Message for World Youth Day: Violence is never the answer, we can do nothing else but love, love, love...

As noted here, "Msgr. Olivier Ribadeau Dumas, secretary general of the French Bishops Conference, told reporters in Krakow..that the atrocity (a priest having been martyred by having his head cut off) was 'an unbelievable, unspeakable and heinous act.'


But he added that it means World Youth Day 'needs to proceed with even greater intensity and power so young people who are the present and the future can show a path for the Church, and for being within the Church.'

'We need to see a horizon of peace, joy, brotherhood and prayer,' he continued. 'We are rooted in Christ and, I repeat, we believe evil and violence will not have the upper hand.'

Noting that many young people from Rouen are in Krakow for WYD, he said they have come 'to build a new civilization of love that Pope St. John Paul II had called for — we want to build it and that’s why we’re gathered here in such big numbers.'

He stressed that 'anger and revenge would be the easiest ways out but all of this can crush us' and called for mercy on the perpetrators, saying that we all 'live thanks to Jesus and we’re all gathered here because of the mercy he has lavished on us all.' Neither violence nor hate 'are a way out', he said, and one 'cannot surrender to these sentiments,' nor to 'suspicion of neighbors.'

He also recalled that in every part of the world today people are 'killed because they’re Christians or Muslims, more Muslims than Christians.' Asked by the Register if what is really needed is for Muslims to hear the Gospel and convert, he said 'sure', but added that what is important now is dialogue, collaboration and fraternity.

'The answer is only love,' he said. 'We cannot do anything else: love, love, love, dialogue, dialogue and also mercy for all those who are totally destroyed by the violence.'"

Msgr. Ribadeau has forgotten that it is possible to "be angry and sin not" (Ephesians 4: 26), and he is not alone.

Writing for Touchstone Magazine, Dr. Leon J. Podles explains that, "..many Christians have a false understanding of the nature and role of anger. It is seen as something negative, something that a Christian should not feel.

In the sexual abuse cases in the Catholic Church, those who dealt with the bishops have consistently remarked that the bishops never expressed outrage or righteous anger, even at the most horrendous cases of abuse and sacrilege. Bishops seem to think that anger at sin is un-Christian. Gilbert Kilman, a child psychiatrist, commented, 'What amazes me is the lack of outrage the church feels when its good work is being harmed. So, if there is anything the church needs to know, it needs to know how to be outraged.'

Mark Serrano confronted Bishop Frank Rodimer, asking why he had let his priest-friend Peter Osinski sleep with boys at Rodimer’s beach house while Rodimer was in the next bedroom: 'Where is your moral indignation?' Rodimer’s answer was, 'Then I don’t get it. What do you want?' What Serrano wanted Rodimer to do was to behave like a man with a heart, a heart that is outraged by evil. But Rodimer couldn’t; his inability to feel outrage was a quality that had helped make him a bishop. He would never get into fights, never rock the boat, never 'divide' but only 'unify.' Rodimer could not understand why he should feel deep anger at evil, at the violation of the innocent, at the oppression of the weak.

Emotional Deformation

The emotions that are now suppressed are hatred and anger. Christians think that they ought not to feel these emotions, that it is un-Christian to feel them. They secretly suspect that Jesus was being un-Christian in his attitude to the scribes and Pharisees when he was angry at them, that he was un-Christian when he drove the moneychangers out of the temple or declared that millstones (not vacations in treatment centers) were the way to treat child abusers.

Conrad Baars noticed this emotional deformation in the clergy in the mid-twentieth century. He recognized that there had been distortions in 'traditional' Catholic spirituality. It had become too focused upon individual acts rather than on growth in virtue; it had emphasized sheer naked strength of will. In forgetting that growth in virtue was the goal of the Christian’s moral life, it forgot that the emotions, all emotions, including anger and hate, are part of human nature and must be integrated into a virtuous life.

Baars had been imprisoned by the Nazis. He knew iniquity firsthand and that there was something wrong with those who did not hate it:

A little reflection will make it clear that there is a big difference between the person who knows solely that something is evil and ought to be opposed, and the one who in addition also feels hate for that evil, is angry that it is corrupting or harming his fellow-men, and feels aroused to combat it courageously and vigorously.

Just Wrath

Wrath is a necessary and positive part of human nature: 'Wrath is the strength to attack the repugnant; the power of anger is actually the power of resistance in the soul,' wrote Josef Pieper. The lack of wrath against injustice, he continued, is a deficiency: 'One who does good with passion is more praiseworthy than one who is ‘not entirely’ afire for the good, even to the forces of the sensual realm.'

Aquinas, too, says that 'lack of the passion of anger is also a vice' because a man who truly and forcefully rejects evil will be angry at it. The lack of anger makes the movement of the will against evil 'lacking or weak.' He quotes John Chrysostom: 'He who is not angry, whereas he has cause to be, sins. For unreasonable patience is the hotbed of many vices, it fosters negligence, and incites not only the wicked but the good to do wrong'..." 

The spiritually mature Christian understands that not all anger is unjust. That there is such a thing as just or righteous anger. Such a Christian strives to control anger through prayer and by considering the example of Christ. Let's all pray for those in leadership positions in the Church. That they may come to a mature faith which is able to discern between just and unjust anger.

The time has come for a Crusade against the satanic forces of radical Islam.  Now is not the time for cowardice or a deformed spirituality. Now is the time for real men to stand up and fight for Christian civilization (what's left of it).

We don't need the "moral" advice of sissy clerics who lack testosterone.  We need to listen to authentic men who understand that there is a time for peace and a time for war and that war has been declared on us by the antiChrist forces of militant Islam.

In the words of Cicero: "Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war."

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