The Blind Trying to Direct the Blind

The National catholic Distorter, a/k/a the Fishwrap, has hired a BLM supporter as an 'opinion editor'.

From One Mad Mom

Why a Catholic journalist is urging the church to engage Black Lives Matter

Mar 3, 2021

by Alejandra Molina, Religion News Service, The Associated Press

Editor’s note: Olga Segura joined the National Catholic Reporter in September 2020 as opinion editor. Her beats include pop culture, race, identity and culture.

Well, if this isn’t the hundredth strike against NcR, I don’t know what is. OK, I realize we’re talking thousands now. Whatever it is, it’s one more nail in the spiritual coffin.

Olga Marina Segura has often been asked why she’s chosen to remain involved in the Catholic Church, an institution that, in her eyes, has often ignored the trauma of Black people.

Segura, a journalist who’s built her career in Catholic media, has asked herself that same question: Why did she attach her identity to such an institution?

Uh, the Eucharist, perhaps?! It never ceases to amaze me that what is a big “duh” for many of us is still so hard to grasp for the group who sees the Church as a social club. The whole “one, holy, catholic, apostolic”, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come, and the Sacraments which facilitate all these is lost on many. But, seriously, why Catholic? Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity should be the first thing to roll off the tongue.

As a journalist, Segura has covered race and culture, studying and interviewing leaders like Alicia Garza, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, and mothers of young Black men killed by police, highlighting the role their faith has played in both grief and activism. She’s written about the Catholic faith of activists like Tarana Burke, the founder of the #MeToo movement, whose Catholicism was a place to “gauge how to exist in the world.””

If only Segura would spend more time studying the Church. Or, heck, how about some really basic stuff like the Bible? Got to say, I’m really enjoying Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year podcast. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-bible-in-a-year-with-fr-mike-schmitz/id1539568321 I’m playing catch up now so I’m still in Genesis, but if you really want to understand where conflict, jealousy, Black Lives Matter, and #MeToo come from, the history of man described in Genesis is the perfect place to start. It runs far deeper than the supposed “systemic racism”, but the fix (or at least the most we can hope for in this world) is rather easy, yet some just keep missing it. Hint, the fix isn’t to seek vengeance, to be vindicated or to dominate. So, please, Olga, why don’t you start there?

Through her reporting, Segura, 31, an opinion editor at National Catholic Reporter, has realized her faith has given her the language to talk about “why every person mattered” and “why God called us to care for the planet.”

As usual with the National catholic Reporter crowd, no mention of overcoming sin. I’m glad she realizes that every person matters. It would be really interesting to hear her views on abortion and the slate of liberal causes, including #MeToo and BLM, that dehumanize, well, just about everyone.

And in her recently released book, “Birth of a Movement: Black Lives Matter and the Catholic Church,” Segura highlights the urgency for Catholic leadership, such as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, to reject systemic oppression and engage in dialogue with the co-founders of the Black Lives Matter movement. To Segura, who wrote the book amid the disproportionate spread of COVID-19 and the uprising over the police killing of George Floyd, these matters are urgent.

I know this will come as a shock to Segura, but the Black Lives Matter movement wasn’t founded by Christ. It was founded by people with very evil intents. They finally scrubbed it from their website because it woke people up to this fact, but their “about us” page basically said they were for killing children, destroying the nuclear family and erasing gender. You can find some of their old lingo here: https://omm.foeduscatholic.com/its-not-just-a-hashtag/ Ryan’s full post on BLM that I talk about is definitely worth the read.

If the Catholic Church doesn’t do more to engage with Black Lives Matter, “the future of our church is at stake,” Segura told Religion News Service.

“Sin is OK but you better capitulate to the BLM narrative or the Catholic Church is doomed.” Wrong. The Church will be here until the end of this world. However, a great deal of foolish thinking people like Olga Segura will depart (or have already departed) from Her teachings, as foretold. That is a result of sin, pure and simple. You want to fix racism and the Church, Olga? Work on YOUR sin and encourage everyone else to do so, too.

