Posted on 03/13/2002 5:39:02 AM PST by father_elijah
BRUSSELS, Belgium, (Zenit.org).- The European Parliament on Tuesday is poised to debate a report that condemns the Catholic Church for its moral principles and its position on women priests.
The document, written by Spanish Socialist María Izquierdo Rojo, was approved last October by the Women´s Rights Commission and analyzed subsequently by the Citizens´ Liberties and Rights Commission.
Among other things, the document condemns "the administrations of religious organizations and the leaders of extremist political movements who promote racial discrimination, xenophobia, fanaticism and the exclusion of women from leading positions in the political and religious hierarchy." The report could be voted on this Wednesday.
The report also deplores "the interference of the churches and religious communities in the public and political life of the state, in particular when such interference is designed to restrict human rights and fundamental freedoms, for instance, in the sexual or reproductive sphere."
The European chamber´s principle would thus deny the Catholic Church the right to proclaim the moral doctrine it has always preached.
The proclamation of religious truths is guaranteed by Article 10 of the European Union´s Charter of Fundamental Rights, on "Liberty of Thought, Conscience and Religion."
Here's more to add to my post in #36:
Excerpts from: "The Gay Priest Problem"- By Rev. Paul Shaughnessy - a Marine Corps and Navy chaplain.
AIDS has quietly caused the deaths of hundreds of Roman Catholic priests in the United States, although other causes may be listed on some of their death certificates, the Kansas City Star reported today. The newspaper said its examination of death certificates and interviews with experts indicates several hundred priests have died of AIDS-related illnesses since the mid-1980s. The death rate of priests from AIDS is at least four times that of the general population, the newspaper said. Kansas City Bishop Raymond Boland says the AIDS deaths show that priests are human.
Astonishing, when you think about it. The paragraph above comes from an Associated Press report on a series of newspaper articles by Judy L. Thomas that appeared in January of 2000. It is too much to say Catholics were “rocked” by the attendant media hype—the scandal threshold has been raised pretty high in recent years—but among the laity the articles occasioned, if not a gasp, at least a general sigh of exasperation. From almost all sides one heard the complaint “Why doesn’t somebody do something?” Why not indeed.
A large part of the answer is implicit in the remarkable response to the situation tendered by Bishop Boland. To aver that a priest shows he is human by dying of AIDS is to say either that yielding to this sort of temptation is something that might happen to any normal person or that it is somehow natural to our human state to engage in acts of passive consensual sodomy, from which the resultant infection takes its predictable course. Few Catholics who are not in Holy Orders would share this view of human nature. In reality, the fact that priests die of AIDS proves that they commit sin, by which they show not that they are more genuinely human but that they act in a sub-human manner; sub-human not in any special sense, but in the ordinary sense in which each of us falls short of his true human dignity by sinning, whatever our sin may be.
But Bishop Boland, like many of his brethren, is unwilling to concede any moral component to the phenomenon. “I would never ask a priest how he got [AIDS],” he told Thomas, “just like nobody asked me two years ago how I got cancer of the colon. But I would provide for him. I would not write him off and say, ‘Because you’ve got AIDS and because there are doubts about how one can acquire it, therefore you’re not a good priest.’” Well, let’s take the case of a three-year-old girl brought into the emergency room with a broken jaw and cigarette burns on her rib cage. Suppose the hospital personnel said, “Look, there’s more than one way to pick up these injuries, and the girl’s medical treatment will be the same whatever their cause, so there’s no point in asking how she got them.” Most of us would see such a response as a culpably willful refusal to face up to a grim reality. By the same token, when we are urged to pretend that there is room for doubt as to how most priests contract AIDS, we can be sure that our gaze is being intentionally diverted from the ugly and indisputable facts: a disproportionately high percentage of priests is gay; a disproportionately high percentage of gay priests routinely engages in sodomy; this sodomy is frequently ignored, often tolerated, and sometimes abetted by bishops and superiors.
Father Smith (not his real name) is a Jesuit priest working in a Philadelphia parish in one of the older parts of the city. He is a closeted gay priest and does not want his name used. . . . “In my worst moments,” he said, “I fear I will have been a collaborator in supporting an institution that oppresses gay people. . . .” He said he became a Jesuit after falling in love with an older, 40-year old Jesuit priest. Smith was 20 then and studying at St. Joseph’s College in Philadelphia. “As a Catholic priest, I know there would be no church without gay people. . . . I assume priests are gay until proven otherwise.”
In the same vein, such priests routinely gloat about the fact that gay bars in big cities have special “clergy nights,” that gay resorts have set-asides for priests, and that in certain places the diocesan apparatus is controlled entirely by gays. What is significant is that these are not claims made by their opponents, not accusations fired off by right-wing Catholics in a fit of paranoia; rather they are gays’ words about gays themselves. Their boasts include having blackmailed the Connecticut Catholic Conference into reversing its opposition to a gay rights law by threatening to “out” gay bishops—a reversal that is difficult to understand without resort to the blackmail explanation.
