Posted on 11/20/2003 12:43:24 PM PST by CatherineSiena
You contradict yourself (more or less): You say in one post that the bishops should not endorse or criticize candidates because "that would cheapen their mission." Yet, when it comes to upholding the Church's teaching regarding sacrilegious reception of the Eucharist, you say they should take into account the fact that doing so could affect the election.
It is not a bishop's job to guess how his actions might affect an election. He should teach what the Church teaches, and enforce the Church's law, and let elections take care of themselves.
Our real problem is that we have some bishops who are honest-to-goodness atheists, and sought their positions entirely because it's the best way for them to exercise political influence. There are also many more who are Democrats first, and Catholic a distant second, third, or fourth.
The more things change the more they stay the same. From The Church Above the State by Orestes A. Brownson in his Quarterly Review for July, 1873
There is nothing novel or in itself startling in the assertion that "God is above man and the church above the state," but it requires some courage on the part of a Catholic bishop in these times to proclaim it; for it is precisely what the age denies, and what exposes the church just now to a bitter persecution throughout Europe, and excites no little hostility to her even in our own boasted land of equal rights and religious liberty."
'The great controversy of the day turns on this very point. Gallicans, Old Catholics, liberal Catholics, Protestants, Jews, infidels, all unite in more or less distinctly declaring, at least by implication, that in the government of this world God is not above man, nor the church above the state. All those Catholics, and we meet them everywhere, who are accustomed to say, "My religion has nothing to do with my politics; I respect the priest in his place, but if he comes out of it, I treat him as I would any other man," and who, of course, claim for themselves the right to define what is the priests place and to keep him in it, practically deny it, as do all those Catholics who form secret societies, associations, and combinations, for national objects, based on principles that contradict the principles of their faith as Christians, or seek to accomplish them, by means religion forbids."
"All these, though they may not be aware of it, place a pretended patriotism above the Christian law, the state above the church, and therefore man above God."
This is very old, but bears repeating. Hopefully, finally, our bishops are realizing what they have started and are on their way to correcting it.
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