I miss the simple time when Protestant Fundamentalists were the big enemies of the Church in the US

…and not Fundamentalist Catholics.

For instance, this washed up in my Feedback file for this blog and it made me feel downright wistful for the 90s:

I started to read an article written to you defending the seven books of the apocrypha. What you called the seven myths. Answer just reading number one I just continue reading because you really are being very disingenuous if not deceptive in your teachings. You just miss protestant saying that the the old testament was pretty much set in the days of Jesus. Using the confrontation that Jesus had with the scribes and Pharisees. Where the Sadducees did not believe in all the books of the Bible where the Pharisees did. Use the story and Mark 7 about traditions. Saying you see the Sadducees do not believe that all the books of the Old Testament that we have today were inspired they did not believe in the book of Isaiah which gives you certain commands about washings after being in the marketplace before eating. But yet you didn’t bring bring up Matthew 15 where Jesus is arguing with the scribes and Pharisees where he tells him you nullify the Scriptures with your traditions and he’s referring to the 10 Commandments were one of the Commandments say that honor your father and mother. Which is written in the first five books of the Bible which all Jews believed in. With your selective reasoning and cherry picking of scriptures. Your argument about the acceptance of old testament books was fluid. It does not hold water. Just like you Catholics have added books to the Old Testament and incorporating them in a way that you don’t see in any Hebrew Bible. It is no wonder Catholics have such a screwed up understanding of scriptures. From teachers like yourself. You should know better if you were truly raised in an evangelical non-denominational church that you say you were. You see when people like myself who know the Scriptures can read stuff from people like you who for whatever reasons does not want to be truthful about the Scriptures and which ones we should except or not. I can take you to task and show your number of discrepancies between the inspired book so we have an in the old testament now minus the apocrypha. Showing that apocrypha books contradict or just things incorrect. For example the book of Baruch says that the Babylonian captivity lasted for seven generations or 280 years. And the book of Daniel says Babylonian captivity last 70 years. Now I know you might try to play more word games with the word generations. But it’s clear that the writer of Baruch got it wrong. And the Holy Spirit would not inspire someone to get things incorrect. You need to repent of the falsehood you were teaching.

The reader is responding to “Five Myths about Seven Books” which I wrote for Envoy Magazine back when Pangaea was breaking up and a good percentage of today’s Catholics had not been born or still believed that to be a Good Catholic[TM] you needed to be in union with the Pope and not his mortal enemy, to think that a President who was a sex predator should not be supported, and who were not in love with the propositions “Let us do evil that good may come of it” and “Opposition to abortion is a moral disinfectant for any filthy thing I want to do or say.”

Back in that Golden Time, the biggest problems I faced as a Catholic were Fundamentalist Protestants with weird arguments for sola scriptura and a tendency to think that the Church had never read the Bible. I also sometimes ran into complaints about my moral turpitude for claiming that I was “raised in an evangelical non-denominational church” (something I never claimed for the very good reason that I was not raised in any church or religious tradition and only became a believer in 1979, followed by entry into the Catholic Church in 1987).,

For replies to this somewhat incomprehensible complaint, I would simply refer readers to the article the reader is responding to, and if that does not scratch where you itch, I would refer you to my book BY WHAT AUTHORITY: AN EVANGELICAL DISCOVERS CATHOLIC TRADITION.

For Catholics still living in the fantasy that interlocutors like the guy who wrote the above are the Big Challenge the Church faces in presenting a credible witness to our culture, I would recommend you wake up and face the fact that the real challenge the Church in the US faces are Catholics who have embraced the sociopathic narcissism of MAGA antichrist religion that adores Trump, hates a good man and a good Pope who calls us to serve the least of these, brims over with a ridiculous sense of victimization and self-pity, and cosplays at imaginary persecution fantasies while turning a blind eye to real persecution in the world, often at their own hands.