Don’t worry Sam there is life beyond the socialism you have embraced! Courage brother!
So Sad
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Has Sam Rocha blessed us with any of his trademark countersignaling or concern trolling in response to the SCOTUS news?
Can someone define their terms first? This sounds like a waste-of-time argument, even if you’re not arguing with someone given to gamesmanship. (Rocha’s a pest, but IMO below the median for academicians in that respect).
The only socialist organization I know of that works is the monastery where the monks make the Christmas fruit cakes. Even there, they must follow the laws of classical economics or go broke.
Maybe it’s just an issue with me, but I’ve read Sam’s statement nine times now and I still can’t figure out what point he’s trying to make. Could someone unpack that for me? Am I just missing the obvious?
Judging from the comments on his twitter feed, he’s talking about people leaving the Catholic Church.
Of course in pure Sam Rocha style he doesn’t elaborate on why people are leaving the Church or what we can do about it. All of that is meant to be obvious (though I suspect the real reason that his anti-Church friends can fill in whatever reasons they want while simultaneously allowing Rocha to claim that HE never attacked the Church.)
he’s talking about people leaving the Catholic Church.
Correct. I decided to apply his comment to Sam’s true faith.
Scanning through his feed (and being reminded how bad a platform is for actual discussion), it appears to be a response to a tweet from Eric Sammons which says:
For everyone who starts their argument, “As a former Catholic…” let me tell you something: You aren’t that special. Sadly you are simply one of millions who didn’t receive the formation they deserved, and you likely know less about Catholicism than my 7yo daughter.
(Despite Sam Rocha complaining about people talking about him without directly applying on Twitter, Rocha didn’t directly reply to this tweet but rather to an image of it, so I can’t link to Sammons’s tweet directly.)
Rocha has a variety of tweets and retweets on this matter, all of which are variations of saying that when people leave the Church it is understandable and probably because the Church was bad. The nadir is when he responds to someone saying “I don’t tell Jews what Judaism should do or Muslims what Islam should do” by snarking about Jesus being a Jew.
Rocha’s goals on twitter are basically three fold:
1.) Advance leftist causes while leaving just enough wiggle room to deflect accusations that he is a leftist first and Catholic second.
2.) Attack the Church using the same wiggle room tactics.
3.) Present himself as the smartest guy in the room. What makes this one particularly obvious is that he’ll almost always respond to insults towards his intelligence, but will usually find ways to avoid answering other accusations leveled against him.
Maybe it’s just an issue with me, but I’ve read Sam’s statement nine times now and I still can’t figure out what point he’s trying to make.
The point he’s trying to make is that you’re stupid cloddish meat and need instruction from Sam Rocha. Academe is in a decadent period right now.
For once, I am sympathetic to one of Rocha’s arguments–which stinks, since I usually agree wholeheartedly with Eric Sammons.
But it is entirely too glib to write off defection as a matter of catechesis. Sure, catechesis too often stinks on ice. Yet a Catholic can have all the head knowledge in the world, but become a clanging cymbal to others. Witness matters. Lest we forget, the simplest peasants can be bereft of encyclicals and still saints.
And no shortage of well-educated Catholics versed in the teachings of the Church can wreak havoc in the service of heresy.
None of which means that Rocha is handling the argument in a way that smacks of witness to anything other than his own righteousness, but the bedrock point is correct.
My view is this: probably 90% of people who leave the Church do so due to bad catechesis. That still leaves 10% who had good formation and still left, but most who leave probably would have stayed if they had actually known what the Church taught.
But at the same time probably 90% who remain in the Church do so in spite of bad catechesis. So while poor knowledge is the most significant factor for people leaving the Church, it is never the only factor and in some cases there are other factors.
The only real problem with Sammons’s statement is the use of “everyone” rather than “most people” though using a universal in a situation where something is true the majority of the time is a common bit of rhetoric. But at least he is making actual claims in contrast to Rocha’s approach of “I’m sure they all had really good reasons, but I’m not going to say what those will be. I’ll still mock you for saying they don’t exist though.” (Not an actual quote, obviously, I’m paraphrasing and only using quotes to separate from my own writing.)
As the resident non-Catholic who hangs around these parts for the pro-life commentary, I’d like to note that one of the reasons I’m not a Catholic concerns the Church hierarchy’s lack of commitment to condemning abortion. Under Pope Francis’ papacy, a number of Catholic nations (among them Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, and San Marino) have either legalized abortion or liberalized their abortion laws, and he’s barely said a word about it. The man is literally from Argentina! To put things in perspective, he came out in defense of the BLM riots a year after they occurred. That’s like the ultimate middle finger.
I started watching the debate, but there’s no way I’m watching the whole thing, especially not Rocha’s constant deflections.
But I am curious on one point: at several points Trent Horn notes that there are encyclical documents which specifically condemn socialism by name, and asks Rocha to explain what exactly is being condemned if it’s not the socialism that Rocha is advocating for. Does Rocha ever answer this question? In every response I watched of him he started talking about how socialism has good aims, or how it is anti-fascist and good people should be anti-fascist, etc. But I didn’t watch the whole thing so maybe Rocha eventually answered it in a part that I didn’t see.
Though I did see the part where Rocha was so definition was so definition adverse that he had trouble determining if any country was non-socialist only to decide that China of all places was the least socialist place on Earth.
It is fun to imagine how Rocha would respond to certain questions in debates.
For example:
“Mr. Rocha, can you tell me the difference between American football and soccer?”
“Well, uh, I don’t really like getting into these discussions of overly theoretical distinctions which put to the side the genealogical history that goes into the reality of these sports. And there certainly is a spectrum in these matters so that I don’t know if we can say if something is categorically entirely American football or not. I think we can say that historically there was a common pot that they were in, though there were differences. By the way, soccer fans are certainly the first to tell you that American football isn’t soccer, I find. I was at a bar on my vacation in the UK and they talked all the time about how much they hated American football. But, um, there could be differences of a sort in terms of the extremes that one sport puts on a shape of a ball when compared to the other.”