Anthony Esolen is a calm, cool, and collected one. So this little offering of his should make you think. If it does not, well, at least you were warned.
I know there are plenty of Catholics who are, in one
way or another, looking forward to the relentless institutional
persecution that is coming our way unless we surrender the One Thing
Needful to the secular left, and that is the family-destroying and
state-feeding beast called the Sexual Revolution, with its seven heads
and ten horns and the harlot squatting atop it. As I see it, these
Catholics belong to four groups.
First are the Persecutors. These people hate the Church, and that is why they remain ostensible members of it....In all conflicts between the State and the Church, the Persecutor will
not only side with the State; he will be glad to lead the charge....But why do I use the generic masculine pronoun here? She—she will
want to compel Catholic interns to assist in abortions, or even to
perform one; she will want to compel Catholic parishes to allow their
grounds and their halls to be used for the celebration of pseudogamy.
Religious freedom? The Persecutor respects neither God nor the
conscience of man....
Second, the Quislings. The Quisling does not hate the Church, but he
does not love her, either. He is a worldling and craves the approval of
the world. He believes in “the future,” and that means he is easy prey
for the peddlers of ideological fads...
...Then comes the Avenger. He has tried to live in accord with the Church,
and has received mainly contempt from her, or neglect, or persecution.
That has curdled him within, and he now hates the Church such as she is
more than he loves her as the bride of Christ....The Avenger enjoys rejection, enjoys loss, because that gives him a fine
opportunity to meditate upon his courage. Sometimes the Avenger is a
traditionalist. Sometimes he is a hater of the traditionalist. Whether
he is one or the other, he does not aim his rifle at the terrible
enemies of the Church from without: he does not fight the materialist,
the sexual revolutionary, the radical secularist, the globalist, the
corrupter of children, or the hawker of filth. He aims his rifle at
Catholics...
Yes, thank God, there is a 'good guy' in the mix:
...Last we have the Soldier. The Soldier complains about his superiors not
because they give him bad orders, but because they give him no orders at
all. ...The Soldier does not say, “I will fight, but my generals must be
perfectly wise.” Generals are never perfectly wise or perfectly anything
else. The Soldier does not say, “I will fight, but only if I do not
have to share the field with these others,” which others may be
traditionalists, the ecumenically minded, Protestants friendly to the
Catholic Church, or Catholics who disagree with him on some political
point. The Soldier is grateful for his brothers in arms, and if their
uniforms are a little different from his, he figures that the Lord of
Hosts will sort the matter out in the end.
The Soldier does not make light of the desperate situation. His name
is not Pollyanna. But he remembers the words of Jesus: “In the world you
will have tribulation; but be of good cheer, for I have overcome the
world.”...
Oremus. Flectamus genua.
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I’m of the view that there is in the Church a sort of ‘silent majority’ or at least a substantial number of people who go about their religious ‘business’ quietly. They attend Mass and the Sacraments religiously. They say their prayers and believe all that the Church has taught for millennia. They contribute to the Church (at least at the parish level) and do works of mercy without fanfare.
They are not caught up in fashions or factions either within the Church or outside. Their Faith is strong and they do not worry about the vagaries of hierarchs, priests or Popes. They figure it is Christ’s Church which He promised to safeguard and if there are problems He will sort it all out – sooner or later. They just want to get to Heaven. That’s work enough for one lifetime.
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