SENSE & SENTIMENTALITY

A sentimentalist is a man who sees an absurd value in everything and doesn't know the market price of a single thing. Wilde

PL's apostolate is devoted in part to debunking the wrong-headed presumption that SGG cult masters represent traditional Catholic culture and clergy. Their ignorance of Latin, their numerous scholarly and liturgical errors, their fixation on their bloodthirsty cats' mayhem, their non-stop fund raising, their alienation from tradition, and much, much more render the Ohio cult a worthless simulacrum of naïvely re-imagined 1950s American Catholicism. There's nothing substantial beneath the tinsel, hype, and cheesy showmanship.

In addition to the above deficits of Catholic mind and outlook, there's another, more alarming one: Deacon Dan's reflexive appeal to the sentimental in religion. His Emotiveness habitually spreads this poisonous, un-Catholic goo in an effort to disguise his malformation and to manipulate the Gerties' passions. (All the better to keep folks' money at the dying West Chester cult center, we surmise.)  So effective has he been that his victims don't realize the Dirtbag is feeding their souls empty-calorie emotional marshmallows, not life-sustaining spiritual bread.

Especially offensive to Catholic sensibility is "One Hand's" milksoppy, compulsive reference to "The Baby," when referring to the Christ Child. Here's a sampling from the last few years (emphases ours):

We usually have an excellent attendance on Advent IV, although it has been light since Thanksgiving. But I think some folk come the Sunday before Christmas, as a kind of a bow before the Baby, because they’ll be too busy for church come Christmas. But the Baby’s not here yet, and we’re just thinking about decorating. Come back for the Birthday! (12/17/16) 

How blessed are we to give and receive the gift of beautiful music for the Baby’s birth. (12/31/16) 

The Baby Jesus’ Little Helpers and big packed gift boxes for our poor Mexican children. (11/26/16) 

 Of course I prayed for you all at Our Lady of Guadalupe and at the dear shrine of the “Baby Doctor” Jesus. (12/23/16) 

I thank God in advance—as Fr. Solanus would do—for a wonderful Christmas, and each of you for the gifts you bring the Baby God for His birthday. (12/26/15) 

Ask him, and ask him often as you try to take good care of Mary and the Baby this Christmas. (12/27/14)

Oh, can't you just hear the Wee One cooing and hyperarticulating?

Apart from the unsettling echoes of Protestants' tacky birthday parties for the Baby Jesus complete with garishly decorated cakes, chintzy party supplies, and cornball jingles (click here for a gag-inducing example), Li'l Daniel's infantile Leitmotiv irreparably harms the Gerties' faith. The saccharine-saturated context reduces the Incarnation — "the one thoroughly laid down and safe way to avoid all going wide of the truth"* — to a sticky mess of superficial feeling typical of a trailer-park communal baby shower. The grave danger to Catholic truth posed by Dannie's sentimental coloring is this: A mundane, easy-to-evoke emotional response to a cutesy-pie evangelical Christian deviation from pious tradition irreverently displaces the awe Catholics should summon for the magnum mysterium of the Word made flesh.

The lyrical language of the Breviary's hymns and responsories, the Church Fathers' theologically precise sermons and commentaries, and the Martyrology's noble Proclamation of the Nativity all yield to Dannie's worthless — and alien — baby-talk. On His Insipidity's lips, the expressive worship of God degenerates into cloying sentimentality. As trained, genuine Catholic clergy will tell you, religious sentimentality perverts good human sentiment by removing its proper object. By so weakening both the intellect and the will, it's the enemy of the true, the good, and the beautiful.

If everything we've posted about "One-Hand," Tony Baloney, and Tradzilla wasn't enough to persuade you that these men stand far outside Church tradition, then surely Dannie's yuletide mawkishness will. His almost exclusive appeal to the affective faculty is, to be blunt, anti-Catholic. No properly Romanized bishop of the pre-Vatican II Church would have appropriated such disordered, insincere pap to arouse the faithful's fervent adoration.

Long decades of watchful supervision and painstaking socialization taught the well-vetted churchmen of yesteryear to restrain the emotive impulse to pour on the treacle. Had they not exercised self-control, they never would've received an apostolic mandate. (More to the point, they'd have never made it to the subdiaconate.) To the extent that those luminaries also had studied moral theology in depth (and in Latin), they correctly classed sentimentality as an unruly consequent passion, which can readily give rise to moral defects. In this case, the defect lies in supporting the SGG-Brooksville enterprise through financial contributions and submission to the Big Shots' unholy control.

From the evidence we've found in his "Corner," Dannie seems to be trying to make sentimentality the predominant Gertie passion for his own advantage. Aware that many seated in SGG's soiled pews blame his culpable inaction for the 2009 SGG School Scandal, His Excremency senses his grip loosening.  Vanished is the fiction of his "broad culture," liturgical expertise, and leadership of Tradistan. (PL's made sure no one falls for the first two fabrications, and arch-rival Big Don's given the lie to the third.) Whereas most cultling males have written him off as ineffectual or worse, Deficient Dan's only chance to survive is to enlist the distaff side in his cause: On the Gertie gals alone rests the Dirtbag's hope to silence their beleaguered menfolk's and ragged bairns' pleas to escape the spiritually suffocating and financially exhausting SW Ohio cult center.

To that end, Wee Dan has been re-inventing himself over the last couple of years as a gentle, sweet, childlike soul — the Forrest Gump of Sedelandia — who waxes all gushy and squidgy about babies, whether they be squirrels, bunnies, shoes, or the Divine Infant (from Whose royal patronage, invoked by real Catholic clergy, come palpable blessings, not hollow emotionalism.). He's banking on cheap schmaltz to stir up sympathy. After all, what stone-hearted brute could leave such an mewling innocent destitute of gelt and grub? "C'mon, Paw! We'uns caint jes' up 'n' dump de li'l ol' bee-uh-ship. Land sakes alive, he's no bigger then a rabbit pellet. Caintcha see how he luh-oves bye-ee-bees?"

To be sure, anyone familiar with the history of the SGG School Scandal sees through the transparent cynicism of Beggar-Man Dan's off-center musings. A reading of the litany of abuses detailed in December 2009 (click here) should tell you how fictitious is the tender, misty-eyed persona His Callousness projects. (No sensible adult would've permitted the "Principal" to remain employed after such horrors came to light.) Like all the other muck oozing out of the reeking cult cesspool, Dannie's baby-talk is aimed exclusively at capturing material resources for himself and not at lifting the hearts and minds of the faithful to venerate fittingly God Incarnate.

THE CULT IS NOT CATHOLIC. IT ISN'T EVEN A MEDIOCRE COPY OF THE CHURCH.

GET OUT THIS YEAR BEFORE

YOU

ARE NO LONGER CATHOLIC!

* The phrase as frequently quoted and anthologized; Augustine's original Latin is: sola est autem aduersus omnes errores uia munitissima.