Monday, October 16, 2017

Actually, Father James Martin, S.J., is the one engaging in fascist techniques of degradation...


Matthew Archbold writes:

"Fr. James Martin is now referring to Catholics who oppose what he wrote in his latest book as 'alt-right Catholics.'

Honest to goodness, I have no idea what that even means. I didn't really have a firm understanding what 'alt-right' meant when it referred to politics but I definitely don't understand what it means in reference to Catholics.

Is it just the new 'fundamentalist' which pretty much meant 'a Christian I don't like because he actually believes that stuff.'

Politically, the alt-right moniker seems to be a way of calling someone racist or a Nazi without calling them a Nazi racist. So it's like a skirting of Godwin's law. But in Catholicism, it seems to mean someone who actually believes the Church teaching on sex and gender. But (and I'm not being obtuse for humor reasons here) I'm honestly not sure what the heck it means.

Maybe, they should call it 'alt-rite' in Catholic circles just to give it that Catholicy feel."

As defined by Wikipedia, "The alt-right, or alternative right, is a loosely defined group of people with far-right ideologies who reject mainstream conservatism in favor of white nationalism. White supremacist Richard Spencer initially promoted the term in 2010 in reference to a movement centered on white nationalism and did so according to the Associated Press to disguise overt racism, white supremacism, neo-fascism and neo-Nazism. The term drew considerable media attention and controversy during and after the 2016 United States presidential election.

Alt-right beliefs have been described as isolationist, protectionist, antisemitic and white supremacist, frequently overlapping with Neo-Nazism, nativism and Islamophobia, antifeminism, misogyny and homophobia, right-wing populism and the neoreactionary movement. The concept has further been associated with several groups from American nationalists, neo-monarchists, men's rights advocates and the 2016 presidential campaign of Donald Trump..."

To understand why Father James Martin would use the term Alt-Right to refer to faithful accepts who actually accept the Depositum Fidei, we need to understand the sick mind and the fanaticized consciousness of someone like Father Martin, who spurns God Himself.  See here.

In his work of critical importance entitled "Man Against Mass Society," the French philosopher Gabriel Marcel writes, "..the fanatic never sees himself as a fanatic; it is only the non-fanatic who can recognize him as a fanatic; so that when this judgment, or this accusation, is made, the fanatic can always say that he is misunderstood and slandered...Fanaticism is essentially opinion pushed to paroxysm; with everything that the notion of opinion may imply of blinded ignorance as to its own nature....whatever ends the fanatic is aiming at or thinks he is aiming at, even if he wishes to gather men together, he can only in fact separate them; but as his own interests cannot lie in effecting this separation, he is led, as we have seen, to wish to wipe his opponents out. And when he is thinking of these opponents, he takes care to form the most degrading images of them possible - they are 'lubricious vipers' or 'hyenas and jackals with typewriters' - and the ones that reduce them to most grossly material terms. In fact, he no longer thinks of these opponents except as material obstacles to be overturned or smashed down. Having abandoned the behaviour of a thinking being, he has lost even the feeblest notion of what a thinking being, outside himself, could be. It is understandable therefore that he should make every effort to deny in advance the rights and qualifications of those whom he wishes to eliminate; and that he should regard all means to this end as fair. We are back here again at the techniques of degradation. It cannot be asserted too strongly or repeated too often that those the Nazis made use of in their camps - techniques for degrading their victims in their own eyes, for making mud and filth of them - and those which Soviet propagandists use to discredit their adversaries, are not essentially different though we should, in fairness, add that sadism, properly so called, is not to be found in the Russian camps." (pp. 135-136, 149).

Marcel explains that, "In fact, the greatest merit of the critical spirit is that it tends to cure fanaticism, and it is logical enough that in our own fanatical times the critical spirit should tend to disappear, should no longer even be paid lip service as a value."

The irony is that Father James Martin is employing the very tactics used by the Nazis.

Our strange time!



2 comments:

Karen said...

From LaSalette's Journey:

A sign of this sin's gravity is that one who commits it is automatically excommunicated. See c. 1364, 1 of the Code of Canon Law.

Fr. Martin? Let's have a comment to this statement. How in the world can you deny this??? And again, one of the four sins that cry to heaven for vengeance.

I try to pray for him but I'm not always very successful at having a heart full of charity - I'm just so sick of him and his vile poison.

Anonymous said...

Some good news. Fr. Martin was invited by the Archdiocese of New York to be a speaker at Spirituality Day, which is mandatory for all administrators and teachers in all Archdiocesan Catholic schools.

There was a major protest, and Fr. Martin appeared with a much snipped and edited script, which was very bland and uninteresting, according to one participant. He received very little applause.

The speaker the previous year had received a standing ovation.

There were no references whatsoever to Fr. Martin's talk on the Archdiocesan website, or almost anywhere else (one school in Dutchess county referred to it in Upcoming Events), and there was some talk that it may have been scrubbed.

Sometimes the good guys win.

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