Guest Post: On the Unraveling of Mark Shea

All Mark Shea fans,
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by Antigon

Editor's Note: I received this response to yesterday's post about Mark Shea and baby Alfie Evans. I think it warrants its own post.

Mark Shea is a genuinely sad case. Deciding to become a virulent Bergoglio man, he has pretty clearly abandoned what he would have called, back when he still had some wit, the-thing-that-used-to-be-Catholicism. So, however painfully depressing, it's not surprising he also seems fairly well to have lost his mind.
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His constant and truly frenzied rants are now, in substance, little different from folk like Kathy Griffin or Kurt Eichenwald, however occasionally dressed with an unconvincing RC veneer. He claims still to be against abortion, but writes post after post denouncing any who seriously fight it; didn't just oppose Trump, but openly promoted the election of Hillary Clinton; insists we are obliged to accept Roe is forever, and work instead for the destruction of the Republican (but not Democratic) Party; and that we can only seriously be 'more pro-life' (his regular refrain) if we first embrace and effectively support the manic left positions of the Dem Party - complete open borders, gun confiscation with relevant pretenses, criticism of Soros is anti-semitic, Russia elected Trump, God wants him impeached, now!, the whole crazy shtick.

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Even, alas, to the point of now defending the cold-blooded killers of Alfie Evans, on the grounds these had the expertise to know, unlike his parents, that death, of all things, was in the boy's best interest; and, in line as ever with Dem Party thought, denouncing any and all who suggested otherwise for exploiting the boy, and doing so most likely as but a ruse to promote Trump. He accordingly ignored the international nature of the outcry, save for Francis, whom Shea felt was just being his wonderfully kindly self, if perhaps in this case a trifle naively.
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Long before the Catholic Register sacked him, and after too, old friends made serious efforts urging him to calm down and steady himself: whereupon he repudiated those friendships. His pre-Bergoglio blog used to include spirited and serious debate, with not infrequently over 500 comments. He's long since blocked any who seriously challenge his views, and now, on the rare occasions he gets more than a dozen responses, they're virtually always the same ten folks commenting on and praising each others comments; and, save for only rare and always silly posts from opponents used as straw men to pummel, the regulars are uniformly sycophantic.

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It has been painful to watch this public unravelling, and frankly hard to understand. Best guess, perhaps, is that somewhere Shea knew he couldn't with honesty defend both Bergoglio and the Faith, he bet on Bergoglio, and the dichotomy broke him.