What's Wrong with the Church - in One Short Video!
This morning, a friend texted me a link to this video.
Let me preface this by saying that I have been to confession to Fr. Schmitz, and he’s a very good confessor. He also helped shepherd a friend of mine back into the Catholic Church. I am told his Scripture Study videos are excellent.
But this ain’t.
I am including, lightly edited, what I responded via text after I watched this thing …
MY TEXTS: I'm watching it. I’m a few minutes in. I want to slap him. The only thing Fr. Schmitz is lacking is sincerity, and once he learns to fake that, he'll be fine.
Meanwhile, methinks he doth protest too much. His showy earnestness and inappropriate eagerness is disturbing.
He's now going on about the "feminine genius". Holy crap.
I'm cyncical, but this strikes me as a paid promotion.
If he's being honest, he has an obligation to deal with the dishonest aspects of this movie and its producers, distributors and marketers, including problems with Tim Ballard, Jim Caviezel, the organization the movie is promoting and the dishonesty with which its “astroturfed” ticket sales are being promoted.
You know, despite what the movie’s producers and distributors say, criticism is not necessarily persecution. The refusal of mainstream players to touch this movie is not necessarily part of the great conspiracy.
Those crocodile tears at the end are simply too much.
This tells you more about Fr. Schmitz's fan base than it does about him.
So, on the one hand, the Church ignores this issue. On the other hand, when it deals with it, it makes it into a particularly sappy Oprah episode.
The editing is manipulative: the cuts to medium close ups, the empty chair at the end. The whole damn thing is manipulative! They’re turning a civilizational crisis into a cheap melodrama.
The sad thing is that Fr. S. has enough of a following that, if he addressed this issue head-on, without the maudlin insincerity, he could stir up a campaign to help. But he's using it as padding, not for trafficking and abuse, but for his own brand.
You know, if this were just an internet priest being glaringly insincere, it would be no big deal. But this is what Catholic media has come to, in the last 20 years that I’ve been involved in it.
This video is the state we're in in the Catholic-Evangelical Church. There's no intellectual content, no honesty, no willingness to deal with reality. And people gobble it up!
That video is like "You Satisfy the Hungry Heart with Gift of Finest Wheat" and other sappy church songs. It has the appalling artificiality, make-believe-concern and faux-spirituality of those horrible tunes. It is fundamentally opposed to what is real. It turns what is real and morphs it into a kind of costume or prop for a narcissistic musical.
This is part of the Great Unmasking. We are finding out who these people are. I am finding out why the Church has been such a problem for me since my conversion 23 years ago. Sometimes what you see is indeed what you get.
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Addendum - Yes, it’s good that people are talking about sex abuse and human trafficking. It is, apparently, a hard subject to deal with honestly and sincerely.