Posted on 11/27/2012 3:44:22 PM PST by NYer
On the morning after Thanksgiving, I was driving over to Frederick, Maryland with one of my nephews. On the car radio, he was listening to a talk radio program from WMAL in Washington. The host of the program was a man who described himself as a conservative Jew. He was talking of the increasing religious persecution within the United States. Several times throughout the program he pointed out that it was the Catholics who are more and more being singled out and discriminated against. The First Amendment on religious freedom seems almost a dead letter when it comes to Christians in general and Catholics in particular.
The host noted that if any similar criticism is directed toward other religious groups and religions, especially Islam, the whole world knows about it. And in some cases the world is threatened. Churches are burned in Islamic countries, Christians killed, and nothing much is said either by our government or in the press. Almost the only voice that seems systematically to defend a Catholic position, he remarked, is that of Bill Donohue of the Catholic League. The host went on to wonder why this silence is the case. Part of it, he thought, is because Catholics themselves do not seem to care too much, or else they are not aware of the dimensions of the issue. They think it will just go away.
Many writers and voices have pointed out that the present administration is by all odds the most anti-Catholic regime in this country’s history. That did not prevent some 50 percent of Catholics from voting for it. But that may be a clue about the problem. Often the leaders of those measures and decrees most against officially stated Catholic positions are formulated and carried out by those who are Catholics. Several other writers have argued that so long as these high-profile Catholics carry out anti-Catholic policies and remain in apparently good standing in the Church, many Catholics will conclude that, whatever the noise about these issues, it must be all right to be a Catholic and take positions contrary to what the bishops and Church seem to hold.
Why Catholics do not defend themselves against such attacks on their religion and their place in public life has long puzzled many sympathetic citizens. Part of the reason is that the current attacks—which revolve around marriage and family life and the proper order of one’s interior moral life—are not attacks against the faith as such. They are about what we can and should figure out from reason and natural law. Catholics are involved here not primarily because they are Catholics but because they are human beings. These issues are not what we usually call “religious” issues. It is true that, in many ways, the Church is the last public defender of the natural law and of reason itself in these areas, but that is because revelation does not replace but agrees with and heals reason when it goes wrong in its own order.
Immediately after the recent election, many writers (David Warren was perhaps the most accurate) sensed that a line had been crossed. It was not primarily an election about politics, about good or less good laws. It was an election about approving bad laws and about bad morals being elevated to the status of accepted, settled doctrine. That many Catholics in practice have already joined the opposition is obvious to everyone who cares to look at the evidence.
Much of this confusion has to do with the perennial problem of what was Vatican II’s response to modernity. Was Christianity the measure of modernity or was modernity the measure of Christianity? Many Christians, including Catholics, opted for the latter. The test turns out to be centered on children and families, over what is the proper atmosphere in which children should be begotten and raised. Indeed, the issue is whether most begotten children should exist or not, over whether we have a “right” to dispose of them as we will.
But if we spell out in a coherent fashion the issues—marriage, contraception, abortion, cloning, same-sex marriage, polygamy, parental authority—we become aware that what we are seeing before our eyes is the embodiment of earlier ideas now carried into reality. Of course, there are good ideas and bad ideas; this has been clear from the account in Genesis of the Fall. Its essential premise—that man, not God, is the maker of the distinction of good and evil—is the quintessence of bad ideas. It is this principle that lies behind all aberrations in family life and what surrounds it.
In this context, I have often wondered why it is that a Jew, the radio host, is the one most concerned over the failure of Catholics ably to defend themselves in the public order. Since, as I have said, these current aberrations in the public order are not about specifically theological issues but about those of natural law and reason, it is perhaps because the believing Jew can see the origin of the issue in one’s view of God’s initial plan of creation.
Many Catholic bishops did seek to point out the problem manifested in the election, in a choice of leadership. They evidently did influence many Catholic citizens to understand the nature of the threat against what the Church stands for. But it was not enough to change the results of the election, as many hoped it would. No doubt they will pay a price for this failure. On the other hand, the principle that something is radically wrong in the polity is at least on the table. When the chance arose to do something about the problem, the effort failed. This means the government has even less need to pay any attention to Catholic positions which are, in any case, seen as part of the problem.
Not a few writers have tried to put a ray of hope before us. All is not lost. Other elections will occur. But undoing what has now been done to family law and the understanding of marriage now involves the deeper issue of habits of disorder in the souls of so many of the population. While it is possible to rid ourselves of bad principles and habits, it is monumentally difficult, even if we want to. But for the most part, as a people, we do not want to. This election was, by most standards, an approval of the direction of the government, an assurance that it was on the right—that is, popular—path that rejects the central premises of reason about moral life.
