SNAP Leader Blaine Comes Unglued In Search of Media Attention: ‘Nothing’s Changed’ in Catholic Church’s Handling of Abuse Cases

Everybody in San Francisco loves Barbara Blaine!  VIVA BARBARA!  VIVA!  GORA!

Frank Lostaunau, I recall you calling me a "Ho" when I posed on another site. That says a lot about Barbara Blaine supporters.

Publion,
I was thinking one day about what Michael Voris believed about attacking the church: He believed is
was a "divide and conquer" strategy.  I thought about this for a while…Do you think it has been more of
a "sub-divide and conquer" strategy?  Think about it.  Not only our religion, but also our various
cultural/ancestry backrounds can be mocked (with no hate speech consequences).
The "priest" issue, while it has had an enormous media and financial impact, was really the
last segment of the "sub-division". 

I am not greatly familiar with the Voris work and have not followed its career. But let me offer these thoughts on ‘Anonymous’s question from 440PM today.
 
American ‘Progressivism’ began around 1900 with a strongly Christian (but Protestant) element: whether Teddy Roosevelt’s ideas of Americans adopting a muscular approach to spreading both Democracy and (Protestant) Christianity around the world, or Woodrow Wilsons’ insistence that America must pursue what he saw as her vocation to make the world safe for Democracy (Wilson was not as overtly Christian as TR, but he had a missionary-like intensity to what he saw as his vocation as President and Great Man to lead America into a world leadership role in the fresh new modern 20th century, and Christianity was a major part of his concept of America).
 
But in later 1960s, the progressive/liberal (in the 1930s FDR had begun using the term ‘liberal’ rather than ‘progressive’ to define the Democratic Party) approach began to run afoul of any traditional sort of Christianity (and Catholicism) as it sought to embrace the demands of new political demographic groups of that era. The Boomer subset of Flower Children were particularly interested in a much freer approach to sex (as had numerous Progressives in the later 19th and early 20th century) and they emphasized individual ‘freedom’ over any sorts of traditional ‘commitment’ and had a rather sanguine approach to ‘change’ – equating it almost by definition with ‘improvement’ and giving no thought to consequences and prudence (which sort of goes with the territory when you’re young … I recall Mary Hopkin’s marvelous refrain from her 1968 or 1969 song Those Were the Days: “We’d live the life we choose, we’d fight and never lose, for we were young and sure to have our way” – I think for a while she knocked the Beatles off the No. 1 spot in the charts with that song, and at that time the Beatles were putting out some pretty impressive stuff).
 
This trend had been given a certain general public credibility when – in the mid-1950s – the Southern Jim Crow States had tried to block Martin Luther King’s campaign to eradicate Jim Crow by claiming the need to slow down, be prudent, and look at consequences. By placing prudence and deliberation and a careful look at consequences into the service of continuing segregation and Jim Crow, the Southern elements had thrown prudence, deliberation, and concern for consequences into a bad light. And along came the Boomers in the 1960s … youth is not the period of life when prudence, deliberation and concern for consequences come naturally. There is, I would say, a strong need for some adult supervision or else – like eager young puppies – they will run out into the traffic (and if you don’t keep a good grip on the leash, take you with them).
 
Some significant forms of post-MLK (he was sidelined by black vanguards by 1966, as well as by LBJ – for not supporting that President’s war in Vietnam) black thought became enmeshed with European and Maoist ‘revolutionary’ thought.
 
But it was radical feminism that took the lead here, because – if you read Catharine MacKinnon’s 1989 how-we-did-it summa Toward a Feminist Theory of the State – as early as 1971 radical feminists were looking to old Soviet ‘philosophy’ to provide a ready-made philosophical basis for an agenda which even then they recognized would have to help de-validate and de-construct substantial chunks of American and Christian tradition: the concept of marriage and the commitment it requires; the concept of the family; the very notion of human-nature itself; as well as a recasting of abortion as a right required if an individual is to be ‘free’ (curiously, the argument here basically required the federal government to somehow address the non-political evolutionary reality that the female of our species will wind up with any possible ‘conceptum’ issuing from a sexual encounter while the male gets to ‘walk away’ from the sexual encounter … this was cast as an intolerable condition – a denial of ‘freedom’ and ‘equality’ that the federal government is – as a matter of constitutional responsibility – required to remedy). Not only certain elements of American Progressive thought, but the Soviet State itself in the early, Leninist years (it backed away after it realized the consequences of the whole thing) also sought such re-arrangements, for the good of the State and that State’s Revolution.
 