“Black and brown people do not feel at home in this church, especially young people,” said Segura, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic.

That might possibly be because your/their focus has never been on God but on self.

Young people, whom Segura referred to as the Trayvon Martin generation, “think about these things more radically and they want to see a church that reflects that.”

Well, of course they do. That’s like the old as time “me” years where social self-preservation and self-centeredness prevail. It’s the years where you really rebel from the what you are supposed to do in lieu of what you want to do, what makes you feel accepted by your peers, what makes you not outcast, etc.  Every generation thinks they’re fresh, new thinking rebels. Has she heard of the 60’s??? They’re just the same, old dissenters wrapped up in a new line of clothing. Some of us grow up and realize that it’s hollow and not a helpful mindset and it’s full of empty promises.

Segura got her start as a professional journalist at America, an esteemed Jesuit magazine, where she immersed herself in learning about Catholic church history, familiarizing herself with papal documents and bishops statements on issues like racism.

And like most people at America Magazine and NcR, she immersed herself only as far as she needed to support her mindset instead of reality. In doing so, she became a cherry-picker extraordinaire like her colleagues.

In her book, she underscores ” Laudato si’,” the second encyclical of Pope Francis, where he highlighted the risk of “rampant individualism” and detailed how many of society’s problems are “connected with today’s self-centered culture.” She notes that in 2018, the USCCB published its first pastoral letter on racism since 1979, titled “ Open Wide Our Hearts,” where it noted that even after slavery was abolished, many freed Black Americans were forced into “continued servitude in the evolving economies.”

Exactly. We live in a self-centered culture and what BLM seeks to do is make us more so, not less so. Fighting racism with continued racism is not going to work. You cannot cure evil with evil. It is NOT the way. (Yeah, I’m going to throw in a Mandalorian reference.)

Of course, as usual, there’s no link to the document from the USCCB she cites. Give it a read. It’s 32 double-spaced pages. You can do it, although I doubt Segura wants you to see some things.  https://www.usccb.org/resources/open-wide-our-hearts_0.pdf

After sin entered the world, however, this sense of justice was overtaken by selfish desires, and we became inclined to sin. St. Augustine described well our lives after Eden, saying that in the fallen world our relationships with one another have been guided by a “lust to dominate.” Whether recognized or not, the history of the injustices done to so many, because of their race, flows from this “lust to dominate” the other. Even when we are freed from Original Sin by Baptism, we continue to struggle with overcoming temptation and sin in our lives.

and

Too many good and faithful Catholics remain unaware of the connection between institutional racism and the continued erosion of the sanctity of life. We are not finished with the work. The evil of racism festers in part because, as a nation, there has been very limited formal acknowledgement of the harm done to so many, no moment of atonement, no national process of reconciliation and, all too often a neglect of our history. Many of our institutions still harbor, and too many of our laws still sanction, practices that deny justice and equal access to certain groups of people. God demands more from us. We cannot, therefore, look upon the progress against racism in recent decades and conclude that our current situation meets the standard of justice. In fact, God demands what is right and just.

They’re talking about Planned Parenthood and abortion here, y’all, and it’s in direct contradiction to the BLM narrative that cheers them on. If we can’t stop dehumanizing the most vulnerable and let people target the most vulnerable minorities, we’ll never have a shred of hope stopping racism. This is the one thing the bishops in the U.S. get very, very right. And those mean prolifers who “only care about babies until birth” are the ones who have been fighting for the minority communities to have the right to be born! Of course, they don’t care just about children in the womb, but they certainly fight for them because, as many have said, you can’t have any other rights if you cannot be born. And Planned Parenthood and their ilk? They target minorities. Talk about institutional racism. It doesn’t get any worse than that.

BLM was never about minorities or stopping the dehumanization of them. It was always about retribution, power and money. And, sorry, BLM is every bit as racist as the KKK. What’s worse is they throw those they say they’re trying to help under the bus. As always I’ll throw in the disclaimer that I’m talking about the organization. Sadly, many people bought intot he hasthtag without ever realizing there was full blown organization behind it.

