Dave Griffey brings us the news of Mark Shea’s longing for a totalitarian state:
So that’s that
I was emailed this blog post, in which Mark Shea throws down the gauntlet. It’s time to destroy the GOP and set up the Democratic party as the sole political party of the United States. That’s some moxie, to admit you desire the eradication of your political adversaries setting up your own party to rule unhindered. Of course the GOP is people, and we saw last century how that line of ‘I’m only against the politics, not the people’ thinking usually ends up.
For a bonus, I did something I almost never do anymore and actually delved into the the combox section. It reminded me of that episode in Lavern and Shirley when the girls have to go into Lenny and Squiggy’s bathroom. They run in and run out screaming. But it absolutely showed why this sort of fanaticism can’t be reasoned with, and is the sort of thinking that those who would destroy liberty and life must have in their corner to accomplish the end of the Christian West.
For instance, here is a response to a reader agreeing with Mark, but concerned that the evils of the Democratic party don’t justify such support for them, even against something as bad as the GOP:
What enthusiasm? Seeing the obvious necessity of supporting the Dems is not enthusiasm. It is realism. And I deeply resent the comparison to Saruman. Here’s reality. One of the biggest lies conservatives tell is the Both Side Moral Equivalence Lie, which they use to try to posture about their moral aloofness from the catastrophe they helped create in their slowness to oppose the monstrous freak show of the GOP. When you compare people who had the guts to *act* while you stood back and lied to yourself that the Dems were no better than the GOP freak show, all you do is insult people who helped to stop the gravest domestic threat since the Civil War, and one responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans in a single year. When you slander those people as being willing to do evil that good may come of it, you are simply bearing false witness against your neighbors. It’s ugly and you should repent it and apologize. One need not support evil to see that voting Dem is clearly the sane way to lessen evil. Your moral aloofness has one concrete effect: it helps the evil and it bears false witness against those who, often at great personal cost, have fought that evil.
Whew. In other words, how dare you even challenge the purity of my motives, and the clear and obvious truth of my political positions – repent and apologize.
Yep. That is someone beyond all reasoning. That he is a paid Catholic apologist who is able to be keynote speaker for Catholic ministries and a published author continuing to be referenced by Catholic leaders and clergy and publications goes a long way toward explaining the unchecked gushing of people making ‘former Catholic’ the fastest growing religious group in the world. People want God, and a world unlike the crazy mess we’re in, not just another version of the crazy mess world that has a crucifix dangling from the walls.
For a bonus, I noticed he had a follow up post here, in which he tells people not to bother reaching out to even the elderly who may have fallen under Trump’s spell. Let God save them if He will. To which already a few commenters have rejoiced at the thought of urinating on yet another demographic: elderly conservatives who refuse to see the light.
Remember folks, this:
Comes from somewhere. It doesn’t just happen overnight. When you’ve reached the point of saying my politics is on the side of God, and the opposition party is evil beyond redemption and must be destroyed, it’s not hard to believe there is no limit to where you will go. This is especially true when you have the bulk of the power players of a given society at your back, egging you on.
So with that, I return to my self-ban on Mark’s social media sites and pray for the future, since just who will be doing what in the upcoming months is becoming clearer and clearer with each passing day.
Go here to read the comments. Shea never got over the torture debate, and being canned from National Catholic Register, and has decided to have his revenge on the evil conservative Christians who do not march in mental lockstep with Mark Shea. That if his fantasy were to succeed a civil war would likely ensue bothers him not in the slightest. Pathetic is too kind an adjective. All of Shea’s endless verbiage boils down to the fact that he was, and is, a small fish in a small pond who delusionally thought he was a whale in a small sea. An object lesson of what can happen when you combine a lack of humor with an inflated ego and boiling hate. No way to go through life.
Update: Dave tries yet again to reason with Shea:
To clarify, when I was in ministry back in the 90s and 00s, my colleagues and I frequently brought up the problems with Fred Phelps, back when he was in the news. It wasn’t that we couldn’t get over him. We simply felt the need to show our parishioners what happens when someone who makes a living off the Gospel decides to use the Gospel as a tool to advance personal agendas or, worse, personal grudges.
