liturgy by Protesters is Masonic liturgy coming in the back door, so that, though by the light of day Christian Protesters merely do “less liturgy” than Catholics, I am afraid the light of the stars will show you that this is really not the case, the only difference being which master their more elaborate, intentional liturgy serves. Yet I digress.
f| The Christian Protester’s M.O. for reading Sacred Scripture fits right in with the Muslim stereotype of Christians and Jews as “People of the Book”[29]. It is the difference between “As it is written…”[30] vs. “Thus says the Lord God…”[31] or “In those days…”[32] Ever wonder why Luther’s “Bible” “arbitrarily” reverted to the Jewish canon rather than the Christian one? Friend, nothing is arbitrary. Two words: Masonic duke. So in vain do Christian Protesters boast of “honoring God’s Word,” not because most of them neither eat the Body nor drink the Blood of God’s Word made Flesh, but even just simply because their ostensibly xenophobia-based paranoia of more universal, or Catholic, Christianity has driven them to reducing[33] Scripture’s content. You read correctly: Christian Protesters are denied access to God’s whole Word whereas the Catholic Church kept the whole Bible open and universally available[34] in their churches before Luther ever got the mechanical presses running! For Luther’s revision of and even worse interpretation of Scripture there is simply (a) no precedent in Ancient Christianity and (b) no good motive. What Christian Protestism is rooted in is Masonry and nationalism. Where Masonry in the Enlightenment had its own brand of dubious human primitivism[35], it had in the Reformation[36] its manufactured history of Christian primitivism[37] totally disconnected from the teachings of the New Testament and Early Church Fathers. Reinventing history and editing the Bible—more drastically as the “reform” itself came to be “reformed” until there was nothing but Quietism[38] and Neopaganism remaining—was to become a tradition in Christian Protesters’ cults[39] to where even the Traditional Doctrine of Christ’s divinity and the Blessed Trinity becomes “extrabiblical”[40]. You hear these “Christian” theologians talking but you’re really hearing the voice of Freemasonry[41] in disguise.
g| But Jesus is not the only victim here whom these doctrinal extremes tear asunder. The Holy Spirit is also clapped in irons. Fortunately “Bible Alone” is culturally unsustainable because it is just so very anticultural, so incurably suspicious[42] of culture. Eventually the severed laity are pining for prophecy. They want the Holy Spirit let loose again. You know, magic[43] is everywhere and God is everywhere and only Masonic nationalist imperialism bullies us into forgetting[44] this, tearing them from us and from one another where the Church gave us them all as Sacraments. And, hey, I’ll just say it: what are we to think of “Christians” who practice circumcision? What in Hades is this if not blatant syncretism, friends—in other words, playing fast and loose with God? He who artificially limits Catholic ceremony is openly inviting in Masonic ceremony, because ceremony is essential to culture. He who artificially limits Catholic orthodoxy is openly espousing Masonic antidoxy[45] to bridge the gap. He who artificially limits the Sacraments is on the road to inviting another Light in who is far more cunning than man, in his infinite insolence, could have ever dreamt. For there is One who clarifies and One who distorts. There is One who abounds and One who starves. There is One who invites and One who invades. There is One who creates and One who destroys. This is just the way of things. So go ahead: ask a Christian Protester why he treats the Bible with an “As it is written…” hermeneutic as though it were the Unholy Qur’ān or the Book of Mormon, why he disdains history in favor of sectarian pettiness.
h| “Bible Alone” is nothing but a busted barstool[46]. What do I mean by this? The Church that, according to history, Jesus originally started has a three-pronged system of leadership: Sacred Scripture, Sacred Tradition and Sacred Magisterium. The same undeniably wise Trinitarian balance was employed in United States governance with its checks and balances: Legislative, Executive and Judicial. “Bible Alone” is nothing but a busted barstool. A one-legged seat doesn’t give a man much repose. “And so, in anger, I swore that not one would reach the place of rest I had for them”[47].
