*TheMediaReport.com Special Investigation* Overlearning the Lessons of the Abuse Scandals: Custodian Uses Bathroom, and Cardinal O’Malley Fires Everyone

On the 16th at 840PM what do we get?

In the first paragraph and first sentence: an epithet unsupported by any explanation or explication.

And in the same paragraph in the second sentence: another epithet (this one based on the only 3×5 under the topic ‘Churchill’). And readers are welcome to consider especially the accuracy of characterizing Churchill as being “a homegrown version of fascism”.

In the second paragraph another epithet: I “know nothing of history” although then – rather incoherently – “unless history is to be considered”. And readers are welcome to try to make heads or tails of that one.

But in furtherance of this bit, we are then proffered “The Amazing Miracles of the catholic church” (sic). But nothing else in explication, leaving us to make heads or tails of that one.

Abuseniks seem to be averse to explanation or explication; they – and the Playbook – are content to simply toss up epitheticals and figure they’ve done the job they set out to do. And that may be true: their only move is to toss-up plop-tossy epitheticals and hope those bits pass for illuminating commentary.

In fact, in the crop of JR bits thus tossed-up on the evening of the 16th on the current and two most recently-past articles, he keeps on about my “posing” and “pretending” in regard to this or that; through the wonders of projection I think we see clearly that Abuseniks are pretty much besotted with “posing” and “pretending”. Which gives rise to the thought that they deployed it for their stories as well as their comments.

Back to that same second paragraph: we are then given an example of JR’s historical and logical chops: Churchill was voted out in 1945 because the Brits preferred a Socialist government to Churchill’s “homegrown version of fascism”. But the Brits were tired of the rigors of war (6 years of it), on top of the Depression, and so they tried something else. Which got them yet more years of deprivation and scarcity until … they brought Churchill back again.

And Churchill was a Conservative, not a Tory.

Then on to Alinsky: once again, we get the old Abusenik bit about being “a truth-teller” (or – perhaps – posing as one or pretending to be one). But that’s not at all what I have been saying about Alinsky, whose Gramscian and revolutionary agitprop was designed to manipulate or force the imposition of the Alinskyite practioners’ very specific and particular definition of what they saw “truth” to be. Alinsky was a technician of agitprop; his underlying conceptions of ‘truth’ shared with Gramsci the ‘revolutionary’ definition of ‘truth’: if it’s good for the ‘revolution’ then it’s true (and good); if not not.

Then an epithet to the effect that I might want to ‘try’ to “tell the truth” – but of course that “truth” to which he refers is the Abusenik ‘truth’ and thus we’re right back at square-one.

And the whole confection topped-off here with – yet again – the insinuation that I am somehow paid for my comments. Once again: Abuseniks can’t seem to imagine anybody engaging in ideas for the sake of the ideas and the larger and deeper comprehension of things  – they can only imagine being paid for their stories and assorted bits. Which may well be what drew them to the Stampede in the first place, as Anderson and Doyle realized in their own ways several decades ago.

Then on the 16th at 850PM we are given the proffer that the Revere episode is merely a “show” of that Cardinal’s “pretending to be forced into immorally firing people, who did nothing” (sic). In what way exactly would this be a “show”; why would Cardinal O’Malley ‘pretend’ “to be forced” to do it? What would be the benefit to him of starting such a dust-up?

But – yes – the Cardinal’s action here is, I have said, “due to the … pressure of” Victimism (not “victims” and I didn’t say “somehow immoral”) and of Victimism as embraced and amplified by the media. Subtracting for the usual Abusenik misquotation in order to get something more convenient to toss their stuff at, it is Victimism at the core of things here; Abuseniks – as is evident from JR’s text here – can’t think or don’t like to think in terms of large conceptual categories; this reflects the agitprop and Playbook requirement to always keep it ‘personal’, so that the emotional manipulation arising from this or that ‘story’ sidesteps and precludes any deeper conceptual analysis of their stuff. After all, look what happens when you actually do try to analyze and assess their stuff.

