Cathocalypse
 

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Yet another sign that the apocalypse is nigh...

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/o...-religion.html


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Thanks Cameron. I think the link above is all set now...

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As a non-believer, I'm going to stay away from this except to say that I think "no hell, no dignity” is a derogatory thing to say about one's religion. Do they really think that without the threat of hell no dignity would exist? The same people say humans have no way to know what is good and what is evil without heaven. Because, as we all know, a belief in heaven has done a great job of turning away evil. My closest friend is a devout old-school Quaker. We talk about this and I know he doesn't believe the light inside comes from without.

John, good point about the fiction of hell.

Sounds like Dimes Square is cultivating in the young the tenets of Cathofascism.

On the fiction of hell, my first office mate at UCLA was a Jesuit fresh from service at the Vatican. His book, based on the Vatican’s mammoth library of religious history, concluded that hell didn’t exist and the devil was basically a misprint: A. Kelly, The Devil, Demonology, and Witchcraft.

Yours in Divinity,

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I confess (yes confess) I'm guilty of posting this thread without even reading the article. I skimmed it and saw gaudy descriptions of a micro-trend that used James Joyce's Dubliners as a point of reference (???); thought the title was catchy in a NYC kitsch-kind of way, gave a passing thought to the possibility that this was evidence of yet another manifestation of evangelical gangrene, came up with Cathocalypse as a thread title which I though was clever way of saying "Is this the second coming?" — and decided to post it. Poor decision, I confess.

My penitence is seeing this thread drop like a lead balloon.

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Yes, this New York Times op-ed portrays young, conservative Catholics as the so-called cool kids. But consider the source. It was written by one of the senior editors of First Things.

Of course Julia Yost would like to think that her social-justice-rejecting brand of Catholicism is trending among the hip and happening.

But the real trend in modern Catholicism is that droves and droves and DROVES of young people, in every neighborhood and demographic of New York—and the world at large—have already abandoned the Church due to:

1) the Church's hypocrisy in imposing strict sexual rules and terrifyingly harsh consequences for breaking them (in this world and the next) on everyone but the child-rapists among its own priests—while it simultaneously acts bewildered that the moral authority it once commanded has been undermined by this "do as I say and not as I do" approach; and

2) the glaring cognitive dissonance between the Good News of compassionate mercy and and the core mission of today's trad Caths: namely, to gain political power so that they can legislate their version of morality, instead of having to preach and persuade, since fewer people will sit still to listen to them anymore (see 1). Trad Caths want to deploy the power of secular government to make sure that women and queers suffer for having sex, and that the rich and comfortable are not too inconvenienced by paying for the needs of the poor and vulnerable.

Frankly, the political goals of the First Things crowd worry me. A lot. But the tiny number of young Catholics in Dimes Square? Don't they seem pretty insignificant, next to the growing number of former Catholics, everywhere?