Posted on 05/30/2004 3:21:39 PM PDT by miltonim
"I'm not a Catholic, but it seems to me that those wearing sashes are deliberately defying the teachings of the Catholic church and saying, "I plan to sin, I see no need of forgiveness for my blatant sin, but I want to draw you into my own pretense of receiving forgiveness. I am mocking the church's teaching that my sin is a sin and you MUST pretend with me. I am here to pretend I need to be absolved of a sin I don't want to be forgiven of and don't plan to stop commiting."
Thank you, well put. I agree. I think these people are nothing but community anti-family trolls whose agenda is to turn traditional religion, traditional family values upside down, backwards and forwards with some zig zagging to confuse, deflect, create anarchy and chaos till in their mind the country is totally secular. They are parasites who demand attention like attention defecit disordered children. They are to be pitied.
"Interesting factoid. I believe that faithful Protestants and Catholics will be coming together more and more to oppose the anti-Christians."
You would be correct. All of Gods children step forward on his behalf. He did it before he'll do it again.
I see a lot of or most of the homosexual agenda threads, as I do the pingifying. A fair number of the heavy type posters are homosexuals themselves, there was a rash of them for a while.
The statement of Mr. David Pence, and his Ushers of the Eucharist, who knelt in the aisle of St Paul's Cathedral in Archbishop Harry Flynn's Archdiocese to prevent the Rainbow Sash-ayers from approaching for Communion.
We are Catholic laymen devoted to the Eucharist as the center of Catholic life. In our diocese, priests disloyal to the bishop have performed liturgies celebrating disordered sexuality as a form of Christian love. The folks of the rainbow sash have been misled by these wayward priests. The rainbow sash is meant as a public refutation of Church teaching concerning sexual love and the restricted nature of Eucharistic reception. The first sash protesters in Washington DC were met by bishops who safeguarded Christ by refusing them Communion. Last year in our own diocese Christ was handed over.
Across the country the Eucharist has become a special target of activist homosexuals and pro abortion politicians. As the last vestige of the sacred in a vulgarized culture, reception of the Catholic Eucharist is meant to sanction the taboos of abortion and homosexuality. Catholics are targeted precisely because our Eucharist has a real meaning. No one is breaking into Unitarian services. We are here today as a sign of fraternity with the bishop.
Across the country, the authority of Catholic bishops is being challenged at a fundamental level. For years Catholic politicians have disregarded the U. S. bishops' statements about public policy. That is understandable. The authority of the bishops in the Mass however is a very different matter. The bishops are not experts in public policy but they are the legitimate authorities over the Eucharist. Abortion and homosexual acts are grievous offenses against the Body of Christ. To publicly advocate such sins as "human rights" and then demand incorporation in the Body of Christ through Communion is a desecration of the Eucharist and an insult to the bishop.
Across America our bishops are being cast as helpless eunuchs unable to protect the Eucharist in the face of the crushing secular power of the feminist and homosexual movements. This is a blatant power play by these wealthy, politically powerful and media connected secular movements to seize the Eucharist from the hands of our priests. They remind us of Napoleon crowning himself in mocking defiance of church authority.
The homosexual and feminist activists have many friends in the Catholic bureaucracy. Church dissidents have already transformed the mission of many inner city parishes closing schools for the urban poor in order to become celebration centers for middle class narcissists. Like the secular homosexuals who kicked the Boy Scouts out of the urban schools, they have transformed social justice from serving the needy to gratifying their own desires.
A significant subculture of homosexual priests and sympathizers lives comfortably in this atmosphere of deceit. Unbeknown to the archbishop, they have encouraged the rainbow sash movement. A white middle class culture of entitlement and dissent pervades our diocese newspaper, the schools and the archdiocesan bureaucracy. The homosexual movement is the most blatant form of this notion that religion is a birthright not a call to conversion and creed. The Church's property, status, and jobs are the targets of these smiling usurpers who have replaced the gospel of Christ with their own self serving theories of pacifism, feminism and gay rights.
We come today to place ourselves between Our Lord and those who would desecrate Him in the Eucharist. We also will not receive Communion today since our actions may tempt us to a state of anger or pride. We apologize for not asking the priests of the Cathedral for permission to take this action but we do not want to place them in a compromised position with the bishop.
The horrendous abuse in the Church was largely caused by the infidelity of homosexual priests and the unwillingness of the bishops to confront and expel them. Today's brazen desecration in the Cathedral by the sash movement shows the corruption continues in our local church.
Ushers are Catholic laymen who serve by keeping good order in the Church. Catholic ushers are not just here to collect money. If the mystery of the Eucharist is violated then the mission of the Church is compromised. This is the feast of the Pentecost when the apostles stopped cowering in their hiding place to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. We call the people of the sash to conversion. We call our bishop to be courageous in service of an event larger than all of us - the mystery of the Eucharist.
The Ushers of the Eucharist
"Je détruirai votre Eglise!" was the threat Napoleon issued to Cardinal Consalvi, the Holy See's Secretary of State under Pius VII, seeking to bully him into signing an unsatisfactory concordat. "I'll destroy your Church!"
"No, you won't destroy it", the Cardinal responded. "If bad popes, immoral priests, and millions of sinners in the Church failed to do so, how do you suppose you'll be able?"
Across the country, the authority of Catholic bishops is being challenged at a fundamental level.Thanks for posting the letter, ELS. The irony is that, since the bishop offered communion to the men and women wearing the rainbow sashes and instructed his priests to do likewise, then by blocking the aisles, the ushers in effect did precisely what they objected to in their letter -- namely, they challenged the authority of their bishop.
Is not an order in favor of sacrilege immoral? Is one bound to obey an immoral order?
Christ Jesus established the intrinsic connection between the Eucharist and the episcopacy when he instituted the two sacraments of Holy Communion and Holy Orders together at the Last Supper. At the same time, Christ Jesus likewise commissioned Peter with his singular authority within the unfederated episcopacy (cf. Lk22:32). The singular Petrine commission as final arbiter of all matters concerning episcopal authority was further expounded by one of Peter’s early successors, Clement of Rome, in a Letter to the Church at Corinth (ca. 90 A.D.), which Clement wrote in response to the Corinthians' having challenged their own local bishop's authority.
Accordingly, the ushers can certainly appeal to the bishop of Rome and ask him to review their local bishop's actions. Other than that, however, the ushers have no moral standing whatsoever to challenge the divinely instituted connection between Holy Orders and Holy Communion by interrupting their local bishop’s masses.
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