Bullets and Butterflies

I cannot NOT post this. Was reading one of my favorite mags today...Envoy... and came across another splendid article by Peter Kreeft; How NOT to Win the Culture Wars. It's a take off on the famous Srewtape Letters by C.S. Lewis so you'll immediately recognize its backwardness (Screwtape is from the Dark Side). In presents an insightful 7 ideas to plant into the American Catholic mind in order to collapse the faith of western civilization...today, I'll just give you a snapshot of #2, Happytalk. If you want the rest, better get your hands on a subscription to Envoy; here's the link: http://www.envoymagazine.com/

(By Peter Kreeft, Ph.D.)
The second principal is Happytalk. Let them always talk up the achievements, the successes, the progress that the Church has made in the last forty years. Insist that they insist that the Church in America is healthy even though the statistics are devastating. Keep them at this relentlessly, nose to the grindstone, 24/7, especially the bishops. Keep that bland smile on their faces. Make them forget that they are prophets, and if they remember, make them think that it's socially profitable to be a prophet. (Of course that's another really obvious BIG Lie, and that's what makes it so delightful to us.) Keep the laity ignorant of the facts, if you can; and if you can't keep the facts out of their minds, keep them out of their wills, so that even though their minds are not ignorant, their wills will ignore the cultural abomination of desolation that has removed half the Church's priests, 2/3 of its nuns, 9/10 of its children's theological knowledge, belief in the Real Presence among 70% of Catholics, decreased Mass attendance from 75% to 25% and Confession even more, and destroyed Catholic families at the same rate as non-Catholic families, since Catholics abort, contracept sodomize, fornicate, divorce, and sexually abuse, and thus contribute to the gradual suicide of their society through the attack on its single most fundamental foundation, the family, at almost exactly the same rate as non-Catholics. Amid this devastation, keep them happytalking. Keep them saying Peace, Peace, when there is no peace, exactly like the false prophets in the Bible. Keep them pretending that the battlefield they live on is really a playground, and that those bullets are really butterflies those land mines are really the yellow brick road to the land of Oz, as they blandly celebrate themselves in songs about how they, not God, are "building the Kingdom of God." Thus, thjey will give Our Father Below the tremendous advantage of ignoring his very existence. They can even be persuaded to embrace and accept all the darts and arrows that we shoot at them, and at the sheep thawt are in their care, in a spirit of universal tolerance and nonjudgmentalism. In other words, persuade them to be spiritual Chamberlains at Munich."