Stuck in a Walker Percy Novel

Piggy-backing on Aramis' excellent post (below), let me say the following. I feel these days as though I am a Walker Percy novel protagonist: I sense strange goings-on, a stranger in a strange land, and I'm not feeling too good myself. Everything and everyone is in a peck of trouble somehow, and there is a megalomaniac at the switch who is making Bill Clinton look like a raving right winger.

Furthermore, the Catholic Church is being tarred from disparate, yet discernibly connected, points - a former British Prime Minister "convert" who paints himself as a harbinger of enlightened Christianity; a Texas TV evangelist who sees the megalomaniac as one who "loves the Lord" (preach it, brother); a series of appointments who are junkyard dogs against the Catholic Church; a continuing battery of smears and sneers toward the pope.

It begins to look more and more as though the "progressive" forces see the Catholic Church to be the last and major rock in the road standing in the way of the Enlightenment Project, so-called. They, too, appear to be more and more intent on carrying out the ramifications of the "Reformation" - that is, the schmoozing out of the positivity of Catholicism to a gradual humanist wet dream of religion as a harmless garland-throwing love fest ("LET the love shine, let the love shine in, the LOVE shine in..."), regardless of what we have come too far to ignore about human nature and the sacred, Gnostic romanticism to the contrary notwithstanding.

It may very well come to the kind of law-enforced harassing and martyrdom that the Church faced in the Mexican Cristero Wars, and the Spanish Civil War.

It is not a time for despair. But we are sure to see many, many more Catholics get snookered by the con job that the megalomaniac and his cronies are throwing so smoothly at unsuspecting - or, sadder still, hypocritically ignorant - American Catholics.

Marian chivalry is what is called for. Make these holy days of Holy Week count.