Now, I did approach you directly on Facebook and you banned me there as well. I did reach out to you but you never responded, something others who say they have reached out to you also report. If you are interested in an actual mature discussion, I’m all for it. That is, an actual mature discussion. If not, then I see no reason to do anything other than warn the unwary as we did all those years ago.
That kind of propaganda resulted Rep. Scalise (R LA) and several other GOP Congress personnel shot by Bernie Bro James T. Hodgkinson and Senator Rand Paul (R KY) viciously assaulted by his Marx Shea-like neighbor.
That sSounds an awful lot like incitement to violence.
Evidently, Marx Shea’s psychoses and demons have taken control in the form execrable, irrational rantings. These psychological pathologies are prevalent among wannabe totalitarians and the imbecilic left.
Angelo Codevilla, “At its core, the ruling class politics of Covid-19 is now no more about public health than environmentalism is about the environment, or Feminism is about doing good to women, or BLM is about saving black lives, or the education establishment is about cognition, or the national security establishment is about public safety. None of these causes are about their purported objective than communism was about equality or the proletariat. Lenin made clear in ‘What Is To Be Done?’ (1902) that the revolution is all about power for ‘the vanguard of the proletariat.’ The Party. Like communism, each of today’s revolutionary movements is based on its own lie, and all are all scams—the purpose of which is to transfer ever more power to the ruling class.”
Heartbreaking, ain’t it?
Infuriating as well, of course—yet heartbreaking nonetheless….
It’s one of those moments where someone comes up with something so insane you want to both laugh and be horrified:
Yes, per Shea Biden is now the only “proper conservative” in the USA.
And here it seems a mystery to me how today can really be worse compared to literal centuries of Catholics & Protestants shooting each other. Or some of the worst popes.
Though I suspect blaming Trump for harming Catholic witnessing is easier than looking inward and figuring out if you’ve been harming it through your own flaws.
I think he never got over the torture debate because he lost, and he knew it.
He had to lie to support his position, and it drove him nuts.
Nate,
Believe it or not, Mark isn’t as bad as it’s getting, and that’s sort of my point – I’ll mention that in the near future. But I was told he took a swipe at me in his combox, so perhaps he’s at least paying attention to critics.
@Dave – Sadly I’ve seen too many examples of folks to disbelieve you. Though I try to avoid “nutpicking” and focus instead on people who have more prominence – like Shea.
Anyway found the swipe. The TAC article here landed a pingback at Shea’s place with his reply:
Extra irony in the reply to Mark.
If my sample of three is any guide, people sliding into dementia and lunacy do so in signature ways, maintaining familiar character and personality traits. I’m beginning to wonder in Shea’s case if you’re now looking at slow-tempo early-onset dementia. It seems as if his filters are falling apart and you’re seeing more of his Id. The husband of Sandra Day O’Connor was by age 59 behaving so peculiarly that he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s; he lived another 20 years; not the way you want to shuffle off.
Nate, I wonder who posted that response.
@Dave, it was 3vil5triker
@Art – I’m sure it will be of interest to some psychologists if social media can induce in people dementia and lunacy like symptoms. I’ve certainly seen folks in their 30s and 40s acting just as bad as Shea.
Heh, Nate, of course he could have come to my blog and told me that, couldn’t he. I’d be happy to discuss things with Mark if Mark was willing to discuss things. My last attempt I gave up on. Mark didn’t ban me, but stood by while his legionnaires swooped in with slander and lies and personal attacks, as he added his normal battery of insults and false accusations. That, by my lights, is not mature debate.
Mark’s favorite song is, “Springtime For Hitler!”
There are some people in this world who are temperamentally unfit to have and wield power. Who have no capacity for valid self-criticism, and self-control. I remember seeing a documentary about rock where someone said that what a star really needs is someone to help them keep their feet on the ground and not succumb to the adulation.
BTW Chinese Joe is a gift to the right.
Dave G.,
You can’t reason a crazy person like Marx Shea.
As I remember, while he still owned one or two scintilla of sanity, all Marx Shea ‘had’ were wrath, logical fallacies, and distortions of that which he erroneously thought was Church Teaching.
Wrath is a sin, avoidance of the near occasion of which [joyfully] induced me to never again open his execrable site.