As you can see from this highly compressed historical sketch, the Democrats (and the ‘liberals’ generally) were being ineluctably pulled in a direction away-from American and Christian tradition as that tradition and cultural Shape had evolved throughout the history of the country from its Founding and toward a repetition here of Continental revolutionary secular materialism – it was the only way to ‘justify’ the tremendous shift away from traditional concepts in order to create social and cultural ‘space’ for the new demographic groups’ agendas and demands.
 
And among the various Christianity-based religious organizations, the Catholic Church was the largest. And the Church had already demonstrated its ability to influence public debate in the early 1980s when it had spear-headed the Reagan-era effort to re-valorize nuclear weapons.
 
But the Church was herself also riven from within. Vatican Two, which delivered its texts right smack dab in the middle of the 1960s (1965 – the same year as the Voting Rights Act which completed LBJ’s initial burst of federal legislation giving shape to MLK’s long campaign), created a many-faceted fission-reaction within American Catholicism. While there were numerous ‘surface’ elements having to do with the look of liturgical and sacramental practice and traditional pious observances, there were also deeper rifts opened up by the question of ‘social justice’: how do you define it, how does the Church and how do Christians fit into it and what are their responsibilities toward it? Quickly, there developed within the American Catholic community a division similar to that in American politics: a ‘liberal’ wing (that easily shaded into a ‘revolutionary’ wing) and a ‘conservative’ wing. Curiously, this division was more pronounced within the ranks of the clergy and Sisterhood and professoriate than within the Catholic laity at large.
 
It was only a matter of time before the Catholic ‘liberals’ and the political ‘liberals’ found each other. While it would be nice to think that the Catholic liberals remained sufficiently Catholic to neutralize some of the secularism and relativism characteristic of political ‘liberalism’, it seems to me that just the opposite type of dynamic took place.
 
Anyhoo, here we are and the question was about Mr. Voris’s approach. I certainly agree that a society and a culture needs a strong sense of morals in order to Ground and Boundary and Shape (call this triad ‘GBS’ for short) itself and the milieu and ethos it creates, in which its young will be given their early training.
 
And or morality to work among humans as they have developed, I think it is absolutely necessary that GBS be anchored solidly in a multi-plane or multi-planar reality. As engineers know, if you are going to anchor some quantum solidly, you have to reach above or below the plane on which that quantum is standing: if you are going to build a building, then you have to dig below the surface for the foundations, and the higher the building, the deeper the foundations have to be (assuming also that you are anchoring in solid earth or rock and not in sand or swampy mush). You can’t simply build a building with the first floor on the plane of the ground-surface that the building will occupy; you have to go beneath that plane for the foundation.
 
For morality – or more specifically – moral standards, the Christian and Catholic building-approach is to  anchor ‘up’, in a Higher Plane or Higher Reality. You have to , I think, because if you don’t then the ‘authority’ of your moral standards remains as transient and fungible as anything else in this human-historical dimension. If – and this is pretty much the bottom-line of secularist thought nowadays – the selection of moral standards  is simply a matter of a general human group consensus as to what moral-standards they are going to embrace as a group and enforce upon each other, then the authority of those standards is only as reliable as the ‘consensus’ that brought it into being (sort of like Supreme Court decisions: a case is only permanently decided until a new coalition of Justices comes along to change it).
 
