TRANSCRIPT
It needs to be said — the Marxist, lefty media have more integrity than most Catholic so-called media.
“Why?” you ask. Because the Left, to borrow from Abp. Sheen (one of our Church Militant heroes), have all zeal, even if they have no truth.
The Marxists work toward a common goal, an agenda larger than themselves. They are driven by their worldview and will sacrifice to achieve it. A huge portion of the Catholic (again, so-called) media work not for a global agenda but rather to ensure self-comfort. It really does boil down to a question of integrity.
It is, in fact, precisely the greed and self-centeredness of these “professional Catholics” of the media world that has allowed the Marxists — or, in the Church, modernists — to succeed so far beyond their imaginings.
Let’s look, for example, at the activity of these Catholic so-called journalists in the Church of Nice as it relates to Fr. James Martin. Here is a man who refuses to reveal his own sexuality (which is a sort-of admission) as he tromps around the Church extolling gay sex and calling the disordered passion “a gift” — and saying that God is the author of this disorder. “Being gay isn’t a sin. It’s the way that God made some people,” he says. They were born that way, he says (which, of course, means they would have been conceived that way).
Sure, the Catholic notables on the Right in the world of social media and a certain television network gone awry will, from time to time, condemn the homosexualist Jesuit’s ramblings. But see, that’s where it stops. The underlying support mechanism within the hierarchy for this celebrated dissident is allowed to go on unchallenged, unremarked on and, therefore, advancing his evil.
Faithful Catholics are sick and tired of hearing about Pope Francis this and Pope Francis that. They’ve already written him off, even as he hails down recriminations against them. But the ecclesiastical swamp of modernism from which he arose — that story never gets reported on.
And it doesn’t get reported on because that would mean naming names of the same bishops who sit on their boards, give them permission to speak at conferences, even grant them interviews — interviews which keep the facade propped up that the media outfit is some reliable source of information, with its finger on the pulse.
Evil Jimmy has been allowed to persist in the polluting of Catholic minds, especially young Catholic minds, including thousands of high school students every summer at their Jesuit High School Camps, because various bishops and cardinals back him. So where are the stories? Where are the reports? Where are the investigations of these wicked enablers? Not evil Jimmy (like the pope; the lukewarm, somewhat-faithful Catholic has already taken all that into account). It’s baked in. But the bishops, the ones who keep silent about him, why are they not challenged in editorials, for example?
Why doesn’t EWTN or Relevant Radio, St. Anthony Messenger or Our Sunday Visitor, for example, go after these prelates, publicly and loudly and often? Why don’t other so-called Catholic so-called journalists pick up the standard here and go after these loser bishops? And losers is exactly what they are.
In fact, Hell-bound is a better descriptor, certainly from an accuracy standpoint. What other destiny would an unrepentant prelate have who positions himself as an enemy of Christ?
Why do EWTN and Relevant Radio, for example, feel absolutely no responsibility to warn their listeners of the evil, the malice present in the hierarchy? Could it be that many of those hierarchs are sitting on their boards?
If that’s the motive for the establishment media (and until they answer what their motive is for keeping silent, it’s fair game to speculate), then that makes their intent purely self-comfort.
That is a massive lack of integrity.
And even further down the right side of the spectrum, there are the so-called traditionalists, whose idolization of the Latin Mass blinds them to the abuses within that community. Here, too, the selfishness of self-comfort is the goal by the so-called media types and social media personalities that haunt that corner of the internet. If there’s a quick buck to be made through donations from wealthy schismatics or the pandering of a book or a podcast, count on them to be there, ignoring the dark underbelly of this movement with way too many ties to things like Naziism, as well as misogyny.
Again, so-called Catholic media are outshined in level of integrity by the enemies of Our Blessed Lord. In fact, a fair amount of what passes for Catholic media is little else than self-indulgent, get-rich-quick schemes — and they keep the engines humming.
