Friday, September 13, 2024

Big Brother has it in for everyone – but especially ‘extremist’ Catholics

  Gavin Ashenden

Traditional Catholics founds themselves targeted by the FBI last year. In August 2023, the Heraldreported that “leaks revealed that the FBI focused in particular on Catholics who were interested in the Traditional Latin Mass as the group within the Church allegedly the most likely to be sympathetic to violent extremist activities.”

What begins in America often swiftly finds its way to the UK.

Yvette Cooper, the recently appointed UK Home Secretary, has just commissioned a swift review of what have been described as “extremist ideologies” as part of a new government anti-extremism strategy. 

We live in a world of new politically charged euphemisms, and, as so often happens, “extremist” has come to mean views that an authoritarian left-wing government disapproves of. Cooper has vowed to crack down hard on people whom she considers to be pushing “harmful or hateful beliefs”.

The problem of course, and the accompanying potential threat, lie in the definitions of what constitutes harm and hate. In the Left’s new lexicon, anything that counters the authoritarian dogma of progressivism is harmful and hateful.

The writer and commentator Brendan O’Neill sounded the alarm recently on behalf of Catholics when he wrotein the Spectator:

“Indeed I can envision entire belief systems being reimagined as harmful. Some already have been so. Traditional Catholics, for example. They think marriage should only be between a man and a woman, that sex is determined by God not scalpel-wielding gender surgeons, and that only followers of Christ to go to heaven. That’s homophobic transphobic and Islamophobic right? In other words harmful. Shut them down.”

One of the consequences of secular opprobrium is that it places a lot of pressure on us as Catholics to dilute Catholicism in order to be thought better of by others. 

But this is a form of ideological Danegeld, that tax levied in Anglo-Saxon England to raise money to pay or see off Danish invaders. The more one gives away in order to placate one’s enemies, the more they demand.

Read the rest: https://catholicherald.co.uk/big-brother-has-it-in-for-everyone-but-especially-extremist-catholics/

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