Social Media: Anti-Catholic Propaganda

Photo: Roger-Viollet. Pose d'un échafaudage sur la cathédrale Notre-Dame. 

Paris, février. 1952

On Notre Dame.

The people of France own the Cathedral - the French Government gives it to the Church to use and maintain.* The will to rebuild a national, indeed a world heritage site comes from the people - Christian and secularists alike. Enemies of the Church accuse the Church of hypocrisy, of exploiting the faithful, raising money to rebuild while ignoring the poor and the immigrants. That is just not true.

This is the meme posted by an online gay-friend

which occasioned my post.  Gay Pride Month

brings out many anti-Catholic memes.

The Church is the major voice in the world today speaking out against injustice and the exploitation of peoples. The Church is the one supporting the cause of immigrants and refugees seeking asylum. The Church is the one who has always reached out to the poor and the marginalized - since the time of Christ. Catholics provided schools, education and welfare, hospitals - religious pretty much invented hospitals and hospice, religious organized nursing, established orphanages - providing every charity one can think of. (Except killing people through abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia.) The Vatican itself has free clinics and facilities to care for the homeless. Mother Teresa is famous for caring for the poor, the dying, being one of the first to open a hospice for AIDS patients in NYC when the epidemic first started. Her order does no fundraising.

Many Gay people angry at the Church because the Church can't change her teaching on life, gender, sexuality and marriage. For all of their education, they should know better than to spread false information about the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris.

Not a few former Catholics share a similar attitude, "that of the wronged, rejected, 'poor me'" and they blame the institutional Church for all that is wrong in the world. To quote a psychoanalyst writing about a specific group of chronically disgruntled people, I will repeat his analysis here:

"They are therefore easily insulted; they 'collect injustice', as psychiatrist Berger has so well put it, and are liable to see themselves as victims. [...] Attached to self-pity, they are inner (or manifest) complainers, often chronic complainers. Self pity and protest are not far apart. A certain inner (or overt) rebelliousness and hostility to others who do them wrong and to 'society' and a determinate cynicism, are typical of many" of these types. - dr.vda

Of course I could be wrong about the analysis 'of these types' - but not about Notre Dame and the Church.