Today’s post is at One Peter Five: The Culture is Wrong, and The Church is Right: Zmirak’s New Book Reviewed.
Scurry out and buy two copies of John “Bad Catholic” Zmirak’s The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. Keep one for yourself, and give the other to your priest or clergyman (despite the title, this book is for all Christians). Be quick: get it to him before the election.
If you have a clergywoman, buy three copies, because she might throw the first one out the window.
Cringe at that (anemic) joke, did you? Then, boy howdy, do you need Zmirak’s book. Hyper-sensitivity to trivial and imagined sleights, and the notion that any disagreement to the prevailing progressive ideology is immoral, are the hallmarks of our age. It’s pleasant to discover somebody who isn’t buying it.
Here is a partial list of the politically incorrect opinions Zmirak outlines. Catholics, and by extension all Christians, can’t support socialism. Catholics cannot support abortion in any form: Catholics can’t be personally against abortion but be happy to vote for it for the sake of others who do support it. Catholics must especially eschew artificial means of preventing conception. Catholics can own guns and use them to defend themselves against maniacal intruders, even if those maniacal intruders are amnesty-seeking immigrants, and even if those amnesty-seeking immigrants are Muslims. Catholics don’t have to support wide open borders, nor do they have to believe in one-world government.
Catholics can support the investment of capital, and can support personal property rights. Catholics can even believe profit is good, while simultaneously professing the love of money is root of all evil. Catholics must believe same-sex “weddings” are evil and they must not participate in them. Catholics must also say that homosexual acts are sins that cry out to heaven. Catholics can support a just war and the death penalty. Catholics can be proud of the Crusades. Catholics can and should support good science. But no Catholic is obligated to support bad science, and this is so even if it the Pope himself who is touting the bad science.
No Catholic is obligated to believe everything the Pope said, especially if what he said is a flippant remark made on a low-oxygen aluminum tube hurtling through the atmosphere. Personal incredulity is even more justified if the remark appears to go against centuries of Magisterial teaching.
No Catholic must profess that every Pope is above average…
Go there to read the rest. Bonus Patton quote at the end!
Hooray!! This is exactly what we needed to hear. Confirmation that we are right. Confirmation they are wrong. Encouragement to stand and fight them to the death of their liberal, pagan, Vatican II ideology. I ordered the book. Where do we enlist?
I don’t know of John Zmirak and his book sounds interesting. However, while I am no theologian I think he is wrong that the Ordinary Magisterium of the Church is not infallible. This is a matter of debate between sedevacantists and recognize and resist Catholics and there is much written on the interwebs about this.
Here is a quote from Pope Leo XIII
“Wherefore, as appears from what has been said, Christ instituted in the Church a living authoritative and permanent Magisterium, which by His own power He strengthened, by the Spirit of truth He taught, and by miracles confirmed. He willed and ordered, under the gravest penalties, that its teachings should be received as if they were His own. As often therefore, as it is declared on the authority of this teaching that this or that is contained in the deposit of divine revelation, it must be believed by everyone as true. If it could in any way be false, an evident contradiction follows: for then God Himself would be the author of error in man. The Fathers of the Vatican Council (I) laid down nothing new, but followed divine revelation and the acknowledged and invariable teaching of the Church as to the very nature of faith, when they decreed as follows: ‘All those things are to be believed by divine and Catholic faith which are contained in the written or unwritten word of God, and which are proposed by the Church as divinely revealed, either by a solemn definition or in the exercise of the ordinary and universal Magisterium.”
Here is a link to the web page http://www.the-pope.com/magchuco.html
I would also have to disagree that a real pope could be a heretic. Again, there is much written about this on the internet. Sedevacantists vs. R&R once again.
I knew it! Catholics need others to tell them how to think and what to believe. To be a good Catholic is to go buy the book. (Am I being politically incorrect here? I want to be righteous. To be righteous nowadays is to be politically incorrect.)
Hmm… does Magisterial teaching say anything about the atmosphere?
Right… no Catholic is obligated to believe what other people say, especially if what they say is against ones’ own belief, whatever the belief is.
JH this is their problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vh-wEXvdW8
Joy, Flanders & Swan forgot that the Han Chinese are smartest. ^_^
Even excessive love of money cannot possibly be “the” (exclusive) root of “all” evil. That would imply an obsessively monomaniac type of ethics.
The better interpretation, found in several recent bibles is rather “a root of all kinds of evil”.
http://biblehub.com/1_timothy/6-10.htm
It’s like something you’d hear from a drunk slob in a dank bar at 4 in the morning. The fact is modern American conservatism has very little in common with Catholicism. Conservative Catholics are simply experiencing Protestant Anglicization. The only thing Catholic on this site are the weekly visits from Thomas Aquinas, and even then only in a backwards attempt to male the case for Evangelical-esque literalism.
JMJ
JMJ,
It’s not that you’re wicked or naturally bad, It’s knowing you’e foreign that’s driving you mad!
You don’t have to be stupid to be native, Joy.
JMJ
The responses here remind me of what would happen if you stood up during a gender sensitivity seminar and declared loudly that there are only two sexes.
Briggs,
You can lie to yourself and say that you are a Catholic. But a Catholic you are not. The Pope is God on earth. If you are a Catholic then you follow your leader, if you don’t you are not a Catholic.
I have rejected Catholicism when I was very young, around 12, because I couldn’t support the hypocrisy of that Church. On this earth all religion are false prophets.
The only real faith or spirituality is your own individual work and body something that no one can effect or touch.
At this moment you are heading directly to the idiotic hell that you created.
For sure you haven’t seen the truth of God since you persist toward your own doom trying to gain some materialistic benefit from your false beliefs
I’ve seen the light! I too once thought the Pope was God on earth. Now I see that it’s Sylvain.
Sylvain, our local bishop agrees with you. (I am not kidding.)
Sylvain, if you were taught that the Pope is God, then the Church you left was a straw-church. Some remedial reading is in order, starting with the Baltimore Catechism ( http://www.catholicity.com/baltimore-catechism/ ). This should help to disabuse you of some of the outrageous falsehoods you’ve been taught.
Faith in the Church is faith in Christ, not in the Pope or any other member of the clergy. Frankly, if we the members of the Church were all there was to it, it wouldn’t have lasted a month. But God is the true head of the Church, and the Pope is his vicar (or, as he often calls himself eg on encyclicals, the servant of the servants of Christ.
you are making a common error. You presume that whatever the people do must also be the doctrines and/or dogmas.
Somehow I have the impression that the religious folks here are real proud of The Don. Sadly this is not a sarcasm.
Sylvain–
This is a book for folks who reject the modern and false Catholic Church, Pope Francis and all the socialist nonsense that goes on under the rubric of Social Justice, i.e., Democrat Party platform. The modern Catholic Church has effectively rejected God and put it’s faith in Man. From what you say, Sylvain, your problem may also be with the Modern Catholic Church. Buy the book and see for yourself.
My problem is with any Church
Confirming my thesis.