Perhaps we have become desensitized?
The always-excellent John Zmirak turns in a great article about a Catholic dissident, and kind of contrasts her against St. Therese de Lisieux, playing off the haughty self-importance of the dissident as a subtle lesson in the virtue of humility, which the saint of Lisieux exemplifies.
Perhaps the lesson was too subtle.
See, the thing with Zmirak is that he’s always funny. But as I read his article for the second time (which, I admit, was when I actually caught on to its satire), I realized that I had still managed to miss the joke. And in reading the comments to the article, I realized that it wasn’t the only one. (Others, it seems, missed the satire outright!)
Then came this clarifying comment from “Dr. Z”:
I guess I forgot how much CRAZY TALK we have all suffered from Catholic dissenters, enabled by a hostile media (for which Mrs. Somerville is an unimpressive shill). In normal times, Catholics might have caught on that irony was involved when a writer…
* Mentions Screwtape right up front.
* Calls the denial of absolution to the unrepentant ” a gross abuse of the sacrament.”
* Calls a 19-year-old a “helpless child.”
* Compares a willful, petulant, spoiled middle-aged dissenter to Therese of Lisieux.
* Says that prose as pitifully clunky as Somerville’s could have come from Cardinal Newman.
AND FINALLY:
* Sums up her worldview in an Irish drinking song that sets to music virtually every statement attributed to demons in Scripture.
You know, I really didn’t think I was being that subtle. I guess things are just that bad. God help us all….
I laughed at this (and hard), but at the same time I think Zmirak understates the case a bit.
For example: I’ve seen many columnists (and even a relative or two) denounce — in all seriousness — Catholic priests who have held the line and denied absolution to people who refuse to repent of certain sins (usually involving birth control, natch). A column in the National Post some years back by one Donna Laframboisie stands out in my memory as an example of this.
Which is to say that the shamelessness if liberal Catholics knows very few bounds. But it is also to say (in a kind of cruel inversion of Poe’s Law) that orthodox Catholics have been subjected to so much rubbish — from friends and family as much as from the MSM — about “progressive” “Catholic” ideals that even well-intended satire sometimes cannot be distinguished from that which it mocks.
We really have become quite desensitized.
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