This really hits me wrong today and I'd like to say that our American bishops haven't only kept abortion legal for thirty years.
I think their most effective tactic has been their refusal to educate Catholics - from the pulpit and in CCD classes.
The bottom line in all this is that Catholics don't live a "Catholic" life and they have no idea how to vote or how awful abortion really is.
Maybe I shouldn't say it, but our bishops have A LOT to answer for, lots more than abortion and sexual abuse.
I wouldn't stand close to one of them in a lightning storm.
BTW, I love the Church, but I'm tired of being 'nice' about it.
Something has to be done about our bishops. They've done such a good job of diluting Catholics' knowledge of their faith that the average Catholic has no idea what the Church teaches and those Catholics of us who are knowledgeable have come to be considered "radical."
I've been fighting this battle in Catholic parish education for so long that I finally quit. I may go back but I need a break.
Neither would I.
Sometimes praying the sorrowful mysteries of the Rosary helps me settle my anger towards them.
The more things change the more they stay the same. From “The Church Above the State” by Orestes A. Brownson in his Quarterly Review for July, 1873
“ There is nothing novel or in itself startling in the assertion that "God is above man and the church above the state," but it requires some courage on the part of a Catholic bishop in these times to proclaim it; for it is precisely what the age denies, and what exposes the church just now to a bitter persecution throughout Europe, and excites no little hostility to her even in our own boasted land of equal rights and religious liberty."
'The great controversy of the day turns on this very point. Gallicans, Old Catholics, liberal Catholics, Protestants, Jews, infidels, all unite in more or less distinctly declaring, at least by implication, that in the government of this world God is not above man, nor the church above the state. All those Catholics, and we meet them everywhere, who are accustomed to say, "My religion has nothing to do with my politics; I respect the priest in his place, but if he comes out of it, I treat him as I would any other man," and who, of course, claim for themselves the right to define what is the priest’s place and to keep him in it, practically deny it, as do all those Catholics who form secret societies, associations, and combinations, for national objects, based on principles that contradict the principles of their faith as Christians, or seek to accomplish them, by means religion forbids."
"All these, though they may not be aware of it, place a pretended patriotism above the Christian law, the state above the church, and therefore man above God."