The larger matter, if it is larger, is the central government has succeeded in positioning itself as the chief dispenser, not only of jobs, health, and well-being, but also of what is moral and right. Government has established a claim and an agenda that would make all real moral, economic, and political understanding and activity dependent on itself. The country has radically changed its soul from one that insisted the main actors are individuals and their voluntary organizations to one that holds the ungrounded government responsible for all the major (and minor) issues. In this new capacity the government conceives itself as being subject to nothing—not to the Constitution, amendments, reason, or natural law. It will not be put quite this way, but that is the effect. This is what we elected. The Jewish talk-show host was correct. Catholics are the target, the locus of what the government sees as the cause of its own problems. This government will brook no opposition to its plans. Catholics, insofar as they are Catholics, will be more and more singled out as the causes of the failures of public policies. If we are surprised at this turn of events, it can only be because we did not really understand what was at stake in the recent election.
And since you did everything right, when they come for you, as they will, you’ll just curse us and blame us religious freaks??????
Divide and conquer. That’s how Hitler and Stalin and Mao did it and you seem to take your page out of their playbook.
What you wrote is bigoted hyperbole.
“Exactly why I finally had enough and left my Church and found a Christian Church that I honestly enjoy and look forward to Sunday. I leave with a fulfilled heart and soul. I just could not handle the hypocrisy any longer, it seemed pointless. It has saddened me though that the leadership has been so confused in their messaging. People like Pelosi,Kerry and Kennedy’s should have been made examples of and instead are allowed to do what they have done without any repercussions.”
I will never leave the Church unless they truly go against Christ. Which will never happen because Jesus said that the gates of Hell will never prevail.
Are there problems? You bet there are. But there is no perfect place.
We have a lot of CINOs in the Church but that doesn’t mean that the Church is wrong, it means that we have many members who are wrong.
Do we give up on our families when they are wrong? Or do we hang in there and try to bring them back to the Truth?
I strongly disagree. Real action on the part of the hierarchy would bring the issue into sharp moral relief. It is precisely the inaction of the bishops which provides comfort to the CINO majority by providing tacit approval of their apostasy. Do you really believe that if the Church refused a catholic burial to someone like Ted Kennedy, for example, that that action would not have impact?
“Anyone with common sense also knows that once a child is spoiled it’s too late to invoke parental authority.”
I disagree. In any case, apart from the spoiled child, there are younger siblings that will benefit from any discipline the spoiled child is given. They would have the chance to see that the parents hold these matters as being important, and they wouldn’t otherwise. By the Grace of God, they would then make better choices.
“But it won’t unspoil the children. Sorry, it won’t. To think that it will is a pipedream and we have much more important things to focus on.”
If what the bishops say is true about all these matters, then what could be more important? I reckon I don’t see how to attempt to fix anything without public dicipline being used.
Freegards
For those in the choir, yes. But for the mainstream (both Catholic and non-Catholic) the “morality” will be placed with Obama and the immorality will be pinned on the bishops.
How many times do I have to repeat, yes,the bishops should excommunicate, because it’s the right thing to do.
But don’t fool yourself into thinking that it will help. It will be used as a further reason to persecute us.
That’s the mess we are now in. Denial won’t help.
I wrote at least three times on this thread that the bishops should go ahead and excommunicate.
But it won’t “help” bring clarity or benefit younger siblings. The younger siblings who “get it” already get it. The younger siblings who don’t get it won’t start getting it when the bishops finally act. They will turn on the bishops and blame them and instead of the focus being on the malefactors like Sibelius, it will be on whether the bishops shoulda done that or not.
Once moral rot and moral confusion sets in, even proper moral discipline can be twisted by those who hate it into its opposite. We have lost control of our own narrative. The bishops of the 1970s are to blame for that.
The bishops of today suffer from the malfeasance of the bishops of the 1970s. There is no way out now except through the fire of persecution. Persecution will bring moral clarity to those who already had it or were at least open to having it.
For those who have bought the Lie, and that’s probably a majority of “Catholics,” confusion, not clarity, will reign in regard to what the bishops just did.
Action on the part of the hierarchy would be very helpful from the point of view of public perception. But one of the reasons they are reluctant to do it, I think, is because they are generals of an army whose officers don’t give a darn about their orders. The orthodox bishops are afraid that giving a clear, unambiguous order will result in an outright mutiny among their lax, worldly clergy and possibly lead to schism, so they prefer to maintain the fiction that they hold the powers of leadership and are just holding back.
