Vatican Racing World To The Bottom?
By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
Another big voice has been silenced. Tucker Carlson was ousted at Fox News last week. It was indeed big news, thus many of you are already aware of this. Why was it big news? Tucker, so “household” that he’s known by his first name, reached millions by speaking for them. He was one of the biggest names on cable at the time he was axed. He gave a voice to the majority view increasingly crowded out by the globalist, oligarch, Godless “Herods” of old media. He spoke for Christians, families, pro-lifers, those disenfranchised by the new trans, LGBTQ+, pagan, abortion, and euthanasia agenda.
Many turned to Fox only to watch him. It was worth taking the time to hear his voice in the midst of busy lives, even though TV is passé because he consistently told it like it is. I cannot figure out how to get my TV working, so I was almost daily in the habit of watching the Tucker reruns on my phone using the YouTube app. Tucker covered the real issues behind the lies so commonly peddled elsewhere by paid lackeys and spoke for common sense. He made all the wrong people mad. Time and time again I watched and listened, nearly incredulous that he was “allowed” by his handlers to speak with such honesty about the big picture, to include faith and God.
One example of the power he wielded in the public sphere was in exposing the falsehoods used to unjustly imprison Americans following the January 6 Capitol incursion. He showed uncut clips of the protesters inside the building, giving the lie that they were all there to bust the place up. Pretty hard to make that case when one of the jailed primary actors in the drama is seen obediently following Capitol police as they lead him around inside the building. That man was freed after Tucker exposed the injustice.
But it was his recent talk to the Heritage Foundation, in which Tucker recommended prayer, that may have been the last straw. Just a day or so before he was cut loose at Fox, he addressed the foundation’s 50th gala. He followed Fr. Scalia’s invocation, which called for prayer for our country. Tucker’s speech ended on the same note after he painted our modern struggle in stark terms of good and evil. He made more than a few self-ironic jokes about his own Episcopalian faith, but in the course of his inspiring speech he dared to paint the modern context in honest terms of faith.
Word is that his talk of the true God may have angered a modern Herod beyond the point of toleration. “Nothing is permanent beyond our own demise. And God,” he said. He addressed the criminalization of the exercise of our rights under God by questioning an election or deciding what to put in our bodies. He made two points near the end of his speech.
“The country is going at high speed in the wrong direction.” The pressing down of sadness upon us because of the lying and evil which seem so prevalent are overwhelming for some and they almost shut down rather than try to integrate it. Others of us are doing our best to parse it and live our integrity despite the sometimes overwhelming threat of consequences. Many lie simply to keep their jobs. Tucker’s view is that the desire to belong may have a lot to do with the COVID-style conformity that has been operative in so many contexts today.
But he affirmed that we always have with us those who stand up against the lies. You can find them everywhere. He tells the story of a previous social and political conformist who changed course during the COVID lockdowns and the attendant insanity and said, “No, I’m not going along with this.” And once a person tells one truth, that person will begin to tell other truths. Tucker described this phenomenon as an experience of tapping into a force greater than oneself. Of course, this is the growth of grace that comes with cooperation with grace.
Simply, the goal of destroying things and people is evil, Tucker commented. It’s not a partisan political principle, he said. It’s more fundamental, a larger force that’s avoided in “totally fraudulent” debates where one struggles to win by marshaling more facts than others. He recommended prayer as the answer. Prayer, of course, is tapping into good, communicating with, loving, and being present to God, goodness Himself.
He also used the trans child mutilation phenomenon and abortion as keys to explaining the evil in which we swim today. He made the point that every society in history has committed child sacrifice and that it’s not political but rather a “theological” phenomenon; it’s evil.
For believing Christians, for Catholics, the silencing of truth is simply the retelling of our own story, the story we just relived in this year’s Lent. It is the history of the silencing of the One Who is Truth Himself. And the victory over evil which is His Resurrection, in which victory we all share through our faith.
But prophets have always invited the plotting of their enemies to silence their voice. Words have power, as Tucker reminded the Heritage audience. The truth is dangerous for its enemies because it threatens everything their existence serves. There is a shortage of prophets today. Everywhere. To demonstrate this truth we need only ask what do Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia, at the gutted Pontifical Academy for Life, and the U.S. Secretary of the Treasury have in common? They both speak as if human life is expendable at will.
The Catholic Internet also exploded last week when Paglia spoke in support of euthanasia and then quickly attempted to walk it back. But the damage was done. Which is often the purpose of speaking evil: to do damage to the truth and those who believe it. The Treasury secretary recently recommended helping the economy by having an abortion.
Ritual human sacrifice at any age, at any point in life’s spectrum, is evil. It’s intentional killing. Which leaves us to ask: Is the Vatican engaged in a race with the world to the moral bottom? Paglia unwittingly makes the point quite eloquently that many currently involved at the highest levels of the Vatican sound as though they simply desire to mimic the world, cut loose as it is from any moral compass or anchor. The real danger for the world is when those called to be prophets of truth, priests and bishops, Catholics, simply mimic the culture back to itself.
Tucker made the point that the truest things are often the most ironic, in the course of sharing comments from a recent interview with Elon Musk. Just as in Easter the death of the Lord means life for Him and for us all, despite our sins, so with history. The Internet was supposed to mean more information but very often results in the very opposite. Don’t throw away your books, tell people you love them, and trust only the things you can smell, he concluded. There are such ironies all around us these days when we must often search quite diligently for the truth and for those who speak it consistently and heroically.
And even more ironic? When a fired Episcopalian TV anchor at a nonprofit anniversary dinner sounds more Catholic than an archbishop on the Vatican staff.
Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
@TruthSocialPadre
