"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
- Flannery O'Connor
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?
What’ he doing teaching Catholicism?
Sickening, please don’t do that again.
He doesn’t qualify.
I think not.
Could this be the dumb@ss that came up with the "boycott gas stations for a day" idea?
Sounds like this “professor” resigned from the faith a long time ago.
He quotes Flannery O’Connor for support? I’m thinking that if she were not rolling in her grave, she would slap him upside the head.
"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
- Flannery O'Connor
Do they have gay aliens?
Catholic you aren’t.
Stay away from the pews? It isn’t the priest one meets on Sunday.
It is Christ in the Eucharist.
I must give this professor a scintilla of doubt for charity, but anyone who thinks this way does not believe in the Real Presence.
The new pope could do worse than suppress the order, which has lost its charisma.
The Church will be standing long after all of us.
Anyone remember Joe “How-many-divisions-does-the-pope-have?” Stalin?
I’d love it if all those who truly no longer believe in what the Church teaches would leave. If they want to be part of a religious experience that accepts all the things they now believe in, they can join the Episcopal Church. It has some of the trappings of the Catholic Church without all those inconvenient rules.
Not going to happen.
I have a deep and permanent emotional connection to Georgetown. Albeit, as far back as 1993 I saw unsettling trends at the university, where the perverts had gained a foothold at the Jesuit Institution, and gained a certain frightening legitimacy.
This story just disappointingly suggests that things have deteriorated further.
LOL!
Here's a prayer to offer up for this guy, and anyone else he manages to "Counsel" or "Provoke" into following his lead:
PRAYER FOR THE CONVERSION OF SINNERS
Lord Jesus Christ, most merciful Saviour of the world, we humbly beseech You, by Your most Sacred Heart, that all the sheep who stray out of Your fold may one day be converted to You, the Shepherd and Bishop of their souls, who lives and reigns with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.
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