Check this clip by Michael Lofton:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IqJlleA4d3w
There are LOTS of disappointments that fellow Catholics, clergy and lay, could have spared me over the last decade.
Michael Lofton certainly knows I am watching, I have reached out to him with comments since October, and he hasn't answered. Including on e-mails.
IF some clergy want to test my resignation, for one reason or another, and IF they would in doing so want to remind me I need to resign to God's will, which seems in line with some things they already did, Michael Lofton would certainly be someone they could use as a mouthpiece, and he doesn't need to mail me because they know and he knows, I am watching him, and won't miss this clip.
Now, on certain types of venture, testing someone's resignation might be an idea.
Bl. Lucy of Narni had stigmata, and she definitely was tested to the utmost as to her resignation.
St. Bridget of Vadstena was certainly a less resigned person, but her patience was tested too. She was a prophetess, and behind papacy returning from Avignon to Rome.
Stigmata and prophecy are supernatural things, charisms, they come from God. And the Devil likes to fake them. And doing one's work for God with such a life may take the whole life, so being resigned up to when one dies is actually not a loss. And one symptom of such things not being from God but faked by the Devil is lack of resignation.
I have not claimed any such strictly supernatural vocation. I am a writer, not a prophet. I want to marry, not be a monk. I want to feed my family from my writing, not just my own person from God's providence providing a bare minimum. I am not denying God has kept me alive. But I feel very sure someone else than God is keeping me
back. And it so happens, God keeping me alive in such a case is repairing for me, just part of what certain others are destroying for me.
That destruction would for instance involve:
- clergy pretending I'm heterodox
- when this doesn't work, pretending my writing is prophecy
- and that the prophecy must be tested
- which involves testing my resignation "to God's will"
- which can be done by exposing me to evil men's will. Like their own.
It would also involve clergy pushing this before laymen, like my colleagues in apologetics, like Michael Lofton, like Matt Fradd, like Trent Horn.*
Considering how much Jimmy Akin has spent on attacking a truth of the faith, namely Adam being created directly from the soil, not procreated by non-human parents, and its by now apparent corrolaries of Young Earth Creation, I am not sure I'd consider him a colleague, and the same goes for Karl Keating.
All of above certainly have profited from support from clergy. But none of above are employees of clergy. Some of them have patreon for their videos on youtube as a major income. This means, being an apologist for the Catholic faith does not depend on being promoted by the clergy. It is not a clerical or monastic state. It is in a very real sense private enterprise, and there is no canon law against that.
This means, trying to test me and test my spirituality "before allowing me to become" a Catholic apologist is simply robbing me of the income I could already have
as the Catholic apologist and writer that I am. Or at least, it is basically doing that, I am not a prophet and can not answer for whether some of the guys were under some kind of pressure, like Putin telling Bergoglio he would invade Ukraine if I weren't held back (with a fine shade of irony in posing as "the one restraining" and casting me for the role as someone who can only appear when "the one restraining" is out of the way). Wait ... Ukraine already is under a threat of invasion and parts of it are invaded ... no, that isn't it.
It is a very evil habit of certain cults on the Evangelical side, and ma and me went out of one when it began to show signs of it, to try to run the lives of lay members. It's an even more evil thing to do so by intriguing for disappointments and then doing emotional blackmail or even gaslighting against one not satisfied with the results of their actions. If Catholic clergy start doing that kind of thing to people, and it seems they may have done so, that is a sign, among some others (like accepting Evolutionism) that they are not Catholic any more.
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Agnes
21.I.2023
Romae passio sanctae Agnetis, Virginis et Martyris; quae, sub Praefecto Urbis Symphronio, ignibus injecta, sed iis per orationem ejus exstinctis, gladio percussa est. De ea beatus Hieronymus haec scribit: "Omnium gentium litteris atque linguis, praecipue in Ecclesiis, Agnetis vita laudata est; quae et aetatem vicit et tyrannum, et titulum castitatis martyrio consecravit."
* Or Anthony Stine, or Kennedy Hall. Not specifically as a youtuber, but as a content provider.
