The role of righteous anger

Saintly anger seen through the prism of Aquinas, l'Abbée Pierre, Pieper, Rose and Yashua (Christ)

Anger is one of the 11 passions (also known as emotions) that God has equipped us with. A person must have the perfection of all the 11 passions in order to be completely moral, and that includes the passion of anger. A person must be able to feel the emotion of anger to be moral, because otherwise a person could not easily resist a great evil.  The passion of anger is governed by the virtue of fortitude.

If a person is unable to feel a justified anger, there is something wrong.

When a great good is at stake, and the good is difficult to obtain or to preserve, this calls for spiritual combat. Here is where the moral virtue of fortitude is especially visible and, when necessary, righteous anger. The two basic acts of fortitude are endurance and attack. Concerning endurance, St. Thomas Aquinas says that “enduring comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely, a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good.”  Also, “The brave man not only knows how to bear inevitable evil with equanimity; he will also not hesitate to ‘pounce upon’ evil and to bar its way, if this can reasonably be done. This attitude requires readiness to attack, courage, self-confidence, and hope of success….” (Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, p. 132)

Josef Pieper sums up the error that Fr. Johansen has fallen into:

“The fact, however, that [St.] Thomas assigns to (just) wrath a positive relation to the virtue of fortitude has become largely unintelligible and unacceptable to present-day Christianity and its non-Christian critics. This lack of comprehension may be explained partly by the exclusion, from Christian ethics, of the component of passion (with its inevitably physical aspect) as something alien and incongruous—an exclusion due to a kind of intellectual stoicism—and partly by the fact that the explosive activity which reveals itself in wrath is naturally repugnant to good behavior regulated by ‘bourgeois’ standards. So Thomas, who is equally free from both these errors, says: The brave man uses wrath for his own act, above all in attack, ‘for it is peculiar to wrath to pounce upon evil. Thus fortitude and wrath work directly upon each other.’” (Josef Pieper, The Four Cardinal Virtues, p. 130)

Faithful Catholics are now “pouncing upon” the evil ones in the Church. More power to them. 

St. Paul, when he was struck on the mouth by command of the high priest, did not remain passively silent but boldly said, “It is God that will smite thee for the whitened wall that thou art; thou art sitting there to judge me according to the law, and wilt thou break the law by ordering them to smite me?” (Acts 23:3) 

Christ displayed righteous anger when the Pharisees tried to trap Him in His words: “And looking about on them with anger, being grieved for the blindness of their hearts” (St. Mark 3:5). With righteous anger and zeal, Christ threw the moneychangers out of the temple: “And when He was entered into the temple, He began to cast out them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the chairs of them that sold doves… And he taught, saying to them: Is it not written, My house shall be called a house of prayer to all nations? But you have made it a den of thieves.” (St. Mark 11:15,17)

To say that it is un-Christian to be angry is a lie; Christ has shown us Himself many examples of righteous anger. What is happening now is a display of righteous anger among faithful Catholics, and this is a very beautiful thing, something to rejoice in.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SCIENTITIC EVIDENCE ON THE THERAPEUTIC USE OF "RIGHTEOUS" ANGER IN THE ART OF CANCER TREATMENT (A European cancer "psycho-neuro-immunological" approach).