And then – but of course – those who do try to analyze and assess are merely “right-wingers”. Yah.

And the whole bit then not-quite-sensically concluded with a bit about the hierarchy being “so democratic it listens to people”. “When did that happen?”,  JR asks.

Answer: it didn’t happen. As I indicated in my comment, there are now “forces” put in play by the larger concepts of Victimism and the Stampede that are exerting pressures. But that doesn’t mean O’Malley had to work so hard to cave-in to them.

With cigar in one hand, and an elegant glass of premium vintage wine in the other, I watch the RCC, ablaze as a Viking funeral pyre, vanishing before my gleefull eyes into the shadowy  depths of history. May the church remain it's the cold, dark, watery grave forever. 

You catholics didn't demand same sex marriage or married priests or women priests. None of which are "nefarious". You are your own bogeyman, no need to call anyone else "nefarious' with your track record. You catholics demand nothing from your bosses. Hell you don't even care if your kids are raped.  You've kept the same enablers in power., still.

It's you who are a moral desert. You've failed on every major moral issue in the 20th century. Then get on your high horse about marriage; divorce; women's equality and the use of birth control and gay people. The catholic church gets a big fat F in moral leadership.

Not really much different than all the "Protecting God's Children" classes they now expect every volunteer to attend.  And be background checked.  And be fingerprinted.  Because we are all supposed to pretend that it wasn't the homosexual priests preying on our children.  No, it is the mother of five children who has volunteered to teach CCD that is the real threat.

Too bad the teacher isn't an illegal alien.  She would have gotten a promotion, a raise, automatic citizenship, free health care, tenure, and retirement benefits to retire early at full pay.  Not to mention catered to in her own language, with her own food, in her own "culture," and would be given complete and total support in all ways for reproducing as much and as fast as possible.  Plus be given license for an infinite number of relatives to enter the country and receive the same as she.  After all, they are (supposedly) the future of the Church and the nation are they not ?

I take the child has no father in the home? If the sight of a man urinating frightens him then something is amiss.

You have no priests coming in. Why wouldn't you use women as priests? You will have to in the end.

First you'll let your male priests marry; and then if that doesn't bring the number of priests up. you'll finally have to turn to women. Where you should have looked in the first place.

Christ! I'd make a better pope than the ones you have had. Excluding my grandpa pope Greg X of course. :^)

On the 22nd at 136PM we are informed (by a commenter screen-named “Catholic Advantage” and to whom I shall refer here as ‘CA’) about a “Catholic Advantage” proposed by Bill Donohue; there is no explanation as to what Donohue means by that term or how he defines it. And that’s unfortunate here because it the basis for the rest of the paragraph, which immediately goes on to riff about CA’s own take on the “Catholic Advantage” (however it is defined or perhaps however CA defines it).

Apparently, CA skips all the clarifying and explaining and proceeds to throw us into the middle of the stream forthwith: CA asks whether Donohue believes “that priests and bishops should make parishioners aware if [sic] they are working with the government to entrap innocent people?”.

It would help to know the incident(s) prompting the question, since as it is posed here it is less than clear (and smacks queasily of the old Playbook ‘innuendo’ gambit).

And the paragraph then segues – with no obvious logical connection or traceable thought process – to “homosexually active priests” and “priests in charge of elementary schools” who might “focus on a better curriculum than their boyfriends”. (I could presume that a “rather” would be well-placed after “curriculum” in that phrase, but that’s not what the commenter wrote.)

Unless there is some unstated connection between a) “clergy working with the government to entrap innocent people” and b) “homosexually active priests” and “priests in charge of elementary schools” then I can’t see the point that CA is – presumably – trying to make to us.

Nor are things at all improved by the second paragraph, which simply drags in the USA Patriot Act and – apparently (that “they”) – clergy using “their contact in government” to “’report’ innocent parishioners”. Innocent of what? Suspected of being guilty of what? We are not informed.

