Posted on 12/15/2002 8:34:40 PM PST by Notwithstanding
Their so-called smoking gun theory boils down to this: the pope in 1999 recommended that a defrocked priest ought not return to the area where he committed his offenses. They take this eminently sensible advice and use it as a hammer to bludgeon the pope. Just so everyone understands what’s going on here, what the pope did was to say that a former priest—someone who had been returned to the status of a layman—ought to start a new life in a new location. Isn’t this what parole boards recommend to released inmates—that they not return to the neighborhood that nurtured their maladies? Shame on Massachusetts Attorney General Thomas Reilly and others for disseminating this mindless charge.
(Excerpt) Read more at catholicleague.org ...
Let me be more clear. Peter was given two separate charges: feed both the lambs AND the sheep. In this way the Lord established the primacy of Peter--as the sheep were understood to be the other Apostles; the lambs the ordinary Faithful.
Therefore, one only has grounds to argue with defined church dogma/doctrine, when such dogma/doctrine is not found in scripture.
Doctrine and dogma are either directly stated in Scripture, or are handed down as Tradition (written or oral), agreed upon by all; or are developed in a logically precise fashion from one/both of the above.
The most recent 'controversial' dogma was the pronunciation that Mary was assumed into Heaven, body and soul, rather than dying. Well, it was not controversial to the Eastern Rites, nor the Orthodox Greeks, nor to the vast majority of the Faithful who had always so believed, anyway, based on Tradition--likely the testimony of St. John, passed on orally.
Taking a step back and looking at the whole, it's rather comforting to note that Catholicism is eminently the religion of common sense. There's little that is shocking--and the 'shocking' parts are directly from the Gospel (i.e., "eat of My Body, drink My Blood.")
Hey, I made a passing remark after reading the article. My comment here goes to the standard approach many of you apologists have to everything. One only needs go to a thread where some of the better informed are talking with the usual suspects of the Catholic apologist persuasion. You guys invoke a claim, and at the first sign of a fact that invalidates the claim, the epithets fly - "bigot, anti-catholic, heretic......" long and infamous list of bile that pours forth because the facts generally are always either against you or are not with you. If you guys could back up your claims perhaps the continual smear campaign against those who betray the emptiness of your claims would not be needed. Given that you guys continually use the liberal tactics as a duck and run move and Given you're supposed to be above such things as 'christians' one wonders why it is one of your primary modes of argumentation.
This is no secret to anyone. I just retired from such an argument within this past week. Faced with facts, the claims of your church coulnd't stand and it quickly degenerated. Questions are answered with diversion. Character and intelligence are impugned.. you name it. The only place where such apologists differ from liberals is that when it becomes so blatent that everyone on the sidelines have their eyes opened wide to it, the apologists don't invoke the all telling "now I don't think we should be pointing fingers on either side." Not that the attacks cease persay, at that point your side usually clams up if it hasn't run off to another topic for cover. You'll note, I don't say All catholics do this and I specifically limit it to many of the hardcore apologists and attack artists.
So please, do tell us about bigotry and slander. Your practices are shouting so loudly I can barely hear your protest to consider it as to credibility. God forbid you should need me to defend you on something where you deserve defending (as I have defended Catholics repeatedly to no credit - not that I'm keeping score) and I should ignore your protests as just the standard form of argumentation on your side. I like to defend truth. I don't find letting truth fade because of boys that constantly cry wolf to be a good thing.
You guys invoke a claim, and at the first sign of a fact that invalidates the claim, the epithets fly - "bigot, anti-catholic, heretic......" long and infamous list of bile that pours forth because the facts generally are always either against you or are not with you. If you guys could back up your claims perhaps the continual smear campaign against those who betray the emptiness of your claims would not be needed.
You're wasting your breath, Campion. Havoc has been engaged earlier this week to provide sources for some of this statements and actions he attributes to the Western Church. Nothing. Zip. Zilch.
No name calling. But certainly, a genuine desire to discuss the facts, logic, reasoning and faith of the matter. If someone wants to claim what the Western Church claims, then provide the citations, etc.
Sorry, but that's moral law 101--and the above-mentioned persuasions ALL hold that to be true.
Hold what? That I am not permitted to utter or write the words "The Roman Church is the Whore of Babylon?" You'll have to do more than assert such to make it so.
Besides, I think you are mixing apples and oranges: What is untrue is not right morally, but under our Constitutional system, men (like you, for instance) are free to think and utter religious creeds that may be wrong. Besides, truth is an abstract quality. Abstract qualities to not have rights. Individual free men have rights.
