Posted on 09/20/2013 12:10:51 PM PDT by Jeff Chandler
In a frank interview with the Wall Street Journal last year, Cardinal Timothy Dolan conceded that the post-Vatican II Church in America has “gotten gun-shy” on hot-button moral issues. The Church’s encyclical on artificial birth control, Humanae Vitae, “brought such a tsunami of dissent, departure, disapproval of the Church, that I think most of us—and I’m using the first-person plural intentionally, including myself—kind of subconsciously said, ‘Whoa. We’d better never talk about that, because it’s just too hot to handle.’”
The soft-pedaling started, he said, “when the whole world seemed to be caving in, and where Catholics in general got the impression that what the Second Vatican Council taught, first and foremost, is that we should be chums with the world, and that the best thing the church can do is become more and more like everybody else.”
(Excerpt) Read more at crisismagazine.com ...
“Gun shy”? How awful that he would use such insidious language. /s
I guess we're realizing that changing our music to the milktoast bland that passes for "religious" music nowadays, that the "sign of peace" and constant hand shaking, and the change from the Latin mass to english, and even turning the altars around.....it wasn't quite all "that" was it...
Somebody pointed out that the papal discourse got one thing wrong: it’s not the Church that keeps talking about these issues and putting them front and center, it’s the world.
I liked what he said, btw, because it is true that the Church is a hospital for sinners and not a self-congratulatory hangout for the perfect. And we shouldn’t present the “thou shalt nots” first and expect people to come running. We have to show them the love of Christ and also the love of the Church.
But that doesn’t mean approving of bad behavior, and that wasn’t what the Pope meant. He said that he accepts all that the Church teaches and if people want to know what he thinks, that’s all they have to look at. He was talking more about an evangelical approach than anything else.
And I think one of the reasons many Catholics got upset about this is precisely because many of them haven’t heard any orthodox teaching from their bishops for so long that they’re probably no longer sure what it is and they feel embattled and confused. This, I think, is what the Pope does not understand (at any rate, in the US).
Date of article: April 4, 2013
What are the bishops saying NOW?
Strangely enough, I think that what is responsible for this is the whole Vatican II concept of the Church as the “People of God” instead of the Body of Christ, the Bride of Christ, and our Mother, all of which were traditional ways of seeing the Church.
The “People of God” results in a stuffy, dull bunch of people who’ve gotten their tickets punched in terms of the sacraments (because that’s all they see the sacraments as), filled out the parish membership forms at the rectory, and then go on Sundays (sometimes) to be around other members of the perfect people (almost all of them middle class and white and increasingly, elderly). The fact that most parishes like this don’t even offer confession should tell you all you need to know about their attitude towards their own sins!
I left the date out by accident. I posted this because Neumayr’s observations were prescient.
I do not care what people think... I care what the FATHER and SON think. There is the WORD of GOD... and then there are words of men. One is the most important thing in existence... the other is meaningless.
I didn’t mean to imply you were being duplicitous. Sorry.
No problem.
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