Below, from this week’s Catholic Herald, are two outstanding examples (from the many available) of the new brand of Catholic gracing the novus ordo parishes today – or in the case of the lapsed lady planning her funeral, not gracing the pews…
First up, a letter…
Bishop O’Donoghue: Is he right to speak of a Catholic litmus test?
From Philip J Butler
SIR – Your headline (Report, July 3) says that Bishop Patrick O’Donoghue believes “disobedience is harming the Church” and the accompanying article says that he thinks agreeing with the ban on contraception is the “litmus test of the acceptance of obedience in the Church”. By what right does the bishop replace the Resurrection of Christ with rejection of contraception as the central tenet of Catholic faith? Is he just as much a pick-and-choose Catholic as he would no doubt accuse those with disagree with him of being?
The derivation of obedience from a Latin word meaning “to listen” indicates that obedience in the Church should not be a matter of a self-selected elite telling everyone else what to think and do, but all of us together seeking to listen to the promptings of the Holy Spirit. For over 40 years most of the people of the Church have agreed with its own pontifical commission in finding that that the sinfulness of contraception cannot be proved.
In choosing to disobey that voice, not because he disagreed with it but because of the fears stirred up in him by his curial bureaucrats, Paul VI created a crisis for authority in the Church that has persisted ever since, has never been resolved and scarcely even addressed. Subsequent popes and bishops who will not address the issue are, more than anyone, responsible for the low estimation in which people at large hold the Catholic Church and which so corrosively undermines its credibility and witness, seeing that they simply find it to be thoroughly hypocritical when its leaders insist on teaching which most of its members reject. In this sense it is bishops like Patrick O’Donoghue whose disobedience is harming the Church.
It is no surprise that the bishop’s views were expressed at a retreat for priests. Only celibate men who do not themselves have to undergo the trials as well as joys of childbirth and the raising of families could be so arrogantly indifferent to those who do. A year celebrating priesthood as a thing apart hardly bodes well for the Church.
Yours faithfully,
Philip Butler
Second up, a lapsed Catholic, oops, an “emotional Catholic” (a new brand, just come onto the ecclesiastical market – watch as this one catches on…)
http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/f0000439.shtml
Click on ‘comments’ to tell us which (if either) of these two self-styled “Catholics” is closest to obeying Canon Law (e.g. Canon 209: “Christ’s faithful are bound to preserve their communion with the Church at all times, even in their external actions…”) and – tell us, please – who’s to blame for their ignorance?
