Two-Minute Video with Interview of Me on James Martin, SJ

Yesterday morning, I was interviewed by Konrad Aderer, of Currents, NET TV’s nightly Catholic news program. The interview lasted about one half hour, from which the editors chose some preferred segments to put in the two-minute video embedded below.

Given the small percentage of the interview that made it into the segment, most of my points were omitted. I know this is how things go, and I am not complaining. In this brief column, I present a few of the points that did not make the cut.

James Martin, S.J., does not overtly say that Church teaching is wrong, though he makes it very evident he wants it changed. He does this under the pretext of “building bridges” to the LGBT “community.” But LGBT identifies acts, or at least tendencies to acts, that are intrinsically disordered and evil in themselves, as per the dogmatic teaching of the Catholic Church. (Anyone having doubts about this is invited to read my Boy Scouts and Homosexuality: What’s the Big Deal? on this site.) Now, the Church is not in the business of “building bridges” to “communities” associated with other sinful lifestyles. We don’t have an outreach to the impenitent wife-beaters community, or the capitalist deniers of just wages to employees community, or the community of incorrigible drunkards. A “community” which derives its entire identity from a sinful lifestyle it wants to retain is not something the Church would build bridges to; rather, it is part of that world that the Church has the duty to evangelize.

Instead of building Martinesque bridges to enable vice and coddle sinners in their sins, the Church reaches out to people — sinful people who need God’s truth, His forgiveness, and His healing grace. And there are priests who administer these things to homosexuals, just as there are homosexuals, and other kinds of sinners, who are receptive to God’s healing grace as mediated to us by the Church. THAT is building a bridge, one that goes from earth to Heaven. That is what the Church is here to do: save souls.

What James Martin, S.J., does is send a Trojan horse into the sanctuary of the Church, a Trojan horse loaded not with sinners seeking grace, but activists demanding conformity to their agenda. The “bridge-building” effort has nothing to do with grace or conversion — nothing, that is, beyond aborting or inoculating against it. It has to do with facilitating the program of a special interest group that is in no way Catholic.

Another point that did not make the cut has to do with the reasons I created the page “Praying for the Conversion of James Martin, S.J.” The reason is twofold. First, I wanted to pray for the man. He is leading others to hell and consequently going there himself. He is a priest, and a baptized brother of mine in Christ. I don’t want him going to hell, and I don’t want others following him. Praying for the living and the dead is a spiritual work of mercy. Secondly, I want to give Catholics who object to the Jesuit’s evils an outlet to do something good in reaction, that is, to follow Saint Paul’s admonition, “Be not overcome by evil, but overcome evil by good” (Rom. 12:21). Just because the liberals call faithful, orthodox Catholics “Pharisees” for our opposition to their infidelities does not mean we should become Pharisaical. And how would we become so? By holding out that we are, by ourselves and without God’s grace, better than they are, or by being so embittered against them that we refuse to do what Our Lord commands in the Gospel: “But I say to you, Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you: that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who maketh his sun to rise upon the good, and bad, and raineth upon the just and the unjust” (Matt. 5:44-45).

None of that, by the way, rules out a strong, militant opposition to James Martin’s lies and heresies.

Some other points came out in the interview, too. Maybe I will make mention of them in a future posting.

This is the blurb from the Currents YouTube page:

Since Father James Martin released his book on “Building a Bridge” to LGBT Catholics in June, a firestorm in social media has erupted and recently escalated. Our Konrad Aderer speaks with Brother André Marie, M.I.C.M., who has launched a Facebook page to pray for Father Martin.