Great article in general, but ex-Catholic Giffey can’t pass up the cheap — and wholly unwarranted — opportunity to take a swipe at the Catholic Church. Is this the Rod Dreher Syndrome or something?
Newsflash for Giffey: Mark Shea is not even remotely representative of the Catholic Church. Not. Even. Remotely. I can safely guarantee that 99.9999% of Catholics have never even heard of him. Good grief. I’d bet even 99.9999% of Catholics on the Internet have never heard of him. On the rare occasions when I mention Mark on Facebook, invariably get responses like: “Who? Who’s that?”
What’s more, Dave has plenty of vicious cranks in his own communion. And they get away with spewing their nonsense with utter impunity. And yes, I can name names. Are they representative of Orthodoxy the way Shea supposedly is representative of Catholicism? If not, why not? And if so, why doesn’t Dave focus on his own communion’s issues instead of fixating on ours? But oh yeah, Dave thinks the big fat SCHISM between Moscow and Constantinople is a mere “kerfuffle” (his word), so I guess it’s another case of the Classic Convertodox Polemic: “Our 💩 don’t stink, but yours does.”
Giffey also draws a causal connection between Mark’s continued presence in the Catholic apologetic community (a presence that amounts to a nano-blip) and the exodus of Catholics from Catholicism.
Never mind that American Orthodoxy is bleeding members left and right. In the same numbers? Of course not. There are about a million American Orthodox vs. 70 million Catholics. Math. It’s a thing. Really.
We have a prominent Greek community in our area, with a beautiful Orthodox church. But when I check the local paper’s Weddings section, I frequently see that someone with a very Greek surname is marrying a Baptist in a Baptist church. Gee, what drove that person away, seeing there was no Mark Shea to do the job?
Things are tough all over.
Mark Shea needs to be called out, big time. But not by someone who can’t resist getting his digs in at Catholics at the same time. The last thing we need is Dreher 2.0.
Diane, actually we came back to the Catholic Church last year. But your post does remind me why I unfriended you from my Facebook page. Thanks.
Ms. Kramer, I’m sure you’ll be delighted to know that Mr. Griffey and his family came back to the Church a few months ago. I most certainly was.
Apart from that, I often read his blog and, even during the time he had left the Church, he never made any “swipes at the Catholic Church” in his blog, he just occasionally mentioned the understandable concerns that so many of us Catholics share in these troubled times. In my opinion, he was always a gentleman and showed a great love for the Church, even when he was leaving her (for a short time, thank God). May we have many Catholics of the same kind.
Your rantings, on the other hand… Well, the less said the better and may God have mercy on us all.
The extra r was a typo, but a strangely appropriate one.
In response to Diane Kamar: I don’t think the Catholic press and blogosphere were read by many pew sitters 20 years ago and I’d wager fewer do so today. (IIRC, Crisis had about 30,000 subscribers ca. 2001). However, Shea has been a prominent figure in and among that odd minority and at one time he was second only to Amy Welborn in how many unique visitors typically checked his blog on a given day. (NB, Amy Welborn had at that time a regular column in Our Sunday Visitor, which may have stimulated her readership). There were people at that time with (arguably) a larger audience (Andrew Greeley, Ralph McInerney, Scott Hahn), but he was up there.
Mr. Griffey’s sensibility is quite different from Dreher’s. The latter is highly emotional and other-directed. No clue why you’d put the two in the same pigeonhole.
I sincerely apologize to Dave Giffey. I had no idea. (I thought I’d unfriended him. Maybe we cross-unfriended each other.)
I am a tad testy these days, because my older son has come under the baleful influence of the egregious Jay Dyer. Not only has he adopted Dyer’s lamebrained arguments. He has adopted his manners (or lack thereof). I am daily regaled with gaslighting and ad hominem and disrespectful personal insults, and frankly it is getting to me.
Again, I apologize. I rejoice that Dave has come back to the Catholic Church. I had no idea. (How could I?) Last time I interacted with him, he was bashing us.
I would hope that he would do me the courtesy of forgiving me. After tussling with my son tonight, I’m feeling pretty beat up.
I would also welcome hearing his reversion story.
