Polemical rogue Mr. John Bugay blames Catholic Church for ISIS.

o doubt, dear read­er, you have been read­ing seri­ous things about the wicked hor­ror and evil that does its Satan­ic deeds under the name ISIS. Mean­while, in Pitts­burgh, the polem­i­cal rogue John Bugay—a man whose rea­son turned vagabond long before—has once more become pos­sessed by the mad desire to out-do Jack Chick for clown­ish buf­foon­ery. Lis­ten to his newest dumb out­rage upon good sense. (But pray do not have food or drink in your mouth, make sure you are secure in your chair, and say a few Aves first. Okay, here we go.)

Roman Catholi­cism, in its com­pre­hen­sive­ness, is a major source of evil in the world. [Take a breath, we’ll get through this.] Cer­tain­ly some good Roman Catholics have done some good things—[Don’t you just want to slap him?]—and it may even be said that Roman Catholi­cism helped to enable a world to fol­low-up [sic] with the sci­ences.

What a self-imposed void this poor man lives in. I’d say he should sit down and read a book for once, except that when he tries, he can­not stop him­self from leap­ing sev­en moons beyond what the writer is talk­ing about just so that he can attack the Church again. If he was read­ing a cook­book, he’d find in it a les­son on all the errors of Rome. So no book could help this man.

Inso­far as Rome dis­fig­ured the gospel—[Dear read­er, here is where you must brace your­self.]—it was an enabler of Mohammed. … [I]t became a teacher of, a moti­va­tor for, and an exam­ple to, rad­i­cal Islam today: that heretics must be tor­tured and killed.

I know not whether to be amused or offend­ed by all of this. Mr. Bugay cites no author­i­ty for any of these claims, apart from his own mus­ings in a com­box on Face­book. But so we’re clear here, Mr. Bugay has just com­pared the Catholic Church to the evil mon­sters who slice the heads off of babies.

Dear read­er, the polem­i­cal rogue has offi­cial­ly lost it. If there were doubt before, there can be doubt no longer. There is no sew­er into which the man will not step and thank God for the smell.

Now, I don’t make a habit of tak­ing offense at much, par­tic­u­lar­ly not the fever­ish ram­blings of a hate-filled, big­ot­ed, smarmy anti-Catholic like John Bugay. More often than not, the poor man deserves laugh­ter, eye­rolls, and pity. (And he has my sin­cere prayers when I’m not in a mis­chie­vous mood.)

But this cross­es a line that ought not be crossed, and Mr. Bugay should be ashamed of him­self. Because even he should know bet­ter. Even he. And if you are Catholic, and your love for the Church is but a nanofrac­tion of his hatred for it, you should take offense too.

I will tell you why.

There is great and unspeak­able evil going on in the Mid­dle East. It requires a holy response. It requires prayer, it requires spir­i­tu­al sac­ri­fice, it requires God, and it may require just war. And it requires the seri­ous­ness of a man, not the clown­ery of a pompous jack­anapes full of hate and breath­ing stench.

(Mr. Bugay being the man who once pho­to­shopped Hitler’s mous­tache onto a pic­ture of St. Therese of Lisieux.)

On oth­er blogs beside Mr. Bugay’s—sensible blogs, not crack­pot ones—serious Catholics are writ­ing seri­ous things about the goings-on in Syr­ia and Iraq.

And what, by con­trast, do we get from Mr. Bugay? More hatred and big­otry. More rant­i­ng at the bogey­man. Anti-Catholi­cism might be amus­ing, most of the time. But this lat­est screed at Tri­ablogue shows that there still lurks, under­neath the clown­ish sur­face, a dark and soul­less cesspool of hatred with no sense of pro­por­tion or truth.

Tru­ly, any­one who can seri­ous­ly com­pare the Catholic Church to ISIS, and keep a straight face, will not be helped by any gen­tle, good-natured les­son in truth. Such a man needs the Holy Sac­ri­fice of the Mass. And per­haps an exor­cist.

Of course, to be clear: The truth does help. Mr. Bugay’s “the­sis,” if I may give it so grand a word, is that the Catholic Church was a “teacher” to rad­i­cal, mur­der­ous Islam because of—brace your­self against guf­faws of laugh­ter here, lest you strain your left side—the Cru­sades.

Now, if I recall cor­rect­ly, the Cru­sades were fought against the evils of Islam. Remem­ber that, Mr. Bugay? Does the word “Lep­an­to” mean any­thing to you? Your igno­rance is inex­cus­able and embar­rass­ing; and your attempt to com­pare what ISIS is doing today in the Mid­dle East to any­thing that Catholics did in the Cru­sades lacks mer­it, excuse, depth, hon­or, and even a min­i­mum of intel­li­gence and san­i­ty.

But: I don’t know that truth mat­ters to the man, at least not when it is incon­ve­nient to his hatred of Catholi­cism.

For my part—I hope you may lis­ten very care­ful­ly, Mr. Bugay—I will make sure that the Holy Sac­ri­fice of the Mass is offered for his immor­tal soul.