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When the Bible says ‘well done, good and faithful servant’, the master’s not commending his servant for believing in him, but for his fidelity to him. That’s the kind of faith we’re called to, and what Mother Teresa meant in saying we’re called to be faithful, not successful. /1
I think about this a lot, and have been pondering it especially in these times when I think our Catholic Faith is genuinely endangered, not by attacks from those who pose as liberals and progressives, but by those who pretend they’re on our side. /2
I think Niamh absolutely puts her finger on the problem when she talks of the ‘Trumpening’ of Irish Catholicism - https://twitter.com/theologianniamh/status/1264607326067097602?s=21 - and this has happened in England too, and in America of course, and doubtless elsewhere. Bad ideas and habit spread easily nowadays. /3
The people who come for us, waving whatever supposedly liberating banner they like today, can’t destroy us. They can cramp our style and they can reduce our numbers, but they can’t destroy us. We were born in the jaws of a wolf, and have 2,000 years’ experience of surviving. /4
No, we can’t be destroyed from without, but we can destroy ourselves from within. We can be seduced into allying ourselves with the enemies of our enemies, and we can make excuses for wickedness because it’s done by people we think are our friends. /5
Sometimes we’ll excuse our friends’ sins, and sometimes we’ll commit them ourselves, and justify them in the name of what we see as a more important good. And when we do this we betray our identity, betray who we’re meant to be, betray the one we’re meant to serve. /6
In recent decades, Catholics may have leaned too far left in a lot of cases, and may have slipped into certain left-wing mindsets that have turned a fair few Catholic charities into NGOs indistinguishable from their secular peers. Sure. I’ll buy that this happened. /7
But that’s not what happening now. Now, faced with attacks - apparent or real - from liberal and leftish quarters, too many of us are looking for allies on the right, whether its flavour be libertarian or autocratic or statist. /8
That’s where the real threat is, in this world of tribalised politics. Because in those alliances we can excuse or overlook horrors if they’ve not horrors that specifically target us and the things we hold most dear. /9
And if we overlook families torn asunder, children in cages, populations exposed to illnesses, poor people being forced to work in hellish conditions, you name it as long as our ‘freedoms’ or our unborn are safe from direct attack, then we betray who we’re meant to be. /10
There are many roads to such betrayal, and many of them are paved with good intentions, starting with simple things like innocuous questions that ease corks out of diabolical bottles. But however they start, they all end with us losing our identity, all lead to our defeat. /11
Anyway, it’s absurdly late and sleep is calling again, but I just felt I should get these nocturnal thoughts written down. We need to remember that sometimes the last war isn’t the same as the one we have to fight now, and that sometimes our greatest danger lies within. /ends
