Beware the demons "tenderness" and "compassion"

Watch out for the people preaching "compassion".

Flannery O'Connor, as usual, has summed up the problem:

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

We hear a lot of this kind of language from the world. We are to be compassionate, tender, with people who suffer terrible emotional traumas from being denied their rights...

We have heard a great many words about "tenderness" coming from this pontificate. It all sounds just fine on the surface, doesn't it? And it is playing well with the world. It seems to be making people weep with joy to hear about "tenderness" from the pope. "Never be afraid of tenderness..."

Yes, be afraid. Be very afraid.

"Compassion," "mercy" and "tenderness" as well as care for "the poor" seem to be the watchwords. The trouble is that without the correct definition and framework, these concepts come to mean something quite different from the Biblical interpretation.

We have certainly got a lot of the same kind of talk from the world: "Every child a wanted child..."

At the same time, we have heard not much more from this pope than an apparently never-ending stream of invective and insults aimed pretty unmistakably at those Christians who are interested in their eternal destiny and think it's important enough to devote time and energy to.

I am beginning to understand that there is a vast, and perhaps uncrossable, gulf between the goals and interests of NuChurch under this pontificate and the goals and purposes of Christ in founding His Church. These people seem to be completely focused on this world, the material and worldly. The pope talks a good deal about 'tenderness' and "the poor" and the things we need to do about them. Most recently we have been told that there must be an "appropriate redistribution of wealth" so that the poor will no longer be the poor. Won't that be nice? (Please leave your bank account details in the commbox...)

It is making me wonder if he is at all concerned about the salvation of souls. Are we to take away that "the rich" save their souls by giving their wealth to the poor? Doesn't this just mean that there will be new poor? Or maybe "salvation" in the classical sense is just not on the radar at all...

What to do, what to do...? I still don't know.





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