We are then informed that “it would have been nice if” … and we off now into American history “since WW1”. Specifically, if the Church would kindly ‘incorporate’ … what appear to be two publications, about which we get nothing but the titles.

The bottom line of which – have you been waitttttting forrrrrr ittttttttttt? – appears to be that “the priests during WWII until recently” were doing little “besides allowing the morale of soldiers, students, doctors and nurses” – which rather broad grouping is then qualified parenthetically as “Americans of German and Italian descent” – to “be demoralized”.

Readers who can see their way clear to work with CA’s material as it is proffered here are welcome to do so. But I can’t see what issues CA is on about here; presuming that we aren’t merely getting i) yet another clear example of unclear expression and mental-processing or perhaps ii) just another nice example of Playbook ‘innuendo’. Or both.

However, a familiar note is sounded: there is a recently-published book entitled The Train to Crystal City, which may be the basis of an earlier recent commenter who makes reference to a “Crystal City”.

This book is about US government internment policies in regard to persons classified as “enemy aliens” of German and Italian extraction (apparently not citizens, although that distinction appears to have been only loosely made by the government in some instances). The Crystal City (Texas) camp was set up not by the Immigration authorities (under whose aegis the West Coast Japanese internment camps were conducted) but rather by the Department of Justice (apparently on the more selective basis of internees there being adjudged potentially criminally dangerous by means of maintaining actual contacts with enemy agents – although again the government was rather loose in its definitional boundaries in all of this).

I have found no reviews of this book that mention the Catholic Church’s involvement as being of significance to the reviewer’s assessment of the book or of the events described in the book. This in and of itself does not prove that the Church was not somehow mentioned in the book but it certainly doesn’t seem to have been a major concern of the author’s.

From all of this it seems to me that what we are seeing with this “Crystal City” bit is some excitation down in the lower depths of the anti-Catholic precincts of the internet that is somehow seeking to do some Church-bashing by connecting the Church in the US during WW2 as being complicit in the various government internment policies and programs.

If so, then my questions in a prior comment to the earlier “Crystal City” mentioner are applicable: In what ways is the Church supposed to have been complicit? Was such complicity (presuming it is established) out-of-bounds for a wartime situation? (Which also will require establishing that in the Texas camp the US government was itself not acting understandably and/or appropriately for a government in that era and in a time of war.)

Without such assessment and explication, there’s not really much more to be done on this subject here.

Then on the 22nd at 740PM we get a self-pitying manipulative plaint from JR: can he “post anything today?”. As if this site were an aural/verbal (rather than a visual/written) exchange and he can’t get a word in edgewise.

But, of course, JR and/or his muse(s) can put up anything desired.

And sure enough, at 838PM JR and/or his muse(s) proceed to do precisely that, and at uncharacteristic length.

So let’s go along paragraph by paragraph.

In the first paragraph: In regard to a) my point about word-processor software and spell-check and b) my question as to just what word-processor program he uses (that apparently doesn’t include a spell-check function) we merely get the dodgy plaint that he doesn’t “know computers at all” and that he only “send[s] emails and that’s about it”.

Apparently he must be reminded that he also puts up a lot of posts here (and until barred from the sites, elsewhere) and thus the composition of those posts require his use of a word-processor program that has to be deliberately engaged on his computer. Unless, of course, he merely gets all his comments from others by email and then simply cuts-and-pastes the texts of such emails so that they appear here under his name as his own compositions and material. Who knows? But the explanatory options are limited.

In the second paragraph: JR – as is his right – proffers to ‘Paul Smith’ JR’s own take on “Abuseniks” and the definition of that term. His description of “Abuseniks” as my word “to describe the media’s response to the cathocli church sex abuse crisis” is wrong: the term describes certain persons, not the “media’s response” (that would, instead, be a partial element in my definition of “Stampede”) and I clearly made that distinction in my comment to ‘Paul Smith’ on the 22nd at 1043AM.

