Vanity, Vanity all sin is vanity.

I have way to much on my plate to be posting, but Mark Shea has a must read post up.  He is railing against the cult of personality which has infected Catholic media stars. This includes lay people and Priests.

They need to remember that they are not bishops.  BTW I do remember reading that Bishop Fulton Sheen, near the end of  his life, regretted that his television show had caused him to become prideful.

Mark  writes a cautionary tale.

(excerpt):

The cult of celebrity is poison. People need to stop hoisting aloft every internet chatterer who thinks God has given him the power of excommunication against those who don’t happen to know their suffocating small constellation of shibboleths.

Read and heed. We internet loudmouths are not to be obeyed like bishops. When one of us pops off about Earth Day and stupidly declares, pronounces and defines that “if the priest even so much as breathes a word about Earth Day, throw nothing in the collection plate, finish your Sunday obligation and resign from that parish on Monday”, that does not constitute a de fide teaching of the Church. This sort of blind Pavlovian stupidity which teaches the faithful to respond to acoustic cues (“He mentioned Earth Day! Abandon ship!”) is a reflection, not of an intelligent Catholic approach, but of the kind of culture warrior mobthought that so much of the blogosphere facilitates.

It is, in fact, a mirror image of the sort of cult of personality one sees in Fr. Pfleger’s parish.

When I compare and contrast the audience reaction to this priest whipping the mob into a frenzy against the mean Church and Voris fanboys whipping the mob into a frenzy against the mean Church, the only difference I can see is that the combox crowd dislikes the politics of the former and not the latter. So the former is vilified and the latter lionized.

No doubt, if there were a combox full of Pfleger’s groupies (I haven’t checked the National Catholic Reporter), they would look like a mirror image of the Voris groupies, full of adoration and the certitude of victory for their hero and full of loathing for Voris for his sin of batting for the wrong tribe.

Moral: Democracy truly is that form of government that chooses Barabbas over Jesus.

Second moral: Don’t put a mitre on the head of any loudmouth in the blogosphere or Catholic media, especially me. A gaggle of apologists and bigmouths like me is not the Magisterium.  Read  the post here.

Heh. I wonder what a gaggle of apologists and bigmouths looks like. Note to self as my blog keeps getting more traffic: it is not about me. Everything I do should be the work of Christ and not me.

Catholic Stars could learn from the once vain St. Peter Gonzales.