Posted on 06/09/2002 5:16:31 PM PDT by Lady In Blue
USCCB COVERAGE OF THE SUMMER SESSION
EWTNews Director, Raymond Arroyo and his guest will provide extensive coverage of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops Summer Plenary Session. Tune in for daily live coverage of the events.
There is always room for forgiveness. I will pray for them and for you.
After watching last night's 60 Minutes II and seeing the Bishops in action today, it is very hard to believe that these bozos are the successors to the Apostles. Perhaps, most of them they aren't.
The Vatican STILL doesn't really think that private authorities should stick their noses into what the Curia believes is a Church issue.
Who would be doing the forgiving?
Absolute freedom of religion means that a given religion is free to determine its relation to the state. Under caesaropapist liberalism, even in its American form, the state defines the bounds and authority of religion. Is it any wonder that the Vatican is skeptical of such pretension?
This bears repeating. You could even include the commentator and priest on EWTN today!
The Vatican's skepticism in this particular case makes it appear to be soft on sexual perversion toward children.
I gotta go to the cops to keep Father's hands off my kid, while the Vatican tut-tuts that I'm going over the head of a bishop who protects these pervs?
His Excellency Gabriele Montalvo
Embassy of The Holy See
3339 Massachusetts Ave., NW
Washington, DC 20008
Your Excellency:
With the American bishops now confronting the scandals they have produced, I pray that our Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, will not hesitate to attack priestly and episcopal abuses at their root. Crimes of sexual misconduct must not be considered in a vacuum, as if unconnected to both the priesthood and the episcopacy, nor is this the time for the half measures of new policies and procedures. There must be no talk of a bureaucratic response, nor of innovations that will further disorient and alienate the faithful who are reeling from years of destructive experiments.
Do not be swayed, your Excellency, by talk that sexual abuse, and the corruption that conceals it, derive from celibacy. In truth, they derive from unfit priests with objective disorders, and from corrupt bishops, who do not appear out of thin air. They come from unfit seminaries, which tolerate moral disorder, where good men are harassed and corrupted. They come from unfit candidates, from a laity whose religious formation has been neglected when not perverted. Finally, they come from an ecclesial culture that honors mastery of process above holiness. Today's shortage of vocations is the fruit of many years of poor catechesis, insipid liturgies, and the wholesale abandonment of apologetics. Many good men have never discovered the riches of the Church, while others gravely unfit have been allowed to impose themselves on laity who - having been denied the spiritual and catechetical resources to identify and resist these wolves - will only produce more and worse unfit candidates in the future.
Because the Church's disease is systemic, she must treat it systemically, eschewing any procedural "solutions" that treat only symptoms and not deep spiritual sickness. The Church must never tolerate the idea that wreckage caused by sexually disordered priests and bishops can be "managed" as a regrettable but unavoidable cost of doing business. Finally, the Hierarchy must submit, in both letter and spirit, to the 1961 Document, "Careful Selection and Training of Candidates for the States of Perfection and Sacred Orders" as promulgated by the Vatican's Sacred Congregation for Religious on February 2, 1961. Authentic compassion flows naturally from a well-formed priesthood and a diligent, orthodox episcopacy. Stripped from this proper context, the current episcopal expressions of regret are pseudo-compassion - an exercise not of charity but of cynicism and fraud.
Bishops who have been negligent or complicit must be driven from their sees. It is not enough that the guilty be quietly retired: they must be punished, and seen to be punished, as an expression of the Church's scornful repudiation, and pour encourager les autres. That is real compassion for victims - whose injuries cry to heaven for vengeance. Do not be intimidated by threats that the faithful will follow bad pastors into schism; they will not. After forty years in the desert, the laity hunger for doctrinal clarity, for a restoration of dignity and sacredness, and for faithfulness from the Church who solicits their faith.
Respectfully requesting that you convey these sentiments to our Holy Father, and asking your Excellency's blessing, I am
Sincerely yours,
[ROMULUS]
Good idea!
oreilly@foxnews.com
or you can go to foxnews.com and then the Contact buttons.
From yesterday's thread, I don't think many intended to watch it -- they just don't trust 60 Minutes II (or "I" either, for that matter).
Has that been posted here?
If "going to the cops" entails repealing the priest-penitent privilege, a repeal for which there is no small support, then skepticism is indeed warranted. Pederasty isn't the only threat, and we are fools if we think it is.
I think I'll take a stroll home now, visit the Blessed Sacrament, change, and go out for a nice cold one ... or two. God bless.
Is Montalvo trustworthy? (I know nothing about him.)
Maybe you could cc l'Osservatore Romano by e-mail through their website.
LOL. I didn't see any of the coverage today. But, on the way home I chose to listen to Bob Dylan sing "Everything is broken." It seemed apt for today; "Broken cutters, broken saws... Broken treaties, broken laws... Broken words, never meant to be spoken.. Everything is broken"
When I got home, I researched the quote I was paraphrasing earlier when I was noting how the coming collapse is inevitable. It was by Peter Kreeft in his "You can Understand the Old Testament." Pride---->Disaster--->Suffering---->Repentance----->Blessedness---->Luxury ---->Pride etc etc etc.
I don't see how we can escape.
Maybe I'll just pour four fingers of single malt scotch and listen to Dylan sing "Highlands" "My heart's in the Highland, gentle and fair. Honeysuckle blooming, in the wildwood air. Bluebells blazing, where the Aberdeen waters flow. Well my heart's in the Highlands, I'm gonna go there when I'm ready to go"
I'm ready to go there now..bottoms-up (pun intended)
Montalvo is part of the problem, I fear.
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