HACKER 1, CATHOLIC ANSWERS FORUMS 0
JOAN CHITTISTER WHISTLES IN THE DARK
THOMAS DROLESKEY TURNS RIGHT AND JUST KEEPS ON GOING
GOOD RIDDANCE TO THE AZTECS
Dear Friend of Catholic Answers:
It has been some weeks since I sent out an E-Letter, so I hope you will forgive the extended length of this one.
THE GREAT CRASH OF '06
One Wednesday evening I noticed that the Catholic Answers forums were down. Not to worry, I said to myself. This has happened before. The forums will be up and running sometime later tonight.
It was not to be. This turned out to be no ordinary glitch. It was a full-scale crash brought about by a hacker. We found the smoking gun in the form of a software "tool" imbedded deep in the main hard drive, evidence that the hacker had breached our security and had figured out a way to wipe out everything on the computer (which is located at a facility in Texas).
The forums had to be reconstructed, and that took a while because in the process we upgraded the software and added many new features to the site.
If you have not visited our forums recently--and especially if you never have visited them at all--I invite you to do so. You will find more than 100,000 threads (topics), more than 1.8 million posts (messages), and about 37,000 registered members (and about twice that many unregistered "guests").
SISTER JOAN, NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH SAINT JOAN
You will not find Joan Chittister on a charger, but you often will find her behind a microphone, as she was last month when she gave the keynote address at the annual convention of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
Chittister, a Benedictine sister, told her audience not to be discouraged that the number of women religious in the U.S. has dropped from 125,000 to 67,000 in thirty years, a reduction of almost half. "There is a temptation to equate numbers with effectiveness," she said. "Numbers are a capitalist answer to a Christian question."
She professes to be unworried about the increasing average age of women religious. "When did we get too old, too remote, too small to sign petitions, to sit through a peace rally, to include the innocent in Iraq and Lebanon and Israel in our liturgies and public programs?"
If you have followed Chittister over the years, you will know that such lines are emblematic of her approach to religion. I can't remember her ever talking about the need to teach Christian doctrinal truths. To her the faith is reduced to petitioning and rallying, which suggests why women's religious orders have been reduced in numbers. American women have learned that, if you want to sign petitions or attend rallies, you don't need to be a nun.
Chittister says she is not worried about demographics, and neither am I. We both know--but she will not publicly say it--that demographics will provide a solution to the problem of the decline of the religious orders.
In a few years the liberal religious orders, headed by the women who attended the LCWR convention, will disappear. If they have lost half of their membership in three decades, where do you think they will be in another three? Organizations without members cease to be organizations at all.
The demise of liberal religious orders will cause a vacuum that will last for all of, oh, ten minutes--at which point the traditional religious orders, freed from the dead weight of LCWR and the bad press that goes with religious liberalism, will expand rapidly.
A DECLINE AT THE OTHER END OF THE SPECTRUM
He may be "on the road," but he will not be mistaken for Charles Kuralt.
Thomas Droleskey, his wife, and their four-year-old daughter "now live in their motor home" as he "travels the nation to give lectures in behalf of the Social Reign of Christ the King and Mary our Queen." It was not always so.
Once a political activist, Droleskey ran for lieutenant governor of New York on the Right to Life Party ticket in 1986. In 1998 he opposed Sen. Alfonse D'Amato in the Republic Party primary and received 37 percent of the vote. In between he was active in other political races.
From 1992 to 2000 Droleskey wrote for "The Wanderer," the most conservative of the four nationally-circulated weekly Catholic newspapers. From 2001 to 2003 he was a contributor to "Latin Mass" magazine.
During most of these years he worked as an adjunct professor of political science at Long Island University. As a side venture he produced a small-circulation newsletter called "Christ or Chaos." It was replaced in 2004 by a web site of the same name:
www.christorchaos.com
.
Along the way, Droleskey also replaced his opinions.
When he ran for political office he was styled a political conservative. When he wrote for "The Wanderer," he was a religious conservative. By the time he wrote for "Latin Mass," he was a Traditionalist Catholic. Later, when he wrote for "The Remnant" and "Catholic Family News," he was identified with their more strident form of Traditionalism. He has left all that behind.
Now he writes for nobody except the few who visit his web site, where he posts, every day or two, essays of yawning length. Two weeks ago, for example, he uploaded six articles totaling 66,000 words--enough text to flesh out a book of 240 pages.
His September 9 essay was about "Joseph Ratzinger." Droleskey refuses to call him "Pope Benedict" because he doesn't believe that he is a pope. To Droleskey, who recently revealed himself to be a sedevacantist, the last real pope apparently was Pius XII, who died in 1958. (Droleskey was six at the time.)
Droleskey insists that "Joseph Ratzinger is a Modernist. He has been a Modernist throughout his entire priesthood. ... Joseph Ratzinger is an enemy of the good of souls. ... An enemy of the good of souls is an enemy of God Himself." This is why Benedict XVI should not be considered a pope at all, says Droleskey, and this is why Droleskey now is on the fringe of the fringe.
