. . . whenever I think of "smarmy", I always think of the egregious Rev. Obadiah Slope from Barchester Towers.
Brothers under the skin, sounds like.
One of my favorite words, smarmy, it sounds like what it means. Perfectly descriptive of this bishop.
"It is helpful to reflect on why the Church in the United States has mandated this posture: standing is appropriate for those who are risen with Christ and who seek the things that are above. As people united in faith, we are also united in our common posture which serves to foster the intention and spiritual attitude of being one in Christ."
OK, let's address the modernist psychobabble of tacking on invented symbolic meanings to body english. First of all, this is hardly some enlightened discovery of the hallucinatory modernists who have seized control of the Church. Some people, the elderly, for instance (like me) actually have trouble standing for long periods of time. Is some modernist clericalist idiot going to accost me, issue a chancery citation, and order me to stand???
Now, if a priest can figure out how to reach down and give Holy Communion to someone in a wheelchair, they ought to be able to figure out how to accomodate those Catholics who feel they should kneel at this point.
The flippancy in this missive, dismissively writing off centuries of Catholic tradition in favor of the latest social engineering and musical chairs chicanery from the Buggernini crowd, reveals a tackless disregard for Catholic conventions and pieties. Quite alarming to be coming from a Catholic bishop.
"smarmy modernist bishops"
Considering this guy's entire record, this expression is probably too nice for him.
I wonder sometimes, if bishops/cardinals like him might in fact be working for the other team.
Kneeling "is clearly rebellion, grave disobedience and mortal sin," Father Martin Tran, pastor at St. Mary's by the Sea, in Huntington Beach, Calif., told his flock in a recent church bulletin.
http://www.heraldnet.com/stories/06/06/17/100fea_b3kneel001.cfm
They can tear out all the altar rails, rip out historic stanined glass windows and statuary, stripping down every parish to sterile white blank iconoclast padded cells, and make up as many imaginary clericalist canons ordering all modernist Catholics to jump off the Golden Gate Bridge at the psychobabble Sign of Peace, it doesn't make it right. And it doesn't make it Catholic. We are not some sort of authoritarian fideist cult where the leaders can make things up out of thin air and order everyone to follow as if tradition did not matter.
. . . whenever I think of "smarmy", I always think of the egregious Rev. Obadiah Slope from Barchester Towers.
Brothers under the skin, sounds like.
Personally, I think "twit" is better in the case of Bp. Tod.
But "smarmy twit" is good, too...