We see again that the Abusenik mind and the Playbook agenda do not pay attention to the actual meanings of the words and terms they encounter. Which is also a characteristic of the plop-tossy mentality: if it looks like it can be tossed as some plop, then toss it regardless of whether – when looked at closely – it actually means anything.

We see, as well, the rather breezy disregard for definitions that may have played so handy a role in the fashioning of claims and allegations and stories: it’s not the actual meanings of the words, it’s just the spirit of the thing.

In that same paragraph, JR would need to provide an actual quotation from my material (accurate, of course) that indicates my position as being that “a left wing feminist gay conspiracy has caused the outrage” of the Catholic Abuse Crisis. But I would advise that readers not postpone their next meal waiting for it.

In the third paragraph we merely get more epithet, in the form of an utterly ungrounded assertion that I am “stationed on this site” for the purpose of trying to “turn a ‘stampede’ with lies”. If anyone can make sense of that formulation they are welcome to share it; and we see yet again the accusation of “lies” without actually naming any such purported “lies”.

In the fourth paragraph: JR slyly conflates i) the actual historical existence of Pope Gregory X, who reigned from 1271 to 1276 (which I have seen nobody here doubt) with ii) the assertion that Pope Gregory X is JR’s distant ancestor (manipulatively referred to by JR as “grand pa”). Who knows? He proffers only the existence of the site Ancestry.com (which nobody doubts) but not any actual link that would establish his own descent from that Pope.

And even if he were descended so very distantly from that Pope … so what? From all the material in the record here that has gone up under his name, such a purported descent doesn’t seem at all to have bestowed any critical or expressive or analytical (or perhaps characterological) chops.

 And ditto for the King and the Saint (“of” – we are informed by the Wig of Knowing – “Paris France” [sic]).

And the whole bit in the paragraph topped off by an epithet: I may be able to “spell well” but I ‘lie’ “like a bad rug”. Tee hee.

And apparently pointing out the numerous and substantial problems with Abusenik material is “snobbery”. Although this may actually shed some light on the JR spelling-issue: he deliberately misspells as a back-up defense: i.e. if his material isn’t accepted he can then don the Wig of Victimization and claim that he is the victim of “snobbery” perpetrated by those who assess or correct or address the material. That’s neat. This is the type of mentality attracted to the Stampede.

But then but then: in the fifth paragraph we are led into a papal agenda that JR would seek to implement if he “were the pope”. So profound, indeed abyssal, a counterfactual might be dismissed as the type of visions and plans overheard in the day-rooms of secure institutions, but readers may consider it as they will.

The series of agenda-items reads like a hodge-podge of the usual liberal/radical agendas for the Church and I doubt anybody here would be unfamiliar with most of them. (Although they are expressed here with a rhetorical skill not very often seen in JR’s material.)

That takes us through paragraphs six to fifteen and paragraph seventeen.

All I would say is that the mainstream Protestant polities have attempted to implement each and all of these agenda-points in their own way and have simply rendered themselves invertebrate and increasingly irrelevant. And I would repeat and refer-to my recent comments as to the remarkable capacity of the Catholic Church to simultaneously i) maintain a coherence and substantive essence while ii) also providing for well-considered change congruent with that essence. No other religious entity or polity in the history of the world has managed to do that (and few have even seen fit to try). Any nominations for any other such religious entity or polity are, of course, welcome to be proposed here.

In the sixteenth paragraph: We get a cutesy effort to sound au courant with a variation on the Charlie Hebdo mantra.

In the eighteenth paragraph: We get a cutesy effort with that bit from the Book of Genesis (with – have you been waitttttttttttttttttttting forrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr itttttttttttttttttttttttttttt? – JR playing the role of God).

