Ouch!
Excellent essay by Matthew Hanley in "The Catholic Thing." Excerpt:
Graham Greene, the great twentieth-century novelist and convert to the Catholic faith, was intimately familiar with the powerful inclinations of the flesh. He led a deeply conflicted life replete with extramarital romantic liaisons. The soul in turmoil, at once given over to passion and afflicted with remorse, is the theme that dominates his greatest works.
Greene recognized that his persistent involvement in a series of affairs severed him from the Church. He knew he could not have it both ways; that would be to arrogate to himself the content of the faith handed down from the beginning.
In the end, he opted for the affairs. In a 1990 letter to Newsweek’s Kenneth Woodward, Greene tells of his experience travelling to Padre Pio’s village in Italy with girlfriend Catherine Walston. He was moved by the Mass they attended early one morning, but also reveals: “I was invited to go see him that night in the monastery, but I made excuses not to go as neither of us wanted our lives changed!”
In spite of his failings, he displayed a certain integrity by choosing not to present himself for Holy Communion – an issue of striking contemporary relevance. “I've broken the rules”, he writes. “They are rules I respect, so I haven't been to communion for nearly thirty years. . . .In my private life, my situation is not regular. If I went to communion, I would have to confess and make promises. I prefer to excommunicate myself." If this is not exactly an act of faith, but it is an acknowledgment of the Catholic faith’s coherence.
Such a stance seems almost quaint today. The stark contrast with Nancy Pelosi and other Catholic politicians who do approach Communion – despite acting in flagrant, public defiance of Catholic teaching – springs immediately to mind. Here we glimpse what it is like when not even the spirit is willing; how dreadful indeed it is when the mind, unlike Peter in the garden, does not even intend to be present to the Truth.
Nancy Pelosi’s support of abortion policies hardly needs to be detailed here. Although Catholicism cannot be reduced to the issue of abortion – or indeed to a mere code of ethics – any Catholic who actively supports it acts as antithetically as (and more destructively than) the vegetarian who frequents steakhouses, or the Muslim who promotes pilgrimage to Panama. It simply makes no sense; and it is not that hard to grasp....
Pelosi is not the everyman (everyperson?) “hypocrite” who recognizes goodness yet fails to conform perfectly to it, but the intellectually dishonest one who misrepresents truth and fails even to aspire to it – all while claiming to advance it. It’s far worse to champion falsity in the name of truth, than to recognize and respect truth – but crash land in its pursuit."
Plus, another nice video from Michael Voris:
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