The Black Biretta (that's Catholic code, folks) thought highly of Solzhenitsyn. Here's why:
...His epic Gulag Archipelago mirrored the conditions in many seminaries across the country at that time
...Political dissenters and religious leaders who dared expose the nakedness of the state would be labeled as mentally incompetent. Ironically, anyone who dared defend the Magisterium and/or the Roman Pontiff were similarly diagnosed as 'rigid'
...We, too, experienced certain seminarians who were faculty favorites and who listened at closed doors and literally spied on their contemporaries just to make reports to their dark lords and masters in formation. Since most bishops would not see it as negative that a seminarian had healthy Marian devotion, the double-speak technique was used so that a poor unsuspecting candidate for Holy Orders would have a notation in his evaluation saying: POSSESSES POSSIBLE SIGNS OF OEDIPUS COMPLEX. If you were known to oppose women's ordination, your file listed you as a potential MISOGYNIST. If you were loyal and obedient to the Pope, you had a distorted perspective of authority which expresses itself in domineering PATRIARCHIALISM.
...Reading Gulag Archipelago opened my eyes to the tactics and strategies used by dissenters to either brainwash orthodox vocations or to prevent them from ever getting ordained
Nazis, Commies, Heretics....all the same.
Sadly, in some dioceses this is still the way things are. Thank God that in many dioceses it has, or is changing.
ReplyDelete