Posted on 06/05/2006 10:29:56 PM PDT by right-wingin_It
Like Catholic priests everywhere, Bishop Peter Hickman dons a white tunic each Sunday to celebrate Mass in a sanctuary laden with incense and crosses.
Unlike most, he'll often have lunch with his wife and children afterward.
"Marriage promotes growth," says Hickman, 50, who has fathered five children, been married three times and divorced twice. "People who've never been married have a hard time knowing themselves."
Marriage and children aren't the only things separating Hickman from nearly all Roman Catholic clergy. The church he has pastored for more than 20 years, St. Matthew in Orange, operates much like any other Catholic church, and offers what appear to be the same sacraments. Yet it ordains female, married and openly gay priests, recognizes divorce, accepts birth control and premarital sex, blesses same-sex unions and, most important, rejects the authority of the pope.
Occupying cramped storefront quarters in a strip mall, Hickman and his church have become the center of the nation's largest coalition of liberal independent Catholic churches, the Ecumenical Catholic Communion.
SNIP
"Our Catholic identity is very important to us," Hickman says, "but the Catholic Church no longer has a monopoly on sacraments." Speaking to his congregation, Hickman goes even further, saying the Roman church hierarchy has betrayed the Gospel.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
What a title for this garbage, eh? Faithful to who, exactly!?! For cryin out loud, the guy had 3 marriages...The only thing these people seem faithful to is themselves...(Themselves being American Sodomites) The tile should read "Faithelss and Not Traditional Catholics".
FYI .. The article goes on to highlight the bogus 2001 "ordination" of the woman from Rochester, NY diocese. Apparently her parish priest was canned (hopefully for heresy if what the article says is true), whereby she thought she'd take his place.
ping
Wow...the msm has finally decided to pay serious attention to faith in America huh?
Flannery O'Connor wrote a great story about an athiest who starts "The Church Without Christ." That wouldn't even work as fiction today. Some crank does essentially the same thing, and he's the star of the LA Times.
Then again, my local rag plastered the "Religion" section with Davinci Hoax hype for weeks, so what else is new.
They left out the part about him teaching people to live in accordance with THE TEN SUGGESTIONS.
Now would that be the 10 planks of the DNC platform?? Oh yes..making more sense now!
"Cramped storefront quarters in a strip mall" ought to tip off even the most dense that this "Catholic" church is not kosher, so to speak......
Being Catholic means being faithful to the Gospel and being part of the universal church. The word catholic is Greek for "universal."
These splinter groups are obviously not Catholic. I won't insult Protestants by calling them Protestant.
Wearing clerical vestments, burning candles and incense, etc. has little to do with being Catholic.
I'm an evangelical Christian and probably should keep my nose out of RCC business, but it is very sad and disappointing to me to see Catholic churches and clerics going down the same road to politically correct ruin that so many mainline denomination Protestant churches have gone down over the last century. Hopefully that can still be nipped in the bud and turned around in the RCC by a firm hand of authority that was lacking in the Protestant denominations.
Agree with you completely. This is not a Catholic Church with a capital C.
Well, there are certainly a few that are doing that -- Certainly a few more than I can stand. Although, I think in the case of this article, the supposed "Bishop" here was never ordained at all by the Church. These are lay people claiming to be clergy, although the article makes it sound as if they have been properly ordained within the Church (thanks to some crafty wording learnt in best Journalism schools). *Sticking my finger down my throat*
The media aids these people since they share the same agenda, hurting Christianity and Catholocism in particular.
This is no different than the media taking the stance that the feminists who "ordained" themselves as priests were actually priests from that point on.
All of these people are pretenders of Catholicism in order to hurt the real thing.
This article is so dumb for the LA times to run
He calls himself a Bishop? Who ordained him? He doesnt have Apostolic Succession. It appear he is not even a break away Priest.
Anyone can go to a costume store and buy an outfit or order Priest vestments and play Priest/Bishop
I think the vision is a 'smaller and purer' church. Thankfully, it's helpful when the rotten fruit falls from the tree by itself, that is thes people leave to make something like the ECC, athough I disagree this their use of the word Catholic in the name of their organization..illegal perhaps??
You mentioned the path some of the Protestant denominations have taken. BTW...I think all the various groups of Christians (Catholic/Protestant/Orthodox) have contributed something positive to each other through history, despite any negatives. We should thank each other for that -- for the good stuff. It's about time to put aside the once seemingly large differences and come together, as believing Christians, to stand up to the true threats to our religion. (That's real Ecumenism as opposed to the crap these people in the article are claiming). I mean, do we have to wait until we're hiding out together in the caticones again?? It's getting late.
I've noted some other Evangelicals commenting here so I'll stick in my two cents. We have been asked to pray for Pope Benedict XVI to promote the gospel of the risen Christ. While we worship in very different ways our value systems of moral behavior are much alike. This group of "Catholics" is anathema to believing Christians.
I really appreciate your comments.
I'm a Christian and this is one of the many reasons I don't belong to a 'church'.
We have our doctrinal disagreements of course, some them profound, but I don't believe any of us want to return to that tragic time and place where our respective spiritual forefathers apparently forgot that they worshiped the Prince of Peace and took up arms against one another. I have to believe that conflict was motivated as much or more by political issues as it was by spiritual issues.
More than once I have stood arm in arm with Catholic demonstrators in front of abortion mills and felt a solidarity of purpose and spiritual kinship that transcended our differences in doctrine and rites of worship. Hopefully we can agree to disagree on those differences and still put a solid front on our mutual opposition to the spiritual and secular humanist forces which are trying to take the US down the same road to institutionalized atheism that has created a spiritual vacuum in much of post-WWII western Europe. A vacuum that is being rapidly filled by the alien religion of Islam. Apart we are two minority groups within the US voting population, together we can be and should be be a force to be reckoned with politically.
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