In the nineteenth paragraph (are we continuing to overhear conversations from that day-room?) we are forthrightly and cheerbily informed (by JR’s personal collection of tea leaves, perhaps) that “all of [his] actions above would cause a renaissance in the Church” (correction supplied).

In response I would simply refer back to my immediately prior points in this comment about those actions having been tried before with much-less-than-happy historical results and consequences.

In the twentieth paragraph we are further informed that this envisioned (to put it politely) ‘religion’ would be a place “where people were more important than even an imagined god”. Which – how to put this? – would somewhat fundamentally undermine its efficacy and legitimacy as a ‘religion’, would it not? A religion without any divinity at its core, with no Metaplane, would be rather hard to define as a religion, would it not? A ‘lifestyle’ perhaps, or even a ‘philosophy’ … but a religion it would not be.

But what are definitions and concepts to Abuseniks? They are gall and wormwood and thoroughly unfamiliar and uncongenial territory indeed.

Then in the penultimate paragraph we get the gauzy tootle about “nurturance” (my spell-check flagged “nurturence” instantly) and the rest of it. A nice rhetorical flourish and hopefully the orchestra down in the stage-pit quickly takes its cue to strike up the head-for-the-curtains music.

And the whole show concludes with JR’s ‘logical’ conclusion that he would “be a swell pope”. And readers may consider that assertion as they may.

Kathy seems to be marching to her own drummer.

Let's see I talk about SNAP's affect on settlement talks for Australian victims and the bargain basement settlement numbers agreed to by SNAP the very day such low numbers were suggested; and we get non sequators galore.

I may be in a day room after all. It's called: The Media Report.

I'm glad Cardinal O'Malley wasn't chosen as pope.

We have often discussed the Anderson Strategies and how they slyly and shrewdly took advantage not only of i) ‘reforms’ demanded by Victimists in evidentiary principles and jurispraxis in regard to sex-claims cases (civil or criminal) but also of ii) the gap between the objectives of Insurer attorneys and Church attorneys  and – so rarely – attorneys for individual accused priests.

This is a link to an excellent article that discusses at length but quite readably for a lay-person the various complexities involved in civil lawsuits that involve Insurer attorneys.

http://www.hprweb.com/2015/02/sacrificing-priests-on-the-altar-of-insurance/

As you can see if you read the article, there are numerous complexities that would confront any attorneys seeking to defend against allegations; so numerous that settlement would be the only rational solution.

Thus, I will say, readers can see how the Stampede lawsuits were not at all merely the inevitable working-out of ‘justice’ in a simple and clear fashion nor were those lawsuits in any way valid indicators of the veracity of what the assorted allegations claimed.

Nor did the Romans have any concept of “damnation” (certainly not in the Christian sense of a damnation in the next life or damnation by a God or by the gods): the Roman punishment for not publicly worshipping the civic gods was not theological or religious “damnation” but rather a very practical and very palpable persecution by very real public authorities, up to and including a horrible death by some form of public execution.

And what we see here is – as so very often – a mushy conflation of historical tidbits from various centuries and historical periods, to the effect that the Imperial Romans were – have you been waittttttting forrrr itttttttt? – tools of the Church.

This is a cartoon. A cartoon dressed-up to look like historical discourse and analysis, but a cartoon nonetheless. And a very self-serving and convenient cartoon as well.

The Pope became Pontifex Maximus (the old pagan Roman office of Supreme or Greatest Priest, a title held in Imperial times by the Emperor himself) only after the decline of the Imperial authority (and the splitting of the Empire into East and West). Pope Damasus I was the first to hold the title, bestowed upon him by (Western) Emperor Gratian in 360AD on the hardly illogical grounds that since that young Emperor was not himself a priest, then he didn’t think it proper for him to be holding a priestly office.

The Popes of the era did not consider the title as being of any great significance, continuing to base their Office on the Petrine Authority. But in subsequent eras, as the Popes (now by default coming to function as both religious and political authority as the Imperial power declined) came into conflict with heretically-minded Eastern Emperors, the title came in handy as a buttress to the papal (and Western) position.

