The Church Militant in a Time of Compromise and Depravity

If you've given up on this generation of Catholic youth, if you think that the militant Church of Lech Walensa and Josef Mindzhenty is in the rear-view mirror, have a look at the TFP Student Action website and follow some of the links. I wrote a friend recently that this is robust Catholicism with some bass in its voice. http://www.tfpstudentaction.org/what-we-do/

The youngsters have vowed to confront depravity and apostasy in the street and on the Catholic campus alike, to restore the values of Christian civilization. "Youth was made not for pleasure, but for heroism," they exhort their boys at Chivalry Camp.

Their full name is the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property. The TFP was founded to "resist, in the realm of ideas, the liberal, socialist and communist trends of the times and proudly affirm the positive values of tradition, family and private property."

It has a full-time volunteer staff of 75, and claims 120,000 members. I'm not Catholic, but I'm profoundly encouraged by this movement during a dark time in our country. They look like a cavalry regiment cresting the ridge, in the nick of time.

Obama Consolidates Power, Disrupts Supply Trains of Potential Rivals

A post in today's Comparing Obama and JFK blog reports on the president's disturbing decisions to consolidate personal power and create insatiable new entitlement constituencies at the price of transforming America's robust, independent private philanthropy sector into gaunt mendicants. Here is an excerpt.

Obama consolidates power, reduces privately-funded philanthropy to his discipline

No danger of confusing President Obama with JFK here. He is not only increasing taxes robustly, but cutting the deductions allowed for charitable contributions. This is not mere revenue generation, but consolidation of power in the national government at the expense of private philanthropy - especially churches and parachurch organizations - which compels further dependency on government officials, and potentially yields a large, loyal patronage constituency where once potential rivals lurked.

Princeton professor Robert George has observed that socialism is not merely antithetical to individualism, but it is an attack on "mediating civic institutions," such as the family and the church. When collectivists' ambitions ambitions approach the totalitarian, there's not enough room on this planet for government and church and family. In the long run, such totalitarians cannot tolerate independent families or churches, and come to view them as incubators for resistance.

American Leftists couldn't openly oppress church and family a generation ago, but times have changed. They are now in full control of the media (see yesterday's post about "media malpractice"), so there is no watchdog to hold them accountable. Our civic literacy has been suppressed (see yesterday's post for the URL to filmmaker John Ziegler's exit interviews of 2008 voters) enough that electoral accountability is unlikely. Triumphal Leftists are casting off restraint now as the Leftist regime settles in.

As an example, legislators in Connecticut recently proposed a bill to remove Catholic Church property from the custody of its bishops, and to require that it be held in trust by laymen. This is transparently an act of retaliation against the church because it dares to oppose homosexual marriage. The Latter Day Saints are incurring similar intimidation in California, for the same reason.

Already Catholic Charities has been driven out of the child adoption business in Massachusetts by homosexualists. If President Obama and his allies are not restrained, there will be soon be no refuge for Christian philanthropy - or Christian conscience - in the U.S.