The Potemkin Church

The Roman Catholic Church recently put out The Pastoral Challenges In The Context Of Evangelization, and I made an attempt to read it, though I was put off by the bureaucratic nature of the document. There are entire paragraphs that don't contain meaningful content. Later, it dawned on me that I didn't see anything that demonstrated any understanding of the destruction of marriage via the widespread civil destruction of the father's natural rights and authority. A search for the word 'father' made it apparent this has not even been imagined by these bishops, nor shall it be worked on, or solved in any way.

The general social tendency to select for intelligence reached its zenith in the Victorian era. The revolutionary era led to the purging of the nobility and the new political landscape has put in place perverse incentives which result in dysgenic choices. With the owning class gone, the new ruse is that we all own, and that the bureaucrat is just there to administrate. The catch, of course, is that none of us can act against the bureaucrat in quite the same way as the old owner could.

The lack of nobility applies to the Church, just as much as it applies to the governments of the world. Here are our little bureaucrats; some talk like progressives, others talk like conservatives- but none act like nobility. One will dangle before you the hope of converting thousands; the other will circle the wagons around an ancient liturgy- none will take the responsibility necessary and figure out how to put people into productive labor so that they can marry.

The marriage license was once a thing granted by a noble who had a nominal interest in making sure his subjects were healthy; now the marriage license is the way to provide the divorce industry power, and the way some choose to redefine marriage. This was not mentioned in this working document.

Obviously I could go on about what should be done- but I suppose I shall err in some fashion if don't ever get around to what is going on now, and to what the title of this post refers.

Just like the Soviet bureaucrats did, our Christian bureaucrats build little Potemkin villages. Sometime they are centered around evangelism; sometimes they are centered around liturgy. Sometimes it's glorious progress, and the promise of building a new heaven and a new earth, sometimes it is apocalyptic, with it's own particular glory of being the last bastion of whatever tradition that may or may not have ever existed.

These Potemkin villages represent yet another cost against the next generation trying to come up, even if they happen to be the inhabitants. A new couple still has to have two incomes, because your faux village doesn't have it's own economy, and it costs just as much if not more than the secular city that surrounds it.
This is why it always devolves to either evangelism or liturgy- because these jokers can only ever make a speech or put on a play. They cannot build a city, or take any responsibility for the needs of a people. Ultimately, this ends up being an upper-middle class past-time that does little more than signal a pretense that they've managed to pass on their class consciousness to the bright shiny children in their faux village. Meanwhile, the majority of even their own children, let alone the multitude they purport to want to help, live outside of the faux village, and suffers the costs.