Catholics absolutely get a pass WRT pointing out Catholic problems. We can criticize our mother. But no one else had better!
Well said Diane! My prayers for your older son.
well said
Thank you so much, Donald. It means a lot to me.
“Of course the GOP is people, and we saw last century how that line of ‘I’m only against the politics, not the people’ thinking usually ends up.”
Dave, Shea is against the people! That’s the whole point. People who think like he does aren’t satisfied with defeating the ideology; they must destroy those who hold it, as an object lesson for the future. That’s Shea’s thinking.
Shea is evil. He’s become no better than the Muslim terrorists who murder innocents for the Greater Glory of Allah.
BTW, T. Shaw, where did you get that quote from Codavilla? It’s brilliant!
Joseph,
I copy/pasted the quote from Instapundit blog. I don’t know where Codevilla’s (he’s doing God’s) work is published.
This morning Instapundit links and quotes a Claudia Rossett on the Tienanmen Sq. Anniversary. Here goes.
“Beijing’s [America’;s execrable left’s and concentration camp guard wannabes like Marx Shea] grotesque rewrite of history is part of a vast CCP [American leftist and Shea] campaign of propaganda and coercion dedicated to ensuring that the people of China [America] do not attempt a replay of the 1989 democratic movement [Glorious 2016 Election] that was, in truth, the People’s Republic of China’s [America’s recent] finest hour.”
People need to resist Biden’s, Shea’s, Xi Jinping’s Tienanmen Square vision for America.
Well said, Mrs. Kamer! And prayers, of course.
“When you’ve reached the point of saying my politics is on the side of God, and the opposition party is evil beyond redemption and must be destroyed, it’s not hard to believe there is no limit to where you will go.”
In the case of the Democrats who murder pre-born babies, sanctify sterile sexual filth as marriage and indoctrinate our children with racist dogma called critical race theory, yes, that party is evil, and in making themselves like Sodom and Gomorrah, one wonders if they have gone beyond the point of redemption.
As for anyone’s politics being on the side of God, Jesus didn’t endorse any political ideology during His life among us 2000 years ago. However, there are politics diametrically opposed to God – that of the Democrat Party, Mark Shea’s party. The same with the Nazi Party and the Communist Party before them. Yes, Republicans are often hypocrites and certainly no paragons of virtue. I despise RINOs and loathe Democrats equally. But unlike the Republican Party which isn’t completely evil, the Democrat party is utterly and totally evil in it present incantation.
Does that mean there is no limit to which I would not go? I hope not. I can be utterly opposed to the Democrat Party, but I certainly don’t want murder and mayhem – which is why I oppose the Democrat Party because that is precisely what they do do: murder babies, riot, loot, and pillage inner cities, black-on-black violence and bloodshed – all that and more are because of Democrats.
Ceterum autem censeo Factionem Democraticam esse delendam !
Diane,
No problem, I’m generally of the forgiving sort. I do invite you to come over to my blog to discuss things in more detail.
I would clarify one thing, however. I’m not trying to say because of Mark, people are leaving the Church. My point is that because someone like Mark is given a free pass, it shows where the Church is. Yes, Orthodox and Protestants have their Mark-types. They generally try to reign them in. So do Catholics I’ve noticed. I’ve seen several cases in which Catholic clergy, leaders and whatnot have stepped in and smacked this traditionalist, or that conservative, or the other pro-life organization. That happens in all traditions. What I notice, however, is that people like Mark on Mark’s side of the tracks are not being called out in the same way. That suggests something about the Church leadership and where its priorities are, and that something I fear has had a negative impact on its own flock.
That suggests something about the Church leadership and where its priorities are, and that something I fear has had a negative impact on its own flock.
I doubt many bishops would be motivated to critique Marx Che because his audience has never been large and it’s smaller today. When you have 20,000,000 Mass-going Catholics and Our Sunday Visitor has a circulation of about 60,000, a letter from the bishop on the subject is likely to meet with a “huh?”.
