Clean House!
By Chris Pelicano ( bio - articles ) | Jan 28, 2013
A client of mine creates and sells products that help families to know and grow in the Catholic Faith. His customer base is as enthusiastically and unapologetically Catholic as he and his staff are. He recently told me that while writing some promotional copy for his products he seriously considered “toning down” his descriptions of its Catholic content, “lest it offend” some customers.
He told me he was half-way into this consideration (a matter of seconds...since he is a smart guy) before he suddenly realized it was nothing more than a temptation—and an insidious one at that—to succumb to false human respect. Now, it was a pretty amateur temptation since it did not even make good practical sense. Why water down Catholic content when full-strength content is precisely what your customers want and why they are buying from you to begin with?
Nevertheless, false human respect (sometimes called political correctness) is an effective and widespread temptation. Like a layer of sawdust in a workshop or flour in a bakery, it is everywhere. It is in the air we breathe and coats everything we touch. Its presence and effects are insidious. The dust of false human respect becomes an inhaler through which we breathe rather than the pollution which we should be filtering out. It is a grime and a filth that obscures the shine we should otherwise enjoy from the blessings of life—including life itself. Its a real kill-joy! It is evil—doing the only thing evil can do—masquerading as something good.
So, what do we do? Once my client saw it for what it was—a temptation—he rejected it. That is what we are supposed to do when faced with evil—reject it. Get behind me Satan! We can also cultivate the virtue of fortitude, because it takes strength to stand against the prevailing dust storm of political correctness. Beyond that, we can look around our workshop at all the dust that may have accumulated—and clean house.
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Posted by: Miss Cathy -
Jan. 29, 2013 12:30 PM ET USA
When I sold my first home, my real estate agent, a Catholic, asked me to "tone down" my house of the many references that a Catholic lived there because a buyer might be Muslim or against the Catholic faith. I sold my home without taking her advice, in addition, I never received a negative comment regarding how my home was decorated.
