"Don't...TEMPT me, Frodo!!!"
Dan
Posted on 04/04/2002 12:26:30 PM PST by Caleb1411
The Catholic Church is under fire in the American press unlike any time I can ever remember. To be sure, much of it is self-inflicted; what is being reported as "news" is, sadly, news that demands coverage. That is something Catholics must accept. But Catholics do not have to accept what follows, the what-this-story-means analysis. Many in the press are using recent Church scandals as fodder for attacks on Catholicism in general, Pope John Paul II in particular, and that is also scandalous.
Newsweek's Eleanor Clift has penned a piece on the magazine's Web site that demonstrates just how impossibly incoherent some can be when they choose to comment on a subject about which they know so little. She is positively breathless in her denunciation of the Roman Catholic faith.
Unable to go deeper than the superficial, Ms. Clift reduces the Church's problems to the political. "Like the church, Congress makes laws but doesn't always follow them," she explains. "The analogy extends to the Appropriations committees in the House and Senate, each of which is known as the College of Cardinals, because that's where the power is. They hold the purse strings."
Uh-huh. And why would this be so important? Here we go: "Pope John Paul II (has) named virtually every bishop in America. All of this pope's appointees are ideologically conservative. What has happened mirrors a U.S. president stacking the courts. With John Paul loyalists at every level" -- and here it comes -- "social change will be wrenching, if not impossible."
But the Catholic bishops aren't just out of step with the Enlightened; they're downright evil. Oh, Ms. Clift won't say that, of course. Instead she uses the old journalistic trick of having someone else say it for her. She finds the perfect gutless wonder to do her bidding, an anonymous diocesan priest. "As a group, they're like the Taliban," he proclaims, in his Christian kind of way, of his superiors. "If you want to succeed in this system, you never talk about the ordination of women -- and abortion and birth control are like the third rail."
This system. The Catholic Church with her 2,000-year-old tradition is thus reduced to some kind of Richard Daley good-old-boy political machine. Or Enron. The statement is preposterous, to be sure, but its inclusion in the article is calculated: Because this nameless source is a man of the cloth (we presume), he must by necessity be taken seriously. One wonders if it ever dawned on Ms. Clift that the reason he chose anonymity is not because his words are controversial, but because the "social change" he implicitly supports as a Catholic priest -- say, support of abortion -- is heresy in the eyes of the Church. One can be pretty certain that Ms. Clift never has figured out that what he told her is pretty stupid, too. But it doesn't matter. It's color he brings to her story, and that's really all that counts.
Ms. Clift now takes over and puts things in her own words. I wish she hadn't. "The papacy as we know it" -- she is now an authority on the matter -- "is a 19th-century convention. The idea that in an age of e-mail and fax, and the ability to whisk around the globe in jets, everybody kowtows to a central figure seems quaint."
Attention, Catholics: We had it all wrong. What Jesus Christ meant was, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church -- until the Internet comes along, at which point never mind."
Clift saves her best for last, returning to the scandals with as ugly a statement as she can muster. "The priesthood attracts sexually conflicted men," she states categorically, thus insulting every man who ever dedicated his life to Christ, every mother who ever bore a son who joined the priesthood, every Catholic who ever felt a certain reverence for those touched by God as his shepherds -- in short, every Catholic who calls himself a Catholic -- "and the church will have to face up to that as a potentially criminal matter, not as a way to perpetuate an outdated custom of celibacy."
She is called the Suffering Church for a reason. The Catholic Church survived the Romans, the Reformation, Hitler's Nazis and Lenin's communists. She will survive the poison quill of Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, too.
"Don't...TEMPT me, Frodo!!!"
Dan
Perhaps a visit to historyland could be beneficial to yourself as well. Then come back and show me any long-lasting nation or country that has existed without church or government to defend and/or support them.
Then why is the Church giving them the ammunition? If the Catholic Church had taken swift action to rid itself of these bad apples, cooperate with prosecutors and removed all cardinals and other high level clergy who were involved in this from their posts, then that would have taken all the air out of the balloon. The Church had a chance to come out of this stronger than ever, they had a golden opportunity to rid themselves of the homosexual priests who were doing them harm with minimal fallout, but they have blown it bigtime.
. . .what many of these people and Bill Clinton have in common is their 'Leftist' orientation. . .and the 'Left' has been undermining the Church from within for years, with the same goals as the Left in our Country. . .take the 'spoils' and remake the institutions in 'their image'. . .
In the next few weeks it will be reported that [Anti-]"Catholics" for a Free Choice (Rockefeller money) has issued a UN-approved statement demanding that the Vatican approve of condoms and blaming the Church for AIDS worldwide.
It is not news that C.F.F.C. is making this statement. It IS news, however, that the UN is allowing this to get officially promulgated through UN channels (CFFC is an NGO at the UN).
How many catholic-taxpayer dollars went to the UN last year???
At least, that's the way I remember the stats.
In any case, MOST of the problem-priests were ordained quite a while ago--by appointees of Paul VI and/or John XXIII, and even of Pius XII.
Apparently you're privy to information that the rest of us aren't. Exactly how many of the ~50,000 priests in America make up this huge problem? Don't generalize either, provide an exact number.
I couldn't agree more.
...If the Catholic Church had taken swift action to rid itself of these bad apples...
The Catholic Church consists of real people, most of them sinners like you and me, and some of them (a fraction) big sinners, equivalent to your buddy Clinton. Swift actions are a domain of the law enforcement organs and this is what is now happening. It didn't happen before, because the shameful cases were resolved quietly out of court and your massmedia stayed silent for decades for some reason. It's another issue if grabbing a boy's buttock in a public swimming pool justifies a 10-year jail term. But grasp this, all alleged and real cases from 40 years, 30 years, 25 years, and 10 years ago are all of a sudden taken with equal ferociousness and trumpeted by your media. There is no fairness there, which is what makes it the officially Open Season on the Catholic Church, another one in the history of Christianity.
At the same time, we have our general public totally morally screwed-up. Just watch any of the talk shows and see what is happening. When you feel your "holy rage" against evil clergymen, turn on a TV show and see what's going on in the nation. And don't be surprised; if the best of the best (the Catholic priests) could have had some bad apples among them, then the general public won't be any better.
The gates of hell will not prevail.
Great Idea, but it falls way back in priority, when viewed against the almost utter Moral Collapse of the Roman Catholic Church and the evil goings on over the past 30 to 40 years.
Not to mention the thousands and thousands of children, whose lives were ruined by these Homosexual perverted Priests with the approval of Cardinal Law,Egan and many Bishops.
It appears the vatican cannot come to the reality of the almost complete breakdown and Moral rot eating at the very foundations of the Roman Catholic Church.
His call for a day of Prayer for the Mid east is Insulting when compared to current Homosexual problems engulfing the Priesthood for the past 30 or more years.
What a sad position for this Pope to be in after all the wonderful things he has done during his tenure...
The church has admitted to 90+ priests abusing children in Massachusetts alone. Guess you don't read the papers all that much. Sticking your head in the sand won't make the problem go away.
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