Nothing Like A Crisis To Show The True Colors of People

Last year, 2019 (which seems like at least 100 years ago now), countless "Catholic" traditionalists/conservatives in the Church were very upset about the Synod on the Amazon.  They warned the rest of us for months before the Synod even began how "dangerous" it was.  Cardinal Raymond Burke said the Synod would result in the "dismantling" of the entire global church.  He and other anti-Francis prelates urged Catholics to pray and fast about the Synod, warning that it was apostasy.

However, none of these people seemed in the least concerned about the Amazonians.  Many of the faithful in the Amazon go for months or even years without access to the Mass or the Sacraments because of the lack of priests.  Yet I never heard any concern about this problem on any of the blogs/websites of these self-righteous critics.  No one ever called for fasting and prayer on behalf of the people in the Amazon.

Now those who were so critical of the Amazon Synod have themselves been deprived of access to the Mass and the Sacraments.  This is not the result of the lack of priests but of a worldwide pandemic called COVID-19 that is sickening and killing hundreds of thousands of people worldwide (1,923,935 confirmed cases and 119,612 deaths as of this writing).  Here in the United States, as I write, there are 586,941 confirmed infections and 23,634 deaths (source).  You can click the links to see how much this has changed from the time of my writing (April 13).

As a result of this nightmare in which we are all living, all Masses have been canceled in the United States and most other parts of the world, and there is little to no access to the Sacraments.  This is done in an effort to try to save lives.  Nevertheless in Italy, which is in total lockdown, more than 100 priests have died.  We have lost two priests here in the Diocese of Brooklyn:  Father Gioacchino Basile, 60 and 49-year-old Father Jorge Ortiz-Garay.  At least one priest in the New York Archdiocese has died.

I see no concern on any of these blogs about the death of these priests or anyone else for that matter.  They are all concerned basically about one thing:  they don't have the Mass or the Sacraments, and they are mad!

Even a worldwide pandemic has not helped them develop any empathy or concern for others.  They are still unable to see outside their own little circle, viewing everything that happens in the world only as a conspiracy to destroy these last remaining "faithful Catholics."

I actually don't read many trad blogs or websites these days, mostly because I don't have to.  They are basically carbon copies of one another, no original thoughts, all just parroting each other, filled with anger and hate.  If you have read one, you're read them all.

As an example, one particularly narcissistic, ego-centric blogger wrote this:  "Corona - Cover For Deconstruction Of The Faith."  She writes about different bishops canceling Mass and suspending other sacraments, and sums it up this way:

So here we have it. Progressive prelates are doing all they can to choke off God's graces to His Church and thus to the world. Is it at all possible that this had been their dream all along, and that the covid-19 situation simply provided an excuse for them to plausibly do so?

No concern whatsoever about people gathering together in a church and infecting and possibly killing each other.  No concern in the least about the great suffering and loss of life throughout the world.  No concern about people losing their jobs and being unable to support themselves and their families.  No concern for the fact that economies are starting to fail around the world.  She is completely unable to see that this is not all about her, but that people are suffering around the world in far worse ways than she is.

Sigh.

But as I have written previously, there is one blog that I do check on a regular basis.  I don't know why I check this blog.  It is neither original nor compelling in any way.  It is just like every other hateful blog of its kind.  Yet, I find myself going back to it almost every day.  And every new post is more hateful than the next.

I am talking about Les Femmes - The Truth, possibly the most misnamed blog on the Internet.  There is very little approaching The Truth found on this blog.  It is mostly a anti-Pope Francis/anti-Catholic Magesterium screed and has, sadly, devolved into the rants and raves of a very angry woman, Mary Ann  Kreitzer.  As I have pointed out, Mary Ann sees herself and others who believe as she does as targeted victims of the Church closings. That is the definition of paranoid.  And Mary Ann, that is not an ad hominem attack.  That is just a fact.

I have tried over and over again to dialogue with her, but she completely cuts me off.  I try to post comments on her blog, but she refuses to publish them.  She did acknowledge me in a post, but then gave no links to who I am or to my blog.  She identified me as "a Catholic with her own blog which I rarely read."  Her post was entitled, "The Laugh of The Day: Silly  Trolls and Tattletales!"

Mary Ann discussed three "trolls" on her blog:  me and two other people.

