Better to suffer than to sin

Last updated on: October 13, 2016 at 7:53 am by Mark Shea

Better to suffer than to sin 2016-10-13T07:53:32-07:00 Mark Shea

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Simcha Fisher wisely says:

I’m well aware that Catholics will suffer under Hillary. But we’ll survive, as we always do when persecuted. Will we survive a man who has a strange power to make us persecute and inflict wounds on ourselves? Look what’s already happened. So many Catholics willing to throw rape victims under the bus so their guy gets in. Don’t fool yourself that it ends there.

Hillary will hurt us; Trump will make us destroy ourselves.

It started with John Zmirak’s absurd claim that Hillary is Diocletian and Trump is Constantine. Now with the Wikileaks release of some conversations between a few Hillary wonks Catholics are freaking out about The Coming Persecution and how we have to do Whatever It Takes to elect a lying pro-abort adulterous sex predator who mocks the disabled, spits on POWs, and mocks Gold Star families while cheating his workers of their just wages and promising to torture prisoners and murder their wives and children.

No. We don’t. In fact, we must not. Why? Let the first pope explain it for you:

If you are reproached for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory and of God rests upon you. But let none of you suffer as a murderer, or a thief, or a wrongdoer, or a mischief-maker; yet if one suffers as a Christian, let him not be ashamed, but under that name let him glorify God. (1 Pe 4:14–16).

I think Hillary is mildly hostile to the Church when it comes to pelvic issues. I don’t doubt she will continue Obama’s attempt to restrict “freedom of religion” to “freedom of worship”, particularly when it comes to matters of gay marriage and abortion. I think she will try to force Catholics to pay for contraception too. And she might even be stupid enough to try, as Obama did, to tell churches who they can and cannot ordain. Other encroachments I can’t think of this early in the morning may come too. I also think she will be friendly to the Church in other ways since her goals line up with the goals of the Church in some ways. But what she will never be able to do is get Christians to cheer for and support torture, murder and sexual predators.

Only Trump has achieved that goal. And in giving him that, the “faithful prolife Right” has done more damage to the credibility of the Church and the prolife movement in a week than Hillary could do in a lifetime.

Hillary is no Diocletian. But even if she were, the counsel of the gospel is to fear not persecution, but sin.

Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. (Mt 10:28).

One of the many lies Christians have told themselves about supporting Trump is “We *know* what Hillary will do. We have no idea what Trump will do, so let’s close our eyes and lunge for him.”

False. We know exactly what Trump will do, because he has already done it: he has persuaded conservative Christians to defend torture, murder, sexual assault, spitting on POWs and Gold Star families, gross racism and misogyny, alliances with neo-Nazis and White supremacists, stunning ignorance and incompetence, violence against minorities, death threats against political opponents–and to use the unborn as human shields for all that. He has *already* wrecked the credibility of the conservative Christian prolife movement and made sure it will remain in ruins whether he wins or loses. If he loses, it has a chance to redeem itself. If, God forbid, he wins, it will become completely tarred to him and full of his stink and stench forever.

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