What are the worst ideas on earth? Who is spreading them? What should we think of those who wield power, or hijack our churches, to impose them and punish dissenters?

Liberal Christianity. That’s the worst ideology in the world. Not just today, but ever. Since Adam ate the apple.

Why do I say that? How can I point to Seamless Garment bishops and open-borders preachers, and honestly judge their half-truths and sentimental sophistries as worse than, say, Nazi racism, Stalinist Communism or the views of the Marquis de Sade?

Surely I’m getting a little carried away now, ain’t I? Maybe the news is addling my wits.

The Parade of Weakness and Squalor

The spectacle of the Bishop of Covington throwing his students under the bus. At last, after days of parents’ outrage and threats from their lawyers, he released a belated apology. Did he lift the gag order he tried to impose on the school, parents and students, though? No sign of that.
 

Covington bishop (finally) apologizes. Hate to be cynical, but is amazing how quickly it came after news one of the boys had hired powerful libel lawyer. https://t.co/4qSVdY0qWq

— Bill McGurn (@wjmcgurn) January 26, 2019

 
Or Notre Dame University responding to the hate campaign against the Knights of Columbus … by joining the campaign. By covering the Knight’s namesake’s mural as if Kamala Harris and Mazie Hirono were right. We should cower in shame for our crimes, and plead for gentle treatment from our new masters. Signaling weakness, division and self-hatred is a sure way to win fair treatment from those who hate you, isn’t it?

Or Cardinal Dolan’s smirking face as he announces that it will be business as usual between him and Governor Cuomo, despite the latter’s support for infanticide. We shouldn’t use excommunication as a “weapon,” Dolan said — though that’s exactly how the New Orleans Archbishop rightly used it against segregationists in the 1960s. In other words:

Fellow Democrats, those of us in pointy hats are stuck saying pro-life stuff as red meat for the rubes, but don’t be offended. Keep that federal money and those truckloads of immigrants flowing in to prop up our church. See you at the next Al Smith Dinner. Planned Parenthood is catering!

Or the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops — forty percent of whose budget comes from federal government contracts backed by Democrats. Their response to New York’s Roman-style triumph party thrown to celebrate abortion right up through birth? A brand new letter on … climate change, praising mostly pro-abortion Democrats for a new piece of pointless, statist legislation that would raise heating bills for the poor.
 

Unbelievable.@USCCB bishops ignore defiant RC pols voting to kill unborn children; ~50-100 prelates who covered up for abusers hide from prosecution; the pope has neutered them, anesthetized their spines; hectored them into silence;

So what do they do?

BACK CLIMATE CHANGE! pic.twitter.com/saY8BTKc68

— Christopher Manion (@realchrismanion) January 25, 2019

Or the only college sophomore in the world with professorial tenure, theologian Massimo Faggioli of “Catholic” Villanova University, responding to New York’s abortion atrocity this way. 

I am disgusted by the extremism of abortion culture in the USA.
At the same time I do *not* remember immediate calls for the canonical excommunication of Catholics who had a key role in crafting and executing anti-immigrant policies, commodification of health care, torture, etc.

— Massimo Faggioli (@MassimoFaggioli) January 25, 2019

 

The Lowest Circle in Hell

Yes, that’s all contemptible beyond any human compass. It’s cowardly, self-serving and self-congratulatory. But those aren’t the worst qualities in the world, now, are they? Surely we’d rather face a bishop with all those attributes than say, a courageous Nazi soldier, or a forthright child pornographer. Right?

I’m not so sure. Because there’s one more quality that all these actions and those like them have. One I didn’t mention. They’re the acts of a traitor. Not just a traitor in the flock of Christ, but a wolf among His shepherds. When bishops or their official theologians pimp out evil as good, and trot out a substitute Christ for the real one, that’s the darkest thing on earth.

Yes, because what it betrays is most important. That’s why Dante planted Judas in the lowest place in Hell, being chewed for eternity in Satan’s own craw. It’s why we’re even more repulsed by perverted priests than we are by scoutmasters or stepfathers.

But wait, it gets worse. It’s not just that the corruption of the best becomes the worst. It’s that it insidiously and hideously replaces the good, as cancer cells rot out healthy bone and muscle. Like the virus that hijacks the brain of a rodent and makes it seek death at the hands of cats — where the virus can breed — this ideology can only fully infect a Christian. It does that by replacing his object of faith, which is Jesus, and squatting on His throne.

And that’s why it’s the ideology of Antichrist. Because it keeps just enough of an outside likeness to Our Lord that it can fool us. And get us to serve its Master, who comes as an angel of light.

Better Gosnell than Stowe

No Christian would be taken in by the likes of Kermit Gosnell, who boasted of killing newborns and kept parts of them as trophies. Your immune system would detect such a virus and block it. Gosnell is just a butcher, and in a sense, an honest one.

We can’t say the same for neighboring Kentucky bishop John Stowe. His column joining the elite lynch mob targeting the Covington Catholic boys is really stunning. It reads as if lifted from the pages of The Lord of the World, a prophetic novel of the Antichrist penned in 1900. Stowe, who has praised heretical Catholic LGBT activists, launches into a vicious attack not just on teenage fellow Catholics subject to death threats. He denounces virtually the entire pro-life movement and the half of Americans who voted for a pro-life presidential candidate. He does so with little logic, but vast, overweening self-confidence and unearned moral hauteur.

Go read it for yourself, and sniff the brimstone. Find it mixed with just enough incense to fool the unwary. More than that, it’s designed to give convenient pretexts to those who are really culpable. It is to real moral analysis what a “realistic” Japanese sex doll is to a blushing bride: close enough for government work, good enough if you’ve been drinking. Especially if what you’re quaffing is the poisoned Kool-Aid of socialism, spiked by a stiff shot of Marx.

Stowe speaks of Donald Trump like a mini-Hitler whose voters wear brown shirts and hunt immigrants for sport. Stowe cites the essentially Communist document approved by gullible, abuse-haunted U.S. bishops on racism, which asserts that only white people have power, so only we can be guilty. That’s a Marxist theory of collective guilt. It is completely alien not just to Christianity, but even to pagan concepts of justice.

Even worse, Stowe adopts the brand new idiot mantra of Seamless Garment infiltrators who do the Democrats’ bidding and try to destroy the pro-life movement. Just read the following lines, surely scrawled on a bar napkin in crayon:

The pro-life movement claims that it wants more than the policy change of making abortion illegal, but aims to make it unthinkable. That would require deep changes in society and policies that would support those who find it difficult to afford children. The association of our young people with racist acts and a politics of hate must also become unthinkable.

In fact, the “pro-life movement” claims no such thing. Imagine abolitionists who said they wanted to keep slavery legal until every slaveowner found slavery “unthinkable,” because the government supplied his labor needs. 

Utopia on the Altar

There is no scenario on earth in which abortion becomes unthinkable, any more than rape or murder or stealing citizenship will ever be unthinkable. No combination of government policies could ever achieve that. Ideologues like Bishop Stowe surely know that. They intentionally and culpably, with premeditation and full consent of the will, conjure Utopia as an idol in place of Christ.

Yes, they know that it’s ludicrous to pretend that every issue that could possibly affect human life is a “life issue,” comparable to murdering a million kids per year for sexual convenience. They know better. They know they’re helping to keep abortion legal. It’s time we admit that and see such men for exactly what they are. And whom they serve.

 

This story has been updated.