She wrote this about me:

One of the trolls is a Catholic with her own blog which I rarely read. I tried to engage with her for awhile, but realized it was pointless, and have only read, I think, one post on her blog in over a year. That one defended the Pachamama stunt at the Vatican. What a head-shaker!

Mary Ann's statement about trying to "engage" with me is a complete lie.  She has never tried to engage with me.  She has just completely cut me off.  Mary Ann has told me to just go away and quit reading her blog.  That is hardly "engaging" with me.

She then mentioned a "gentleman from Ireland appears to be mentally ill." She gives no reason at all why this "gentleman appears to be mentally ill" other than he calls her and her co-bloggers "faithless women and other less flattering pejoratives."  I have no idea what has been actually said, but if that is true, I would agree.  Anyone who rejects the Pope, as Mary Ann does, has lost her faith.

Mary Ann does not like being called a "faithless woman" and accused of not being Catholic.  However, she has many, many times called Pope Francis an "evil" man and accused many priests, prelates and others, including me, of being "faithless Catholics".  Maybe she should think about that.

Mary Ann's identifies her third "troll" as:

I think a woman, although she hides behind anonymity [and] is giving me lots of laughs lately. The other day she wrote, "Ok. This blog is officially designated as CRAZY!!!" (I didn't post her silly comment which, again, was nothing but an ad hominem attack.)."

Mary Ann then wrote:

This troll appears to be friends with the blogger troll. They are two peas in a pod so she can easily take her ad hominem attacks to that blogger who will happily post them. It won't bother me because I'll never see them since I don't read it. As I said, Life is too short.

And once again, Mary Ann could not be more wrong.  I have no idea who "this troll" is.  But yes, unless a comment is obscene or over-the-top hateful, I will print it.  I am not afraid to engage with people because I am not defending myself, as Mary Ann does.   I try to defend only the truth of Jesus Christ.  I also realize, unlike Mary Ann, that I can be wrong and it is good to listen to other points of view.

Mary Ann wrote that this third "troll" has threatened to report her to the bishop.  Mary Ann responded with this:

As for the bishop, the last four (Bishop Thomas Welsh, Bishop John Keating, Bishop Paul Loverde, and the current bishop, Michael Burbidge) were and are all well aware of what I do. I've been publishing a newsletter in the diocese for twenty-five years that goes to the bishop, the chancery staff, and every pastor and parochial vicar in Arlington (with a few exceptions) as well as many of the DREs and school principals. I'm not exactly hiding behind a rock marked "anonymous" or "unknown."

Mary Ann is a lay person.  She is not a priest or religious.  She is free to do or say whatever she wants.  No bishop or any other authority will ever personally correct her no matter how off the mark she is.  Just sending the newsletter to a bishop means absolutely nothing.  So this is no defense in any way.

Mary Ann then posted a scripture which she said was a favorite of her late brother:

"The perverse are hard to be corrected, and the number of fools is infinite." Douay-Rheims translation of Ecclesiastes 1:15

Funny how we can look right at something and not see it.

I actually did write a comment to the post, which of course Mary Ann did not publish.  My comment was as follows:

Mary Ann, you are outright lying about me. You did not try to "engage" with me. You cut me off because you didn't like what I was saying. I never did ad hominem attacks against you. I argued with your views.

You have totally discredited yourself with that lie about me. And according to Cardinal Sarah, you have also totally cut yourself off from Christ and His Church with your hateful posts about Pope Francis, questioning whether he is even Catholic.

"Whoever is against the Pope is ipso facto out of the Church. Providence sees us very well, you know?"

I don't know why I keep coming back to your blog. Mostly I just look at your titles and give a quick skim. Some of the posts are so hateful I can't stomach to do even that much.

I read very few other blogs with the exception of Zuhlsdorf because he gives a good reading of the trash posted by other radicals. All of anti-Francis blogs sound exactly the same. No original thought whatsoever. If you've read one, you've read them all.

I have posted on my blog about you, pleading that you will repent of your rejection of Pope Francis. I have never done that with anyone else. I find myself actually praying for you. I can only think that the Holy Spirit wants me to pray for you, because to be totally honest, I would prefer to pay no more attention to you than I do any other anti-Francis blogger. But something won't let me.

You might want to take a closer look at that verse you posted.

Of course, you won't post this comment either.

May Our Lord have mercy on your soul.