A real problem with our bishops is that they don’t teach much of anything. I’m not aware of any who make scheduled and unscheduled visits to their parishes. I grew up in the Episcopal Church. Some bishops visit annually, some biennially depending on how many parishes they have; they’re on the move every week. They’ll put filler in the diocesan paper every other week (if their diocese still publishes one – I think most do not nowadays). I think the last occasion I can recall of a pastoral letter read aloud at Mass or placed on the table in the narthex or put in the bulletin was around about 2004, and it concerned the John Jay Report. I’ve known one very capable preacher. He wasn’t a bishop; he was Melkite priest who was born in 1917 and died in 2010. He wasn’t a performer (think John Corapi); he just knew what he wanted to say and how to say it so you’d remember his point. Almost no clergymen follow his method.
O Shea, can you see by the Dem’s squirr’ly light,
What so oddly you hail is your byline’s last gleaming,
Your odd gripes are not ours, and your thinking is trite,
And the jam tarts you share are but tasteless daydreaming?
I did something I almost never do anymore and actually delved into the the combox section.
One of the reasons that it is so terrible there is that anyone trying to reason with Shea in his combox has been banned. This has been going on for — my guess — over 10 years now, possibly 15.
Recently I commented on one of Shea’s ponderous blog posts which I will characterize as “How we really, really, really need to figure out how to deal with homosexuals in some different way than those conservative Catholics.” My comment was admittedly snarky, and it was something like “It seems like this entire post was an excuse to write the phrase “Greatest Catholics of All Time” which he brought up with his signature reflexivity.
His response was very telling. It was something in the vein of “This is not about you. You think everything is about you, this is not about you.”
I remember thinking, No, actually it kind of is about me. I am raising a number of young men, and I have to help them navigate this crazy world. Some of them may be tempted by homosexuality, so I have to consider that. All of them will no doubt have to deal cordially with homosexuals. I myself have to deal with them. All of us have to be able to explain the Catholic teaching about homosexuality.
So if you are going to talk about the topic in your overly careful way, making sure that you offend no one (except for the people you consider to be self-righteous bigots) then go right ahead, I guess, without us. But realize that it is you who have excluded us, not the other way around. We who are willing to be candid would discuss these things with you and others, but you have asserted that we have no voice, no interest. You have thrown us out of the conversation. And I think it is out of fear of the weakness of your ideas being exposed. Why else would it be?
This has been going on for — my guess — over 10 years now, possibly 15.
Christopher Fotos, Victor Morton, and a third man set up a blog in 2006 to discuss the ‘waterboarding’ issue because of the deletions and banning Shea had engaged in at his then stand-alone site.
Coalition for Fog: I commented there but I was not part of setting it up. Fifteen years since 2006! How time flies.
https://coalitionforfog.blogspot.com/2006/
One wonders how Shea has any respectability as a scholar. If he cannot read and understand a contemporary neighbor using the same language and from the same cultural context, how trustworthy then are his interpretations of people in another time and culture, speaking another language?
By the way, Mark Shea, resident of Washington state, fancies the Republican Party must be destroyed so the people who gave you this scenario
https://www.city-journal.org/transgender-identifying-adolescents-threats-to-parental-rights
can rule unimpeded.
One wonders how Shea has any respectability as a scholar. If he cannot read and understand a contemporary neighbor using the same language and from the same cultural context, how trustworthy then are his interpretations of people in another time and culture, speaking another language?
He isn’t a scholar and never pretended to be. AFAIK, none of the ‘about-the-author’ segments in any of his books indicate anything about his education or how he’s earned a living over the years. He’s made passing references to having been an English major, so I’m guessing an uncompleted degree at one of the state schools in Washington. I don’t imagine you earn much from the sort of literature he produces. (Amy Welborn indicated ca. 2005 she received about $14,000 a year in royalties from her ‘Prove It!’ series of apologetics for youth). In any case, his first book was published when he was nearly 40. His children would be somewhere in the 25 to 38 age range, so I imagine his wife has wage work of some kind.
Hey Donald, could you do me a favor? I’m having some fun at Mark’s blog. Turns out he pinged to this and was in an uproar. He said I should have spoken directly to him rather than this post. So I went to his blog and spoke (apparently he cannot actually ban people, but he can delete comments). That wasn’t good enough. He demand I apologize for calling him a Nazi. I said I didn’t, just that his level of zealotry will get us there. Nonetheless, I apologized. Then he demanded I change the blog heading. I said it’s not mine, it’s someone else’s blog. He then moved the bar again and demanded I have you change the headline (it seemed to really gnaw him), or he will refuse to talk. OK, if that will force him to talk. Again, he must not be able to actually ban people in his new format, which is sort of fun. But I’m curious to see if you change the blog title, if he’ll then talk, or simply find some other excuse. If you don’t want to, that’s fine as well. I won’t cry a river.