This knowledge helped Segura make a clear comparison between Catholic social teaching and the mission of the Black Lives Matter movement. To Segura, these doctrines carry similarities.

For example, the mission of Black Lives Matter and the pope’s encyclical “focused on social issues and called on us to reject the very individualism that was creating the problems we had to combat. Both challenged a world that was different from the oppressive one I knew,” she wrote.

What “doctrines” is she citing that call for children to be killed, the nuclear family to be destroyed, and gender to be twisted and ignored? This is the epitome of the “individualism” that that BLM calls for, not the Church.

The “Open Wide Our Heart” letter, Segura wrote, “calls on all Catholics, regardless of race, to work toward the eradication of racism in the United States.”

Look, I’m not a huge fan of the USCCB document, but it hardly says what Segura would like you to believe it says. The reason I’m not a fan is that it confuses what the Church has already done to help minorities and what has happened in the history of the U.S. You could liken it to the Junipero Serra problem of lumping the Catholics and the Spanish army together in its generalities.

The way Segura sees it, “Black Lives Matter is not a movement pushing an extremist agenda that contradicts our faith; it is the secular version of our Catholic social teaching.”

However, these statements from the church are limited, she said.

Uh, good try, Olga. Although I find the fact that you admit it’s devoid of God very interesting.

“The only explicit mention of gender in the entire document is used to negate the very existence of transgender women, men, and children around the world,” Segura wrote about the pope’s encyclical.

Unlike the church, the co-founders of Black Lives Matter — Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi — “promote a movement that centers the lived experiences of those our church would rather ignore,” Segura details in her book.”

Wow, she even threw Pope Francis under the bus. I’ve addressed this before, but a “lived experience” does not make something good, right, just or something to be normalized. Even murderers, rapists, philanderers, thieves, and, oh, racists, have “lived experiences.” Somehow, along the way, they were deformed in their thinking and acting process and embraced that deformed thinking and lifestyle. That’s why we sinners are called to reject sin – all sin.

As a journalist, Segura has seen how Black Lives Matter co-founders have been maligned for “denigrating religion,” while the movement has been described as “atheist” and “violent.” Segura sets the record straight by featuring the religious upbringings of the movement’s leaders.

Let’s just cruise on over to dictionary.com.

malign
verb
1. to speak harmful untruths about; speak evil of; slander; defame:

Sorry. BLM did that all by themselves on their website. Again, it was so horrible it finally got removed.

While Cullors was raised Jehovah’s Witness, Segura wrote that she moved away from her faith and identifies as “spiritually always seeking.” The work of Tometi, who is Christian, has been influenced by liberation theology, a movement in Christianity, Segura noted.

“These Black female leaders, unlike the predominantly white, all-male bishops who oversee the U.S. Catholic Church, are genuine examples of Christian leadership,” she wrote. “Like Christ, the founders fight for the marginalized, advocate for peace and justice, and work to dismantle oppressive systems.”

Peddling a little envy are we, Olga? Honestly, your position can’t be done without that. Don’t you think all Christian leaders should represent Christ? I mean, JW’s are not even Trinitarians. They’re a cult and the liberation theology club is closer to a political gang than Christianity. Representing Christ isn’t exactly their goal. But, hey, if we’re going to look at black female leaders, how about we look at some of the Christians who haven’t wandered away from their faith (not necessarily Catholic) and what they think about BLM. These two fabulous ladies are the ones the Catholic bishops should be listening to. Yes, we still have our differences but they are a lot closer to Catholicism than BLM. https://omm.foeduscatholic.com/dear-white-people/

In her book, Segura urges the church to stand against white supremacy and to campaign for “defunding and demilitarizing law enforcement.” She envisions a “liberated and resurrected church.” These calls, to many, might seem too hefty. Segura offers practical first steps.

