Protecting the Status Quo: Vortex

As expected, the Church of Nice et al. responded to MV’s Vortex episode which suggested that the substantial salaries of the primary players in the mainstream Catholic media make them dependent on the approval of the powers-that-be; that means that reporting negative news about those same “powers” is compromised.

The people MV is talking to and about seem to just not get it. They think he was criticizing them for having substantial salaries! MV clarifies that in the sequel, embedded below.  He hammers home the point:

THE POINT is this – salaries are being made from the protection of the status quo – and THE STATUS QUO isn’t cutting it in the face of a worldwide apostasy.

…[W]hen the shepherds drop the ball, intentionally or not, it is the Church which suffers.  
This is why Catholic media have a DUTY, a moral obligation, to point out these shortcomings – to explain them, so Catholics in the pews wake up to the crisis, can understand it, take some kind of corrective action – at the very least in their own lives.

… It’s not an issue of how much a person makes – the issue is, however much it is, it’s good enough for them or they would go get another job. That said, they are now dependent, meaning NOT INdependent to be able to say what needs to be said about the deplorable problems in the Church – spiritually and temporally. This is what makes them – to use Pope Benedict’s words – “professional Catholics”. Not that they make money and earn their livings doing Catholic “stuff”, but that they are living off the institution – an institution they will not ever criticize, but is in dire need of having light shed on these problems.

But the Church of Nice doesn’t get it. One blogger (I’m not even going to mention his name, nor link to his post – you can find it if you want to, I’m sure) paints MV as a “controversial self-appointed prophet” and gives this analysis of MV’s personality flaws:

There is a certain type of personality that is never happy unless it has an enemy, and the enemy they like best are the ones around their own table… A little group gathers together and they all feel good about their group because they’re right… [T]hey begin to blame everyone else for being wrong, for being heretics, for being apostates. Then they feel snug and warm and good about themselves and their little religious group for a little while until the next “enemy” appears. Then they can go on the attack again with their smug self righteousness.

Hear that, all you faithful readers of this blog who seek the Truth, good liturgy, and a cleansing and renewal of the Church? That blogger is talking about YOU. He’s not just attacking MV; he’s saying that those of us who support MV, who agree with him, are just smug, self-righteous, nit-picking nattering nabobs out to stir the pot. We don’t care about the Church; we just care about making ourselves look good. He’s another of those who can say “I’m not against traditionalists; some of my best friends are traditional”, and then turn around and say it’s those sourpuss ol’ “rad-trad” traditionalists that give the rest of them a bad name. And who, might I ask, makes the call as to when a good “traditionalist” has crossed the line to being a bad “rad trad”?

That blogger’s little piece of psychoanalysis is purely judgmental. Now, “judgmental” is a word that is often misused, but I think it applies here. The author imparts motives to a broad group of people he cannot possibly know, and implies that he can discern exactly what is going on inside of our heads, that he can read our thoughts. “They feel good about themselves because they’re right” – how does he know this?! What was that about a “self-appointed prophet”?

So, was MV being “judgmental”, too, in supposing that dependency on salaries blinds some members of the Catholic mainstream media? Well, certainly MV cannot know what goes on in the minds of those individuals. But he can point to the correlation between salaries that are at least somewhat dependent on the person being on the bishops’ “approved” and the mainstream Catholic media’s reluctance to take the bishops to task for failures in leadership. Whether or not the blindness is intentional or subliminal is another question. The point is, the bishops are getting a pass from the mainstream Catholic media, and there is an apparent motive. The emperor has no clothes, but no one wants to say so.

The above-mentioned blogger is not the only one to misinterpret what MV said in the August 29 Vortex. Others say similar things. Sadly, I didn’t see any of them saying, “Maybe MV has a point. Maybe we should consider whether we’re actually turning a blind eye to the crisis in the Church…”

For a great rebuttal to the Church of Nice, be sure to read this post, and also watch the Vortex below, where MV clarifies the point.

The script:

There is a mass apostasy in the Church today. Most – meaning the vast majority of human beings who call themselves Catholic – simply reject the faith. In politics we call this treason. In religion we call it apostasy: the rejection of the tenets of your own faith.

But how do we speak of those in politics who do not reject the national beliefs – they actually accept them – BUT they aid and abet the traitors by NEVER talking about them or even acknowledging their existence?

