Posted on 03/02/2013 1:10:44 PM PST by NYer
A professor at Georgetown University wrote a piece in the NY Times advising Catholics to resign from the Catholic Church in light of Pope Benedict's resignation.
Paul Elie is a senior fellow in the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs at Georgetown, and he says that Catholics should boycott Mass (a mortal sin) as a way to instigate change, namely selecting a Pope that would introduce radical change.
This is just so fitting of a Georgetown professor and the New York Times. Here's some of the most outrageous parts:
AT 8 p.m. last night in Vatican City, Benedict XVI resigned the papacy. Now American Catholics should consider resigning too.
The conventional wisdom has it that Benedict’s resignation sharply reduced the aura of the papal office, showed a tender realism about old age, and made clear that even ancient Catholic practices could be changed. That is all true, but the event’s significance is more visceral than that. It has caught the mood of the church, especially in North America.
Resignation: that’s what American Catholics are feeling about our faith. We are resigned to the fact that so much in the Roman Catholic Church is broken and won’t be fixed anytime soon.
So if the pope can resign, we can, too. We should give up Catholicism en masse, if only for a time...
In traditional parlance, Benedict’s resignation leaves the Chair of St. Peter “vacant.” So I propose that American Catholics vacate the pews this weekend.
We should seize this opportunity to ask what is true in our faith, what it costs us in obfuscation and moral compromise, and what its telos, or end purpose, really is. And we should explore other religious traditions, which we understand poorly.
For the Catholic Church, it has been “all bad news, all the time” since Benedict took office in 2005: a papal insult to Muslims; a papal embrace of a Holocaust denier; molesting by priests and cover-ups by their superiors. When the Scottish cardinal Keith O’Brien resigned on Monday amid reports of “inappropriate” conduct toward priests in the 1980s, the routine was wearingly familiar. It’s enough to make any Catholic yearn to leave the whole mess for someone else to clean up...
A temporary resignation would be a fitting Lenten observance. It would help believers to purify and deepen our faith in the light of our neighbors’ — “to examine our own religious notions, to sound them for genuineness,” as the American writer Flannery O’Connor put it. It would let us begin to figure out what in Catholicism we can take and what we can and ought to leave. It might even get the attention of the cardinals who will meet behind the locked doors of the Sistine Chapel and elect a pope in circumstances that one hopes would augur a time of change.
And it might dispel the resignation we feel. Most ordinary believers have given up hope that the church will change its ways. But Benedict’s resignation reminds us of a truth we have known all along: change in the church can happen, even dramatically. If so hidebound an institution as the papacy can be changed, what can’t be?
Let’s begin with the professor and send him packing.
http://repository.berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/PaulElie.jpg
strange looking dude. Looks like he’s waiting for the mothership.
Typical Leftist.
Never content to start their own organizations, or find other organizations that more closely follow their beliefs - they always have to corrupt existing ones. Much like they have to destroy this country rather than moving to the many that already exist that put their philosophies into practice.
History is filled with people who went their own way from the Catholic church, often forming new churches with like minded people. But that’s not enough apparently.
“professor at Georgetown University”
The most unqualified man in the world.
He IS the mothership.
It occurs to me that if all the liberal pretenders left the CC that the CC would become less “radical” and not more.
Notice there's no setting aside of self as Benedict did. This type of self exaltation is the opposite of Benedict's humility. Benedict renounced his office. These folks seem eager to assume many of his roles for themselves. I'd hardly call that resignation from the Church. Sounds like they separated themselves long ago.
Peace be with you.
Their goals have long been to tear down the establishment. Smash monogamy. Smash the patriarchy. Smash the state.
They are an intolerant lot of Communists.
That simple fool talk about change and radical. Let’s say he gets everything he wants. Then change and radical would mean mean going back to the original so what’s his point?
Why doesn’t he just put on a dress and go his homo way?
Say, wasn’t Georgetown once a Catholic university?
In America it's an option to actually become a Protestant.
My own church accepts Catholic baptism and there's a perpetual novena ~ ('cause we have so many converts ~ usually due to divorce ~ they can do such things).
I'd send this peckerwood an invitation but I know he's not sincere ~ he's all hung up on the Pope and who gets what jobs in the hierarchy ~ a couple of things Protestants just don't get into.
What a goofball. Don’t let the door hit you, bud. The Episcopal Church Welcomes You!
The ironic thing is, it is the Georgetown basketball program with 6 others that is leaving what is left of the Big East to form its own b-ball conference. That is sooooooooo very radical!
Surprised? Not really. Just one more intellectual A-hole Georgetown U professor exhibiting his ignorance. Resign? Well, this guy resigned from the Catholic Church a long time ago. He just wants the rest of us Catholics to buy into his brand of “Catholicism.” Just one more Catholic in name only. One more reason why our Bishops and Archbishops need to crack down on these Jesuit Universities who continue to spread heresy.
The Jesuites haven't been Catholic for a generation.
I’ll never understand why so many people who renounce the teachings of the Church still refer to themselves as Catholics.
The door opens both ways. Leave to find a religion that fits what you actually believe and we part friends.
Just sayin’...
This guy is an occasion of sin. Please don’t listen to him.
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