Good Mark Shea Article On Catholic Celebrities

[Amppax]

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[b][url="http://markshea.blogspot.com/2011/04/if-catholic-star-starts-entertaining.html"]If a Catholic star starts entertaining delusions that he is a bishop[/url][/b]
[/b]as, for instance, [url="http://lisagraas.com/2011/04/13/did-michael-voris-instruct-catholics-to-leave-the-church/"]Michael Voris apparently does[/url], then you should give him a wide berth.

That includes me, by the way, if you are one of those deluded souls who thinks that some loudmouth like me with a gift of the gab is somehow more to be relied upon for delivering you the Catholic faith than Holy Mother Church. When I get mail from some deluded fan who imagines something that I wrote makes me a more reliable guide to the faith than the bishops, it makes me shudder. Because sooner or later, I know I will get another letter from somebody saying, "I used to believe in you, but then you let me down. I don't know if I'm Catholic anymore!" I'm tempted to say, "Yeah? Well, get used to it, cuz I ain't your personal Lord and savior. I'm not even a bishop, fercryinoutloud. Stop with the perpetual celebrity anointings and fanboyism and grow up into the Catholic faith."

The cult of celebrity is poison. People need to stop hoisting aloft every internet chatterer who thinks God has given him the power of excommunication against those who don't happen to know their suffocating small constellation of shibboleths.

[url="http://www.mark-shea.com/fist.html"]Read and heed.[/url] We internet loudmouths are not to be obeyed like bishops. When one of us pops off about Earth Day and stupidly declares, pronounces and defines that "if the priest even so much as breathes a word about Earth Day, throw nothing in the collection plate, finish your Sunday obligation and resign from that parish on Monday”, that does not constitute a de fide teaching of the Church. This sort of blind Pavlovian stupidity which teaches the faithful to respond to acoustic cues ("He mentioned Earth Day! Abandon ship!") is a reflection, not of an intelligent Catholic approach, but of the kind of culture warrior mobthought that so much of the blogosphere facilitates.

It is, in fact, a mirror image of the sort of cult of personality one sees in [url="http://www.ncregister.com/blog/holy-hissypfit?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+NCRegisterDailyBlog+%2540National+Catholic+Register%2541#When:02:48:24Z"]Fr. Pfleger's parish[/url].

When I compare and contrast the audience reaction to this priest whipping the mob into a frenzy against the mean Church and [url="http://catholicchampion.blogspot.com/2011/04/diocese-of-scranton-bars-michael-voris.html"]Voris fanboys [/url]whipping the mob into a frenzy against the mean Church, the only difference I can see is that the combox crowd dislikes the politics of the former and not the latter. So the former is vilified and the latter lionized.

No doubt, if there were a combox full of Pfleger’s groupies (I haven't checked the National Catholic Reporter), they would look like a mirror image of the Voris groupies, full of adoration and the certitude of victory for their hero and full of loathing for Voris for his sin of batting for the wrong tribe.

Moral: Democracy truly is that form of government that chooses Barabbas over Jesus.

[b]Second moral: Don't put a mitre on the head of any loudmouth in the blogosphere or Catholic media, especially me. A gaggle of apologists and bigmouths like me is not the Magisterium[/b][/quote][/b][/size][/font][/color]
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[color="#333333"][font="Georgia, serif"][size="2"]I thought this was a pretty interesting article. Lets here everybody else's thoughts. [/size][/font][/color]

Edited April 14, 2011 by Amppax

[Lil Red]

agreed.

[Socrates]

Mark sounds jealous.

I wasn't aware that Vortex-guy had groupies.


Let's face it, if, say, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity sent a letter insisting that Catholic priests preach on some secular right-wing pet cause during Holy Week, Mark Shea and his liberal pals would be equally outraged.

[Lil Red]

[quote name='Socrates' timestamp='1302888517' post='2228945']
Mark sounds jealous.

I wasn't aware that Vortex-guy had groupies.


Let's face it, if, say, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity sent a letter insisting that Catholic priests preach on some secular right-wing pet cause during Holy Week, Mark Shea and his liberal pals would be equally outraged.
[/quote]
i highly doubt it. mark is usually pretty equal in his criticisms of the right.

[emilier98]

That was a most excellent article. I will be sharing this on facebook.

[MIKolbe]

[quote name='Socrates' timestamp='1302888517' post='2228945']
Mark sounds jealous.
[/quote]
TOTALLY!!!!!

lol

[Amppax]

Just an FYI, Mark Shea thinks global warming is bunk too. So its not as if he is criticizing Voris on that.

