Tradition, Family and Property, a far-right Catholic group, had an unexpected Easter Sunday message for people on its email list: “Stop this Satanic card game.”
The email from TFP Vice President John Horvat is targeting the popular and irreverent Cards Against Humanity party game, which he calls “perverse and blasphemous.” TFP urges people to sign a petition asking Target stores to stop selling the game, which it says “poses a serious moral threat to children who visit the store.” The petition had over 28,000 signatures as of Monday morning.
The campaign against Cards Against Humanity is connected to TFP’s larger “Return to Order” project, whose principles are explained in Horvat’s book by the same name. The project calls on Americans “to reject the frenetic intemperance of modern life and adopt a lifestyle of self-restraint and honor.” The goal is the building of an “organic Christian society” as envisioned by the group’s late founder, far-right Brazilian Catholic activist Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira.
TFP’s leaders have fought against the legalization of marriage for same-sex couples and urged Catholic bishops to deny communion to politicians who support abortion rights. TFP’s presence at right-wing events is hard to miss because the group’s (male) members wear bright red sash-like capes and sometimes carry medieval-style banners, a nod to the group’s nostalgia for the Middle Ages and monarchy. At conferences, the group’s table often sports a crusader’s helmet; “Crusade” is the name of the group’s magazine.
In a post earlier in March about the response to mass shootings, Horvat wrote that “modern society is like a factory that mass produces mass killers” by “shattering all the institutions, morals and norms that naturally prevent the making of monsters.”
When God is no longer welcome in the public square, it should be no surprise that immoral acts proliferate. There can be no moral order without God and His Church; secular efforts are doomed to fail. …
The only way to stop the killing is to close the factory that produces mass killers. Anything else is an exercise in futility. This can only be done by returning to order, a Christian order that seeks to produce not monsters but saints.