But none of these historical actualities are congenial or convenient to JR’s cartoon purpose: to somehow conflate the Imperial and the Papal in such a way as to somehow arrive at a whack at the Church.

Then in the fourth paragraph we get more of the same: we are to believe that the Romans “invaded Israel because the Jews wouldn’t worship Caesar as a god”. That is not why the Republic extended its influence in the entire far-Eastern end of the Mediterranean in the Third Mithridatic War (73-63BC) when Pompey moved on Judea; the Romans were simply moving in on a territory that had previously been invaded and controlled by earlier conquerors reaching back through Alexander to the Babylonians and the Assyrians and further back to the Egyptians.

Or perhaps JR had some other “invasion” in mind, or perhaps the cartoon holds that there was only one?

When the Roman-client kingdom of the Herodians failed, then in 44AD the Romans instituted direct Roman rule. (In the time of Pilate’s procurator-ship, power was uneasily divided between the Procurator and the Herodian client-king.)

The first of the Jewish-Roman wars – taking place from 66-73AD – was prompted by the refusal of the locals to pay taxes to Rome.

Indeed, the Romans had proven remarkably indulgent in allowing the Jews to maintain their religious preferences, so long as they remained orderly and paid their taxes. But while the Romans were not overly concerned about Jewish religious practices in their own little Palestinian patch, when the Jews (and the Christians) came to mainland Italy and to Rome itself, then a refusal to make public sacrifice to the civic gods constituted an unavoidable act of lese-majeste  (apologies for not getting the French accent marks into the text here) that had to be publicly and forcefully addressed, especially as the fortunes of the Empire began to decline. And as the number of Christians began increasing throughout the Empire – especially in the Mediterranean and in Italy and The City itself – this situation intensified.

So the assertion that “the populations in the rest of the Roman world did” doesn’t really work, especially with the growth of mystery-religions and other syncretistic religious elements absorbed from various frontier-lands of the Empire and then from various barbarian tribes being invited into the historic territory of the Empire itself.

Then more of the same quality of ‘historical thinking’ in the fifth paragraph with the assertion that “Christianity was built on hatred for the Jews for ‘killing Christ’”. Christianity’s remarkably immediate and powerful appeal was not “built on” hate but rather on the Christian vision of God and human beings and the interplay between God and human beings. The blame for Christ’s death on the Jews (based in the purportedly Imperial Roman Gospels) was an consequence and side-effect of the historical circumstances of Christ’s death but Christianity was not “built on” it; even a cursory examination of the earliest Christian teaching manuals, the Didache, indicate that.

But – pitch-perfectly – this fifth paragraph assertion, so historically inaccurate, is quickly left where it was tossed as JR instead moves into story-telling mode: the “beating up” of Jewish kids (even – harrumph and ahem – “within [JR’s] life time in the U.S.”, his very own lifetime).

Who, we are then immediately informed, were beaten up “for that imaginary murder”.

Suppress, if possible, the inevitable mirth. And we are treated here to JR – who recently has blithely labeled as “murderers” Popes such as Pius XII and John Paul II – now pooh-poohing the execution of Christ as “imaginary”.

On a different topic, but one also mentioned on this and the two prior threads:

John Paul 2 had deep and wide experience of totalitarianism, of both the Nazi and Soviet type in his own Poland and in Europe since the 1930. He was familiar with totalitarianism’s assumptions, its dynamics, its objectives, its strategies and tactics, because he had been personally involved in opposing them all as a young layman, as a seminarian, as a priest, as a Bishop and all the way forward from there.

He knew the beast.

Now when we come to the late-1960s liberal/progressive/revolutionary New Order, we can look at it – its assumptions, its dynamics, its objectives, its strategies and tactics – historically and conceptually as a variant form and expression of the totalitarian impulse.

