A Whole Lot About Mostly Nothing

On When a Liberal Media Bias Might be a Good Thing for the Church and Prove the Existence of God, to Boot. April 30, 2012

Perhaps you’ve heard about this story.  I’ll freely confess, when I first saw it, I thought; “Damned liberal media.  Taking it to the Church again.”  And then I thought, “You’d not hear about this in terms of such high outrage if it had been a simple public figure.  Heck, for most people, you would not hear about it at all.  Stop picking on the Church, for heaven’s sake.”  You simply cannot help yourself with that holier-than-thou mentality when it comes to priests.

And I also thought, “That priest is an idiot, and an incompetent one at that, if for no other reason than he didn’t actually proof his PowerPoint before his meeting.”  I hold no brief for saying a man is condemned for porn, gay or otherwise.  Just as I hold no brief for a man to be condemned for drunkenness, gambling or serial infidelity.  We all have our shortcomings, yes even the priests.  ALL of these things are bad, evil acts.  They do not then translate the person into an evil person.

Love the sinner, hate the sin, you know.

But then I thought a bit more on that.  That priest showed that material at a public meeting.  For First Communicants.  Second graders!!  He deserves to be taken out to the shed for that.

And not just that.  But also for being a priest.

I’ve often concurred with Mark Shea’s tongue-in-cheek assertion that if we allowed educators to marry, then abuse would not happen.  Waitaminnit. . .  And his point still holds.  But I’ve used that as a larger cudgel, to object to the media using a double-standard with us.  They hit educators on pedophilia, but they REALLY nail the Church on it.

And this time it hit me.

The media really should hit us harder.  They really should.

Let me repeat that: The media is correct in hitting the Catholic Church harder on pedophilia than hitting other organizations.  And here’s why:

We are the keepers of the guttering flame of Truth.  We are the heirs to those Irish monks on the west coast of Britain who kept the flame of Antiquity’s wisdom while Europe was convulsed with pagan lawlessness.  In short, WE KNOW BETTER.  And the press knows this instinctively, so they beat us like a gong  every time we veer from the path.

Are they delighting in our errors?  Of course.  Are they drooling, microcephalic hypocrites?  Of course.  BUT THEY ARE CORRECT.

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But here’s the really wonderful thing:  WHY does the press react as it does?  We keep hearing the message that Christianity is outdated, passe, meaningless.  We ought to pay it no mind.

But if it is really that meaningless, then the peccadilloes of erring priests such as the unfortunate mentioned above should be no cause for concern.  “Pay that fool no mind, modern thinker.  He’s going the way of the dodo.”  If it’s that meaningless, why does the Dawkins/Harris/Dennett/Myers Kraken react so violently to our little turns?  Why the vociferous, violent chortles of glee at yet another wayward priest?  If we’re marginalized, why bother?  If we’re meaningless, why does Dan Savage waste so much energy on us?

Deep down at the core, they know there is something to us.  We have the truth, they know it, and they hate us for it.  But in that moment comes proof of the Moral Argument.

If we’re protecting an outdated morality, then why the outrage when we violate it?  We ought to be welcomed by the Saturnalians as finally agreeing with them.  But they know; they grasp the Absolute.  They help prove that Moral Realities exist, and from that rather easily comes the idea that a Creator of those Realities must therefore also exist.