Posted on 09/07/2012 7:31:05 AM PDT by Alex Murphy
I’m not defending pedo-clergy. Put’em in jail (along with the pedo-teachers, coaches, etc.) and purify the Church. Better a Gideon’s army than the mess we are dealing with now.
God bless you!
Thanks, Mark, for the post. We need a BIG purification and the process is long and hard. Unfortunately the grease in the corrupt machine is money: if the Church is really poor like Christ, all of the wackos will leave and only those who love Christ and the Church will remain because there won’t be any money - just Jesus and His Bride the Church on Calvary.
Unfortunately many good and innocent souls are the victims and suffer under the politics, greed, lust, etc. of the corrupt members. My prayer: Come Holy Spirit and purify Thy Church, no matter what the cost. Amen.
A Gideon’s army would be nice about right now. I think of what Archbishop Fulton Sheen said about the encyclical Humanae Vitae:
from Orbis Catholicus Those Mysterious Priests
c. 1974 By Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
“The press and sometimes theologians said that the Holy Father should never have issued the letter [Humanae Vitae] because it divided the Church. Of course it divided the Church as Elijah divided those who had to choose either Baal or God; it divided the Church as the Lord divided it: ‘He that gathers not with Me, scatters.’ Certainly, it thinned the ranks of the Church just as God’s order to Gideon, trimmed his army from 30,000 to 10,000 and from 10,000 to 300 to do battle with an army of about fifty thousand. Humanae Vitae, quite apart from its teaching, is perhaps the most important Church document in modern times. It enabled the Church to know how many would follow the flesh instead of the spirit.”
True.
Sadly, we are seeing a lot of the fruits of the warnings issued by both Leo XIII and St. Pius X. Both warned of the danger of liberalism within the Church (and within the State). Take, for example, Leo XII (writing in Libertas:
By the patrons of liberalism, however, who make the State absolute and omnipotent, and proclaim that man should live altogether independently of God, the liberty of which We speak, which goes hand in hand with virtue and religion, is not admitted; and whatever is done for its preservation is accounted an injury and an offense against the State. Indeed, if what they say were really true, there would be no tyranny, no matter how monstrous, which we should not be bound to endure and submit to.
Or St Pius X (from Pascendi):
But it is not enough for the Modernist school that the State should be separated from the Church. For as faith is to be subordinated to science as far as phenomenal elements are concerned, so too in temporal matters the Church must be subject to the State. This, indeed, Modernists may not yet say openly, but they are forced by the logic of their position to admit it. For granted the principle that in temporal matters the State possesses the sole power, it will follow that when the believer, not satisfied with merely internal acts of religion, proceeds to external acts -- such for instance as the reception or administration of the sacraments -- these will fall under the control of the State. What will then become of ecclesiastical authority, which can only be exercised by external acts? Obviously it will be completely under the dominion of the State. It is this inevitable consequence which urges many among liberal Protestants to reject all external worship -- nay, all external religious fellowship, and leads them to advocate what they call individual religion. If the Modernists have not yet openly proceeded so far, they ask the Church in the meanwhile to follow of her own accord in the direction in which they urge her and to adapt herself to the forms of the State. Such are their ideas about disciplinary authority. But much more evil and pernicious are their opinions on doctrinal and dogmatic authority. The following is their conception of the magisterium of the Church: No religious society, they say, can be a real unit unless the religious conscience of its members be one, and also the formula which they adopt. But this double unity requires a kind of common mind whose office is to find and determine the formula that corresponds best with the common conscience; and it must have, moreover, an authority sufficient to enable it to impose on the community the formula which has been decided upon. From the combination and, as it were, fusion of these two elements, the common mind which draws up the formula and the authority which imposes it, arises, according to the Modernists, the notion of the ecclesiastical magisterium. And, as this magisterium springs, in its last analysis, from the individual consciences and possesses its mandate of public utility for their benefit, it necessarily follows that the ecclesiastical magisterium must be dependent upon them, and should therefore be made to bow to the popular ideals. To prevent individual consciences from expressing freely and openly the impulses they feel, to hinder criticism from urging forward dogma in the path of its necessary evolution, is not a legitimate use but an abuse of a power given for the public weal. So too a due method and measure must be observed in the exercise of authority. To condemn and proscribe a work without the knowledge of the author, without hearing his explanations, without discussion, is something approaching to tyranny. And here again it is a question of finding a way of reconciling the full rights of authority on the one hand and those of liberty on the other. In the meantime the proper course for the Catholic will be to proclaim publicly his profound respect for authority, while never ceasing to follow his own judgment. Their general direction for the Church is as follows: that the ecclesiastical authority, since its end is entirely spiritual, should strip itself of that external pomp which adorns it in the eyes of the public. In this, they forget that while religion is for the soul, it is not exclusively for the soul, and that the honor paid to authority is reflected back on Christ who instituted it.
And we can see, coming out of the USCCB bureaucracy and out of many of our own hierarchies, the results of the above and many other warnings issued by the Holy See in the past 150 years.
You mentioned the reaction to Humanae Vitae. That was classic, but hardly the only example. That was an encyclical that should never have been issued. Not because it was in error: but because we should have never fallen to that degree.
Again, I agree. It will take a generation or so to change the seminary culture in places (if not longer). It will take a rise in vocations to remove the temptation to over look things rather than take action.
Both take time, and probably a generation or more. For the vocations, I don’t know. It is hitting all churches and synods right now. Simply put the type of men we need to be pastors and priests are not, in this time, signing up for it. There are many reasons for that, but it is beyond the scope of this article.
Same with the rather dismal performance of teachers across the board.
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