Goodbye

[Heinrich]

Those are good points, Vetus. Deception has insinuated itself here, too. Same people, different names, recreating personalities. Gets old.

[The Curt Jester]

One person (quite typical on forums, really) calls into question an apparition and that turns the rest into swine, eh?

That is a complete misreading of my wife's point. She's concerned and upset about the treatment of holy things on the forum. It has become a banality to see them questioned and trampled underfoot by trolls or confused converts who quickly burn out. They keep popping up left and right around here, often unchallenged. We've had many attacks over the past months, including a vile attack on the holy rosary that lasted for three full days until the scandal was so overwhelming that something was finally done about it. I second Polymath's feelings. If we wanted to deal with liberal trolls, we'd be on a mainstream Novus Ordo forum where everything that is sacred in our faith, from dogmas to simple devotions, is questioned under the pretense of intellectual inquiry. Faith is not a mere intellectual exercise, it's a living experience that forms our character, our sensibilities and our attitudes. Our Catholic ethos is in danger when we tolerate and grow accustomed to an attitude of irreverence towards holy things, no matter how small they might be.

Context helps, so thanks for clarification.

Please note that over the years, "Goodbye" threads have been laced with insults, blanket-statements, and everything in between.  For instance, in the past couple years we have had (in so many words):

1. I hope many of you get sick and die.
2. You people aren't real Catholics.
3. Protestants are more Catholic than most people here
4. You are a bunch of weakling idiots.
5. None of you spend enough time defending me from other posters

One gets rather jaded of Goodbye posts that make statements which can be construed to mean a chunk of the forum population.  Your wife's post indicated one thread in which one person was against O.L. of Guadalupe (which is highly offensive to a Taco-bender like myself) and a good number of people opposing that person.  There was no mention of other people or instances.  So did that mean that many of us got lumped in via association (or because we didn't jump in that particular thread to take sides?).  Given the past, it's really hard to tell and not a far stretch of the imagination that the latter could have happened.