Gaslighting and lies anyone/?

 Manipulating people by gaslighting and by ridicule.

a lesson on how good, loyal folk can be manipulated by sociopaths and narcissists. 

Right now, when the Pope is spreading confusion by contradictory statements,manipulations, lies, gaslighting,  and by saying both A and B at different times: so that if you quote A YOU are the problem because he also said B... if you object, you are accused of of disloyalty by his minions. 

There is a lot of similar gaslighting and lies are going on in the latest shennanigans of the so called Synodal meeting in Rome.

 The assumption is that meetings let all have a say. But anyone who has been at some such meetings know this is nonsense: They are to manipulate you into group think.

We had done to us in the 1960s and 1970s... a meeting supposed to represent everyone stressing that everyone should give their honest opinion... but the meeting is run by those with an agenda and includes extras who are known to agree with the predetrmined agenda. So even if you suspect many in the group agree with you, they keep quiet in the face of criticism... Don't disagree with them, or you are called disloyal or rigid or a hundred variations of stupid... easier to keep quiet.

Am I being cynical? Yup. 

The dirty little secret about all this synodality stuff is that these meetings have the conclusion predecided by those running it: they are a sham meetings. 

We saw Pope Francis pull this trick a couple of years ago in a meeting about the family, where the plan was to have the bishops approve of allowing divorced and remarried outside the church to receive the sacraments although living in sin. 

Some bishops notieced the already prewritten report (italics mine) on the meeting included this, so they made it known and that part was removed: But someone snuck it in in a small footnote, and voila soon the Pope was telling bishops on the phone it was okay, pointing to the footnote to support his opinion. 

Yup. The footnote trick of sleezy crooked lawyers, and no one said: Wait a second. Because loyalty to the Pope. (italics and sarcasm mine).

Ah, but is he pope when the election was irregular and manipulated by a powerful group who wanted to change the church? Not my area of expertise, but a lot of people are questioning it because it was politically manipulated by the StGallen group.

what about now? Is unity and niceness is more important than calling out a liar? That is what we see in the Trad community: Respect above all else.

 Mr Matt, call your office

Censoring Viganò? Michael Matt responds. pic.twitter.com/nlHzNNmXeh

— Michael J. Matt (@Michael_J_Matt) October 2, 2023

Sigh.

the latest atrocity?

when asked point blank by four important bishops if he supported blessing of gay couples, a ceremony that the press and the woke are insisting is the church's stealth way to approve of gay marriage, the Pope, after saying marriage is sacred, went on to ignore common sense and reality when he said no this is charity and individuals could discern by themselves whether or not to do it. LINK

Excuse me, I am a physician.

I often treat people whose behavior is literally killing themselves. 

I am charitable and try to help them, but I would not be a good physician if I said: OK go ahead and pig out on junk food to someone who is obese, or it's okay to have a double chocolate shake to a diabetic, or don't tell a person with COPD to stop smoking, or say hey, one or two drinks are okay to a known alcoholic, or tell a person or a couple joints on a weekend won't hurt you, when you suspect that the person is into all sorts of drug use because his grandmother keeps losing her pain pills from her purse.

this might work for ordinary folk, but we docs know that there are some who will twist what we said to justify their dangerous behavior.

Ditto with sexual practices that endager one's health.

So do you follow common sense and recognize reality, or do you pretend everything is sweetness and light and evil does not exist.

So the Pope pretends what he is doing is charity, but what he is actually doing is sending a message that wink wink it's okay to have sex outside of marriage, and in today's world that means people will think the Pope said that there is nothing is wrong with promiscuity... 

because it might hurt their feelings if you say: do this you are endangering your health (STDs, MPox), your family, your children's welfare, or in this case endangering your soul

Nagasaki and Auschwitz

 Yesterday was the feast day of the Polish priest Maximilian Kolbe, who ended up in Auschwitz because his Catholic newspaper/magazine opposed the Nazis.

He is considered a martyr, not for his politics, but because when the Nazis decided to punish prisoners for an escapee from the concentration camp, by starving ten men to death, he volunteered to take the place of one of them, a married man with children.

Since Nazis hated priests more than Jews or political dissadents, they let him do this.

So a real peson. 

But the irony is that the story of his death is not just a shiny Catholic one dimensional story: because his story is echoed in several literary works.

He was one of the inspirations behind the fictional priest in the play the Deputy, who questions the silence of the Pope at a time when Jews and other innocoent people are being massacred by the Nazis. The background is that this is the source of many who condemn Pope Pius XII, which is not a surprise since it was essentially written as a broad side by a communist against a Pope who had of course opposed the Nazis but often quietly but was also a leading critic of the communists at a time when the left was silent against Stalin's terror state.

But it is a real question for us is: Do you openly condemn the powerful tyrant, seeing yourself as a proud hero in your own eyes, but leading to the massacre of not just yourself but a lot of innocent people, or do you quiestly try to save as many innocent people as possible?

So Father Kolbe is remembered to remind folk that the Nazis murdered 3000 priests in their concentration camps.

But in the West, it is often forgotten that Father Kolbe spent several years in Japan, in Nagasaki, trying to spread the faith.

And because of this, he is a character in several Japanese stories by Nobel prize winner Shasuku Endo: especially in two the the short story collection LINK

Endo was a Catholic, baptised as a child, but he also has Catholicism and religion and the question of suffering is the theme in many of his novels.

BenedictineInstitute has an essay about Kolbe and Nagasaki as seen in one of Endo's stories:

The noted Catholic novelist Shūsaku Endō modeled the character Mouse in his 1963 short story “Fuda-no-Tsuji” in part on Fr. Kolbe. Like many of Endō’s short stories, it flits between the present and the past: both Tokyo of the 1930s and of the Edo period when thousands of Catholics were martyred in Japan .... The protagonist Inoue knew Mouse as a German monk (Kolbe’s surname was German) who worked at his university, but he clearly had little respect for the weakling. Decades later, at a reunion with his classmates, he finds out that Mouse had been put in a concentration camp where he offered himself in place of a condemned prisoner and was starved to death. Endo’s Inoue reflects: “and if, in fact, Mouse had died for a friend—for love—then that was not a tale from the long-gone days of the Edo period, but an incident that commanded a place in the man’s own heart.”....

You might be more familar with Endo's works from this movie.

Here is a discussion by Martin Scorsese about the film:

The book and film Silence is not just about faith, but about forgiveness and trying to do the right thing. Would you die for your faith? Ah, but would you deny your faith in order to save the lives of others? And if so, would God forgive you for this horrific sin?

Endo's stories often have the theme not just of questioning where God is in suffering, but about can your sin be forgiven? Is God the wrathful king or is he like Buddha, kind and forgiving, and a compassionate father welcoming the prodigal son?

there is a lot of crappy superficial stuff out there about religion in the PC world of western culture. Being fundamentalist means you never have to say you doubt, not just with Christians or Muslims but fundamentalism of the new atheists.

but in Catholicism, doubt and questioning and being in a dark night of the soul is considered part of one's life journey to holiness (or the opposite: such things lead many to an atheism that is not so much denial of God but telling God you are so mad at him you refuse to believe in him to punish him: so there!).

Too often people of faith are shown in films/tv etc in the west as cultists with wide staring eyes that don't blink, rather than as human beings.

But the humans I know who were killed (for serving the poor in an African civil war) were not wide eyed cultists but people who chose to continue their work despite the danger.

and that decision was made, not from a fanatic type faith but in a humble decision that was renewed every day to continue the work of caring for the sick and running schools despite the danger because that was their duty in life, that was how they served God.