Bishop Joseph E. Strickland - "Strickland breaks silence on McCarrick" Posted on 09/25/2019 12:14:42 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
Bishop Joseph E. Strickland - "Strickland breaks silence on McCarrick"
Bishop Joseph E. Strickland of Tyler, Texas, wouldn’t label himself as “bold.”
[snip]
“Honestly, I guess I’m bold enough to just say what I think,” he said. Even “if it gets me in trouble — sometimes it does — I’m going to be true to what I believe. It really saddens me to be considered bold for simply reading the Catechism out loud.”
“When I was ordained a bishop almost seven years ago, I said I’d guard the deposit of Faith entire and incorrupt,” Bishop Strickland said. “That’s what I’m trying to do. It shouldn’t be considered bold to simply uphold my promises. It’s a basic job description.”
Defending Church teaching
In 2012, Bishop Strickland became shepherd of his home diocese where he had become beloved as “Father Joe.” Catholicism is a small minority in east Texas, and many know next to nothing about it — a fact that became evident when Bishop Strickland walked into a local restaurant in his bishop’s cassock and was hailed, “Hey, ol’ pope.” Now, seven years into the job, he has gained something of an international reputation, particularly through his use of Twitter to preach the truths of the Faith.
One of the motivating factors for Bishop Strickland is his distress from what he sees as a rising number of “so-called Catholics” who do not accept Church teaching and who seek to change it.
“Compassionately, you can’t slam the door in someone’s face who says, ‘I don’t understand,’ or ‘I can’t embrace,'” a challenging teaching, he said. “Pastorally you have to help people work through it.”
“But to change the teachings because they can’t embrace it is not Catholic,” he said.
{snip}
Bishop Strickland gets particularly animated when it comes to challenges to Church teaching regarding sexual morality."[T]he truth is that any sexual activity that is not between a married man and woman, [and is] open to life, is disordered. There are people say that harsh word “disordered” in the Catechism regarding homosexuality should be removed. But I think it should be there in any description of sins against the Sixth Commandment.”
"The Gospel does not call for people to live a disordered way of life and just say, ‘We’ll make it perfectly fine. We’ll just change what the Catechism says.'”
A need for bold saints
Bishop Strickland points out that the way to overcome these divisions is to follow Christ completely.
"Being all about Christ and being all about what he has taught us is the greatest path to unity that I can find.”
Bishop Strickland acknowledged that his approach to proclaiming Church teaching has moved many to send notes and leave phone messages in support.
“You probably wouldn’t imagine how many people have contacted me saying, ‘Thank you for speaking up — thank you for teaching about what we believe,’ because they’re not hearing it,” he said. “And that’s tragic, really.”
[He spoke of] his belief that many bishops often are hesitant to speak up because of a “concern about position.”
“If being removed from my position as bishop, or giving up my position as bishop would help the Church heal and gain greater clarity and gain greater unity, I would volunteer in an east Texas minute,” he said. “That’s really what it comes down to. I would do anything that I feel I can to promote unity, to promote the truth, to guard the deposit of faith, to respect the chair of Peter. To respect everything about the Church, I will do my best. If God should reveal to me that, ‘Well, Bishop Joe, the best way to serve is to get out of the way or to do whatever,’ I’ll do my best to do it.”
But, he said, “I think it’s sad that every bishop isn’t saying, ‘This is the Catechism. Embrace it. It’s a loving truth that Christ has revealed.'”
Boldness isn’t something that Bishop Strickland sees as only the responsibility of bishops. Rather, it’s a quality that all Christians need to embrace today, especially noting the witness needed from married couples in the wake of so many threats to marriage and family life.
“We need married couples to live boldly what the Church teaches,” he said. “It’s tough. It’s not an easy path. I’ve had many married couples say, ‘Bishop, we’re facing a bold challenge in our lives, and it’s very disheartening for bishops not to be bold.'”
‘We need clarity’
Bishop Strickland was one of the first to speak out after Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, former apostolic nuncio to the United States, released his “testimony” last August, in which he referred to a “gay lobby” in the Church and even claimed Pope Francis rehabilitated former cardinal and sexual predator Theodore E. McCarrick, former archbishop of Washington.
“When I responded to the original Vigano statement, I said, ‘This looks serious enough and credible enough, so it needs to be investigated,'” Bishop Strickland said. “I would have loved to see it investigated and proven to be inaccurate and off-base and distorted. But certainly much of it has been proven to be accurate.”
Bishop Strickland added that he is not satisfied with the Church’s response to the McCarrick affair.
