Our Besetting Sins: Outrage and Adulation

To all these semi-hypothetical examples, a truthful Catholic would necessarily respond: “So what?” Instead, what too often happens is that these outrages are repeated ad nauseam on social media and shared with others. After all, what fun is outrage if it is private? The private is now obsolete. The media—and that manifestly includes the Catholic media—amplifies these outrages by spinning them and coating them with a political patina. The whole thing exacerbates our political and cultural divisions, and round and round we go. ...To borrow a phrase from the 1980s War on Drugs: Just say no. Just say no to celebrity culture and the perpetual outrage machinery of our era. I do not intend in any way to poke fun at God’s particular judgment when I state that I’m glad it won’t be a trivia quiz about today’s Catholic celebrities. As each of us stands before Our Lord, we will have enough to worry about regarding the choices we ourselves made. Let the dead bury the dead, and let the era’s personalities see to their own choices.