False Pieties

"Empty and false are the hopes of the senseless, and fools are borne aloft by dreams. Like a man who catches at shadows or chases the wind, is the one who believes in dreams...Can the unclean produce the clean? can the liar ever speak the truth?" (Sirach 34:1-4)

A shameless liar "devoid of scruple and of genuine religious sentiment" robbed so many of a true understanding of vocation and discernment and substituted false thought stopping pieties.

False Piety #1: God brings good out of evil

Deirdre Mundy:

"God took the loaves and fishes and multiplied them into a feast. He turned water into wine. He did not take rotting food and transform it into a feast or mud and turn it into wine... God does not turn evil to good ... He's bringing good out of conscious decisions to be brave, or honest, or self-sacrificing".

False Piety #2: God draws straight with crooked lines

Deirdre Mundy:

"Sin is not a crooked line. It can't be made straight. It's not a detour, it's a roadblock. The only way to get a 'straight line' after sin is to repent and start over. God could not bring good out of Maciel's evil, because Maciel did not repent. He started sinning at the founding, and he kept piling sacrilege upon sacrilege up until the moment of his death".

False Piety #3: It's been so good for our young people

Deirdre Mundy:

"He promised them a chance to do big things, when other adults just wanted their help with donut day... He gave them rallies. He gave them VOCATIONS. He made them feel special and needed...But he gave them nothing in exchange. He took their time, their money, their enthusiasm, and used them feed his own sinful desires. He was like a great gaping mouth, swallowing the good and repaying it with evil. He took their enthusiasm and turned it to his own ends with faulty theology and thought stopping phrases".

False Piety #4: The evil done by one man does not detract from all the good being done by so many.

JP2, To The Youth of the World:

"the evil implanted by [the evil one] from the beginning may receive its development from man himself, from systems and from relationships... so as also to become ever more a 'structural' sin, ever less identifiable as 'personal' sin. In other words, so that man may feel in a certain sense 'freed' from sin, but at the same time be ever more deeply immersed in it."

False Piety #5: I would leave if God gave me leave to do so, but He has not.

No. It was the deceiver who schemed for you to feel this way.

Envoy II Letter 80, p. 186:

"Consider that much of your perseverance rests on your identification with your vocation to Regnum Christi. If Regnum Christi becomes an intimate part of what you are, if it is no longer something stuck on but becomes your very flesh and bone, you will never be able to turn your back on it without a thought, because you would feel a terrible wrenching, as if part of your body was torn away