Posted on 04/04/2002 12:26:30 PM PST by Caleb1411
The Catholic Church is under fire in the American press unlike any time I can ever remember. To be sure, much of it is self-inflicted; what is being reported as "news" is, sadly, news that demands coverage. That is something Catholics must accept. But Catholics do not have to accept what follows, the what-this-story-means analysis. Many in the press are using recent Church scandals as fodder for attacks on Catholicism in general, Pope John Paul II in particular, and that is also scandalous.
Newsweek's Eleanor Clift has penned a piece on the magazine's Web site that demonstrates just how impossibly incoherent some can be when they choose to comment on a subject about which they know so little. She is positively breathless in her denunciation of the Roman Catholic faith.
Unable to go deeper than the superficial, Ms. Clift reduces the Church's problems to the political. "Like the church, Congress makes laws but doesn't always follow them," she explains. "The analogy extends to the Appropriations committees in the House and Senate, each of which is known as the College of Cardinals, because that's where the power is. They hold the purse strings."
Uh-huh. And why would this be so important? Here we go: "Pope John Paul II (has) named virtually every bishop in America. All of this pope's appointees are ideologically conservative. What has happened mirrors a U.S. president stacking the courts. With John Paul loyalists at every level" -- and here it comes -- "social change will be wrenching, if not impossible."
But the Catholic bishops aren't just out of step with the Enlightened; they're downright evil. Oh, Ms. Clift won't say that, of course. Instead she uses the old journalistic trick of having someone else say it for her. She finds the perfect gutless wonder to do her bidding, an anonymous diocesan priest. "As a group, they're like the Taliban," he proclaims, in his Christian kind of way, of his superiors. "If you want to succeed in this system, you never talk about the ordination of women -- and abortion and birth control are like the third rail."
This system. The Catholic Church with her 2,000-year-old tradition is thus reduced to some kind of Richard Daley good-old-boy political machine. Or Enron. The statement is preposterous, to be sure, but its inclusion in the article is calculated: Because this nameless source is a man of the cloth (we presume), he must by necessity be taken seriously. One wonders if it ever dawned on Ms. Clift that the reason he chose anonymity is not because his words are controversial, but because the "social change" he implicitly supports as a Catholic priest -- say, support of abortion -- is heresy in the eyes of the Church. One can be pretty certain that Ms. Clift never has figured out that what he told her is pretty stupid, too. But it doesn't matter. It's color he brings to her story, and that's really all that counts.
Ms. Clift now takes over and puts things in her own words. I wish she hadn't. "The papacy as we know it" -- she is now an authority on the matter -- "is a 19th-century convention. The idea that in an age of e-mail and fax, and the ability to whisk around the globe in jets, everybody kowtows to a central figure seems quaint."
Attention, Catholics: We had it all wrong. What Jesus Christ meant was, "Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church -- until the Internet comes along, at which point never mind."
Clift saves her best for last, returning to the scandals with as ugly a statement as she can muster. "The priesthood attracts sexually conflicted men," she states categorically, thus insulting every man who ever dedicated his life to Christ, every mother who ever bore a son who joined the priesthood, every Catholic who ever felt a certain reverence for those touched by God as his shepherds -- in short, every Catholic who calls himself a Catholic -- "and the church will have to face up to that as a potentially criminal matter, not as a way to perpetuate an outdated custom of celibacy."
She is called the Suffering Church for a reason. The Catholic Church survived the Romans, the Reformation, Hitler's Nazis and Lenin's communists. She will survive the poison quill of Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, too.
Just you wait! The Protestant churches will be next.
The media is just spinning their tangled web of lies and deceit, as usual. If they are so set on making homosexuality 'normal' you'd think they'd be congratulating the Church on their 'tolerance!'
Sorry to break the bad news to you, but the Church, as a whole, will be persecuted. This means all the denominations as we are all one in Christ.
The good news is that one scandal after the next makes the Body of Christ band together ever more tightly, in unison and in prayer. The Church has become complacent through tolerating liberalism and is now under attack from those very same evil forces. However, the Church will survive this. History shows the Church has survived throughout, and that fact alone has the liberals scared to death.
Anyone who picks a fight with God Almighty and his Church is sure to lose.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.