Mark Shea gets a lesson

In good old Catholic America hate.  Mark has written before on the role of patriotism under the heading of 'love thy neighbor.'  Of course patriotism does not mean we must blindly support everything our country does.  Our country is a country.  If the Church, the body of Christ, can be defined in our modern age by a scandal in which thousands of priests raped the hell out of minors while their superiors used the  power of their office to hide the fact, a country is more than able to have its share of blunders.  America has had its share.  I needn't go over the examples.  If you attended public school within the last 30 years, the history of our country increasingly has focused on those wrongs.

But here's the thing.  There's healthy confession: Father, forgive me, for I...[insert sin here].  Then there is unhealthy confession: Forget it Father, I'm beyond hope, I suck, I'm a loser, I deserve to die [followed by inserting shotgun in mouth and pulling trigger].  For various reasons, not the least of which are those that have agendas behind them, a growing segment of our population has taken the later approach to the sins of America.

So instead of a healthy desire to learn from mistakes, we have warped and twisted accounts retold for the sake of beating down the legacy of our country.  Some, no doubt, hope to replace this tarnished legacy with their own ideals.  Others just like bashing it, having spent so long doing so, they now hate and loath this country and see no value in it, nothing worth redeeming.  The best of them, of course, leave the country and live elsewhere.  The true hypocrites do nothing to change anything, all the while sucking on the bloated tit of America's waning prosperity, and bitching all the way to the bank at how disgusted they are to live in such a deplorable culture.

Self-fulfilling prophecies being what they are, America does, at times, look to be emerging as all the horrible things that people have complained about for years.  I've heard Big Brother my whole life, but never has it applied more readily than today.  I've heard debauchery and decadence in our democratic society, but it seldom has passed not only what we do today, but what we insist on legislating.  So yes, like the person told they are a loser everyday eventually becomes the loser, America is becoming everything that those who have hated it said they hated it for.

Thus in Mark's blog, on a simple throw out to the veterans, instead of getting the usual 'God bless our troops', he gets a couple of visitors whose contempt for our country is well documented; those who believe that America is the source of all sin in the world - or at least write as if they do.  There are others who frequent his blog.  As Mark, for whatever reasons, has focused increasingly on the bad of our country and its past, his blog has attracted those who are more than happy to agree.  I'm shocked so few jumped in on the bandwagon with today's post.  But it's what you get, and it's a shame for Catholics.  After all, one prejudiced claim in the age of immigration was that these papists would come to America, bleed it dry, then kick the empty husk when they were done.  I'd hate to prove those anti-Catholic bigots right.  But reading the Catholic blogosphere, there appears to be some who have made proving them true their life's ambition.