Sorry. I have a problem with this letter. It assumes that the problem started with the laity. From my perspective, it didn't.
From where I sit, I just take a look at my own parents. Children of immigrants, they were brought up in devout, strict households. They received the Catholic education given to immigrant children, which was short on theological sophistication, but long on pious devotion, love of Jesus, and love of Mary and veneration of the saints.
As they grew to adulthood, the world changed. After Vatican II, in the "spirit of Vatican II", they were taught by dissident priests that dissent from binding teaching was perfectly okay, as long as they were following their consciences. They didn't invent this garbage. They wouldn't have known how. Even to this day, when my mother babbles this dreck, it's like hearing a third grader trying to explain St. Thomas Aquinas' five demonstrations of the existence of God. It would be cute if it weren't so pathetic.
And my parents, in love, in ignorance, passed this junk to their children. The results? Two apostates, one very, very confused cultural Christian, and me, for whatever that's worth.
I went to Catholic schools. I wasn't taught Church teaching. I wasn't taught much at all about Catholicism. I went to a respected Catholic high school. Run by an order of monks. We were taught Freud, Marx, Camus, Sartre, Maslow, Jung. But don't think that we were asked to read St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas, or any papal encyclicals. This school didn't even have a lay principal until 1968, and was still heavily populated with brothers and priests when I graduated in 1978.
No, sorry, the ordinary people in the pews didn't do this. We are all each individually responsible to God for our own souls, and will each answer for our lives. But the crisis in the Church today is not of the making of the laity. We haven't done much to date to stop it, but we didn't create this problem.
Neither does that mean that we ought to throw stones at the bishops, priests, and others who exercise authority in the Church. We have to identify what has been done, and by whom, and we must do what we can to effect the removal of as many guilty parties in the hierarchy as we can.
But this can't be about revenge or bloodlust or even just retribution. It's about identifying those who have failed, doing what we can to force them from high office, and praying that they will be replaced with men of high moral character, orthodox belief and practice, and uncommon common sense.
sitetest
What can be said in defense of the clerics who wreaked such havoc? They didn't know better? Their formation was poor?