Posted on 11/26/2015 6:00:34 PM PST by BlatherNaut
I have never been more than an occasional viewer of Fr. Robert Barron's Word on Fire chats. His recent televised interview with EWTN's Catherine Szeltner put paid to whatever interest I had.
Newly elevated to an auxiliary bishop in the sprawling L.A. diocese, now-Bp. Barron was in Baltimore for his initial appearance among the USCCB. Ms. Szeltner was on hand to ask how Catholics should respond to the slaughter in Paris. "How should they react?" she wondered, as if Catholics were dependent on guidance in their attitude toward carnage.
This was hardly a spontaneous interview. Chairs had been set. The bishop had not been caught on the run; he was not speaking off the cuff. On the contrary, it is standard practice to establish before air time which questions will be asked. Ms. Szaltner was wide-eyed with anticipation for an answer that had already been rehearsed. Here was the fledgling bishop's moment to affirm public solidarity with the mantra of love heralding the Year of Mercy. Which-the Vatican just announced-extends to Muslims.
Barron began with a self-reverential response that carried a hint of conceit for having been placed among the great and the good. Our new bishop has ascended above even just anger. The massacre aroused no outrage, not even a wince of distaste. Rather, his first words were on fire with ... nostalgia. He found the atrocity "especially poignant" because he had studied in Paris for three years. And because he remembered some of the locations involved, the attacks were "moving and poignant."
Not obscene, not demonic, foul or repellant. Poignant. It is a word appropriate for the death of a kitten. Applied to the murder and maiming of innocents, it is worse than unfitting. It is shameful.
He glided on to a serene tutorial on mercy, on the obligation to "respond to violence with love," and "to fight hatred with love." He enjoined Catholics to mercy and "a non-violent stance." Listening, I realized why I have never been able to cotton to Word on Fire: Barron is smarmy. His genial TV persona has none of the alert, intellectual muscularity of Fulton Sheen whose lead he presumes to follow. This time on camera, he confused Paris in 2015 with Selma, Alabama in 1965.
Sanctimonious appeal to non-violence is typical of middle-brow respect for the strategy of King - learned from Gandhi - minus any grasp of its genius. There is nothing commensurate between the cultural situation of the American civil rights movement and the events in Paris. To try to impose the conditions of that movement onto Islamic jihad is astonishing in its obtuseness. Mercy is vacated of all meaning when it is used as an excuse for blindness to history, or for inaction in the face of present realities.
King adopted Gandhi's strategy of non-violence because he understood the nature of the correspondence between American blacks and Indians under British rule. In their different ways and to different degrees, both peoples were subordinate. Their only tool against potentially crushing power was civil disobedience, the crucial tactic of non-violence. Without recourse to civil disobedience, non-violence is no more than passivity. Not only is the tactic impossible against Islamic terrorism, calls for non-violence invite further aggression.
Gandhi, trained as a lawyer in London, was intimate with the basic decency of British culture. His insistence on civil disobedience disarmed Britain only because the British were a people steeped in a Christian ethos, in a sense of fair play, and belief in human rights and the rule of law. As King knew, these animated the American soul as well. They do not apply to resurgent Islam.
Genocide was never the end game of either the British or the segregationist forces in the United States. Genocide - mitigated only by conversion or the slavery of dhimmitude - is an objective of Islam. Barron misleads his audience with bankrupt, Vatican-stroking noises about nonviolence.
The limited applications of non-violence were obvious when, in 1938, Gandhi advised Europe's Jews to practice nonviolent resistance against Nazi persecution. In some mystical way, this would supposedly result in Germany's moral reformation. Nearly eighty years later, Bishop Barron offers the same futile rationale - in the name of Christ crucified - to Catholics.
Inversion of circumstances between Islam and the West is as bizarre as it is reckless. Non-violence is the resort of the weak against the strong. By inviting Catholics to adopt "a non-violent stance" against jihad, Barron insinuates assent to inferiority. It is a failure of will dressed in Christian idiom. Call it submission.
In practical terms, what does it mean to respond with love to genocidal intention? How is non-violence applicable to a contest of civilizations in which one side is committed to the annihilation of the other? Wherein lies the moral force of non-violence against a bloodlust cultivated for fourteen hundred years?
Gandhi's notorious advice to Jews was tantamount to telling them to march quietly to the ovens. Whether satyagraha serves freedom or a final solution depends on the variables of situation. Bishop Barron's inability to discern critical distinctions makes his ministry dangerous.
He remains a cheery, good-natured promoter. Sadly, what he promotes is dhimmitude.
He found the Paris attacks “poignant”?
Because he studied there for 3 years?
Islam is closer to atheistic communism than religion - a political oppression encouraged by satan that requires the willing suspension of common sense and a brutal denial of dignity, liberty, even life to the differing belief.
I honeymooned in Paris, so it’s a special place for me. Poignant is not the word I’d use. I will withhold saying what I think about this bishop right now, but needless to say I am disappointed in him.
It happens that I was never compelled to jump on the Father Barron Express. Barron is too new and newbies have cost us a catastrophe from the White House.
If Barron was so positioned among the picker outers, who nominate these men for consideration, in Rome, I would chance to say that this appointment is no resume enhancer Barron.
Having said that, this article points to absolutely nothing of any magnitude worthy of such a silly rant, full of dramatic pronouncements that have nothing to do with Barron.
I’m sure he was hurt to see his old stomping grounds obliterated with bodies and explosives. We love the memories of our past. Obviously, Barron does too. Paris is a historic city, whose damage by loss of lives and treasure and mystique, and we are all grieving.
Brilliant piece. This woman just earned a new fan.
Ditto. His youtube videos are sufficient to form an unfavorable opinion. Non-violence is not a new theme for him (he even injects it into the Creation story, characterizing Creation as a "non-violent act of speech"). Mullarkey outlines the crucial distinctions which his superficial response to the Paris attacks fails to address.
Barron is too new and newbies have cost us a catastrophe from the White House.
As have ivory tower academics such as Fr. Barron (a theological liberal with a wide media reach who has established himself as an authority).
And turning the other cheek is to personal insults.
I don’t believe for a minute that extends to our reaction to an attack on others.
On the contrary, if we see someone being attacked, I believe it is our moral obligation to protect and defend them.
It’s THEIR responsibility to turn the other cheek. Not ours to do it for them.
"Catholics and Islam"
John R. T. Lamont
"...Islam is the only major religion that was founded with the specific purpose of destroying and replacing Christianity, and that these denials of Christian teaching are intended to further this purpose; they are not simply expressions of theological disagreement. No other major religion contains specific denunciations of the basic Christian doctrines in its sacred texts...
...To some extent the question of terrorism is a side issue when it comes to the establishment of sharia law. The centrality of terrorism as a tool for Islamic extremists simply reflects the fact that they do not control a large and powerful empire, as was the case in previous centuries. Because of this fact, they have to resort to terror as a means of armed attack. Under the early Caliphs and the Ottoman Empire, the expansion of Islam was pursued by regular, well-organised military campaigns. These involved the use of terror at times - as is often the case in all military conflicts - but military victory by regular armies was historically the main tool of expansion of sharia law. This form of conflict was not less destructive and horrible than terrorist campaigns; in fact, it was far worse..."
-----------------
Factual overview of Islam's violent expansionist tactics by Dr. Bill Warner:
It is unfortunate that the Bride of Christ is being led by imbeciles.
Nuke the effers.
Islam must be destroyed.
Here’s a slightly different view from Taylor Marshall that reflects St Thomas Aquinas’ writings that comes down a lot harder:
I agree that Barron has nothing to say here.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.