But the secret is that you didn’t get two generations of ignorant, unbelieving Catholic laity out of nowhere; they were created by a clergy that was either unknowingly ignorant or one that was intentionally disobedient to church law and doctrine. Granted, the responsibility for the institutionalization of this goes back to some really bad bishops, such as Bernardin, but we underestimate the fact that the Church was left in complete disarray after Vatican II. This was worsened by new policies actually depriving bishops of much of their individual power and furthermore making the national bishops’ conferences the ultimate arbiters of life on the dioceses. So once liberals took over those (and conferences of religious superiors, too), which they did immediately because they had set them up, the individual bishop became a nobody, just a rubber stamp for the national conference or a powerless enabler of his dysfunctional, faithless clergy.
Things have changed, but not much. My bishop issued an excellent letter, to be read aloud at Mass in all parishes, about the threat to the Church. I would suspect that it was read in fewer than half the churches, and in fact, the clergy didn’t read it in his own Cathedral. And then the USCCB further weakened the individual bishops with a lame, “nuanced” video that implied that weighing “social concerns” (read Dem welfare policies) against mere Church teachings (read abortion) might justify voting for someone who opposed Church teachings. Or that was, at any rate, the message that my pastor and most of the faithful took away from it.
So while I think individual bishops should go ahead and do what they know they should do, they are like generals with a rebellious officer corps and a confused, lazy and political Joint Chiefs of Staff.
I appreciate your kind words. Maybe when my head and heart are up to it again, I will give another visit. I am always a Catholic thru Baptisim, just a “reborn” Catholic with a little more insight.
Also, I was not aware that Sebelius was excommunicated by her Bishop. More Bishops should have been doing this LOUDLY. Teaching the flock what they speak during the Mass.
Thanks!
Respect your opinion as we should all feel welcomed with what Our Lord promises us in salvation. Leaving one’s Church is not what I ask others to do.
You are happy in your Catholic Community you stay and as you said, good or bad work thru it.
Where I am at there just seemed such a disconnect of the Word of God, and the actions of the leadership and the people. This diocease is based in “Social Justice” mentalitiy.
Until I leave this area, I must find spiriual fulfillment in some way.
Hopefully in the future the Church will get a grip on their issues and show that they are willing to tighten it up again. I always wait in hope.
Have a nice day today!
I understand your concerns, but the Catholic Church is the Church that Jesus founded and we receive HIM in the Eucharist.
We need to stand with Jesus and follow his path and not be influenced by the other sinners in the Catholic Church including the priests and other leaders.
We must be strong and endure the persecution of the secular values of this world and work as a Catholic community to live and preach the love of God and strive for perfection with HIM.
Jesus promised that His Church will survive.
It is just possible that he repented before death and was then given a Mass of Christian Burial. We cannot know, but Our Lord knows His friends and is fooled by no one.
Is there no other parish close to you that teaches in line with the Church?
I have very little sympathy for Catholics or most religions as a whole on this matter.
Example is the so called alcohol and tobacco sin tax which is nothing but extortion.
You would think there would be enough in the Bible to keep them busy, but maybe they could not collect enough money preaching from the bible.
“I wrote at least three times on this thread that the bishops should go ahead and excommunicate.”
I never said otherwise. Why do you think they should go ahead and publicly excommunicate?
“But it won’t “help” bring clarity or benefit younger siblings. The younger siblings who “get it” already get it. The younger siblings who don’t get it won’t start getting it when the bishops finally act.”
I think they should have the chance, especially future generations. And I think teaching with discipline works much better than without.
Freegards
Not really. Next parish is approx. 20 miles away and have not researched their parish. Although they are all under the same diocese that is one of the most liberal in my lifetime. However, in all fairness where I was raised has turned very liberal as well so it might just be the sign of the times.
When I visit another area on the east coast of the state, I visit a Catholic Church that I do enjoy. Just not there often.
And this didn't start with the priest abuse scandal. This has been going on for years in MA, beginning when the Bishops derided those folks in Boston who sent their kids to Catholic schools, instead of the public schools when they desegregated in the early 70s. Folks got angry that their Bishops were calling them racists, so that's when they started ignoring them, and their Parishes became no more than social clubs, rather than a place for renewing their Faith. Goes a long way toward explaining why there are so many Catholics who are Social Liberals, at least here in MA.
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