Bloody sacrifice of the cash cow.

Once you notice it, you can't stop noticing it.

All the best and brightest around us who achieve high positions in any capacity feel obliged to follow this series of steps:

1) Examine the state of the organization.

2) Determine what segment of the market is outside its current reach. 

3) Viciously attack its strongest adherents in the hope of winning over the outsiders. 

We all know the term cash cow from marketing -- that beloved quadrant of the business that just keeps pulling in money, year after year, without very much tending, a segment that yields predictable if unspectacular dividends that can be used to fund more risky, more potentially wealth-generating projects. All the company has to do is feed the cow and not murder it. 

It seems that all the grads from the business schools get a complimentary butcher knife along with their sheepskin. They loathe having to work on a dull part of a dull company that just makes money. Blech! (People who blech! at profit are people who have never had to worry where their next meal is coming from.) They would much rather be social engineering!

Step one: Kill the cow. And the fastest way to do that is to insult its greatest adherents to the point of libel and make them angry every time they see your logo. The next step is to be shocked that people got upset, and then get panicky when the sought-after new audience segment does not flood into the doors and double the revenue. Step three: Write a book about your great accomplishment a fail upward into a new job.

Gilette. Bud Light. Disney (subsets especially include Star Wars). The NFL. These are only some of the prominent businesses that have suffered at the hands of their young geniuses. 

The United States is doing it to its citizens. The very people who love this country and the principles upon which it stands and would die for it are treated with suspicion and worse by its own government, which is run by people who would not suffer a rainy weekend for it. Meanwhile, noncitizens are welcomed, no matter how illegal their entry, no questions asked, and criminals are allowed to run the streets. 

And now, the Catholic Church?

Every devout Catholic I know is worried that the Holy Father, a.k.a. Hippie Pope Frank, has called the three-year synod to make some rash changes, like ordaining women (which the church has declared is not possible), encouraging more illegal immigration (but not into Vatican City), easing up on divorce, or blessing same-sex unions, following the lead of some apostate bishops in Germany. (Germany: Birthplace of Bad Ideas Since Forever.)

The stupid logo they commissioned for it fills me with dread. Rather than being focused on Jesus, God, or the Trinity, it looks like a pagan tree god sheltering the usual multiculti mob, which schleps forward into a future of tribalism and special pleading.

I know church membership is down since World War II, but that's true for all churches. The reasons are varied, ranging from scientism/positivism to the apathy of wealth to the sickness of Communism to worldwide PTSD from the war. It's not just because the Pope doesn't like the Pill. 

Protestant churches who ran out in front to rubberstamp everything people wanted lost attendance even faster. Why? There's no point to a church that asks nothing, because a church with no firm moral center can give nothing. A church that approves everyone's bullshit can neither inspire nor educate, and certainly can't compel adherence or the personal sacrifice that leads to spiritual growth. If they're just social service stations, who the hell cares? The government already does that and tithing to them is not voluntary.

Is the Catholic church killing the cow with the so-called synod? Is it Vatican III, "Just do what you want"? Which would utterly infuriate and demoralize the faithful, who have kept the joint up all this time. And the church would be following a modern heresy. 

Heresy is not what the atheists say; that's simple unbelief. Evildoers within the church are not usually heretics; they are evil bastards who would have been better off sunk with a millstone necktie. Heresy comes from focusing on one part and blowing it up to be the whole thing. Worship of poverty like Tolstoy or worship of spiritual matters as secret magic like the Gnostics are heresies. Love of people to the exclusion of the laws of God would be the greatest heresy to ever invade the church. 

If the pope is thinking of doing something nuts -- not ex cathedra level but still -- he will not bring any of the "lost sheep" and he will lose the powerful love and devotion of those he has. He may think he's being Christlike, leaving the 99 to go after the 1, but when he gets back with the 1 and finds the 99 have fled and then the 1 kicks him in the nads and tears off, he'll feel a little stupid.

If that's possible. None of these cash-cow-killer geniuses ever seem to regret, understand, or appreciate anything. You explain that people don't like it when you attack them and their cherished beliefs, and they act like it's weird that stupid people would have feelings. They fail to grasp the most simple ideas, and we're the stupid ones?

The people in charge of things hate the very people whom they need the most. Once you see it, you see it everywhere.