I don’t have a bishop. I left the building that is today ‘the church’ years ago. For the very reasons I stated previously.
Quoting verse isn’t helping your position. In fact it is making my point. The entire basis of my position is that the church leadership has abandoned everything ‘the church’ stood for. IE, God, and replaced it with material concerns. Because He’s the very thing the Catholic leadership has turned it’s back on with their socialist/homosexual/silence on abortion agenda.
This conduces very much toward that Pharisaism to which we are all tempted: "O God, I thank You that I am not like Tim Dolan. That I am not like that dolt, communist, whatever, Jorge Bergoglio."
You are separated --- not entirely, but to an extent --- from that very Body, built by Christ, which gave you the Scriptures on which you hope to stand.
It leads by a short route to cynicism, callousness, and slander: dismissing with a wave of the hand 2,000 years of living transmission of the words and example of the Apostles, dismissing good popes along with bad, good bishops along with bad, saints with sinners, dismissing a billion fellow Christians whom you say "are" the Church, Christians in every culture, in every century, on every inhabited continent, because you perceive that some of the hierarchy are unfaithful.
To remedy which, you are unfaithful yourself, because separated from the very people who for 20 centuries have been faithful. And why? Because you are surprised, surprised and shocked, shocked that there are sinners in the Church.p> That's a hell of a problem, scandal: I mean it. St. Francis de Sales says that those who GIVE scandal (peeling people away from the Church because of their bad example) are committing spiritual murder; and those who TAKE scandal --- allowing themselves to be peeled off by that bad example --- are committing spiritual suicide.
The Ark was full of sh** (had to be, with all those animals). I'm sure it smelled to high heaven. But no way I'm going to go off on my own rubber raft--- or some hodgepodge flotilla of rubber rafts --- because Noah was a drunkard and the Ark stank.
Pay real close attention now.....The Catholic church is suing the Federal gov't regarding the birth control issue, they are 100% against abortion and homosexual behavior (not homosexuals)...the current Pope is from a socialist background and does lean that way....the church doesn't, the Pope does.