“I believe the bureaucracy has used McCarrick as a scapegoat,” he said. “McCarrick is now [being] used to say, ‘OK, we know this can be proven, we can’t hide it anymore, this man is dirty. So let’s get rid of him and that will shut them up.’ I don’t think it’s worked. I have encouraged people to keep saying we need clarity.”
“It wasn’t the response of shepherds of souls,” Bishop Strickland said. “I don’t think it was a faith-based response.”
When it comes to a full investigation on McCarrick, which has been publicly demanded by clergy and laity alike, Bishop Strickland said he doesn’t “have a lot of hope.”
“I just don’t think the bureaucracy is going to move it in that direction, honestly,” he said. “Hopefully I’m wrong. Maybe a very detailed report is coming. But, honestly, I think that if that report ever came, the position of a lot of hierarchy in the Church would be put into question if not totally undermined. I think it’s all connected.”
At the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ plenary assembly last June, Bishop Strickland was the only bishop to speak up in support of two lay-led boards who asked the body of bishops for a full-scale report on McCarrick.
“I didn’t hear any support for that or any response to that,” he said. “It was like ‘Oh, OK, sit down Strickland.’ To me it was a slap in the face to those advisory boards that we constructed, that we called forth. These busy people giving of their precious time and sharing their talents, and they say, ‘Please do this,’ and we say, ‘OK, next on the agenda?’ It’s disrespectful if nothing else.”
Promoting unity
Bishop Strickland acknowledged that upholding the Faith — including its controversial aspects — may result in some people leaving the Church.
“There will be people who walk away. I’d rather have them walk away because I’m teaching the clear, settled Catholic faith than walk away for some fractured reason,” he said. “Unity is not going to happen if you’re not teaching the same thing.”
Thinking back to May 2018 when all of the bishops in Chile offered Pope Francis their resignations after an emergency summit on the abuse crisis in that country with the Holy Father, Bishop Strickland pondered what it might look like if bishops in the United States chose to do the same thing.
“Honestly, if the USCCB came out and said, ‘For the good of the Church we’re requesting every sitting bishop to offer his resignation to the Holy Father,’ I’d be writing it as soon as I heard it,” he said.
“I don’t expect that to happen, but if it did, in order to bring final healing or an element of healing and greater unity, (to) be unified as bishops by all offering our resignation, I think that I’d be willing to do it. If every sitting bishop was suddenly gone and we started over, it might not be such a bad thing. And I’d be willing to take the lead and be the first to hand in my letter.”
“I’m nothing special,” he said. “I’m just one guy in a small diocese in east Texas. But I think we need that attitude. What is best for the Church? What is most faithful to Christ? What is going to promote the greatest unity?”
Claiming the Good News
Finally, Bishop Strickland reminded Catholics to remember the treasure of the Faith, which is the surest hope there is in the midst of the crisis.
“What does the word Gospel mean?” he asked. “It means good news. In a lot of the controversy, we’ve lost sight of that. This is the best news for humanity that has ever been proclaimed. The son of God has been sent to us, has lived among us, died for us, rose for us, and we have the ability to share in his saving action of sacrificial love. That’s good news! Let’s focus on that, let’s celebrate that, let’s call young people to that.
Yeah, it’s challenging, but it’s good news. That’s something, I think, in all the noise and all the confusion and all the talk that I don’t hear mentioned enough. To be evangelical is to be about the Good News of Jesus Christ.”
Despite his outspokenness, Bishop Strickland said he still thinks of himself as shy. And he added that he recognizes that his words might be taken as provocative.
“I know that people will overhear what I say and agree or disagree,” he said. “A lot of it is appreciated; sometimes it is denigrated. Appreciated or not, it’s still the truth as far as I believe. And I have an obligation to teach it.”
On Sept. 22, Bishop Joseph Strickland shared a letter to the faithful of his diocese, asking him to join in a novena to the Holy Spirit to pray for the Church:
“In anticipation of the last weeks of 2019, I feel compelled to share words of hope in Jesus Christ and to give witness to my firm faith in our beloved Catholic Church; the Church established by God’s Divine Son.
"I am inspired by these words from in 1 Peter 5: ‘God’s flock is in your midst; give it a shepherd’s care. Watch over it willingly, as God would have you do, not under constraint, and not for shameful profit, either, but generously.’...
“We must be vigilant and rely on the power of prayer to combat the evils that surround the Church.
