I’m aware that there is a tendency not to speak the truth. It comes down, at times, to friendship, and the experience (which many serious minded women have experienced) of losing a friendship simply by saying the truth, or even quoting someone who says the truth.

I’m male. This has some handicaps — I do not understand this concern. I tend not to hide my beliefs — and if you cannot take a joke or deal with someone who likes you and disagrees with you, so be it. I can live with a few friends, and true friends are rare.

Besides, boys bully with their fists. It is the girls who use words, and gossip. Bruises heal.

This means that at least half the church is vulnerable to error simply because they are afraid of being shunned. If you add to this the fact that people have itching ears and try to find the deep, the spiritual, and avoid dealing with their own sin — we can fall into the error of Thyatira. Tolerating heresy.

Revelation 2:18-29

18″And to the angel of the church in Thyatira write: These are the words of the Son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire, and whose feet are like burnished bronze:

19″I know your works — your love, faith, service, and patient endurance. I know that your last works are greater than the first. 20 But I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols. 21I gave her time to repent, but she refuses to repent of her fornication. 22Beware, I am throwing her on a bed, and those who commit adultery with her I am throwing into great distress, unless they repent of her doings; 23and I will strike her children dead. And all the churches will know that I am the one who searches minds and hearts, and I will give to each of you as your works deserve. 24But to the rest of you in Thyatira, who do not hold this teaching, who have not learned what some call ‘the deep things of Satan,’ to you I say, I do not lay on you any other burden; 25only hold fast to what you have until I come. 26To everyone who conquers and continues to do my works to the end,
I will give authority over the nations;
27 to rule them with an iron rod,
as when clay pots are shattered —
28even as I also received authority from my Father. To the one who conquers I will also give the morning star. 29Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.

This has infected all of the church. And to resist this, the serious are making functional alliances. We need all the faithful — across the scattered congregations, hidden in the visible church. For heresy can infect every church. Consider this for a second… (sorry, Cail, I’m quoting you extensively)

A conversation started on Sunshine Mary’s blog recently about whether the pope is being too lenient with straying Catholics. My response was too long and off-topic to post there, but this was the line that got me typing:

That path ultimately leads not to schism but the slow death that it is currently experiencing.

When he was still Joseph Cardinal “God’s Rottweiler” Ratzinger, Pope Benedict predicted that death in the book Faith and the Future:

[The Church] will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. She will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity…. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek…The process will be long and wearisome.… But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church…. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death.

That shrinkage seems clearly in the future, but whether from a violent schism or a quiet dying off and drifting away of the unfaithful is the question. He’s softened since becoming Pope (though still much better than his predecessor), and I’d like to see him take a harder line again, but I try to remind myself that he’s much holier than me, much more knowledgeable about the situation, and maybe even smarter than me! (Seriously, read any of his many books; the guy is brilliant.)

He heads a church where, according to polls, 75% of the members violate one of the 6 core precepts (confession at least once a year). So according to the rules, at least 3/4 of his sheep are going to burn, unless they escape on the technicality of cluelessness (which seems to be what most people are counting on, but they shouldn’t). That seems like good enough reason to shake things up and let the chips fall where they may, but what if a schism leaves an even greater number of people without valid sacraments? It’s not that easy a call.

Traditional Catholicism is healthy and growing, just very small yet and mostly confined to the United States, Poland, and a few enclaves in Europe. Demographically it’s the future, but it’s going to take a while to get there. (My understanding is that the same thing is happening among Protestants, with the more traditional sects growing and the mega-churches and soft groups starting to wane.)

Cail’s clearly Catholic, and distressed by the issues in his church, As he should be. As we all should be. But the word of Christ in revelations is clear. God will let us be in our error. God will refine and purify the church, by letting those who remain in error die off. Their church will not last, there will not only be not another generation of believers but the womb will be closed — which we are seeing in the current fertility rates, where liberals have but one child ber women, and the traditionalists have two, three, four or five.

The use of Jezebel is instructive. She was a queen of Israel, married to a corrupt and weak king, the last of his dynasty, who used her beauty and her soft power to introduce Ba’al — with its ritual, sexual, orgiastic worship — to Israel. At her death, she dressed at her finest and tried to intimidate the men who had killed her husband. However, Jehu asked if any man of God would do his duty. And a eunuch chose to defenestrate her. (Women, remember that beauty is a weapon that only works for some men).

{Again, I’m male. But I can read, and there is literature, at present underground, of women counseling women to be submissive to their husband, to welcome new life — and how to practically run a large household on a small income while keeping their house beautiful and themselves pretty. Much of it is concentrated around the nutraditionalism links. We have to test this teaching, and we need to make sure that it is not tending to error, but we have to do that for everything anyway]

However, the words of our LORD also give us our duty if the church has fallen into error. There is no new burden. There are no deep things. Our job is to stand.

And if we are shunned, let us embrace the shun.