ChurchPOP previously reported that dozens of major Catholic Facebook pages, in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, were suddenly removed from Facebook yesterday morning without explanation, causing serious concern for their owners. The incident sparked outrage among Catholics around the world, who demanded the pages be restored and an explanation be given. Yesterday evening, all of the pages were restored without explanation. This morning, ACI Prensa, one of our sister Catholic news agencies in Latin America, received the first explanation from Facebook for the incident: “The pages were restored. The incident was accidentally caused by a spam detection mechanism on the platform. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused." While we are glad the pages have been restored, ChurchPOP remains skeptical of the official explanation, since it appears that only Catholic pages were affected worldwide, which seems unlikely if the problem was a software glitch.
ChurchPOP certainly isn’t the only organization that remains skeptical. We at The Remnant have been anticipating just such a Facebook purge for quite some time. And while we’re gratified to learn that the public pressure brought to bear in this case evidently prompted Facebook to rethink its policy (or at least adjust the…ahem… sensitivity levels of those automatic spam detectors), the handwriting, it would seem, is on the wall (no pun intended). After all, as social media begins to eclipse even mainstream media in power and influence, it stands to reason that saving the world from mean words and so-called “hate speech” would become a fulltime job.
According to a recent report at theBlaze.com, Facebook has announced an ambitious new plan to do just that:
“Facebook will hire thousands of employees to aid the social media network’s effort to eliminate what it deems ‘hate speech’ from users’ profiles. Our current definition of hate speech is anything that directly attacks people based on what are known as their ‘protected characteristics’ — race, ethnicity, national origin, religious affiliation, sexual orientation, sex, gender, gender identity, or serious disability, or disease,” Richard Allan, Facebook’s vice president of public policy for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, wrote in a blog post.”
“Protected characteristics”? Really? So the entire world has become a great, big kindergarten where "teacher" must take draconian measures to make sure none of the little snowflakes in the world feel even a tiny bit offended by anyone or anything at any time. Here in our brave new world, sticks and stones may break our bones but names will send you to jail!
And it’s not just Facebook. According to a multi-part expose on Breitbart.com, the omnipresent and omniscient search engine Google is also getting into the act. Aside from providing 24/7 surveillance of pretty much every human being on the planet, it’s now making sure its own employees think only Google-approved thoughts:
“Google was rocked by the publication of an internal manifesto that alleged wide-ranging political bias within the company. In exclusive interviews with Breitbart News, more Google employees are now speaking out. The 10-page manifesto, which was met by an immediate backlash, described a climate of fear at the company, in which employees who challenged prevailing leftist narratives on diversity were faced with immediate threats to their career.”
The Thought Police to the rescue. Thanks be to Google!
In a day and age marked by mandatory acceptance and toleration of every obscenity under the sun, there's just one mortal sin remaining: ‘hate speech’-- the amorphous definition of which presents a far greater threat to the civil liberties of faithful Catholics than to actual haters. Ubiquitous porn stars, anarchists, neo-Nazis—they all affiliate with Facebook too, and yet—funny thing! — they don’t seem to be subject to the same levels of scrutiny and censorship as Christians.
Hardly surprising, I suppose, given the decades dedicated by Far-left public policy wonks to recast the Bible as “hate speech” and denounce Catholic dogmas (such as ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’) as the smoking gun of dangerous religious supremacism, as threatening to the common good as race supremacism was under the National Socialists in the 1930s.
And so if a Catholic website in 2017 takes it upon itself to defend marriage, for example, as an institution created by God for the purpose of the procreation and education of children (and thus reserved exclusively for one man and one woman), said website naturally “hates” homosexuals and inadvertently or otherwise, is fomenting violence against the ‘champions of liberty’ who reject the Christian definition of marriage.
If the same website defends the infallibly-defined dogma that there is no salvation outside the Church, well, obviously, this indicates hatred of non-Catholics, a certain proclivity for anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and a whole evil host of fascist attitudes. To censor Christianity here in our post-Christian world is thus to defend mankind from prejudice and hate. Never mind that the Church has never wavered in her strict prohibition—under pain of mortal sin, no less! —of hatred of any kind against anyone and everyone, especially those raised in non-Catholic families who never knew Christ and who never made a single conscious decision to reject Him.
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The caricature of foaming-at-the-mouth Catholic zealots, forced baptisms and bloodthirsty missionaries invented by Catholic-bashing historians and dutifully incorporated into university text books and Hollywood movie scripts, is generally accepted by the masses that will recognize social media’s purge of “Catholic extremism” as a perfectly reasonable means of preventing the next holocaust. After all, we’re solemnly informed, Hitler was a baptized Catholic!, his apostasy and fanatical embrace of paganism notwithstanding. (One wonders how the Left would respond if we were to point out that since Jeffrey Dahmer was a homosexual, it obviously follows that homosexuality creates serial killers...)
