Essays in Idleness

One tries to avoid Twitter, Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, and other filth of that sort. The challenge is often to suppress one’s curiosity, when it is being relentlessly teased. Sometimes the post might even be about you: addressed not to you, but to an electronic mob that is encouraged to form around you. Often a claim is made, which if true would “change everything,” although it is obviously not true.

No phase of communications technology, since Gutenberg and his wretched printing press — which put all the educated scribes out of business, and made “fake news” available to all men — is so irredeemably toxic as our present phase — although there is promise that things will get worse. Yet as ever with “progress,” there are good things, too: tiny wee good things, floating in the stench and sludge. (In my naiveté, perhaps, I aspire to be one of those things.) The hounds of progress call attention to the little gleaming bits, whenever they can spot them. But the “net” damage, to our social and spiritual peace — to simple goodness and our capacity to think straight — is on an astounding scale.

Consider, if you will, the following “tweet” by a gentleman who signs himself “Pope Francis” — called to my attention by an Idlepost reader:

“Let us dream, as a single human family, as fellow travellers sharing the same flesh, as children of the same earth which is our common home, each of us bringing the richness of his or her beliefs and convictions, each of us with his or her own voice, brothers and sisters all.”

Perhaps the pope’s account was hacked, but as the sentiment expressed is quite typical, I’m inclined to think it was genuine. My correspondent points to what we might call “the problem”:

“This is straightforward, clear apostasy — not on one particular point of doctrine, but on the entire Gospel and Magisterium.”

Yet it is only one dose of the poison that is administered hourly, not only from the Vatican, and not only from Church functionaries around the world. And when prominent nominal Catholics, such as Joe Biden, can call faithful believers (alike Christian, Jew, and Muslim) “the dregs of society,” and extol the faithless glib — he doesn’t expect bishops to contradict him. Where are we when he, like the pope in Rome, can even claim to be Catholic, as opposed to dress-up Catholics seeking personal advancement?

Is it any wonder that, according to plausible surveys, clear majorities of Catholics in North America, and in each of the European countries, are willing to accept such things as abortion and euthanasia “on demand”? Or casually acknowledge the redefinition of “family,” from what it had been, time out of mind? Or are further willing to vote for parties that advance these causes? It is not that they are confused by political slogans, although they often are. They have been taught wicked lies by those they think are in authority.

This is more significant than the depravities in which our more liberal clergy are frequently caught. The abortions and suicides might happen anyway, in our present “cancel culture,” or “culture of death”; but turning the moral order upside down, perpetuates the darkness.

How are Christians to behave, when they are radically disinformed about Church teaching? Which is Christ’s teaching, now largely unheard.