Obviously busy

Busy, busy, busy.  Mostly struggling through life, juggling the older three having jobs, home school, and our oldest prepping for college, remembering to be there for our youngest, helping my Mom, and continuing to get zero from the Church in terms of either material aid or vocational direction.  With that, I must admit, we've been casting our eyes askance at other potential ecclesiastical alternatives.  Still, theologically and, to be honest, culturally I'm Catholic.  Always have been, even in my Protestant days.  So it's like finding out your wife is having an affair.  Do you just leave her, or work through the betrayal and the pain and heartache in the hope that something will turn a corner?

Nonetheless, as we struggle with bills, a bleak future, and a clear message from those in the diocese that 'you don't serve our kind', things are tough time-wise.  And with juggling so many things, the blog has obviously taken a back seat.

Still, I've had a couple emails and some questions, such as why am I still visiting CAEI when I said I would be done with it at Easter, and a profound question asking our take on some current issues in the news.  I'm working on the second, and will elaborate on the first.  But for now, a reader sent this link along and all I have to say is 'yep.'

This explains why so many Catholics have gotten so mean and unbelievably fundamentalist in their zeal to defend the Pope and the Church.  Proud of their conservative leanings and their belief that authentic conservatism and the Church are one and the same, they are stuck admitting that both this Pope, and the Church in recent years, is tacking seriously to the left.  Its approach to economics, political policy, social issues, theological and critical scholarship, scientific theories of human origins, are all more in line with a more liberal viewpoint than anything Catholics would have recognized even 50 years ago, much less 100 years ago.

Therefore, their desire to be both loyal to the Vatican, which for many is the same as being loyal to the Church, and yet insisting they are ever and always just good old conservatives like grandma used to make, produces quite the strain. One of the favorite go-to answers to why Pope Francis sounds so liberal if he really isn't one is that he is just misquoted.  Or his words manipulated.  Or stupid evil Catholics and Francis haters aren't smart enough to get his wise words.  In any event, he's just not to blame. Ever.

Well, John-Henry Westen at LifeSite News disagrees.  He believes, somewhat foolishly, that if you are in the business of communicating important things - like the Gospel - and you continually see your words being twisted by powers that ostensibly represent the powers of Hell, then a new strategy or approach might be in order.  And yet, it isn't.  Pope Francis continues, as does the Vatican, to lean on 'we didn't mean it that way' as the favored approach to insisting that the somewhat liberal sounding words weren't really liberal at all.

In keeping with the mood of the post-JPII Catholic apologetics world, expect Mr. Westen to be skinned.  At least verbally.  For I've found that for some Catholics, ever since the rack and thumbscrews went out of style, the world of apologetics and the blogosphere are  the best they can do.