This is the case in the Church these days with the very people you would imagine would feel moral obligation to do so – the Catholic media establishment. This was the point of last week’s Vortex where we spoke of Catholic media people and their salaries. No one cares what someone makes. That’s not the point.

THE POINT is this – salaries are being made from the protection of the status quo – and

THE STATUS QUO isn’t cutting it in the face of a worldwide apostasy. Many of these guys – heck all of them – do a great job laying bare the evil of the culture, the ignorance of other faiths in relation to Catholicism.  Again: not the point. THE Point is that that for all their fine work in those areas – directing people to the Church and away from a degenerate culture – what good is it if the Church they are coming to is rife with corruption, both moral and spiritual on a scale unprecedented in her 2000 years?

From a large number of homosexual clergy, to clergy who may not themselves be homosexual but are supportive of the agenda, to radial dissidents who preach garbage

Sunday after Sunday to milquetoast bored men who never want to rock the boat so they preach God is Love – but never tell you about God or explain what REAL love is.The

Church has been drowned under an ocean of pithy sayings and no real hard conviction.

And who is responsible for this? Well, while there is certainly enough blame to go around – us included – there is just no way that the bishops of the Church, in whom virtually every drop of authority and power resides, can escape a lion’s share of the blame. They are the leaders. Period. Did they CAUSE the initial problem? No, at least not THESE particular bishops – they were in seminary and were just baby priests when the wheels came off the wagon.

But they are responsible now for letting the status quo continue. Why don’t they remove errant priests from parishes? Why do they work so hard to marginalize anything traditional from emerging among the rubble? Why do they let rebellious clergy and nuns continue to run the show in parish after parish? Why do they give them such free reign in their chanceries over all kinds of departments that have massive influence over the daily life of the average unsuspecting Catholic.

Leaders are vested with power and authority and people who live under that authority expect it to be exercised in a way which protects them. They are too busy with their daily

lives in the secular world to do anything else but.

So when the shepherds drop the ball, intentionally or not, it is the Church which suffers.

This is why Catholic media have a DUTY – a moral obligation – to point out these shortcomings, to explain them, so Catholics in the pews wake up to the crisis, can understand it, take some kind of corrective action – at the very least in their own lives.

Wasn’t this the WHOLE point of what Mother Angelica used to do and say on EWTN when it was SHE who ran it and not the current leadership? She criticized almost non-stop the American hierarchy for their massive shortcomings.

But that sort of discussion has disappeared into oblivion at EWTN these days, replaced by the Church of Nice discussions that refuse to say ANYTHING controversial. And that same lead has been followed by every other major Catholic media outlet.

But when Catholic media WILL NOT talk about these things because they are beholden to the bishops for their paychecks – whatever amount they are makes no difference – then they are aiding and abetting in the rebellion – at least in this regard. And understand – beholden to them for their paychecks or incomes doesn’t mean the bishop actually signs the check. It means they are so closely tied to the establishment that to buck the system and criticize all this evil in the Church would absolutely mean the end of their careers and incomes – again, however much those incomes are.

The old saying don’t bite the hand that feeds you comes to mind.

It’s not an issue of how much a person makes – the issue is, however much it is, it’s good enough for them or they would go get another job. That said, they are now dependent, meaning NOT INdependent to be able to say what needs to be said about the deplorable problems in the Church – spiritually and temporally. This is what makes them – to use Pope Benedict’s words – “professional Catholics”. Not that they make money and earn their livings doing Catholic “stuff”, but that they are living off the institution – an institution they will not ever criticize, but is in dire need of having light shed on these problems.

We get emails here by the hundreds of horrible stories of people having fallen away from the faith because of things done in the Church regarding the faith – priests failing to tell them the truth of the faith and so forth. It’s inconceivable to us that all the other Catholic media types don’t get the same type of emails and letters and phone calls. If they don’t we’d be happy to share ours with them.

These spiritual calamities which have befallen the Church are the responsibility of the bishops. Period. That’s why Our Lord established a hierarchical Church, so we would be protected and fed by the shepherds. When that is not happening, of course the sheep have to say something.

But if some of the sheep with loudest bullhorns conveniently ignore the crisis because they have a dog in the fight – then that IN AND OF ITSELF becomes ANOTHER issue. The time for half-truths has come to an end and a simple honest look around the church these days reveals that sad reality.

Pray for the whole Church my fellow Catholics. We are being trampled by the culture, by and large, at the end of the day, because WE are allowing it – first and foremost, in our own ranks.