".. it is instructive to ponder the following message to his fellow gay clergy by South Africa’s Bishop Reginald Cawcutt, penned in response to a rumor that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith was about to issue a letter prohibiting the acceptance of gay seminarians.
Kill [Ratzinger]? Pray for him? Why not just f—- him??? Any volunteers — ugh!!! ... I do not see how he can possibly do this — but . . . If he does, lemme repeat my statement earlier — that I will cause lotsa s—- for him and the Vatican. And that is a promise. MY intention would be simply to ask the question what he intends doing with those priests, bishops (possibly “like me”) and cardinals . . . who are gay. That should cause s—- enough. Be assured dear reverend gentlemen, I shall let you know the day any such outrageous letter reaches the desks of the ordinaries of the world."
Bishop Cawcutt’s actual communication, be it noted, contained no prudish dashes. While the virulence of his language may be exceptional, the targets of his antagonism are not, and it is noteworthy that none of Bishop Cawcutt’s several defenders distanced himself from the content of the prelate’s harangue.
Ideology allows the problem to persist
Bishop Cawcutt’s astonishing survivability puts one in mind of President Clinton’s, and to some extent the persistence of the gay priest problem and President Clinton’s immunity to scandal have a common cause: gay clergy in their sphere and Clinton in his own have been indispensable agents in the advancement of the liberal agenda.
Like their secular counterparts, Catholic liberals, even where they do not positively applaud the sexual recreations of gay priests, are willing to overlook the resultant embarrassment in order that a more important end may be served—in order, that is, that gays may remain as active members in the Church to assist them in their project of replacing ecclesial authority with personal experience as the norm determinative of authentic faith.
The leadership of the liberal movement in the Catholic Church today is still dominated by former priests, brothers, and seminarians who abandoned their vocations in the 1960s and 70s. Most of these left to marry, and for them contraception remains the touchstone issue. Of their companions in dissent who stayed behind in the priesthood, a disproportionately high number are gay, and even liberal writers have commented on the “lavenderization of the left” that characterizes the clerical wing of their movement. A review of a recent book on the priesthood by the National Catholic Reporter’s Tom Roberts typifies the position—uneasily held, nervously expressed—of the non-gay progressive:
Go HERE to read the essay (in it's entirety)
How long before these "open-minded individuals" come for us too?
Oh wait, they did from 1917 through 1991. Never mind.
Amen!
| European People's Party/European Democrats (christian-democratic and conservative) | EPP | 233 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Party of European Socialists (social-democratic and socialist) | PES | 180 | |
| European Liberal, Democrat and Reform Party (liberal and centrist) | ELDR | 51 | |
| European Federation of Green Parties/European Free Alliance (ecologist and regionalist) | GR/EFA | 48 | |
| European Unitary Left/Nordic Green Left (socialist and communist) | EUL | 42 | |
Okay, Fr. Groeschel should be sent in to replace Cardinal Law and clean up the mess and take out the garbage.
This is why our Founding Fathers wrote the First Amendment.
The Government has no business running the Church and the Church has no business running the Government.
Other than that, the People should be left alone to wish each other Merry Christmas, Happy Chanaukah, Happy Winter Soltice or anything else without fear of the P.C. Police that has hijacked the meaning of the First Amendment.
I'm not sure what you're asking... But the answer probably is something like you guys didn't have a bunch of lunatics misrepresenting the Second Council of the Vatican as a sweeping endorsement of modernism. The next Pope needs to be a modern day Hercules; the Augean Stables are reeking.
AB
This is an example of why I believe that the EU will not long survive. Namely, it is being constructed in a way that is totally divorced from the European peoples, their history, and their traditions. The EU elites are creating a sterile, bureaucratic regime that inspires the cultural loyalty of an IRS audit.
If the folks running the EU were anything other than leftist, socialist, paper-shuffling, universalistic, pencil-neck hacks (which, they are not) they would be encouraging the new European polity to reflect and glorify the various European peoples and their cultures. They would be incorporating their heroes, their religion, and their heritage into the fabric of the new union.
Instead, these Dilbert/Stalinist hybrids are attacking one of the ancient bedrocks of European culture.
The Church in Rome and its papacy stretches back to the Casesars....and will continue long after this paper-shuffling monstrosity in Brussels goes the way of the "utopia" that their cousins created in Moscow.
Three years ago at a men's conference (how politically incorrect) Fr. Benedict Groeschel spoke to about 7 or 8,000 of us. He said: "you young men may live to see the confiscation of Church property."
perhaps we shall. Perhaps we can fight for it.
My German/Irish/CATHOLIC blood is getting up again. :-)
Say hi to the EU bureaucrats for me at your next convention!
Personally, I'd rather have to explain our few dissenters then ally myself with the Socialists as they attack Catholics, but that is your choice.
patent
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