[Nihil Obstat]

I think there is a place within our Catholic identity for thunder, bombast, and [i]hyperbole[/i]. These last couple decades we've become a little anemic.

[Lil Red]

his follow-up article:
http://markshea.blogspot.com/2011/04/evidently-i-hit-nerve.html

a snippet:
[quote]It is legitimate to argue about which *ideas* are "really" Catholic. But I'm much more wary about blithely declaring which members of the Church are "really" Catholic--especially on the basis of Pavlovian acoustic cues. For we are all sinners. Every one of us thinks and does things that are not really Catholic. If a Catholic defends an idea that is wrong or dumb, one can criticize that without having to declare or suggest that he is not a "real" Catholic and without having to advocate a schismatic, Protestant dream of hiving off into some fantasy of a truly true pure Catholic Church. The wheat and the weeds, the bad fish and the good, are a reality of the Church till the Last Day.

That is not, by the way, to say that one must endure real and blatant contempt for the Tradition in a parish forever. Our family chose to go to Blessed Sacrament because I wanted to make sure our kids got decent catechesis and were not exposed (as they had been at our former parish) to declarations from the pulpit that the Scripture reading was (and I quote) "a crock", that Exodus was like a Paul Bunyan story, that the Pope was worthy of contempt, and all the sundry croutons one can hear in a suburban parish.

But here's the thing: when we got to Blessed Sacrament, we found a wonderful parish full of wonderful Catholics with a gorgeous liturgy, reverence for the sacraments, tremendous works of charity and formation and clergy and staff who work their butts off for us. We also found simmering resentment from an embittered nucleus of "real Catholic" malcontents for whom nothing was ever good enough. They ostentatiously wore flightline earphones to Mass. They disrupted parish meetings. They spread lies and rumors about the clergy. They treated the rest of the parish with contempt. We were half-breed, false, "not real Catholic" enemies. I quickly learned that the problem isn't *always* loony progressives with visions of the Third Vatican Council. Sometimes its bitter Donatists for whom the Church is never pure enough.

And, as with all of Satan's ruses, what I quickly learned as well was that such attacks on the unity of the Church always come in pairs that, fleeing one, we will embrace the other. Voris' counsel to abandon your parish on a hair-trigger shibboleth is as dreadfully wrong as the counsel to knuckle under and let your kids be taught goddess croutons in Sunday school because that is Sister Trendy's personal obsession. Both are appeals to a cult of celebrity, which is another word for factionalism. Both should be avoided.

And that goes, as I said yesterday, double for any readers here who so much as think to turn me into an alternate magisterium. I'm an internet loudmouth with a bunch of opinions about stuff. I think I'm right, of course, otherwise I wouldn't venture an opinion. But (unless I'm citing the Church's teaching), there's no guarantee I'm right.[/quote]

[Amppax]

[quote name='Lil Red' timestamp='1302898142' post='2228988']
his follow-up article:
[url="http://markshea.blogspot.com/2011/04/evidently-i-hit-nerve.html"]http://markshea.blog...-hit-nerve.html[/url]

a snippet:

[/quote]


Thanks red, great article!

[MIKolbe]

[quote]I quickly learned that the problem isn't *always* loony progressives with visions of the Third Vatican Council. Sometimes its bitter Donatists for whom the Church is never pure enough.[/quote]

iawtc

[MIKolbe]

[quote name='Socrates' timestamp='1302888517' post='2228945']
Let's face it, if, say, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, and Sean Hannity sent a letter insisting that Catholic priests preach on some secular right-wing pet cause during Holy Week, Mark Shea and his liberal pals would be equally outraged.
[/quote]

from Shea's blog a few moments ago...

[quote]Just in case you weren't clear on this....
If you are Catholic, the Obama Administration [url="http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.1813/pub_detail.asp"]lies about your Church[/url] and [url="http://www.c-fam.org/publications/id.1831/pub_detail.asp"]considers the Vatican an enemy[/url] when it comes to its policies on human reproduction. [/quote]

[url="http://markshea.blogspot.com/2011/04/just-in-case-you-werent-clear-on-this.html"]yeah..total liberal...[/url]

[Nihil Obstat]

Real conservatives will criticize Bush just as harshly as Obama.

Edited April 15, 2011 by Nihil Obstat

[MIKolbe]

false premise.

[Nihil Obstat]

[quote name='MIkolbe' timestamp='1302900726' post='2229012']
false premise.
[/quote]
The premise that I know what real conservatives are? Or the one that implies people like Bush?

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