Thirteen Years of USC

The official anniversary of the establishment of this blog is June 29th, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. What a different place I was when I founded this blog back in the summer of 2007! I was working for the Church and had to be super careful what I said for fear of offending the powers that be. I was also brand new to traditional Catholicism and using the blogger platform to voice my increasing anger about things like sloppy liturgies, bad music, and the scarcity of Latin in the masses of my diocese. I had no idea at that time how far down this rabbit hole went, nor to what degree the Catholic tradition would form my thinking and alter my view on so many things.

Sorry I have been a bit vacant as of late. I have been working on a series of posts, however, that are all fairly dense and have required a lot of thought and research. Hopefully I will have some more available soon.

Anyhow, a special thanks to all of you who have patronized this little endeavor over the years, and who have put up with my crankiness and occasional bouts of stupidity. I truly value you all. Please pray for me, a sinner.

Our New Civic Religion

So, we have a new civic religion in the United States. It is Black Lives Matter, whose structure and methodology are essentially religious. Consider:

The confession of white privilege that whites were born with and is always present and must always be fought against is Original Sin.

The corresponding soul-searching with resolution to think and act differently is a  form of repentance and Metanoia.

"Taking a knee" is a sacramental symbol, a sign that signifies the believer's translation from the state of denial to a state of Wokeness. It is a rite of Baptism.

The movement has its own prophets, priests, apologists, hierarchy, and missionaries. The various state branches of the movement are its dioceses.

The BLM symbol of the raised fist is the new cross: a symbol of resurrection and victory.

Those who died at unjustly at the hands of police are the new Martyrs, whose cultus the movement venerates.

BLM marches are processions; the images of the martyrs carried in these processions are icons.

It has created it's own calendar with observances such as Juneteenth and Indigenous Peoples' Day that are meant to call to mind important themes from salvation history.

It has its own rigid orthodoxy that is to be accepted on Faith; the BLM narrative is the only acceptable narrative, and to question it is an act of heresy, for questioning BLM is not only an act of intellectual disagreement but a manifestation of bad faith. Heretics must be degraded for their bad faith and acts of heresy must be expiated by evidence of contrition, public acts of penance, and professions of orthodoxy.

The virtue of charity, which "in the bond of perfection" that holds all things together (Col. 3:14) is replaced with grievance, which is the one universal "virtue" that binds the entire movement.

The tenets of this BLM orthodoxy are defined by the policy objectives of the movement (e.g., "Defund the Police", "Vote by Mail" etc.), denying any of which is an act of heresy. "Racist" is synonymous with "heretic."

Contrarian statements are deemed "problematic." Problematic means blasphemous.

The progressive Twitterati who scroll through social media history of others looking for such "problematic" statements to expose are the Inquisition of the new religion.

Monuments of the old order must be torn down and expurgated from public consciousness like the temples of pagandom.

The future moment when America "comes to terms" with its racial past is a kind of Day of Reckoning, a Last Judgement where all historical-social injustices are rectified. Nobody knows when or how this will occur; it exists solely in the realm of the eschatological.

I am making no judgment on any of these things other than to note that the BLM movement, in its contemporary incarnation, has all the essential elements of a civic religion. It is the country's new faith here in CURRENT YEAR.