Religious submission of mind and will also applies to the hierarchy, and part of the submission must be the full acceptance of obedience to the moral and spiritual demands of proper episcopal oversight.
In the 1999 movie The Matrix, a dark and dystopian vision of the future is presented in which humanity is trapped within a virtual simulation concocted by intelligent computers. The movie, which has become a cult classic, is also famous for its invention of the terms “red pill” and “blue pill”. Anyone who takes the red pill can see beyond the simulation and recognize the ugly truth of reality and of humanity’s enslavement. Those who take the blue pill stay within the world of illusions, blissfully unaware of the truth of reality.
In common parlance, the term “red pilled” has come to mean anyone who believes they have finally seen beyond the façade of the carefully constructed narratives presented to us by those in authority, and to see the real “man behind the curtain” pulling the strings.
I contend that this phenomenon aptly describes as well the rise of a newly awakened laity in the Church who, in the wake of the priest sex abuse crisis and its various episcopal coverups, have been red-pilled into the clear-eyed realization that the Catholicism they had been taught and formed within was a blue pill illusion.
The “establishment Catholicism” of the past centuries fomented the notion that our episcopal shepherds were almost always conscientious stewards who had the best interests of the laity at heart and who, despite inevitable human mistakes here and there, were truly committed to the Gospel and its moral and spiritual truths. However, as it turns out, this “Bing Crosby Catholicism” of the “father knows best” variety was in many ways a simulated fantasy having little bearing on reality.
To be sure, there were then, as there are now, many fine episcopal shepherds in the Church. I know several, and so I do not want to exaggerate here. But that is, I think, irrelevant to the fact that there was a deep rot within the Church that was carefully hidden away until it exploded in 2002 like a Coldplay kiss cam.
The laity were never the same after that. Only a super-pious few could continue to cling to the blue pill illusion that the vast majority of our Church leaders were worthy of a presumptive level of trust. And this is no mere overreaction of a sensitive laity led by the nose by anti-Catholic media propaganda. That is an insult and implies an ongoing infantilization of the laity as just so many untutored rubes in matters of the faith. The crisis was a real one and was a direct result of episcopal malfeasance, the sin of covering up the molestation of our children by some of our priests and bishops, and thus enabling those clerics to do it again and again and again.
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