Posted on 11/15/2012 12:30:35 PM PST by massmike
The prospect of a second Obama administration,freed from the constraints of running for re-election, have created a crisis for the Catholic Church in the United States.
The immediate threat is the HHS mandate requiring Catholic institutions and Catholic employers to include coverage of contraceptives, sterilizations, and abortifacient drugs in the health insurance offered to their employees.
A further threat comes from the gay insurgency, which will press the administration to find some way to federalize the marriage issue and to compel acceptance of the chimera of "gay marriage."
Yet another threat to the integrity of the Church comes from the re-election of a vice president of the United States who has declared "transgender discrimination" to be "the civil rights issue of our time;" who has openly celebrated the abortion license; who has grossly misrepresented the Church's teaching on the life issues; and who is, in myriad ways, an ecclesial embarrassment.
Some effective way must be found to make clear, publicly, that men and women like Vice President Joe Biden and Representative Nancy Pelosi are living an auto-defined Catholicism so incoherently that their communion with the Catholic Church is severely damaged. Absent such clarity, ill-catechized Catholic voters will continue to misunderstand both the nature of discipleship and the responsibilities of citizenship.
Only a robustly, unapologetically evangelical Catholicism, winsomely proposing and nobly living the truths about the human condition the Church teaches, will see us through the next four years. Radically converted Christian disciples, not one-hour-a-week Catholics whipsawed by an ever more toxic culture, are what this hour of crisis, in both senses of the term, demands.
(Excerpt) Read more at thebostonpilot.com ...
This is a crisis of the Establishment Clause...and the media is yet to cover it in any serious way. During the campaign (also known as Romney’s surrender) any time this issue was brought up...the meme was the GOP’s “war on women”...and of couse what it really was...is Obama’s war on Christians of conscience.
Let’s see if it gets coverage now...I’d be surprised.
The thing that they’re going to go after us on is “gay marriage.” I was very happy to see that a pastor just refused to confirm a young man who had posted his support for “gay marriage” on his FB page, because the pastor said that the teenager clearly did not either understand or accept the teachings of the Church and thus could not be confirmed. So that’s a good sign that there might be resistance.
But the liberal Catholics have been high-fiving each other since the reelection of Obama because they claim this means the bishops are powerless and were ignored. This may be true, but in many cases, their message didn’t get out there until too late, was ambiguous in some statements (”weigh up the candidates and see which one is more in favor of social justice [Marxism]”) and was often never transmitted or even opposed by an elderly leftist clergy.
We still have time, I think, to fight back, but the window is closing.
There are ways to send this message to Pelosi and Biden. Excommunicate them publicly.
But the Bishops haven’t got the guts to do it.
So Catholics say If they let Pelosi and Biden get away with it, I am free to do as I please also.
Nothing to worry about. When they lose their lawsuit, the bishops will discover that paying for abortions is merely “remote material cooperation.”
Even Weigel can’t bring himself to speak plainly. Their “communion with the Church is severely damaged”?
They are bitter, fallen-away Catholics who have become overt persecutors of the Church. They are in no way in communion with the Catholic Church. They are in no sense “Catholics” except in the barest juridical sense of having been baptized.
Most of the bishops in the U.S. will NEVER make a pronouncement to this effect.
How do you eat an elephant .... one bite at a time. The Catholics better wise up very quickly before they find themselves the elephant being eaten one bite at a time!
Because they are playing politics with Church doctrine to get all they can from Government.
The Church placed themselves in this position. They pushed Obamacare, and they are pushing Amnesty. Both will come back and bite them.
And lots and lots of lay people warned them.
What kind of “healthcare” did they THINK they were going to get from the pro-aborts.
Oh. That’s right. Abortion is an issue unto itself, hermetically sealed off from all other issues. The fact that the Democrat party is pro-abortion is NO indication that anybody in the party is hostile to the Church, or acting in bad faith, or is a bad character.
I have a friend whose bishop said, AFTER the HHS Abortion Mandate came down: “I never saw this coming.”
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