It is not clear how he makes a living. He no longer teaches. He no longer writes for periodicals that once might have paid him (very modest) stipends. For two years he promoted his Christ the King College, but it never got off the ground. First it was going to be a real brick-and-mortar school, then it was reduced to a web-based distance-learning school, and then, last July, it was closed down for a lack of students.
The main page of Droleskey's web site leads off with an appeal printed in big, red letters: "We still need donations. Please make one if you support this site and your means permit you to do so. Oh, pretty please, we really do need more than a little bit of help right now!" He can't be getting much support this way.
Droleskey tours the country in his motor home, giving lectures. He was scheduled to speak two Sundays ago at a sedevacantist church in Ohio. Over the next month he is scheduled speak at five other venues of the same stripe. In none of them can he hope to turn up a large crowd. There are not many Traditionalist Catholics in America (they may not constitute even one percent of the Catholic population), and there are far fewer sedevacantists, just a few thousand in all. It is for this latter group that Droleskey now writes and speaks.
Once he was able to get the attention of a third of New York's Republican voters. Now he struggles to get anyone's attention. It is not likely that many of those voters would recognize the candidate of 1998 in the itinerant essayist of 2006. What happened?
It's hard for me to say, not knowing Droleskey and having read only a sampling of his essays. In them there may be clues, perhaps even a well-hidden full explanation--though I doubt it. Sometimes all we can say is that whatever happened happened. A man changes his mind, changes his allegiances, changes even his faith (though he may think he has stood firm while all else around him has been changing).
Droleskey is a bright man. His having taught at a college shows that he has intellectual skills. Although his current writing suffers from logorrhea, I recollect thinking well of his long-ago articles in "The Wanderer." He has the courage of his convictions, as shown by his having devoted countless hours to political campaigns that had not even the remotest chance of success.
Some readers will ask, "If Droleskey is so marginal and can influence so few, why bring him up? Why not ignore him?" Partly because his is not a unique case--other people, also bright and diligent, have taken similar journeys--and partly because I can't help but feel for a person who so clearly wants to take the right path and who so clearly has missed it.
In my years in Catholic apologetics I have known or been aware of more than a handful of talented people who squandered their talents by becoming more Catholic than the pope. Droleskey is not the only one and is not the best-known one. I have mentioned others in earlier E-Letters, and I have mentioned them--and I mention Droleskey now--because orthodox Catholics are far more likely to be swayed by arguments made by people at that end of the spectrum than by people at Joan Chittister's end.
A CIVILIZATION THAT DESERVED TO GO UNDER
Many people have sympathies for lost causes: for the South in our own Civil War, for the line of the Stuarts in England, for the Cristeros in Mexico. This is not supposed to be. In the Whig theory of history, the winning side is the right side. Who wins deserves to win.
But the Whig theory is wrong. Sometimes the losing side is the better side, and sometimes things would have been better if the losers had won and the winners had lost.
Then again, sometimes it is good for the losers to lose.
The San Diego State University football team is known as the Aztecs, an unfortunate choice of names, in my opinion--not because it's an Indian name and nowadays you're not supposed to use Indian names for sports teams. No, it's unfortunate because the Aztecs were the Nazis of pre-Columbian America.
Theirs was a civilization so bad, with its multitudinous human sacrifices (sometimes thousands of them in a single week), that it deserved to be overthrown. According to Catholic historian Warren Carroll, it was probably as close as mankind ever has come to a civilization married to the Devil. The conquistadors did everyone a favor (including the Indians) by destroying the Aztec empire.
Because the Aztecs lost, they have been romanticized. To modern Americans they were Indians whose warriors dressed with feathery panache, whose wise men told wise tales, and whose lineal descendants (in dress if not in genes) lead cheers at halftime.
These modern Americans have not read about the blood that flowed down from the tops of Aztec temples as hearts were pulled out of living men who had been captured in raids on neighboring Indian tribes. Carroll gives more than enough detail, much of its gruesome, in "Our Lady of Guadalupe and the Conquest of Darkness." One reviewer at Amazon put it this way:
"I have never been keen in seeing the hand of Satan on every bad thing done by humanity. But after reading this book I have made a big exception: there can be no question now that the Aztecs did indeed worship the devil, whether the PC crowd likes it or not. Never before had I read such a clear exposition of the inherently evil organization of the Aztec empire and its association with devil-worship."
When we look at our own society, with its manifest evils, sometimes it's difficult to keep things in perspective. We can find ourselves stuck on a downward emotional spiral, thinking that ours must be the worst of all times. But it isn't, not by a long shot.
Yes, there have been better times (even within our own memory), but there have been worse times too, much worse. An acknowledgement of this does not absolve us from the duty of trying to remedy the evils around us, but it does help us maintain mental clarity.
p.s., If you have a comment about anything appearing in this E-Letter, please do not hit your Reply button. Instead, go to Catholic Answers' discussion forums at
http://forums.catholic.com
where you may post your comment in the forum dedicated to the E-Letter. You will find a thread devoted to this issue of the E-Letter. Feel free to add your comment in the form of a reply to that thread.
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