Burn of the Day
- 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.
This Tim Kauffman fellow is a real wacko. I browsed through his Twitter page. He really has a deep hatred for the Catholic Church and Mary in particular. I wonder if his mother or maybe a nun or someone else abused him as a kid. If so, I wonder if he realizes there is as much if not more abuse among Southern Baptists and Pentecostals (I speak as a former Pentecostal – the stories I could tell from wayward preachers of my youth!). This kind of emotional reaction usually has some basis in having been hurt somewhere along the line (which is why as a Catholic convert I avoid too much criticism of the Pentecostals of my youth – my outlook is prejudiced).
Now that said, yes, perhaps some of the Medieval references he cites about Mary are a little over the top; I don’t know because I am no theologian. But if I were him, I would be careful in what I said about the Lord’s Mother because this isn’t going to turn out well for him.
I knew a guy in my first parish, right after I entered the Church, who came from a Pentecostal/Nazarene background and had carried a similar nasty hatred of all things Catholic. That is, until one day in his prison cell, when he was struggling with his faith, and suddenly his cell filled with the scent of roses, and the Rosary beads he had been given by a priest visiting the prison, which he had moments earlier thrown across the cell in frustration, seemed to glow. He then felt a hand softly rest on his shoulder, and a female voice said “It will be all right.”
He picked up that Rosary, prayed five decades, and a few months later was received into the Church while still in prison, by that same priest. He was our KofC Council Financial Secretary for several years until he died tragically of a heart attack at age 55. But the former armed robber was the best FS our Council had ever had.
Our Lady has a way of getting to those who hate and disrespect her the most. Pray she does the same for this obviously abused soul.
He seems to make statements without backing them. He wants people to believe his version of the Truth…because.
He has put himself in a dire real state of sin to disparage the Mother of Our Lord the way he is. Not to mentioned he has turned his back on the Faith and has rejected the One True Church and its Teachings.
Last week, I went down a YouTube rabbit hole with “former Catholic” Mike Gendron. Mostly generic evangelical Calvinism but with a ton of lies about the Church. I’ve got to admit he got under my skin a bit. I’m usually ok with that type, but the falsehoods were driving me up a wall. I had to watch him debate a Catholic to have some feeling of vindication.
I also ran across a very funny rebuttal to Gendron from a YouTuber I’d never heard of called “How To Be Christian”. Is anyone familiar with him? He’s a Catholic who explains Christian (Catholic) teaching, as opposed to fake Christian (Protestant) teaching, and he does it in a way that it takes you a bit to realize that he’s subverting the whole “true Christian” thing that Protestants do. Very clever. He ripped apart this Mike Gendron for 40 minutes in a completely disrespectful way. It was just what I needed.