Miscellaneous Rambling
I grealty enjoyed James Martin's My Life with the Saints, so for years I've always kept my eyes out for things he writes. At this point, however, I'm writing him off as an unhinged leftist. I remember being disturbed by his "pro gay" positions when the Obergefell fallout was raging, and now he's comparing Trump's temporary ban on Syrian immigrants to the Holocaust. His Tweet: "We shut the door on Syrian refugees on the same day we marked Holocaust Remembrance Day and the March for Life."
Martin loves the leftist approach of watering down the definition of "pro-life," in hopes of excoriating everyone who doesn't agree with him on anything. "You're against Syrian refugees? You're not pro-life!" "You think sanctuary cities ought to be lose funding even though it'll hurt the most vulnerable? You're not pro-life!" "You think welfare gives people an incentive not to work? You're not pro-life!" "You think soup kitchen bathrooms should be stocked with single ply instead of the softer double ply? You're not pro-life!"
All those people should be forced to spend time with Hillary's former OB-GYN (I can't spell "gynecologist"), who was Arkansas' leading abortionist and claimed he was "pro-life." "He waxed religious in searching for words to characterize it. He described his patients as 'born again,' even while conceding, 'I am destroying life.' He candidly called himself an 'abortionist' – a term of derision employed by abortion foes. 'You don't understand,' he reprimanded me. 'I consider what I do very pro-life. I am saving lives when I do abortions.'" Link.
Surely, a Wharton grad and Jesuit-trained priest like Fr. Martin can see the ridiculousness of such things, right? Of course he can . . . unless he has come unhinged. I can't pronounce judgment on his sanity from half a country away, and at this point I merely read the man's Tweets (refusing to spend real time digesting his hokum), but something ain't right and I'm guessing his fame has not meshed well with the humility he knows is necessary.
My daughter is friends with one of Fr. Martin's close colleagues. I was half tempted to write to him and say, "Tell your friend to study more closely Tom Merton's unravelling after he gained fame," but given Merton's politics, I suspect he'd have no idea what I'm talking about.
I wrote the foregoing last weekend, then saw this article by John Zmirak: On Immigration, Fr. James Martin Wants to Shame Catholics with Bad Arguments. I felt vindicated. As always with Zmirak, it's worth reading. Excerpt:
Fr. Martin's latest project is de facto open borders and limitless welcome of Muslim “refugees.” In a new article in America magazine, he greets the astonishing support shown by the Trump administration's for the March for Life with the back of his hand. Like a skilled magician, he tries to misdirect our attention elsewhere with a long, illogical rant on Trump's immigration policies. It's a standard tactic on the Catholic left.
Remember how Chicago Cardinal Blaise Cupich responded to the gut-churning exposé of Planned Parenthood's profitable business selling the butchered parts of aborted babies: he admitted that this cannibalistic practice was wrong, but insisted that it was no more wrong than ”¦ deporting illegal immigrants, allowing citizens handguns, or paring back Obamacare. Seriously – go read the cardinal's op-ed on the subject. He couldn't allow Planned Parenthood's tiny victims even a single news cycle, one short day of commemoration for their crassly profit-driven destruction, without launching into the rest of his Seamless Garment laundry list of reasons-why-we-need-to-grow-the-federal-government.
Martin has responded to America's rejection of pro-choice, leftist, Jesuit-anointed politicians like Tim Kaine and Joseph Biden by accusing the Trump administration of being “un-Christian” in its new immigration policies. Martin must have a Ph.D. in something, because his argumentative technique in this article is indeed to “pile it higher and deeper.” He offers one weak, shrill argument after another, hoping that by the time we begin to see the errors in the first one, we will already be too distracted by the fallacies in the next; and by the end we will simply surrender, exhausted, to his moral dudgeon, his priestly collar, and his piled-up, tottering righteousness