Let’s get real. When you defund police, you hurt the communities that they by and large protect. Who benefits? Not minorities. Their communities are subjected to more lawlessness when police are dehumanized and vilified. How’s Chicago working out for the black community? Geez. I guarantee white supremecists are all for taking police out of minority communities. And does Segura really think she needs to lecture the Church on white supremacy? The people joining with them aren’t the faithful. They’re lost souls looking for a club to join in a kill or be killed world just like you. They’re on the right and your on the left and then there’s us who just want to follow Christ who are being told we must do this or we must do that or we will perish (or cancelled as today’s culture threatens).

And let’s talk about a “liberated” church. Liberated from what? God? Natural law? The Cross? No thanks.

She said the USCCB could conduct a survey on Google Forums or Survey Monkey to ask Black Catholics about topics they would like bishops to address. These suggestions could range from homilies on white privilege to pastoral letters on police brutality.

How about “How to save my soul?” What a topic that would be! Imagine how much evil in the world would that eliminate. It starts with YOU, Olga. Ask yourself how many people who actually follow the Church’s teachings on humanity engage in murder, brutality and/or racism. Oh, yeah, none. How about the Real Presence? You don’t seem to see the disconnect. If we don’t follow the basics, there is no hope for other who don’t.

Also, Segura said, the USCCB can create a website for the Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism so Catholics can see the ongoing work of the anti-racism group. And, she added, Pope Francis should call for and attend a gathering in the U.S. to encourage bishops to address the issue of race.

They can’t even get people to follow the doctrines of the Church, which, oh by the way, is the remedy for all ills. What if, and I know this is a long shot, people believed in hell? What a concept! Starting another committee when a good chunk of the people in the pews don’t know the faith isn’t going to do a darn thing but pander to the likes of you. And how about you, Olga? What are YOU going to do in your very own life to stop more sin from entering the world? Hint: You pointing fingers and pitting races against each other instead of begging all to unite around the teachings of Christ isn’t going to accomplish that.

Segura recognizes regular day-to-day Catholics may not place much importance on what the bishops have to say. However, she said, it’s important to challenge bishops with power who have access to Catholics with money.

Wow! She spells it out. This is all about power and money. She thinks that’s the cure to evil. Actually, scratch that. I’m not sure curing evil is even the goal because it sells books.

“If they started to challenge those people who they associate with, that’s where I think we really would start seeing the change,” she said. “They have access to spaces and power that I will never have as an immigrant woman in this church.”

Baloney. I have to laugh at the constant “the bishops need to do something.” They need to teach and we need to act. Be the change you want to see, Olga. Get out there and get your hands dirty in the minority communities instead of throwing in with organizations like BLM who haven’t done a darn for those communities. Ironically, even Michael Brown’s father is wondering where the money went from BLM. https://nypost.com/2021/03/03/michael-browns-father-ferguson-activists-demand-20m-from-blm/ Personally, I believe BLM exploited that community and that giving money to BLM types won’t help anything other than to make some people wealthy. It just goes to show you the reality of BLM. They got their paycheck on the death of Michael Brown and moved on.

Segura said she hopes her book helps Catholics as well as people outside the church realize “it’s OK to get involved in the struggle for liberation at any point in your faith journey.”

“I hope that people are not afraid … to push our church past where it can really go,” she said.

Honey, the “faith journey” is heading the wrong way if you’re not urging people towards the Eucharist and the salvific work of the Church. Moving away from the Faith is not the path we should follow. Spiritually, always obeying and forming our consciences around the teachings of the Church Christ gave us should be our guide.

Is it really “OK to get involved in the struggle for liberation at any point in your faith journey?” Christ answers that question.

Let them alone: they are blind, and leaders of the blind. And if the blind lead the blind, both will fall into the pit. Matthew 15:14

Open your eyes first lest you lead others astray. Does it require perfection? No, but first and foremost it does require knowledge of and obedience to Christ’s teachings through the Church He established.