I perceive that you would gladly limit the rights of those with whom you disagree on matters of religion to speak their minds. That is not a noble position.
If I am not free to type that the Roman Catholic Church is the Whore of Babylon, then, whoops, I've lost my religious liberties.
What you declare to be false, I may declare to be true. We are each free to declare our doctrinal beliefs. (That bothers you, I know.)
Tradition also happens to be one of the two pillars of the Faith--the other being Scripture.
Perhaps you should re-evaluate your distant forebears' religious affiliation.
Thank you for so eloquently sharing your beliefs in a polite fashion.
However, as for me, I'll stick with the Scriptures, thanks. (See Abraham's words to the suffering rich man in Luke 16.) There is not a "second" pillar of faith for me.
If everyone held on resolutely to his forebears' beliefs, there could be no conversions to Christianity by non-Christians.
That doesn't work at this time in this place. I won't submit to shepherds who are in error or permit it to be taught in the church. I'm referring to a charismatic workshop and mass I attended where two priests were slain in the spirit, one involunarily. And maybe I'm in the wrong, but I just cannot risk my soul and mental health to that sort of thing. I don't trust bishops who permit these things.
I think people need to be very discerning as to whom they will follow in the church.
That really says it all. I hadn't thought about it that way.
Covering up isn't unique to the catholic church. It has also happened with the Masons where justice was not served and other powerful organizations.
You are an ex-Catholic attacking the Church in which your parents had the sense to have you baptized. We are not uncomfortable over your publicizing of the foolishness that you hold as belief according to YOPIOS. We are very confortable that you embarass yourself and those who agree with you. You have every right to make a spectacle of yourself. As a practical matter, it helps us in our work.
Why, Vatican II committed Catholics to DEFEND the rights of error (that would be you and others like you). Of course, we are not about to defend ERROR itself. We did not have to say that we defend the rights of TRUTH because we have been defending that since Jesus Christ chose Peter. The defense and propagation of Truth has alwats been central to the mission of Holy Mother the Church.
Ninenot is a Catholic. Ergo, he is not wrong.
Fidelity: What are the criteria for liberal Catholicism? People have said, for example, acceptance of Humanae Vitae is the earmark of a conservative Catholic or a traditional Catholic or a Roman Catholic. How do you feel about that?
Michael Novak:I don't think in terms of laying down one or two liberal tests. On that score I thought then and I think now that the Catholic teaching, the current Catholic teaching, on contraceptives is a mistake....Pope John Paul II has a splended little book on responsible love, a splendid little book which is, I think, nonetheless wrong on marital love. ...
F:In 1968 Pope Paul VI sketched out a scenario for the West -- saying that contraception would lead to abortion and abortion would lead to infanticide and euthanasia and so on . Do you think that that has happened? Do you think that that is a valid argument?
MN:Yes and no. All of these things have been coming together for a long time. Long before 1964. And it is true that they tend to come as a complex. That is the 'yes' part of it. But, no they need not. Each of those issues deserves to be considered in its own context and for its own merit.
F: But globally it seems that the things go together.
MN: They do and they don't. [Huh?!! So the fact that nearly every country that introduces contraception soon legalizes abortion is an optical illusion? A chance peculiarity of our time? My rant.] There has been infanticide long before there was contraception. Infanticide is a normal practice of many cultures of the world. Horrible as it is, and abortion too. Abortion may or may not go along with contraception....
F:But you are in a sense picking and choosing among Catholic doctrines.
MN:That's much too arbitrary. I'm not picking and choosing at all [I love it when they tell you they aren't doing what they manifestly are doing -- my rant]. I'm thinking in a sustained and systematic way, and there are some places where I think that the humanistic experience, has taught us more than our community has yet publicly recognized. The Catholic Church marches through history burning its martyrs on every street corner and declaring them saints twenty-five years later. Somebody has to go out there and do the work first. Intellectuals are characteristically at war with the magisterium of their time and thirty or forty years later the magisterium learns from them. That's a normal dialectic. If you are a part of the church you have to be a part of its avante garde too and some of the things you say will be wrong and some of them will be right. That's for the community as a whole to wheedle out. But you'be got to be faithful to your own intellect. Otherwise there's no chance at all.
The interview was done in the early 80's. I got it from the anthology, The Best of Fidelity: Volume I -- The First Three Years, pgs 30-35, Ultramontane Associates, 1984.