i| This brings us to the too familiar “Catholic Lay Evangelist”[48], the Catholic who revels in poking fun at other[49] Catholics for not knowing every piddling detail of the Bible[50] and setting themselves up as saviors for a hemorrhaging Church, but oddly never stressing the Sacraments or the Early Church Fathers or the Church Doctors and their indispensable Biblical commentaries. I guess to the man[51] with a hammer everything looks like a nail. But you know the type. Self-styled “Catholic Lay Evangelists” who were ostensibly too creepy to get a real job teaching C.C.D. and are clearly too Johnny-One-Note for radio and too culturally color-blind and tone-deaf to make an honest living, so they latch onto misguided parishes and browbeat the adult laity there into mental resignation, passive-aggression and eventual death. There’s one in every city. Meh, men who study and lecture on the Bible as a spiritless text are not Christians, and there’s an end of it.
j| Here’s a hint. The Protester’s wet dream is that Catholics forget to think. The Protester’s worst nightmare is that Catholics learn to be meek and humble like Jesus.
k| As one remedy for the most salient ails here outlined I want to warmly recommend[52] the Divine Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom: that is, the Byzantine[53] Rite Catholic liturgy. If you really want more Jewry in your worship, that’s where you start: with the Jews who accepted Christ, not like Luther conspiring with those who rejected Him or with the Masons who borrow their apostasy from another “king of the Jews,” you could say a less shining “son of David,” King Solomon.
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A.M.D.G.
[1] Holy Bible, a.k.a. Holy Writ, Sacred Scripture(s).
[2] Mary being beloved, feminine.
[3] The Spirit being Lover, masculine.
[4] Mark 10:9 (Jerusalem Bible). Gee, that’s such a no-brainer! I’ll never know how we milked four pages out of that little duh-hey-no-kidding bit.
[5] Intuit?
[6] But again this, like theology, requires that we be transformed by the humility of Jesus.
[7] Kinda…
[8] Being Jesus and also Sacred Scripture.
[9] Being Sacred Tradition and also Magisterium.
[10] Being marinated in Masonic [i.e. Satanic] spirit.
[11] Be he “Catholic” or whatever!
[12] Here I’d really like us to take a moment to remember that heresy is not falsehood but the exaggeration of a truth to the eclipse of all others. That remind you of anyone? That’s why “______ Alone” is already a heresy. This is theology 101 at most. So already you can see that the issue is far more psychological than theological here.
[13] Which I will henceforth term reform since I’ve had it with those who derive all their pomp from senseless syllables and if I must suffer them will not be party to indulging these outcroppings of acute mental illness disguised as “biblical religion.”
[14] Long paragraph alert! Mental knots galore to untie!
[15] I.e. destruction
[16] Psychology?
[17] Matt. 6:23 (Jerusalem Bible).
[18] Over all theological points whose cumulative absurdity can only be a reflection of out-and-out madness.
[19] Since an increasing number seems to protest the term Protèstant (as they are liable to protest the label of Calvinist, Puritan and God knows even Congregationalist) we’ll use the, in all cases, way clearer term Protester.
[20] They simply recreate their own (in their image and likeness invariably).
[21] Since Jesus’ Ascension (and up until the late Nineteenth Century), to hear the Word is more customary than to read it, not to mention that that’s the way they were clearly intended to be taken.
[22] Each analogous to the other, each an innovation on Christianity but far closer in spirit to Masonry (i.e. Satanism) and theocracy than even most Christian Protesters.
[23] Oh, and by the way, they tell them, Jesus is not God, you can have several wives, your next life will be one of raw dominance over others if you play your cards right and your clerics are the only legitimate heirs to all political and financial powers.
[24] And note that he who acquiesces to Mormonism simply is intellectually ill-equipped to understand what’s wrong with Islam.
[25] Theocrat, deist?
[26] Compellingly analogous to how, for Masons, pluralism and Neopaganism are just positive-sounding masks to hide a negative animus toward orthodoxy (in the vast majority of cases today it is Jewish orthodoxy and Catholic orthodoxy).
[27] Which Catholics just classify as Christian Protèstantism for sane simplicity’s sake.
[28] Giving room for full-blown chauvinism.
[29] Rather than, say, “People of the Word.”
[30] By whom? By God? By an angel? By a demon? And yes, it matters.