And if there is also a sense – as there is in modern secularist relativism – that each individual is ‘totally free’ to choose his/her own moral standards so long as they don’t harm anybody else (the kicker here is how you define ‘harm’), then it becomes even harder to achieve any consensus at all. And the ‘authority’ of the moral standards based on that even shakier consensus is even more fragile and fungible.
 
So I support the idea that you need a Multi-Planar Reality to ground moral standards. But then humans also need to feel that somebody or Somebody ‘up there’ is helping them through life. This abiding human characteristic can’t be written off to ‘superstition’ or ‘primitiveness’ (although the content of some imaginings of that Somebody can surely veer into the primitive).
 
I can even understand Mr. Voris’s call for a more “muscular Catholicism” – during the 1970s ‘tolerance’ shaded rather strongly into relativism, and many of the hierarchy tried to accommodate that massive shift in the popular culture of the day, abetted – it must always be remembered – by a national government that bipartisanly was trying to have it both ways: keep a Shape to American culture while also making as much space as possible for new agendas and demands.
 
The Voris call here echoes the Protestant Social Gospel movement of the very early 1900s, a Progressive element translated into Protestant Christianity in that era, calling for a more typically American and pragmatic (William James’s influence here, and later John Dewey) engagement with the social problems of that era: the consequences of urbanized, industrialized ‘masses’ – often immigrants who while in many cases were solidly Catholic weren’t considered quite up to ‘American’ life and were – I agree – hugely burdened by the social consequences of an industrial-capitalistic economic ethos.
 
The American hierarchy was also similarly concerned for its flock, while simultaneously trying to convince Rome that ‘democracy’ as it existed in America was not the same as the ‘democracy’ of the French Revolution, which in the Vatican’s estimation had led to nothing but a century of civil war and terror and the assorted horrors of European radicalism. They finally got Leo XIII to accept some of their thinking, but the Vatican remained highly wary of ‘Modernism’ – although, again, it was more the European variant of that movement that gave Rome pause.
 
But the problem I see with Progressive Protestant “muscular Christianity” was that it gave too much away to the this-worldly, treating vital matters of doctrine and belief from a ‘pragmatic’ point of view, i.e. that ‘ideas’ weren’t as important as ‘actions’ and those ‘actions’ can only be judged by their ‘success’ or – to use an unhappy phrase of William James – their “cash value”. So I wouldn’t want to see American Catholicism make that same mistake all over again.
 
Thus the Question for me is this: how do American Catholics today gird for battle and war? – which I believe is a trope Mr. Voris embraces. Here the question is one addressed by John Courtney Murray in the 1950s and early 1960s: how do American Catholics engage in the political life of the nation while respecting what Murray firmly believed were the fundamental and foundational presumptions of the American Framers’ Vision? Those fundamental presumptions are that human beings i) are capable of rational deliberation and thought and ii) must be respected in and for that capacity. (Murray, in best Catholic form, stated more clearly what the Enlightenment-influenced Framers were more circumspect about: that human beings are created in God’s Image and that very fundamental reality of human existence ultimately grounds-boundaries-shapes their role in determining the form of their own governance. (Even Aquinas came to that conclusion in his Letter to the King of Cyprus: having spent 108 paragraphs saying that in an ideal world a Benevolent Catholic Monarch would be the best form of governance, yet alas you don’t often get such marvelous creatures in human history, and therefore his basic advice to that King of Cyprus was: treat all your subjects as if they too are kings.)
 
So while I strongly support the idea of a reinvigoration of the sense and spirit of the best of Catholicism, I am not comfortable with the idea – certainly in this country – of a Catholic monarchy or a sort of Catholic theocracy comprised ‘democratically’ of only Catholic voters. Murray too would not approve, from everything I understand of his thought.
 
I don’t want to add to the European sense of ‘culture war’, which was originally the phrase – Kulturkampf – used to describe Bismarck’s campaign to de-legitimize the role of Christianity (the German Lutheran version as well as the Catholic) so as to clear more space for the German masses to accept the benevolence of his own government’s agendas for social and cultural change (and – to give him his due – the Iron Chancellor came up with a government program of  ‘social insurance’ in the second half of the 19th century.  
 