“I ask every disciple in the Diocese of Tyler to pray in union with me and all the faithful in the diocese, a novena to the Holy Spirit beginning on Sept. 27, the memorial of St. Vincent de Paul, and ending on Oct. 5, the eve of the Synod on the Amazon.
[…] Let us pray for the Holy Spirit to renew our faith in Jesus Christ and his Church entrusted to his apostles on Pentecost, to guide the Church away from any false doctrine and infuse Her with the strength to embrace the ancient deposit of faith with new fervor.”
We should all go to his Twitter and give him a big ol' FReeper cheer.
the ‘church’ is morphing- defending the gospel is no longer cool- defending the climate is the new religion
Catholic Missionaries Compare Greta Thunberg to Virgin Mary
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/3781191/posts
Going from worshiping the Creator to worshiping the things created
This LCMS Lutheran wishes all the Catholic priesthood talked and thought like Catholics, instead of like liberal pseudo-Christians in long robes. I'd much rather discuss the differences between Lutheran and Catholic teaching, than have to discuss the similarities between pseudo-Catholic and pagan teaching that is sending much of the church to heretical hell.
No, bishop. The perversion of the natural marital act is disordered. Two people living tigeteher may be immoral, but it is not disordered.
Bump
You are right in that it is part of nature --- species-normal and necessary for the the flourishing of the race -- for a man and a woman to have sexual relations per se. So in that sense it is well-ordered, even if it is rape. Or fornication, or prostitution, or marriage by bride-capture, barter or concubinage. Or even polygamy, assuming the male is copulating only with the females, and the females aren't engaging in the odd jiggery-pokery with each other.
Don't be startled, let me rush very fast into the next point: all of the above varieties of porneia are still porneia, even if they are not biologically disordered. ("Porneia" is the Greek Biblical term for indecent or unlawful sex in general, nonspecified.)
Some are criminal. They are all at least indecent. Even Abraham and his bought or borrowed concubines who became some of the Great Foremothers of the people of Israel was in some sense falling short of what God positively wanted --- and falling short means, a kind of sin.
It is a different (though related) discussion as to whether an act is of the kind suitable for procreation. ---
And that's here disordered heterosexuality can come in.
A whole lot of heterosexuality in the modern world, even in putatively Christian circles, has been not only indecent but queered.
This is obvious where outright marital sodomy is practiced (depositing of sperm where it ought not to go: up the wife's thisaway or down her thataway) --- which is defined as sodomy in historic state law in the US: copulation via the mouth or anus, whether with a man, a woman, or animal, as the law said in Tennessee from the days of Andrew Jackson until quite recently indeed.
Thee is also the new kind of sodomy, depositing your sperm into a baggie or a poisoned or deliberately disabled female genital tract, which is to say, via contraception or sterilization.
So this would be not only porneia, (immoral) but also, disordered heterosexual copulation.
They common factor of all, is that it is intentionally and by deliberate act, sterile. It's disordered --- queered --- because it deviates from the kind of sexual act suited for procreation.
Think of it all as gay sex for straight people.
A Bishop with a spine!
The word “disordered” is used for a reason. That word (and no other) is not arbitrary in the teaching. It’s also not arbitrary that it is not used for other situations.
For bishops to gloss over this by saying, essentially, oh lots of stuff is disordered, is downplaying the seriousness of homosexual acts and trying to placate their proponents.
What purpose for a priest to vaguely state everything contra sixtus is disordered? It’s a diversion from the severity of the real topic.
How, I's not sure that's what Bp Strickland had in mind. Maybe he meant just plain old friendly garden-variety fornication. In which case, he ought not to call it disordered, "merely" mortally sinful.
OTOH, he might be alluding to hetero sex that has been queered or contracepted. I wonder if he has preached or taught or published anything opposed to contracepted pseudo-copulation.
Catholicism is a small minority in east Texas, and many know next to nothing about it — a fact that became evident when Bishop Strickland walked into a local restaurant in his bishop’s cassock and was hailed, “Hey, ol’ pope.”
Isn't Catholicism a small minority throughout *most* of TX (except near the border and maybe in San Antone [that's what a geography professor of mine had a habit of calling it, and he was from northwest PA] and Corpus Christi)?
ff
Hm. So why can;t we make this guy the new pope?
Sorry, let me clarify. A man and woman having sexual relations outside of sacramental marriage is not disordered.
umm, he’s not a Cardinal
One need not be a cardinal to be elected pope.
Oh, in that case the Cardinals may elect Ban Ki Moon as next pope.
Nope. You have to be a Catholic.
In that case, maybe Joe Biden! He will be available.
He’s got my vote!
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