AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH CATHOLICISM

With thanks to Etoday

The internet is awash with hotheads, the type of American who wants to think of himself as a citizen of the one indispensable nation on the earth and who will brook no criticism of any US foreign policy no matter which sock puppet occupies the white house.  Trying to square such an attitude with the practice of the Catholic Faith is impossible, yet many write their comments or create their blogs trying to pound that square peg into that round hole.  The results are as laughable as they are vicious.

Hell hath no fury than a super patriot politely informed, one reminded that perhaps there are other nations which have a different point of view than the US political establishment.  In a recent brief exchange of comments on one popular site concerning the fears of Ukrainian Catholics during this awful turmoil created by the big financial interests this writer attempted to point out as charitably as possible to one respondent (who wrote at least thirty or more responses to the article) that we should avoid taking a simplistic view of the events occurring over there, that we should seriously pray for the Ukranian people and that we should not automatically accept as Holy Writ every pronouncement that emerges from the mainstream media.  For that I was treated to a slew of thoughtful, well-written responses by him in which I was characterized as "ignorant", "amusing", "stupid" and even a Russian spy!  I was addressed as "comrade" by him, which shows you fairly clearly the intellectual level of the man as well as the political disease eating away at his reason.  He is also an enthusiast, in the worst sense of that word, and therefore reasoning with such a man becomes an exercise in futility.

But infantile rants like that are very, very common on the blog scene and it does not bode well for us.  If that is the kind of mind that is common coinage, and there is sufficient evidence to suggest that it is, then we are a nation adrift, and when the time inevitably comes that this US empire collapses of its own weight people like that will be totally unprepared for what will come.

The true view of how to be a Catholic and then a patriot was recently well expressed by Brother Andre Marie, MICM over at the St Benedict Center website:

http://catholicism.org/ad-rem-no-232.html

The goal of the Saint Benedict Center is the conversion of America to the Catholic Faith and while that goal may seem now to be wildly utopian it is one of those worth working for.  Brother Andre calls the reader's attention to the true meaning of patriotism in his interesting piece and it would do some well-intentioned folks a great deal of good to read and reflect upon his article.  Doing so might make some people avoid accusing others of being secret KGB agents, and it also might make people come to understand that the USA is not the greatest nation in the solar system.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/07/paul-gottfried/the-greatest-country-in-the-history-of-the-solar-system/

Pope Leo XIII showed, in Testem Benevolentiae, what happens to the American Catholic mind when it becomes too focused on "national greatness".

American exceptionalism, aka super patriotism, is not compatible with the Catholic Faith.

Or even with common sense.