Happiness is a USCCB banner hanging in your church - get yours today!

Priestly Pugilist ^ | 10/3/07 | Priestly Pugilist

[Balt]

Here's the USCCB banner that solves the sex abuse crisis, right off the front page of their wonderous web site. Order one for your church today!

Don't know about you, but I feel a lot safer just looking at it. The colors are so pretty! It takes a bishop to recognize that the line between evangelization and marketing is very fine ... as fine as the Rio Grande, and just as straight (pun intended).

Let's all repeat it again just to say we did: "What the Church needs is holiness, not management."

A priest friend of mine has pointed out something which is obvious, but -- like most things obvious -- one doesn't think about until it's pointed out by someone else:

In the above poster/banner/whatever it is, there is not one single Christian symbol. It could very easily be an ad for a pharmaceutical company touting the effectiveness and safety of it's products. The poster, therefore, becomes an iconic testament to the very disease that afflicts us: our Faith is not a Gospel to be lived and preached, but a product to be packaged and sold. Even the horrors of priests gone wrong -- a circumstance brought about, more than anything else, by a selection process that eschewed normal, healthy, red-blooded, heterosexual men in favor of a warm, soft, "caring" approximation -- is, itself, nothing more than a marketing challenge.

Did a flaky priest touch you where he shouldn't have? We feel your pain! Look at this pretty poster. Listen to us give press conferences about how much we care for victims. Watch us compose complicated and verbose programs and policy manuals as big as phone books -- the bigger they are, the more we care. Watch your parish priest (who probably hasn't molested anyone) as we force him to go to seminars conducted by therapists and experts -- the same therapists and experts, by the way, who told us to go ahead and ordain all the warm, soft, "caring" creatures while we passed over the real men because they were ... well ... so sure of themselves, so into dogma and doctrine and ... well ... so not "open;" who were interested in all that old stuff like Communion Calls, Holy Hours, hospital visits, and without any interest in empowering the laity to do it; you know, the kind of guys who would have preferred the company of other adults rather than children. After all, didn't Jesus say, "Let the little children come to me"? He sure did, yes he did. Please look at our poster and know how much we care.

Oh, and don't fret about that Latin Mass thing. We already farmed most of those guys out of the system. They weren't "caring" individuals. Some of them didn't even like to be around kids. How cold! Did we mention that we care?

[PeterFinn]

Sad to see the Catholics emulating the United Methodists.

[Gingersnap]

What’s really interesting about the banner is that fact that the beings depicted all have enormous bodies but only very tiny heads.

I think that neatly symbolizes all too much of caring Christian thought these days.

[Gingersnap]

What’s really interesting about the banner is that fact that the beings depicted all have enormous bodies but only very tiny heads.

I think that neatly symbolizes all too much of caring Christian thought these days.

[joebuck]

unfortunately much of the modern Church is more concerned with entertaining the tares than nourishing the wheat.

[maryz]

So when are the national bishops’ conferences going to be suppressed? I think that’s the only way! What was Bruskewitz’s phrase at Dallas? “This hapless bench of bishops . . .”

[livius]

LOL! Good observation!