With Catholics like Michael Novak, who needs anti-Catholics?
Had the defrocked priest been prosecuted to the full extent of the law? Did he serve jail time? Or was he simply defrocked and released into society anonymously? If so, then a definite coverup was going on, and that is the problem. Sex offenders have to register as such. If a priest was simply defrocked and sent back into society, then how would that society know that they had a child molester (or whatever he was) in their midst?
These molestations have not been treated as a crime by the Church. Priests who molest need to be prosecuted and serve jail time. Not just released into the public into a new location. Sorry, Mr. Donahue, but releasing a former-priest/child-molester into a new location just isn't good enough. They also need to serve jail time, and then register as sex offenders in their new location.
It seems that the Church is so desperate for nuns & priests that they have been willing to overlook sexual crimes among their clergy. Or, they don't want to air their dirty laundry in public (so to speak). Or, they just don't consider sexual crimes to be that serious. Whatever the reasons, it is a real tragedy.
And, the coverup is just as bad as the crime.
Well, under the Constitution, falsehoods ARE limited--slanders, libels, etc. But you are correct insofar as you may hold any religious belief you choose, ALMOST without regard for its grounding in truth.
And, BTW, you seem to have forgotten the self-identification Christ uttered: I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
He wasn't talking through his hat. The Word is Truth--very much a Person, not abstract in the least.
Now here's something interesting: the word "commandments" is NOT a translation of the Hebrew term used to describe the Decalogue. In fact, the Hebrew word means "way."
The Commandments are "the way."
Thus, Christ self-identifies Himself as the Commandments (which is why He could summarize them into only two great commands) and further fully equates Life, Truth, and Way (commands.)
Then He founded a Church to which you refer as "the whore."
I dunno; it would give me pause--maybe you should think twice about it.
How he stayed in a position of power as long as he did is sick. Do you remember the comment about how "you treat the least...".
What if several priest had taken the Pope into a room and tortured him to the point that his life became a nightmare for years ... and then Cardinal Law covered for the monsters and worked so they could continue doing damage to the Pope and others? Well, that's what was allowed and it was worse than doing it to the Pope because it was done to children -- the most innocent among us.
People are not judged on how they treat the powerful, the wealthy or the famous, but how they treat the least among us.
Cardinal Law was evil and so were the "priests" who raped children, and the Catholics who let this go on and on and on. It's so sick.
How he stayed in a position of power as long as he did is sick. Do you remember the comment about how "you treat the least...".
What if several priest had taken the Pope into a room and tortured him to the point that his life became a nightmare for years ... and then Cardinal Law covered for the monsters and worked so they could continue doing damage to the Pope and others? Well, that's what was allowed and it was worse than doing it to the Pope because it was done to children -- the most innocent among us.
People are not judged on how they treat the powerful, the wealthy or the famous, but how they treat the least among us.
Cardinal Law was evil and so were the "priests" who raped children, and the Catholics who let this go on and on and on. It's so sick.
I think the book you referred to above was called Tell Me Why. I only read reviews of it. He supposedly has a daughter who lost her faith while attending college. If she grew up hearing comments around the dinner table such as, "the Catholic Church marches through history burning its martyrs on every street corner and declaring them saints twenty-five years later," it's a wonder she had any faith to begin with.
That is kind of the problem, isn't it, people do understand what went on here, too bad many Catholics cannot grasp the fact that it is very strange to the rest of us why this man was not turned over to the law for a long jail term, from which he would emerge actually parolled.
There was no punishment, no justice for the victim, no charges laid, no daylight allowed to shine on this darkness, no..no..that was not to be allowed and that is what we all comprehend very clearly. Not only that was not allowed but the Pope basically said, "Hey, if no body knows about it and it stays covered up, let him stick around".
No matter how much lipstick you put on this pig, it won't sell in the open market. Maybe this is how Catholics and the Pope believe in dealing with molesters, hide them from their just civil punishment, bury the victim in silence, it's not how the rest of civil society operates however.
Meanwhile you can have any opinion that you want but I have read both of your posts throughout the year,and it seems you both usually seek to base your opinions on facts. Assuming you haven't changed you M.O.'s,the facts are the priest in question was reported,convicted,jailed and laicized. It was a comment on the decree of laicization and it was appropriate.
In this case the sub-title of this thread is a fact,and that is;[Rabid Bigots Falsely Accuse Pope]
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