Church Militant is relatively new to the scene compared to some of the old-timers, the well-ensconced, established crowd. The job of a media outfit is to hold those in the actual establishment accountable to the people they supposedly serve. It’s to create pressure and bring pressure to bear on areas where transparency is needed, so that truth may prevail.
But no one in the Catholic media world — certainly none of the establishment ones — really do that, nor have they ever done it, and as long as they are able to keep fooling you, they never will.
Why should they? It’s an easy life, a comfortable life — and so it shall remain as long as they never rock the boat. Having spent decades in the belly of the beast of secular media, I can testify firsthand that a different calculus is at work there — or, at the very least, an additional calculus.
Many of the secular-media types are all about effecting change in the culture, in bringing about their vision (however wrong it is) of how the world should be.
And they bust their humps in the process. Long days, in-depth discussions about how to bring all this about — almost strategy sessions. We see the end result in the reporting.
And people can go on all they want about how many people don’t trust the media, but every single weeknight, for a mere 30 minutes, six times the number of Americans tune in to watch one of the big three networks’ national news broadcasts as do Americans who tune in to FOX, CNN and MSNBC combined over not just 30 minutes, but five hours.
That arithmetic is flooring.
The three cable giants would need one single viewer to watch all their combined programming for five hours a night — six nights in a row — to equal what the three major networks present to just one single viewer in just one 30 minute window any given weeknight.
It’s more than just dollars for the grunts who work in giant news media. The executives and stars pull down enormous profit and pay, but they could not do that without the enormous dedication to a cause that they elicit from those who work below them. The giant media see themselves as able to affect change, and they work toward that end. It’s what makes them tick. It’s what they get up for in the morning.
But over in the Catholic media world, well, what are they working for? It sure isn’t to effect change. It’s to serve the machine so as to keep their rears warm and their bellies well-fed.
It really does come down to integrity as a central question.
The Catholic establishment-media machine cannot effect change while also remaining warm and well-fed. But for decades, it’s tried to present itself as that. It’s not, not even close.
Like the institution it covers up for, Catholic media lie to their readers, their listeners and their viewers. They traffic in truth only to a point. After that, it’s back to the warmth and security of the bishops’ skirts. The entirety of Catholic, Inc., is set up with one thing in mind — self-protection and self-comfort. But the model is becoming unsustainable as fewer and fewer Catholics practice the Faith, and fewer still convert to it.
The dinosaur Church will survive this generation of prelates and self-serving professional Catholics. There are still enough fumes in the tank for that. But after that, when the Dolans and DiNardos and Vignerons and Cupichs and Tobins are either drooling themselves or dead, there won’t be much of a need for a Catholic establishment media.
Parasites can’t live after the host dies.
Not counting immigrants (most of whom are illegal), the Church in the United States has fallen by over one-third in its membership in roughly 20 years. Indeed, immigration is the only thing that is propping up the numbers and, even there, it’s fool’s gold. Eighteen years ago, including immigration (again mostly illegal), one in every four Americans was Catholic. Today, it’s one out of every five.
If you exclude immigration numbers, it’s one out of every eight. And, in reality, immigration numbers should be excluded because, unlike European-Catholic immigrants who held onto the faith for generations, close to half of Hispanic Catholics leave the Church in the first generation of being here. The Church in America is dying, and it’s dying for the same reason the Church has died in various times and places all over the world — lack of fidelity.
Which is why the relatively small handful of mostly laity in the Catholic media world will burden a mighty judgment when their day comes. They could have, perhaps, slowed or even prevented this from happening. But they made and (here’s the point) still make the conscious decision to sponge off the system for their own self-comfort. Refusing to face the facts or tell you the facts, the hard truths of what’s really going on, that is what will be inscribed across the headstones of Catholic media. In another subtext, they died from a lack of integrity.
It seems fitting to leave you with this quote from Abp. Sheen: “It is a characteristic of any decaying civilization that the great masses of the people are unconscious of the tragedy. Humanity in a crisis is generally insensitive to the gravity of the times in which it lives.” If only those who could have told them did.
For if souls are not saved, nothing is.