But there is an even more ominous source of the idea of culture-war: Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci – in the early teens and 20s of the 20th century – tried to come up with a decently humanist way of getting the Leninist revolution going in the established democracies of the West (where you couldn’t as easily create armed revolution the way it had come about in Russia). Gramsci – rather decently, in a way – wanted to see the ‘marginalized’, consigned to the outer rings of political power (the ‘margins’)and ‘oppressed’  by the ‘hegemony’ of those at the core of cultural and social and political power, educated by ‘vanguard elites’ of the Party so that those very emarginati  would be able to bring themselves into the center of political life and in that ‘humane’ way create the Leninist Revolution in their countries.
 
Many of these ideasof Gramsci’s  were taken over by radical-feminists here in the 1970s (read MacKinnon’s book for details) although – shrewdly – without attribution: after all, what Beltway politician could admit that s/he was supporting what was in essence a Leninist strategy for de-legitimizing actual Western democracy and Christianity and replacing everything with a social agenda and strategy devised by a Leninist Communist Party apparatchik looking to undermine Western democracies?
 
Now perhaps a well-intentioned Catholic might realize all of this and then say: well, then, if their side is going to try something like this, then this means war. But ‘war’ is, in my opinion, precisely not the way to deal with such a situation in a still-functioning democracy. First, the entire foundation of a democratic politics is precisely that it is not a ‘war’ (alas that LBJ loved to create ‘war’ on this and that to achieve his Great Society, and subsequent Presidents have gotten into that mode as well); rather, democratic politics is a reasoning-together of human beings rationally-endowed (and made in the Image of God).
 
Second, ‘war’ is a word that Americans – especially –  don’t truly grasp in all its horror and destructiveness, even if it is not a shooting war or civil-war but a political or culture-war. The Vatican in the past half-millennium has come to see the awful wrack and ruin caused by war and war is not something to which any sane polity should lightly resort, even as a ‘metaphor’.
 
And third, I don’t see ‘war’ as the true genius of Christianity or Catholicism or Christ Himself. The true genius – I think – is the Human Being As Created In The Image Of God. And from that, all things flow.
 
So the key to restoring Catholicism’s vitality in this country begins here: with the Creation In The Image Of God – and then much prayerful deliberation and then prudent but genuine action taken as a result of that deliberation (for Catholics, a deliberation involving laity, clergy and Sisterhood, and hierarchy).
 
But we must do it as a genuine Church. The American Protestants of the Progressive Age – lacking any central core of authority (an authority that should always be exercised in genuine and serious consultation) simply fractalized into all sorts of illuminations and favored-causes; we saw the same thing in the post-Vatican 2 era as certain elements within the Church re-created both the Progressive Protestant and then even the Leninist-Maoist excitements and thought they were on some sort of theological cutting-edge (when actually, I think, they were in far too many cases simply on the edge of a cliff and heading full-steam in the wrong direction).
 
The utterly indispensable moral urgency and gravitas necessary for a more “muscular” Catholicism would stem from this: that we as Catholics, whatever our station and role within the Catholic community, realize just how deeply threatened the Image of God is today, precisely as it is embodied in God’s children, our fellow and sister human beings. But I would see us follow John Courtney Murray’s insight that the American Framing Vision of genuine democracy’s potential must define the Method we use to restore a vital and robust sense of that Image of God in the world and in this country. 
 
And I would say that it is a savage irony that within ten years of Murray’s We Hold These Truths, the American government began to bend to the siren-call of what is essentially a totalitarian or totalizing solution, flowing from Gramsci/Lenin/Mao as well as from the authoritarianism that was always latent at the heart of American Progressivism (it is the enlightened ‘elites’ who must be granted plenitudo potestatis or plenary power to shape and drive American culture and society – this was a key belief of Woodrow Wilson that he embraced as early as the mid-1880s, long before he reached the Presidency).
 
Now to the Abuse Matter (which was the original question from Anonymous): I think that the secularist Gramscian elements within American progressivism/liberalism found a ready ally in the post-Vatican2 divisions already created within the American Catholic Church in the mid-1960s.
 
