Christophobes At The Gates: Christopher Ferrara for The Remnant

By now many readers of this newspaper will have heard of the nonsensical and error-filled “report” on the traditionalist movement by an outfit called the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). SPLC’s self-bestowed mission is to rid America of “hate and intolerance,” which is how the far-Left describes any sort of effective opposition to Liberalism’s claim to possession of the entire world.

Karl Keating of Catholic Answers deserves a great deal of credit for being the only spokesman in the Novus Ordo establishment who has been publicly critical of the SPLC smear job.

Keating practiced law before he decided to devote himself full time to Catholic apologetics, and a well-deserved lawyerly contempt is on display in his critique, which appears in “Karl Keating’s E-Letter” of February 6, 2007, under the title “A Botched Report on a Worthy Issue.”

There are, however, serious shortcomings in Keating’s critique, which fails to take issue with SPLC on first principles, as even non-Catholic conservatives have done. If Keating’s critique is any indication, the Novus Ordo constituency of which he is such a prominent representative has failed to grasp that the traditionalist movement is not some dispensable minority group whose fate at the hands of the Liberal inquisition is more or less a matter of indifference to the “mainstream” Church. Rather, this opening attack on the traditionalist movement is an attack on traditional Roman Catholicism itself as the only formidable obstacle to worldwide Liberal hegemony. Hence this article will discuss both SPLC’s “exposé” and Keating’s critique in the larger context of the crisis in the Church and the growing threat posed to her by Liberal social order.