I wrote at least three times on this thread that the bishops should go ahead and excommunicate.
But it won’t “help” bring clarity or benefit younger siblings. The younger siblings who “get it” already get it. The younger siblings who don’t get it won’t start getting it when the bishops finally act. They will turn on the bishops and blame them and instead of the focus being on the malefactors like Sibelius, it will be on whether the bishops shoulda done that or not.
Once moral rot and moral confusion sets in, even proper moral discipline can be twisted by those who hate it into its opposite. We have lost control of our own narrative. The bishops of the 1970s are to blame for that.
The bishops of today suffer from the malfeasance of the bishops of the 1970s. There is no way out now except through the fire of persecution. Persecution will bring moral clarity to those who already had it or were at least open to having it.
For those who have bought the Lie, and that’s probably a majority of “Catholics,” confusion, not clarity, will reign in regard to what the bishops just did.
Action on the part of the hierarchy would be very helpful from the point of view of public perception. But one of the reasons they are reluctant to do it, I think, is because they are generals of an army whose officers don’t give a darn about their orders. The orthodox bishops are afraid that giving a clear, unambiguous order will result in an outright mutiny among their lax, worldly clergy and possibly lead to schism, so they prefer to maintain the fiction that they hold the powers of leadership and are just holding back.
But the secret is that you didn’t get two generations of ignorant, unbelieving Catholic laity out of nowhere; they were created by a clergy that was either unknowingly ignorant or one that was intentionally disobedient to church law and doctrine. Granted, the responsibility for the institutionalization of this goes back to some really bad bishops, such as Bernardin, but we underestimate the fact that the Church was left in complete disarray after Vatican II. This was worsened by new policies actually depriving bishops of much of their individual power and furthermore making the national bishops’ conferences the ultimate arbiters of life on the dioceses. So once liberals took over those (and conferences of religious superiors, too), which they did immediately because they had set them up, the individual bishop became a nobody, just a rubber stamp for the national conference or a powerless enabler of his dysfunctional, faithless clergy.
Things have changed, but not much. My bishop issued an excellent letter, to be read aloud at Mass in all parishes, about the threat to the Church. I would suspect that it was read in fewer than half the churches, and in fact, the clergy didn’t read it in his own Cathedral. And then the USCCB further weakened the individual bishops with a lame, “nuanced” video that implied that weighing “social concerns” (read Dem welfare policies) against mere Church teachings (read abortion) might justify voting for someone who opposed Church teachings. Or that was, at any rate, the message that my pastor and most of the faithful took away from it.
So while I think individual bishops should go ahead and do what they know they should do, they are like generals with a rebellious officer corps and a confused, lazy and political Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“I wrote at least three times on this thread that the bishops should go ahead and excommunicate.”
I never said otherwise. Why do you think they should go ahead and publicly excommunicate?
“But it won’t “help” bring clarity or benefit younger siblings. The younger siblings who “get it” already get it. The younger siblings who don’t get it won’t start getting it when the bishops finally act.”
I think they should have the chance, especially future generations. And I think teaching with discipline works much better than without.
Freegards