We live in very serious times.  Our world is literally on the brink of complete disaster in many different ways, and COVID-19 is a just a part of this.  COVID-19 is a virus which started with bats who transmitted it to animals, who transmitted it to us.  The reason we are interacting with these animals is because we are destroying their natural habitat and displacing them, causing them to interact with us in a manner that would not be happening if we respected nature instead of trying to conquer it.

We are destroying the earth at an unprecedented rate.  From an 2018 article in The Guardian entitled, "One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals":

The world lost more than one football pitch of forest every second in 2017, according to new data from a global satellite survey, adding up to an area equivalent to the whole of Italy over the year. 

The scale of tree destruction, much of it done illegally, poses a grave threat to tackling both climate change and the massive global decline in wildlife. The loss in 2017 recorded by Global Forest Watch was 29.4m hectares, the second highest recorded since the monitoring began in 2001.

Global tree cover losses have doubled since 2003, while deforestation in crucial tropical rainforest has doubled since 2008. A falling trend in Brazil has been reversed amid political instability and forest destruction has soared in Colombia. 

Forest losses are a huge contributor to the carbon emissions driving global warming, about the same as total emissions from the US, which is the world’s second biggest polluter. Deforestation destroys wildlife habitat and is a key reason for populations of wildlife having plunged by half in the last 40 years, starting a sixth mass extinction.

This is only one way in which we are destroying our earth:  we are also raping the land of its national resources with oil drilling, fracking and mining.  We are pouring deadly chemicals and plastics into our oceans, killing sea life at such a rate that it is estimated that by 2050, there will be more plastics in the oceans than fish.  We all eat and drink a credit card's worth of plastic every week.  We are drowning in our own toxic garbage.

Our food is being genetically modified to the point where it will no longer nourish us.  Fresh, drinkable water is fast becoming the most precious commodity in the world.

We are also dealing with wars around the globe, contributing to the misery and death of untold millions and even more destruction of the land.  Much of the world lives in poverty.  Even here in the United States, COVID-19 has exposed the fact that most people are literally living paycheck to paycheck.  Missing just one paycheck left 40% of NYC unable to pay their rent.

According to a Global Wealth Report published in 2019 from the Credit Suisse Research Institute, the
"bottom half of wealth holders collectively accounted for less than 1% of total global wealth," while "the richest 10% own 82% of global wealth and the top 1% alone own 45%."  [Source].

As the COVID-19 crisis has shown us, all of this is the recipe for a complete disaster.  We are on the edge of a cliff, and it will not take much to push us off completely.  COVID-19 just might do it, especially if the shutdown of the world economy goes on for any length of time, which seems more than likely.

The USA has been dealing with COVID-19 for only a few short weeks, and already we lead the world by far in the number of infections and deaths.  What will happen if this is not resolved in the next couple of months?  Hang on to your seats.  This is going to get very rough.

I know there are many conspiracy theories, that this disease is some kind of germ warfare, or that the elite are doing this to gain control of everything.  Yes, we have been lied to many times in the past by government, media and others, and the elite of the world are all about power and money.  Sometimes conspiracy theories are correct.  I do not trust government or any other power in this world because we have been lied to so many times.

But the reason people want to believe in conspiracy theories concerning COVID-19 is because they want to reject the reality of just how dangerous and out of control our world is.  Things aren't really as bad as they seem.  Someone is pulling the strings, and they won't let everything be destroyed.

But there is no way COVID-19 is a part of anyone's plan.  And contrary to many fundamentalists, COVID-19 is not a plague sent from God.  It is a plague of our own making, brought about by our destruction of the world.  We are reaping what we have sown, and the most innocent and vulnerable among us are paying the price right now.  But it is not going to stop there.  Soon the elite will be paying the price as well.

The bishops did not take the Mass and the Sacraments away.  COVID-19 took it away, along with everything else it has destroyed.  Those who blame the bishops are deluding themselves.  They need to wake up to reality.  They need to recognize the fragile times in which we live.

We all need to realize that we are in this sinking ship together.  COVID-19 is a deadly enemy that we are only beginning to understand.  And like most viruses, it will most likely be mutating, leaving us constantly behind, never able to catch up.

We will not find refuge and strength in attacking each other.  Our only refuge and strength is admitting the truth about what we have done to our earth and then repenting of our sins against the earth, our sins against each other and, most importantly, our sins against our Creator.