EYES WIDE SHUT

Does it matter? -- losing your sight?... Sassoon

Ed. Note: Here's an e-mail reaction to last week's post.

Kudos for skewering Dolan and Cekada. A home run.  They can't wriggle out after that. (How do you spell hypocrisy? Simple: S-G-G.) I hate to say it but you are wasting your time. No matter how hard you try you will never change the minds of their blind acolytes. Normal Catholics cannot stomach S.G.G. after a couple of years, but the Gertrudians are abnormal. They relish the circus of reinvention and double standards. It pleases them to think their leaders are "special." The few good people who were there left in disgust. The dregs of humanity remain with their "depraved indifference" to all the unacceptable behavior. It makes me want to tear my hair out when I think about how these "Catholics" refuse to see the truth!

We operate under no illusions about our fellow man. We live in post-moral America where core values have disappeared. This is the land where Bill Clinton continues to exercise a major influence in spite of all his tawdry prevarication, and that harridan of wife can run for president in spite of Travelgate and all the other messy scandals that trace her trajectory over American life. A decent society would have driven these two rogues into hiding for the rest of their lives once they left the White House. Better still, a decent society would have cast them into the outer darkness after the first term.

The hard fact is, we live in neither a "shame culture" nor a "guilt culture." Our meritless leaders no longer find it necessary to purchase men's good esteem with proven virtue, nor do they yearn after the enjoyment of a quiet conscience. In truth, they have no respect for public opinion. What's more, they take comfort in knowing that a jaded, amoral, celebrity-obsessed populace won't punish their transgressions. How, then, can Trad World be all that different from the larger society in which it exists? That would be asking too much of folks with limited education, perverse judgment, and an underdeveloped conscience.

Insofar as we've received similar e-mails from other fans, this may be the time to explain why we continue to blog about the sharp-elbowed Terrible Trio who still manage to hang on by their nails after so many unsavory revelations. Our primary aim, everyone should realize, is not to change anybody's mind. Mind-changing is secondary, and our expectations for it are modest.  Our principal objective is to get on the record the truth about the cult masters, to offer a different narrative to challenge their one-sided, highly colored account of themselves. Simply put, our aim is to make available an alternative view, supported by unvarnished, unassailable facts and robust analysis. What the consumer does with all our documentation depends on his/her own moral formation and innate sense of decency.

That said, to profess we have little interest in changing minds would betray a lack of candor. There is a very tiny cultie cohort whom (we think) we might be reaching. To identify this exceedingly small population, we first must give you an ethnogeographical tour of the foreboding region in Trad World that we call Tradistan, where the cult masters reign in terror:

All Tradistan is divided into three parts. The Sede Troglodytes, the majority, inhabit the first and largest part. Squatting in filthy caves and putrid holes, terrified of the light and the fresh air of truth, they are a cowardly, foul, and entirely blind species, feeding off their viper masters and screeching like bats when good people oppose the cult. The second part, half as large as the territory of the Sede Trogs, is occupied by the Moral Pygmies, uncouth cave dwellers like the Trogs. Capable of some barely articulate speech, they are blind in one eye, with thimble-sized crania but large oral cavities for echoing their masters' propaganda; neurologists have discovered in their pea brains the absence of the right temporo-parietal junction, the portion of  the normal human brain where the moral compass is found. The Traddie Scatophagi occupy the third and smallest part of Tradistan. Their numbers are very few but not zero. They are not blind, merely myopic. In their search for the true faith, they stumbled into Tradistan, got lost, and came under the deadly spell of the cult masters.  Enslaved, they were told to believe they must consume cultic waste by the gallon-load as the price of sanctification.  They dwell uneasily on Tradistan's fringes, haunted by the gnawing suspicion that something is very wrong with its clergy. Of all these three races, the least depraved are the Scatophagi, for they have not quite yet surrendered their souls along with their wallets.

The first population hardly seems humanoid, let alone human. Examples of the species are found in many of the commenters raging against our posts.  The second is best illustrated by a scapegrace of our acquaintance. He and his brow-beaten woman conspicuously left the cult in late 2009 after witnessing an alarming instance of Dannie's bad form. This ethical dwarf vowed never to return again. (As token of his constancy, he advertized to one of the Readers his self-proclaimed rectitude.) Later, he returned to the cult masters because "they do a good job" of putting on a show. The Moral Pygmies are as lost as the Sede Trogs, and more culpable, for at least they have one good eye they could use. No one can redeem either one of these degenerate groups.

Hope is not lost for the third race, because its members' consciences, albeit weak, have already been pricked. We believe our laser-surgery posts can help the Scatophagi see the horror of the mortally dangerous SW Ohio cult (and get them on a better diet as well). Although we do not blog with them uppermost in our minds, we are sure that some, as they read our exposés, have grown in doubt. Eventually the burden of accumulated misgivings may be enough to move one or two of them to affirm: IT'S OKAY TO WALK AWAY. But we won't be put out if they don't. You see, we face the same dilemma with them as traditional Catholics do with good friends and dear relatives who still cling remora-like to the Novus Ordo.

All of you know it's impossible to fathom how outwardly decent, God-fearing people, who sense something's amiss, will not walk away from the Novus Ordo's destruction of the liturgy, teaching of outright heresy, hatred of tradition, Modernist leadership, and brutalization of sacred architecture. If you were to grab them by their lapels and cry aloud, "Open your eyes, you fools! You know this is a all wrong! You've said it yourselves! Get out now!" they still would remain in their hideous temples with their malformed, debased Father Bobs and Father Bills. If you allow the criminal complacency of the blind get to you, as it seems to be sorely distressing our frazzled correspondent, you're just a Xanax away from a fatal attack of the screaming meemies.

Well, that's no way to run a resistance, and besides it's bad for your mental health. Pistrina's content with putting the truth out in plain sight:

Tony Baloney is neither a scholar nor a theologian; ignore everything this blundering non-entity says;

Li'l Dan's priestly and episcopal orders are by no means certainly valid, and he must seek re-ordination; stay away from the uncertain sacraments he offers until he gets fixed;

the rector is an inconsequential, whiny gas-bag, wrong at every turn, and the swampland pesthouse with its loser completers like the Skipper, Scut the Prefect, the Frenchman, Lurch, Squirmin' Herman, and the Toady should not be called a Roman Catholic seminary; don't waste one red cent of your hard-earned money on mammonite "champagne wishes and caviar dreams."

Our Bottom Line: If some culties receive the grace to see the light, then they have a chance. If not, they're in deep doo-doo. Either way, we've done our sacred duty, and we'll continue doing it to make sure the truth about the cult masters is out there for any soul who will open his eyes and see.