How Do I Know So Much about the Perversion of the Rosary into a Politicized Totem of Right Wing Culture War?

Last week, we discussed the grotesque spectacle of Reactionary Catholics attacking somebody for documenting the perversion of the Rosary into a totem of violence-fantasizing right wing culture war. As is so often the case, the cult where accusation is always confession managed to prove the Atlantic right in spades by trying to mock him and succeeding only in providing a ton of evidence for his thesis.

The reason I could go out and document the Atlantic‘s thesis with a small-but-still-overwhelming sample of right wing perversion of the Rosary was simple: this is not my first rodeo with this toxic cult.

For starters, I know Dawn Eden Goldstein, and she was was way out in front of the Atlantic documenting the MAGAfication of the Rosary.

Note, for instance, the date of this obscenity: two days after the Cult Mob killed people in their failed coup attempt.

And note that the marketers of this perverted obscenity highlight and platform Raymond Arroyo, the FOX propagandist who tried to perfume this murderous mob of enemies of America even as the bodies of their victims were still cooling:

In short, there is right-wing money and coordination behind this perversion of the Rosary, and Dawn is able to bring the receipts. Exposure of this perverted filth is no more an “attack on the Rosary” than overturning the tables of the moneychangers was an attack on the Temple.

There’s a reason the Holy Father says that EWTN and similar fonts of right wing agitprop do the work of the devil.

But my familiarity with the perversion of the Rosary from a prayer to an instrument of right wing culture war hatred and intensely personal destruction goes back well beyond that. Here’s a piece I wrote on “Turning the Rosary into a Hex” in 2016:

Again and again I keep encountering this emerging tendency among the Greatest Catholics of All Time to want to use prayer in general and the Rosary in particular as a form of witchcraft for placing curses and hexes on people the pray-er hates and wants to harm.

Having been on the receiving end of such malice personally when a priest led a bunch of people to turn the Rosary into a holy hex against me and Simcha Fisher, I hasten to add that I do not, in fact, believe for a second that such prayer “works” for the very Christian reason that I do not regard prayer as a form of incantational magic that places God in a half-nelson and forces him to obey our will as though he is a genie. The essence of prayer is request and the request, “God, please destroy my enemy” is, ‘ow you say?, not in keeping with the spirit of the gospel. As James says, “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” ((Jas 4:3). Half the reason we pray is so that we learn how to pray in accord with the will of God and not in accord with our passions. Prayers like “Lord, destroy this woman with 10 children because I’ve decided she is my culture war enemy” are prayers God is guaranteed not to hear, except perhaps so that he can teach you not to pray them.

Now, it may be so that God in his wisdom, will see fit to allow Bad Things to happen to people. So, for instance, it is the case that I lost my gig at the Register and so did Simcha Fisher after The Righteous prayed their holy hexes. It is so that Hillary Clinton has been under the weather lately after the holy hexes were prayed against her. Since such things have, in fact, come to pass, it is evident that God, in his providential designs, has permitted such things.

What is not evident is that such providential designs are the answer to the prayers of the Righteous Holy Hexers. It may well be, in fact, that such hexes only serve to blind the people praying them to God’s true designs and that Satan, not God, is the inspiration for such prayers. Consider, for instance, the curses the Self-Righteous laid on our Lord in his passion. Every single one of them came to pass against Jesus in the worst ways possible. No doubt the members of the Sanhedrin and the people in the mob who condemned him and mocked him as he was gasping out his final breaths saw in his condemnation the answer to their prayers. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, they reasoned. We prayed and now he’s dead. God heard our cursing prayers. And indeed, for years after his death, they consoled themselves on the righteousness of their cursing prayers against him with the biblical verse which taught them that the one who hangeth upon a tree is cursed. They were certain of the righteousness of their prayers–and that certitude blinded them to what God was really doing in the life of the man they cursed.

My point is this: when you pray cursing prayers against somebody, when you dare to whistle up the Blessed Virgin and Our Lord and sic them on another human being with the desire to destroy that person, the main soul you risk destroying is your own. Far better to pray God’s blessing on your enemy than a curse. Because the measure you use will be measured to you.

Accordingly, I pray in the Name and power of Jesus Christ that all who have prayed condemnation, holy hexes, and curses against me–especially Fr. Richard Heilman and his followers–be completely forgiven and that God bless them in those places where they cursed me. Father, do not count their sins against them but look on their faith and increase it till they can have hope and not fear and love as you do.