[31] “Hæc dicit Dominus Deus…”
[32] “In diebus illis…”
[33] And only after having taken out the parts that most condemned their Masonic and nationalist agenda—then printing and distributing copies!
[34] All thanks to her “presses of flesh,” also called monks.
[35] A thinly veiled minimalism in the name of “archeology”; this later brought us “historical Jesus” gibberish.
[36] Notice the pattern of needlessly long words they use for the movements the Masons spawn?
[37] A thinly veiled minimalism in the name of “Bible Alone” (which, taken at its word, is the most ironic contradiction of “Faith Alone” and “Grace Alone” any apologist could ever ask for!)
[38] A.k.a. “Born Again Christianity,” a “gateway drug” to Paganism.
[39] I failed to mention the cult of the King James Version. Take the Amish who speak as the King James Version is written or the Mormons who accepted the Book of Mormon because it was written in King James English and not in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Arabic or even in some made-up language. This is highly analogous to the attitude of Muslims toward the language of their scriptures that runs to such an extent that they keep grammatical rules where the Qur’ān keeps them and breaks them where it breaks them. They—the Moormons—in these small but monumental forms make no secret of disdaining reason.
[40] And by implication unnecessary or false.
[41] So much for “Bible Alone” and “Bible First” having any pretense to being Christian principles.
[42] A distinctly Masonic, nationalistic (read Nazi) attitude.
[43] Many an overzealous reader will object to my use of the term magic in connection with the Sacraments. Before you go off on a premature tirade, note that “hocus-pocus” is a term that satirizes the English pronunciation of the consecration formula, “Hoc est corpus meum.” C. S. Lewis (and I daresay anyone acquainted with the Oxford Movement, not to even mention J. R. R. Tolkien) in his book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe possesses the literary instinct to refer to Aslan’s immolation as a “deeper magic.” I think that’s what being a man in academia (today almost an oxymoron) means. Catholicism accounts for everything—natural and preternatural—in its proper hierarchical context. Magic that serves God we call the Sacraments, and amulets that serve God we call sacramentals. Magic that does not necessarily serve God we call the Occult, and amulets that do not necessarily serve God we call charms. Magic, generally, refers to the realm of unseen connections between persons and things, its first principle being that like attracts like. This is not what we would term “science,” but don’t let that fool you just because Puritans have a phobia of all things they cannot control and Masons don’t want non-Masons understanding it so they alone may wield it: it is at least as real as the air we breathe.
[44] This they do so they can play God and hog all the enchantment for themselves.
[45] Disguised variously as pluralism and Neopaganism.
[46] I’ve seen the need to explain the term barstool further for the benefit of those whose pet vice may be prohibitionism. Scripture, Tradition and Magisterium would be analogous respectively to each of the legs of a three-legged stool (such as one may find in a bistro) whereas a cult would be well represented by a barstool. Barstools are cults because they rely completely on being attached to the counter, on human-appointed authority (whether it’s some ecclesial community leadership or (heaven help us) oneself (that’s when the barstool is busted and pretty much impossible to balance). Barstools also only have one point of sale (heresy being one truth exaggerated to the exclusion of others.) Three-legged stools are planted on Rock (Petrus, Pierre, Peter).
[47] Ps. 95:11; Heb. 3:11, 4:3b (Jerusalem Bible).
[48] That is, the Scribe in this age of the Holy Spirit, also reminding me of Eucharistic Minister (or Ministra).
[49] Often, as I have witnessed first-hand, practicing on his parents—the utter perversion of it!
[50] These always focus mostly on the Old Testament like their Protester Judaizer predecessors. They do this not so much for knowledge (let alone holiness) as in a spirit of “beating the Protèstant Christians at their own (Masonic) game,” which (a) I thought the Knights of Columbus already had sewn up and (b) is fine as the personal mission of an angry adolescent but can never account for the whole life of the Church any more than this “praise ‘n worship” competitive complex (see LifeTeen!) can.
[51] Provided he keep the Lives of the Saints at arm’s length.
[52] To all Catholics, and by extension everyone.
[53] As well as the Divine Liturgy the West has received the Divine Mercy devotion and the Jesus Prayer.
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