Jonah Goldberg, in his 2007 book Liberal Fascism does precisely that.

He observes that historically Progressivism was a cradle-sibling of the other totalitarianisms: Communism, Fascism (Nazi or Italian), and Socialism; they were all born in that era between the 1880s and the 1920s and they shared fundamental characteristics.

And while historical Progressivism (an American phenomenon) was not able to deploy overt violence in pursuit of its millennial goals and visions of a (much much) better country and a (much much) better world, historical Progressivism yet shared all the characteristics of its siblings: i) a sense that its visions were so very Good that only Evil could be the source of doubts about it, reservations about it, questions about it, or objections to it. Let alone opposition to it.

And (ii) an elitist sense that most of the masses (Lincoln called them ‘the People’) ‘just didn’t get it’ and thus that (iii) its elites were like revolutionary Illuminati who must (and rightfully) take whatever steps necessary and possible to drag the people and the masses into the broad sunlit uplands of the Progressive vision.

While historical American Progressivism in its original phase was significantly hemmed-in by traditional and fundamental American Constitutional and cultural principles and assumptions, yet however things changed in the 1960s under the forces unleashed by a new generation: a ‘New Left’ as opposed to the prior 1930s ‘Old Left’ – itself enamored of Soviet and Fascist capacities to force their agendas on their peoples, surfing Boomery self-confidence and (utterly unrecognized) ignorance, driven by a government (LBJ’s administration) cocksure that it could achieve without serious negative consequence whatever it set out to achieve, and fueled by the Democrats’ desperate need t construct new client-identities for their ‘demographics’.

The ‘revolutionary’ nature inherent in the Great Society was not taken seriously; the very use of the term ‘revolutionary’ – so widely bruited about even at the highest levels of society and government – was taken to be merely a tad of good old American hyperbole and exaggeration and nothing more.

But it was much more: it was actually the adoption, by government and elites, of some of the most fundamental presumptions, attitudes, strategies and tactics of totalitarianism and of the ‘revolutionary’ mindset and vision.

And in the 1970s, under the especially extended philosophical tutelage of a feminism that took over huge tracts of Marxist and Communist doctrine and praxis (and with a bumptious ‘liberal’ and ‘progressive’ American Catholic acceptance of both feminism  and of Liberation Theology with all of its roots in totalitarian doctrine and praxis), the actual fabric of the Founding Vision was ripped by elites who insisted that the Founders ‘just didn’t get it’ and that therefore their Founding Vision and the principles and political mechanisms they had devised were nothing more than obstructions to the urgent and immediate realization of all the ‘revolutionary’ visions and demands (which of course were pure Good in intention and consequence and all opposition to them had to be Evil).

Thus did Western ‘secularism’ and ‘progressivism’ (as ‘liberalism’ sought to rebrand itself as the unhappy consequences revealed by time went on) more intimately accept and embrace and deploy its Inner Totalitarian.

In light of this, John Paul’s almost instinctive and visceral reactions to the trends in Western culture and society and civilization can be well-seen in the light of his natural recognition that – as much as Western elites did not want to admit it – their Project was essentially unfolding along the natal lines of all of its crib-mates and sibs, demonstrating the essential fundaments of the totalitarian impulse.

And even if they did not demonstrate any of the Strong-State militaristic trappings of Communism and Nazism and Fascism, they retained the ‘for the people’ charms of theoretical Socialism (which, however, in actual historical praxis so often wound up taking the totalitarian path).

And the whole shebang was buttressed-by and fronted-by the postwar and post-1960s adoption of Victimism as the public persona and public self-presentation of the New Order that must and would avenge or even prevent ‘victimization’ anywhere, anyhow, anytime … by whatever means necessary.

So I think it is clear that John Paul II was acute in his awareness that what was happening in ‘modernity’ in his era was deeply flawed and dangerously so. And he opposed it with reason and exhortation at every turn throughout his pontificate.