Naked without Shame
The Anti-Witness of the Unmasked
I continue to read the book I’ve been reading, written by a Super Catholic, covering certain segments of the Post War Revivalist Catholic movement in America.
The book is remarkable for its tone deafness. It reminds me of how placidly self-satisfied my Super Catholic friends and I were, before COVID-and-the-Coup upset everything and led to the Great Unmasking.
I’ve already written on examples of this smug tone deafness, some of my last posts dealing with this group’s
Chauvinistic Self-righteousness and Gullibility
Their failure to Get the Memo that more EWTN outlets and Scott Hahn CDs will not convert a soul, given what the Great Unmasking has revealed about them.
And today I kept reading in this book the once popular phrase “Truth, Beauty and Goodness”.
Truth, Beauty and Goodness are the Transcendentals of Greek philosophy. And, rightly, my fellow pop-intellectual Catholics, from about the 1990s through the 2010s, used to refer to Truth, Beauty and Goodness as aspects of God and as qualities that draw us to the Faith.
They were quite right to do so. These are living elements of the “transcendental realm” that are among us, and that we experience every day.
Jesus says He is the Truth, and that “everyone who is of the truth hears my voice” and “the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth”;
Beauty is clearly one of the fascinating things that excites our wonder, from the beauty of creation to great music and literature, leading any sensitive soul to the “transcendent realm”, to the world beyond;
and Goodness is what we all strive for, what we all are moved by, what we all know to be the goal of life and the heart of Love.
So this was a tool of evangelization that worked. Even atheists or non-Christians could join us in honoring and serving the True, the Beautiful and the Good.
But here’s the problem.
The Super Catholics now witness against all three.
Donald Trump not only promulgated the Big Lie, but lies defiantly every time he opens his mouth; and they continue to support him. So much for Truth.
He is vulgar and morally ugly, as are his followers. So much for Beauty.
These same Super Catholics refused to wear a thin cloth over their mouths, and also refused get vaccinated in order to protect their most vulnerable neighbors, over a million of whom have died in America alone. So much for Goodness.
But the book I’m reading, written in 2024, is oblivious to all of this. It’s as if it’s still the 90’s and all we need are some EWTN VCR tapes at Blockbuster. That would “renew the culture”!
True to the fable, the Emperor, strutting around naked, pretending to wear his “new clothes”, struts about even more proudly, patting himself on the back for being so well dressed, while everyone staring at him has long ago figured out he’s in his underwear.