Yesterday Mark Shea blogged
“One weird phenomenon I’ve noticed on Catholic boards…
is the strange compulsion so many ex-Catholics (especially Fundamentalists) have
to linger around the Catholic Church saying “I’m so glad I’m not Catholic
anymore.”
This indeed is interesting since there are many things that the Church has in
common with individual Protestant denominations and there is not a equal vigor
to attack them. For example infant baptism is done by some Anglicans, Lutherans,
Methodists, and Orthodox churches; Orthodox and High-Church Anglicans have
Iconography and statues of saints. Almost every Catholic practice is practiced
in one form or another in Protestant and Orthodox churches. The only exception
of course is the papacy and I don’t understand how this could bring about such
anger. I couldn’t find a anti-Orthodox site that met the same hatred as the
multiple anti-Catholic sites available. In fact the only anti-Orthodox hatred I
found was for Orthodox Jews, just more of the same idiotic anti-Semitism. It is
a great sadness that these people were so ineptly catechized that they now hate
something that truly exists only in their imaginations. Why do Chick Tracks
present Alberto Rivera as an ex-priest when they know he was never a priest? Why do these groups
publish sensational stories that any amount of investigation would prove false?
No answer here, I don’t understand the motivation. I would be curious to see Gregory Popcak, St.
Blog’s resident shrink and sociologist, tackle this phenomenon.
