Kathy Shaidle, ex-Catholic-Leftist, on the rampage re: ungrateful Christian Peacemaker Teams and Catholic Workers

Shaidle at her best. I'm sure lefties might say, "Uncharitable!", but, remember, folks, it's not uncharitable to speak the truth. And the truth is, she does it with a righteous acerbity that 99% of Catholic Workers only wish they had. Stand back!

Sadly, it comes as no surprise that the Christian Peacemakers would use the rescue (not just "release", but "rescue") of their deeply delusional brethren to launch a predictable, cliche ridden tirade against, not the terrorist kidnappers, but the very people who saved their lives.

(Deborah Gyapong asks: "Why can't they love Americans and British special forces with the same fervor [as they profess to love their kidnappers] -- if they are the enemy, too?")

These guys switched from run of the mill KoolAid to double strength Goofy Grape Funny Face sometime back in the "liberation theology" 80s. Expecting them to even fake a little gratitude to the British Secret Service, just for the sake of the cameras and the poor benighted general public, is expecting far too much. Why, that would be inauthentic. Bourgeois. What would Kirkegaard say? ("Thank you", I imagine. But that's just me).

. . . as years passed I took a closer look at the "heroic" folks that Catholic Workers and their progressive Christian colleagues admire, and came to understand where they got their crappy attitudes.

Catholic Worker founder, Popular Front dupe and Communist fellow traveler Dorothy Day put her indelible temperamental stamp on her followers, making it ok to be a crusty bossy bitch as long as you did it for Jesus. . . .

. . . Were progressive Christians serious about "making a heaven on earth" (which is a heresy anyway), they would abandon their provably false Marxist critiques.

Some of the most vocal critics of the way things are being done, Thomas Sowell observed, are people who have done nothing themselves, and whose only contributions to society are their complaints and moral exhibitionism.

Remember the shrink who told Thomas Merton (another CW hero), "You want to be a monk, but in the middle of Times Square with the word MONK flashing above your head in neon letters"?

Moral exhibitionism is what motivates progressive Christians, past and present. And the selectively outraged Christian Peacemakers are like the oldest strippers in the club. The stale, predictable routine, the barely concealed contempt for the lowly guys in the audience, the best-before-date dancer's arrogant misconception that she's still sexy and powerful and damn it, you'd better think so, too. On days like these, one is compelled to start yelling, "Put it on! Put it on!"

One thing I would say about both Dorothy Day and Catherine Doherty: You can be a saint and still have really unpleasant personal characteristics. The biggest problem of the CW movement, to my view (and Kathy alludes to this) is that members often imitate Miss Day's unpleasant personal characteristics, instead of imitating her heroic virtues, and this is what gives CW its unpleasant and sour appearance to others.