What begins with a ‘C’ and should usually be spelled with an asterisk in the middle?

Father Gaffigan

Call this one more thing nobody wants to talk about on either side of the Great Divide in our culture. The question crops up in vague reporting of unexplained disconnects between what people say and what they mean. We had a good example last week, as Stephen Coldert [sic] was celebrating the last show of his record breaking destruction of a once profitable and popular television franchise. He asked for his personally beatified acolytes that night to ask him interview questions from his own hostly throne on the show’s set while he expatiated from the guest lectern. Jim Gaffigan took the bait. As a Cath*lic in good standing himself, he wanted his Archbishop of Politics to share his religious beliefs with the teevee congregation.

(Un)surprisingly, Coldert’s answer became something of a story. 

That’s not just a claim about life after death. It’s a much more sweeping position than that, particularly in the way it was phrased. Interestingly, the quoted “X’ post was truncated at the exact point when a seriously compromising word had been used in the original and replaced here with Show more. 

The next word was ‘Pleroma,’ terminology employed by the branch of secularism called (oxymoronically) Gnostic Christianity. Here’s how their lingo has it:

It is expressly not Christian at all. It is to Catholicism what Zen Buddhism is to historical Buddhism: a convenient shortcut for the solipsistic and pretentious. Buddhism as practiced for centuries involved intensive scholarship, self-discipline, prayer, and works. Zen came along in stages, beginning a thousand years after the life of the Buddha. It reached its present formalism in Japan after a transition that included mixing Buddhist principles with Taoist philosophies that de-emphasized scripture in favor of direct, intuitive experience. 

Why does this matter? Zen has its own chief midwife/priest, a Chinese monk named Bodiharma, who flourished around 520 AD and has been revered ever since. Gnostic Christianity has its own midwife, a woman named Elaine Pagans, who went to Stanford and Harvard and wrote a book that won awards and followers in the enlightened class of academia. 

She doesn’t call herself a Pope. More like the Archbishop of Canterbury, I suppose, a sort-of-rival authority in an era when nobody seriously believes in the divine origin of Biblical scripture — or its ferocious threats of judgment and punishment over matters that are today considered relative and less helpful than conducive to fanaticism. Quoting from the Agnostic Basics laid out above, “Salvation in agnosticism is not achieved through faith, moral deeds, or sacraments, but through Gnosis, an intuitive, mystical realization of one’s own true divine identity and origin,”

I’m writing all this down and spelling it out because no one else is, and someone has to. The only thing that Gnostic Christianity truly removes from Roman Catholicism is God. The Yahweh of the Old Testament is an evil prankster, Christ is just a man with some altruistic ideas, and the Holy Ghost(s) are all of us, divinely fine just as we are, whatever that is.

It’s not that hard to sum up. Even graduates of Stanford, Harvard, Princeton, and Barnard can understand it:

All the fancy talk about pleromas, demiurges, archons, and whatnot is just lipstick on, you know…

The Essences were not Christian but spin-offs. Their scrolls are interesting but prove nothing. 

Good job/career for a lot of scientific gnostics, though it 

often leads to eyestrain and glasses with big black frames.

The ‘Gnosis’ they promulgated did not become the world’s leading religion and the taproot of an explosion in human development that created western civilization. You don’t care? Without you probably wouldn’t have been born or, if you had, survived to the age Stephen Colderriere is now. It is civilization that propels the growth of population. Civilization requires social ordering arrangements that encourage men and women to get along, raise families, and avoid behaviors that cause neighbors and sons to kill one another and get away with it.

Do you, personally, really wish to take political and moral direction from someone who believes that, whatever he does in this life, all he’s facing afterward is “some continuance of some kind, like a dispersion of the self into some other greater being”? Hopefully with a nice big dressing room and ratings good enough to last for another dreamless aeon? That would be up to you. 

I don’t have any objection to people finding their own way on matters of theology. The concept of “Zen” doesn’t offend me particularly. I missed the literary Vogue of books like “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” only because I didn’t much trust the judgment of the people who recommended it. I did actually look it up this morning and read two of the sample pages. 

Looks to be an interesting book, well written, and having ridden motorcycles myself I find his description of the immediate sensory environment they bring to travel a fine observation. However he wishes to apply such experience to his sense of cosmology, divinity, and personal meaning in life, I would never suggest it might be lacking in value. 

What I object to from the Colberts and Pagenses of this world is the hypocrisy. Colbert is no Catholic, even though he uses this affiliation for cover, as in “I believe in unrestricted abortion and I’m a Catholic, so what does that tell you? It tells me he should be barred from receiving Communion in the Catholic Church, as should Biden, Pelosi, and innumerable other prominent apostates who were baptized as babes but could no longer repeat the Nicene Creed without a teleprompter. They are not excommunicated however. Nobody wants to make an issue of this. 

Is the Pope Catholic? I very much doubt it. I believe he’s more a Chi-Sox fan than a committed, practicing Catholic. I’ve been trained to look for the little boys in choir robes behind the princes of the church.

Not objecting to the cap, only the possibility that his relation to is more devoted

 than he is to Catholic doctrine about abortion and global defense of the faith.

The secularists have made it easy for everyone to fake their way through questions of morality they prefer to interpret as political mandates in service to people who vote for them or give them money. Farces like Gnosticism, Quanzaa, Wicca, and contemporary dilute denominations of Christianity, Judaism, and ‘mainstream’ (rather than Sharia) Muslims enable leaders like Pope Leo, Archbishop Sarah Mullally, Senator Schumer, and the mullahs of CAIR and the Nation of Islam to take any political position they choose without being accountable to the context of their own avowed religious faith.

Not asking anyone to persecute Colbert or take any more from him than he has already lost through the decisions he has made in his public life. All I’m asking is that people who understand the kind of pervasive hypocrisy I am writing about here not to be quiet about it anymore. When they say the next inane, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, anti-American thing, call them on it. Hold them publicly to account. No need for Guantanamo to achieve that much. 

I am not a Catholic. I am an Episcopalian whose church has entirely deserted the faith. I, however, still believe in the Nicene Creed. I really do. I do think of the great accounting that will occur in the afterlife. I’d feel better about a lot of things if I didn’t believe this has become a minority concern in American lives.

We’re not the ones trying to mount Inquisitions. They are. Ultimate justice is certainly out of my hands…