Mark never did have much of a sense of humor Dave. I won’t change the title right now, but I will if he shows up in the comboxes here with a give and take with the readers. I will promise him that he can say what he wants with no editorial control by me. He hasn’t commented here in a decade, but when he did I never touched one of his comments. I like robust debate, something that faithful readers of the blog can attest to. I will also change the title if he shows up in the comboxes of your blog for a free give and take.
Fair enough. I did my part. If he wants you to change it, he may come here and ask. We’ll see.
Hah! If Shea shows up here, I’ll not only promise to not say a word to him, but I’ll outright send Don a demo of my game I’m working on for free!
But we’ll see. The man is nothing if not a sniveling, cowardly, crybully who can’t stand to be outside his bubble.
Mark never did have much of a sense of humor Dave.
It was invested in deriding people.
https://www.crisismagazine.com/2021/the-scourge-of-toxic-online-catholicism
While I of course disagree that anonymity has anything to do with the toxicity– I see no rational reason to hand someone a route for irrational attacks, especially not when SWATing and being fired for being related to someone who has bad-think is a thing– it’s nice to see that someone else has noticed the tendency to bad behavior.
I’d lay the “toxicity” at the feet of the argument style popularized in Rules for Radicals– it is just easier to see online because the kind of people who like to browbeat and/or destroy people in person have a much harder time hiding their behavior in text. The classic “you must have misunderstood” trick still happens, but it’s MUCH harder to pull off when you’re six inches below where someone most assuredly did say exactly what they were “misunderstood” to say.
DaveG and Don,
I don’t have your Marx Che problem. I simply ignore people for whose (feckless) opinions (not truth) I have no respect.
Calling him a Nazi would be an undeserved compliment. He and his ilk (Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot, et al) have caused much more evil than all the Nazis that ever drew breath.
T. Shaw, as I said to Mark, in my Protestant days, we would sometimes remind people that the Fred Phelps of the world do not speak for actual Christianity. Same here. Mark’s whole ‘all good people must united to my party so the other party can be destroyed’ was so nakedly Rolf Gruber, that I felt I needed to break my rule and link to his blog, just so people could see i wasn’t making it up. He then told his readers I should speak to him directly. After a week of trying, he’s moved the bar enough that any attempts to speak with him have resulted in what usually happens when people try to speak with him. Hence the occasional reminder to people that Mark is not someone who should be speaking on behalf of the Church, despite what his bishop apparently believes.
Idly rummaging through his recent posts, I see a vitriolic denunciation of libertarians introducing an anathema directed at Rand Paul (for not getting a COVID vaccine). That Dr. Paul is immune from having had COVID does not interest him. Oh, and there’s this gem:
“Meet Brett Kavanaugh, a multiply-documented liar who was steamrolled into the Supreme Court by the GOP over the massively credible objections for Christine Blasey Ford that he sexually assaulted her as a drunken youth.”
The employees of the Bezos and Sulzberger birdcage liners, along with the staff of various and sundry Democratic pols were never able to produce any evidence that the massively credible Christine Blasey Ford had ever met either of the men she accused nor were they able to specify a set of circumstances which would have made it at all likely that she’d met them. She cited an old friend as a witness and said old friend drew a complete blank, subsequently telling an interviewer that a gathering such as the one described would never have fit into the schedule she was keeping in 1982.
This isn’t a man who is doing any thinking anymore. Reading this, it does occur to me that we have a shirt-tail who pops off like this on Facebook. He’s 20 years younger than Shea, employed as an English teacher in Florida. I think the level of stupidity in these remarks might be beyond him except when he’s had a snootful.
Thank you, Bruno, Dave, et alia. Sorry for late response. Real Life has been fairly crazy.
Dave G, I will absolutely come over to your blog. Thank you so much for your graciousness!