"You better be freaked out!" --Father Z

Father Z at What Does The Prayer Really Say is now a daily stop on my journey around the blogosphere.

I love the way he "fisks" various articles, including this recent story about a lecture by a priest who is also an exorcist.

He writes (his bolds):

"The lecture was definitely interesting," Satterlee said. "It freaked me out too, which I knew it would." [You better be freaked out.]

And recently, he fisked Maureen Dowd's hideous column in the New York Times. The words in black are Dowd's, the red (and the bolds) are Father Z's.

As the Vatican is trying to wall off the “brides of Christ,” Cask of Amontillado style, it is welcoming extreme-right Anglicans into the Catholic Church — the ones who are disgruntled about female priests and openly gay bishops. Il Papa is even willing to bend Rome’s most doggedly held dogma, against married priests — as long as they’re clutching the Anglicans’ Book of Common Prayer. [This is really the only point: "welcoming extreme right Anglicans". This is it. And so now it all has to be about misogyny and homophobia. So, you attack the Nazi-loving, holocaust denying Pope of Rome. She blames him for clerical pedophilia and AIDS in Africa. When she says "the Church" does bad things, she means "he", Pope Benedict.]

“Most of the Anglicans who want to move over to the Catholic Church under this deal are people who have scorned women as priests and have scorned gay people,” Briggs said. “The Vatican doesn’t care that these people are motivated by disdain.”

But Father Z then delivers the coup de grace:

Dowd writes about religion as if she really cares about it. But she doesn’t. This is camouflage. If she can write these manifest lies, whatever Catholicism Maureen Dowd once had wound up with a forceps shoved through its skull a long time ago.

Oooof! Nice to see someone hit back hard against the vile trope that has been so prevalent concerning the Holy Father's generous offer to us Anglicans who wish to be fully Catholic while preserving our precious patrimony. It is about being faithful to the revealed religion as received by the Apostles and handed down faithfully from generation to generation. It's not about women or homosexuals. If those other Anglicans had decided it was okay to change the elements of the Eucharist to milk and raisin cakes, we would have left over that. It is the tampering with a God-ordained sacrament that bothered us. It allowing the latest sociological and trendy politically correct thinking of the age trump the Word of God that we are concerned about. Thank you Father Z for the uppercut this trope deserved.

As Cardinal Pell once said:

We are called to fight and battle against evil in its many forms. We know that evil will triumph if enough people do nothing.

Good parents will battle to protect their children. People will even give their lives for great causes, to defend their country.

I don’t think a Christian can say “I’m a lover, not a fighter”.