Bismarckian Kulturkampf strategy and Leninist cultural strategic doctrine (and Goebbels’s demonstrated strategy as well) would call for de-legitimizing the Church as a cultural and political authority by any means possible. And going after an opponent’s sexual misconduct is always a sure-fire way to do that. (Bismarck didn’t engage in it because 19th century Victorian gentlemen didn’t really discuss sex too much – but Hitler took a stab at it, trying to indict an entire monastery for sexual misconduct, but it misfired and the Reich had to wait until it was sufficiently established to imprison and execute priests and nuns simply because they were representatives of a rival approach to totalitarian life).
 
And thus I place the Catholic Abuse Matter here: it provides a handy way to de-legitimize the cultural and religious and moral and – yes – political stature of the Church, thus clearing space for other approaches espoused by elements inside as well as outside the Church.
 
As always, this is not to deny that the Church as human organization has been the site of moral failures (just like any other human institution – including the government itself). But the sustained 30-year campaign, based on rather dubiously-established claims and assertions, mostly about past instances, cannot – I would say – be sufficiently explained any other way. In the Salem Witch Trials it was precisely the role of the Royal Governor – acting on orders from the Crown – that put an end to the mania. But here, the government has – I believe – been rather hospitable to the whole Thing, to say the least.
 
Well, let me apologize beforehand to readers and even Dave Pierre if I have gone on too long or cast too wide a net in discussing this.
 
And, lastly, let me say that I would be happiest if those readers who find some use in these comments take them for further development. I don’t put them forward as any sort of complete explanation, and the best fate for a worthwhile idea is to be taken and discussed and developed.
 
Also, I guess I would add John Courtney Murray’s writings to MacCulloch’s history and Bishop Sheen’s books for Christmas spiritual reading.

Since there are no more investigative reporters, no one will look closely at SNAP.
You are correct Josie, in being shocked at the hypocracy of SNAP's behavior. Snap is either incredably stupid or something else is going on.
 Not that SNAP isn't stupid but something else is going on.  SNAP continues to constantly make victims appear  dumb and hypocritical on such a scale that If SNAP were controlled by it's "membership" the SNAP officers would be shown the door.
 But no, Barbara and David and Dorris reign supreme in their undemocratic dictatorship. Hmmmm? Remind you of any other undemocratic dictatorships? (Think Rome)

May I be the first to say that I agree with JR on this one? My own hope is that maybe some investigative reporter will do a full-scale work-up but my bet is that if s/he is employed by a major outlet, that's not going to happen, at least not at this point. My opinion is that if SNAP received even a fraction of the treatment the Church has received from the mainstream media in the past 10-20-30 years in this Abuse Matter, a whole lot of stuff would come out.
 
I have started to think about the SNAP-faithful the same way Josie is starting to think. Of course, if you tote up all of the mental derangements that have been made simply to accommodate the double-standard of truth and the new definitions of 'evidence', then all that derangemnet  alone has to throw any reality-based mental equipment out of whack. And then there's the predisposition to the 'tuning-fork' dynamic, and the emotional and psychological bennies that accrue simply by being in the in-group and all that.
 
But beyond that – as I think Josie implies – there is something else. And it isn't pretty.

Hey ERW- OJ Simpson was found NOT GUILTY in a court – not exactly a ringing endorsment of the [in] justice system. And, we can't recount all the true innocents purposefully imprisoned by corrupt prosecuters and judges.
Re: some posting dupes disillusionment with SNAPs "holy crusade" mission; really?? You really thought they were honest brokers…really? Or, did the rattlesnake just simply turn on the copperhead?
How many times will you poor slithering sots allow yourselves to be victimized and then look for compensation and blood-letting to assuage your own stupidity?

My dear Josie. Blaine and Clohessy suck the air out of the room when the camera is on them. They are there for one purpose to get and control victims. To be victims voice to the world. And all for the benefit of the Church.