Drones or Tradition?

Yesterday, Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s quondam running mate, tweeted a seemingly random yet revealing non sequitur: “Does anyone else feel that today’s service honoring Charlie Kirk at The Kennedy Center was the much needed antidote to the weird Hollywood thing that happened at the Vatican yesterday?”

Those who have ears to hear…

Listen, as uplifting as the testimonies of love and appreciation given by Charlie Kirk’s friends and family were, the service at The Kennedy Center was not fitting at all as a ritual of mourning or honor — to be blunt, it was as crass a mishmash of political rally and swelling megachurch lowbrow pageant, held in a temple of culture, not worship, as its sadly ignorant producers could manage.

Americans, of course, do spectacle well, on purely technical grounds, if that’s the kind of thing you like; but it’s not religious. It doesn’t have verticality or relation to anything that came before (other than a nomination convention). It is an act of pure will.

But note well: Shanahan’s reference to “the weird Hollywood thing” at the Vatican is telling — a chilling warning, even, for those who love Christ and His true Church and care for souls. What was she referring to?

This:

Vatican lights up with drone show at historic 'Grace for the World' concert

Please listen to this artist’s short but thoughtful explanation of why this sort of thing fails to move the soul (though it does produce an effect, as the dissenters in the comments attest):

Right now, and I think our hierarchy is completely unaware of it, the internet is overflowing with declarations from the searching world, especially from a lost generation of young men for whom Kirk was, simply put, an awakening of conscience.

They heard him speak and his words made them repent of their unbelief and sinful lives and seek God. He wasn’t motivating them to strive for this or that affirmation, as many influencers today do. He was calling them to turn away from a bad life.

“I put on a suit and am going to church,” they say — because of Kirk.

What will they find? They long for something! (Nicole Shanahan is one of the more interesting of them, though not, of course, a man.) Will they find true worship? What is true worship?

When millions of people, a good number of them quite influential in society, simply have nowhere to turn for a very present help in the one thing they want to do, because the Catholic Church has gotten “weird” and rejected the one thing it has to offer — the Lord Jesus Christ, worshiped in unbroken tradition — then we are looking into a void, and it will be filled by something that is not holy.

These searching people are well meaning, but they are easy prey for the enemy.

What church, whose people ask for bread, hands them a light show?

Bishops, Holy Father — repent, wake up!

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