Let Us Reason Together

A Catholic priest in Gdansk has been rebuked and fined, and may suffer further consequences, for polluting the city with an open-air book-burning. Condemned by the spokesman for his diocese, the martyr has issued a standard non-apology, calling the whole business "unfortunate" and declaring that he has nothing against books as such; rather as the Church has for most of its history had nothing against women as such but only against witches, whores, sluts, trollops, strumpets and those who don't know their place, and nothing against Jews as such but only against those who would not recant, and so forth. The auto da fé last Sunday, in which various graven images were immolated along with some mediocre juvenile bestsellers, was intended as a warning against magic and the occult, which are a far greater danger to the faithful than those purely secular discomforts which can result from the less sublimated fires of priestly lust.