The Flying Buttress, 6/13/05

The Flying Buttress +Dissecting dissent in the Cincinnati Archdiocese+

The Dissenter’s Drug of Choice

+ The Flying Buttress is pleased to announce a new faith-based initiative! In collaboration with the Department of Health and Human Services, we now engaged in prevention efforts that target the increasing use and widespread availability of the club drug Apostasy among the members of the Left-Wing Brain Trust of the Cincinnati Archdiocese. In this issue, we examine the characteristics of Apostasy users and the side effects of its use.

+Known as “the dissenter’s drug," Apostasy is both an ego stimulant and a hallucinogen whose effects are certain to be faith-threatening. Because it is politically correct, easily accessible, collegial, and inexplicably prestigious, Apostasy is gaining in popularity. As reported in the Secularizing the Future study (National Review Board on Faith Abuse, 2004), 100% of Cincinnati’s bishops and Catholic university presidents, 95% of its theologians, 75% of its Archdiocesan department heads, 40% of its priests ordained before 1990, 35% of its religious, and 11% of its laity admitted that they had used the drug at least once during the study year. In addition, bishops, university presidents, theologians, and department head users revealed that they were chronically unable to refer to their faith without it.

What Is Apostasy? +Apostasy is the street name for faithylene-dioxyfaithamphetamine, a chemical substance that combines methamphetamines with hallucinogenic properties. It is also known as “Faith-86’d," “Adam’s Apple," “Nuance," and “Ethicist’s Speed."

+Like all club drugs, Apostasy is a combination of other illicit drugs. Because many different recipes are used to make Apostasy, the risk of death without salvation or permanent faith damage are heightened when some substances are combined, particularly (a) Heresy, Heterodoxy, and Liberation, and (b) Ecumenism and Interreligious Dialogue. Since manufacturers package it to imitate the sacraments and accoutrements of authentic faith, it is available in Eucharist, Chrism, Holy Water, or Missal form. The average cost is between $7 and $30 per dose, but the drug comes free of charge with a lifetime membership to the Jesus Seminar, or an appointment to a Visiting Professorship at Xavier University’s Theology Department.

What Side Effects Are Produced by Apostasy? +Apostasy’s effects can last from 24 hours to a lifetime. The drug produces immediate side effects, and some —such as hypersensitivity, narcissism, relativism, Marxism, religious indifferentism, bleeding-heart liberalism, and white guilt — can occur weeks after it is taken (Community Drug Alert Bulletin on Club Drugs, 2000).

+Because Apostasy alters devotion levels in the brain by acting as a powerful stimulant to the ego and the intellectual pride, researchers have found that chronic use can lead to long-term or permanent damage to those parts of the brain critical to humility, reverence, and civilized values (Facts About Apostasy, 2000).

Psychological Effects +The psychological effects of Apostasy usage have been found to be as follows: arrogance, contempt for tradition and traditionalists, unwillingness to defend the Faith, delusions of immortality, obsession with tenure and inability to perceive truth, as well as confusion, depression, sleep problems, severe anxiety and paranoia, euphoria, hallucinations, sensations of lightness and floating via Modernist thought, depression, paranoid thinking, and malignant hubrithermia (disproportionate increase in self-esteem). Above all, Apostasy users report absolute certainty about the uncertainty of the ethics of Church teachings, and unabashed admiration for left-wing Jesuits who attempt to trump the Catechism with casuistry.

Physical Effects +Known physical effects are: blurred and/or tunnel vision, lack of metabolic heat or cold, hyperventilation, exaggerated vocal piety, carping tunnel syndrome, chronic nose in the air, puffed up chest, posteriori pomposi, and reduced appetite for truth.