Feast of Saints Michael, Raphael & Gabriel
Phone calls are funny things.
I have a love/hate relationship with my phone.
I have often waited by it, hoping certain persons will call, who don’t. I have often avoided it, too overwhelmed with things more urgent to even address the accumulation of voice mails, building up like some kind of virus that in the end will get me anyway, if ignored.
I am gradually learning that we cannot avoid what we fear, but even more importantly, these things we fear mostly are something for which we should not be afraid in the first place. Anxiety is a lie. Early this morning (too early, as I lingered in bed dreamily, listening to the rain) my cell phone startled me by ringing. So I reminded myself of that and picked up.
I had just gone public with my critique of David Clayton who spoke at the illustrious Institute of Catholic Culture a few weeks ago, and was waiting for Satan to rear his ugly head and make his first punitive attack against me.
Attack 1.
The voice was amiable at first.
It was the newly ordained Father Hezekias Sabatino Carnazzo, founder and head of the Institute of Catholic Culture. (Congratulations on your ordination to the Priesthood, Father Carnazzo. Don’t think I’m the last test you will have to face.)
Anyhow, as I was saying, Father spoke amiably at first with a voice sounding both calm, reasonable, and well… young.
But I am an oldster at fifty, so I guess everyone is starting to sound young to me. He said it had come to his attention that a very disturbing “email” had been sent out, and asked if the sender could have been me?
I didn’t know about a disturbing email, except what artist/writer David Clayton had sent me, after he spoke at Carnazzo’s Institute. I did know that last night, or early this morning I forget which, I had sent several links out to my latest blog post, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, The Meaning-heister and Men who Wear Hosen.
My post was about a disturbing subject, David Clayton, and his plans to sell more books on his new “Catholic” method of eradicating the feminine presence (Mary) and the masculine (the cross) in homes across the world. His methods smacked of brainwashing with intent to teach people to dangerously suppress all negative emotions. But I am flummoxed why Carnazzo would think my post was disturbing.
After all, I even gave it a humorous title. Perhaps he didn’t get it. (Hosen does not have to mean stockings Father. My intentions were to mean pants, as in “Men who wear the pants in the family”. Don’t be so creepy minded. )
Father Carnazzo wrongly guessed my intentions repeatedly as we spoke on the phone.
He acknowledged that it was him who personally invited David Clayton to speak. He wanted to know how I had gotten the email addresses of those who attended his event, to whom I sent my link. I explained that I had signed up on the email list myself, and received all their email addresses when Clayton sent out his first email. Clayton was inviting people to sign up to receive emails about his new 8 Point Plan in finding one’s vocation in life.
Startled at the subtly subversive creed he was preaching, I had signed up for the “8 Point Plan”, curious about the bunk that Clayton, with explicit permission of Father Carnazzo, was selling attendees.
I certainly did not lift or copy emails from the sign up sheet, though I sensed a certain disappointment in Father that he could not pin me down for that.
Perhaps I’m imagining things.
Anyhow, I explained to Father how I got the email addresses from David Clayton himself, all of them. When he sent his first two attachments of subtle psychological brainwashing my way, he had attached all the email addresses himself.
Everyone who has been there knows the people who attend the Institute of Catholic Culture are by and large the faithful devout. I care about these people. I have learned from life’s experiences that not warning people of danger, under guise of adherence to some man-made “social custom of politeness” for which there is no true jurisdiction, is the grossest unkindness there is. Even among Thomistic psychologists there is the ethical principle of duty to warn. This applies to every man, woman and child we come in contact with.
David Clayton knows there is a hidden Mystery behinds icons (and it is not the icons that are in themselves powerful) because he an icon artist. His writings deny this Mystery, and attribute God-like power to man, the artist.
Father Carnazzo knows Charity and the Rules of the Universe made by God are superior to the Disordered Shut up and Play Nice Censorship Rules that man imposes, when he has something to hide, because he is a priest. A priest has absolutely no jurisdiction to ask me not to email someone, or command me to break the laws of charity in any way.
The little children of Mary talk to one another, Father Carnazzo, whether that is disturbing to you or not.
If we were protected by you, not Mary and her Son, to protect us from scandal, you would not have invited your friend or whatever he is to you to speak there in the first place. We were not protected by you, nor are we bound by you.
But, Father insisted, Clayton did not “intend” for me to email everyone with a link to the critique I wrote against him, nor did he “intend” for people to get each other’s email addresses. Man’s intentions must come first. Therefore, he said, he would ban me from The Institute of Catholic Culture should I not cease and desist. He said he “knows who I am.”
After all, he said, they had been kind enough to feed me with “free food.” That made me laugh. Obviously he did not know me well enough to realize I owned my own coffee house.
Father simply could not understand why I wouldn’t promise complicity in a cover up job, or any part in hiding disturbing, but obvious and necessary information from the very people who attend his Institute, for the sake of a man who appears to have evil intentions against them.
Like I told Father Carnazzo, it would be fine if he banned me from the Institute of Catholic Culture. My salvation does not rest upon The Institute of Catholic Culture, or any of the other so-called Catholic institutions that have disbarred me simply for stating truth out loud. And though his phone call is disturbing in so much as it suggests even the ICC, with all the good it does do, is compromised with deadlock players…
I am still laughing to myself over his comment about the “free food”.
Doesn’t he know, that the truth is free as well, and there are no laws that bind it?
Yes, false accusations, false imposition of guilt and responsibility, unrealistic demands, empty threats and promises, are usually just a sign, that someone has something to hide.
IF I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. 1 Corinthians 13:1
Unraveled and the Birth of Joy 