And on and on it goes. If you defend the right to life of the unborn, well obviously you’re an unbalanced bigot who would force others to comply with your misogynous fanaticism, even as you deny women their fundamental right to ‘reproductive health’. Your Facebook page is thus trafficking in extremism that if left unchecked will obviously lead to violence against women. In other words: Stop the pro-lifers before they start killing us all. Facebook, do your job!
See how it works? It’s the natural consequence of institutionalized Christophobia in public schools, workplace diversity training, primetime television, etc. And so the purge of all things truly Catholic is inevitable, especially now when the Catholic Church herself has surrendered to the spirit of the age, with entire generations of priests, bishops and even popes crying out from the folding chairs where their thrones used to be: “Who are we to judge?”
The Church of Vatican II not only hoisted the white flag long ago but has now walked off the battlefield altogether, leaving faithful Catholics wide open to charges of extremism—a fringe group in their own Church. "Even the POPE disagrees with you haters!"
What to do? First off, God is in charge and if He asks us to become martyrs, so be it. At least arguably, there is no way out of this nightmare that does not include us following the example of new Christian martyrs. So let’s hope and pray there are some to follow, and let’s not be cowards if there aren’t. It just might be up to us, so let’s let the world know we’re ready, should it come to that. It’s not as if any one of us can get out of here alive, no matter how it all turns out. In fifty years most of us will be dead. Would it be so bad to go out on top?
In the meantime, numbers still matter. So humanly speaking, it makes a lot of sense for us to spend every waking moment trying to wake our brothers and sisters in Christ from the conciliarist slumber. Social media—even with all of its obvious problems—is still a good means of accomplishing just that. The Remnant reaches far-flung regions and unlikely demographics never possible before the advent of social media. For the past week, for example, The Remnant Facebook page has shown a daily reach in excess of 75,000. Our team has regular encounters with non-Catholics, homosexuals, Protestants and mainstream Novus Catholics who would never have heard of The Remnant were it not for social media. And the resulting number of converts to Tradition is not insignificant.
Still, we’re certainly not putting all of our eggs in the Facebook basket. They’re not our allies, they’re not our friends. We disagree with Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, on every social, moral and religious issue in the world. We’re nevertheless using his platform to reach our objectives and to build up a strong universal defense of the Kingship of Christ. In other words, we’re undermining the liberal and radically secularist causes the Facebook team hold sacred. In fairness, then, why should they be obliged to cater to us, when we serve up 24/7 opposition to everything in which they believe? It’s rather amusing, when you think about it.
So when Facebook finally gets around to kicking us out, we’ll kick ourselves for not having used this interim to construct social media platforms of our own. And that’s exactly what we here at The Remnant intend to do. This is not out of reach. In fact, all that is required to get it started is a much more efficient communications system that will help our allies around the Christophobic world become less dependent on the Chirstophobes who own and operate big social media.
We already have the newspaper, and I’m convinced that, even as things go from bad to worse, the powers that be couldn’t care any less about that which lives and breathes offline. For them, it’s all about the almighty Internet, where the real world is defined only by that which can be Googled. This is why The Remnant has no intention of giving up on its physical newsprint edition. We have a contingency plan. And in the meantime, what’s needed is a sort of “minute man” system whereby the traditional Catholic community can stay in touch, defend against Chirstophobes attacks whenever they strike, and in general be able to communicate at a moment’s notice without total dependence on social media which is becoming more Christophobic by the day.
So the plan is simple: As we build up the physical newspaper (offline and on) and network with concerned journalists and Catholic action groups all around the world, we’re also developing a bigger and better email data base. And we hope you’ll come along with us by signing up today for regular Remnant email notifications. It takes only a second and it’s free. Just go to our homepage here at Remnantnewspaper.com and click on the “Free Remnant Updates” tab off to the left, near the top of the homepage (it’s a black horizontal pullout tab). Fill out the short form and hit “Subscribe”.
That’s it. You’re done. You won’t receive any junk mail from us but you will be part of a Remnant communication network that will in no way be dependent on outside media, and which will eventually (God willing) be developed into a kind of Catholic social media alternative.
By the way, The Remnant’s entire online presence (including Remnant TV) is hosted and maintained by a small but powerful Christian company that bans pornography and blasphemy and is committed to developing and supporting a pro-Christian Internet presence. So, no, I’m not talking pie-in-the-sky objectives here. We’re already doing it—all we need now is your support and alliance.
As I noted in our last issue, The Remnant is not backing down, not retreating. But we certainly are preparing for a whole new offensive in the holy Name of Christ our King.
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