Thursday, June 11, 2015
Monday, June 8, 2015
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Thursday, June 4, 2015
"At Long Last, Have You Left No Sense of Decency?" Reflections on the Anti-Francis Mindset
I’ve often had to defend Pope Francis from the charge that he intends to change Church teaching. To me, it was obvious that what the Pope actually had to say about marriage and family was nothing like what his detractors accused him of. But his detractors continued to speak against the Pope, ignoring what he did say and relying on partial quotes. When they were shown to be in the wrong, the result was to claim the Vatican was “issuing more clarifications,” implying that the Church was involved with damage control, and that the Pope was in the wrong.
In other words, the Pope was blamed for saying what he did not say, and for not saying what he actually said. People relied on biased sources, whether secular news sources with whom a person agreed with ideologically, or from religious oriented blogs who have a strong hatred of the Pope and, because of that hatred, portray what he does in a negative spin. While the sources of these distorted presentation will no doubt bear responsibility for grossly misrepresenting the Pope, that does not excuse the members of the faithful from learning the truth about a claim before repeating it to others. Rash judgment is a sin.
The latest bit of shame involves the response that came in response to the interview of Cardinal Kasper where he was forced to admit that his proposals did not ever have the support of the Pope:
ARROYO: Well you did say, and the quote is: “Clearly this is what he wants,” and the Pope has approved of my proposal. [To admit the divorced and remarried to Communion] Those were the quotes from the time …
CARDINAL KASPER: No … he did not approve my proposal. The Pope wanted that I put the question [forward], and, afterwards, in a general way, before all the cardinals, he expressed his satisfaction with my talk. But not the end, not in the … I wouldn’t say he approved the proposal, no, no, no.
This was a point where opponents to the Pope constantly bashed him, accusing him of intending to change Church teaching (contrary to all evidence), and it turns out that it was all relying on a fabrication. The Pope had expressed an interest in finding out how to better reach out to Catholics estranged from the Church, but he never said anything about permitting the divorced and remarried to receive the Eucharist.
That hasn’t changed anything when it comes to the anti-Francis crowd. I’ve seen some call this “a clarification.” I’ve seen others accuse the Pope of telling Kasper to be the Fall Guy. They won’t admit the fact that the Pope never was guilty in the first place. They still accuse him of being a Marxist or a Modernist or a Heretic. Personally, I see these antics and am reminded of the Psalms:
19 You give your mouth free rein for evil;
you yoke your tongue to deceit.
20 You sit and speak against your brother,
slandering your mother’s son.
21 When you do these things should I be silent?
Do you think that I am like you?
I accuse you, I lay out the matter before your eyes
(Psalm 50:19-21)
It is time for the “super Catholics” to consider the consequences of their actions. In being so certain of their righteousness and refusing to consider the possibility of error on their part, they cause division in the Church and disturb the peace of the faithful (cf. Acts 15:24). They have to ask themselves whether they will trust God and follow the Church, or whether they will trust in themselves and disobey the Church. The first choice leads to salvation, the other to ruin.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Why Do I Remain A Catholic?
Some blogs I know have taken up the question of, Why Do You Remain a Catholic? I guess depending on the attitude, it could be anything from a sneer to a request for information. Certainly at this time, the anti-Catholic forces in this country are on the rise and they do have good ammunition due to certain members of the Church dropping the ball or causing a scandal through their personal behavior.
But I find these issues to be irrelevant when compared to the reason I remain a Catholic—Because I am convinced that the Catholic Church is the Church established by Jesus Christ and that God continues to protect His Church from teaching error even when individuals within the Church do wrong.
So, if we know that God is with His Church, having given the Church the authority and the responsibility to carry out His mission, we can trust Him to make sure the Church does not mislead us and we can trust Him to protect His Church from attacks from the outside as well. That doesn’t mean the Church won’t face suffering—in fact Our Lord warned us that the world will hate us too (John 15:18-25). But the attacks against the Church will not defeat the Church.
So my remaining in the Church is not based in Papolatry (as the Protestants call it) or in Ultramontanism (as the traditionalists put it). I personally think Pope Francis is a good Pope, but he is not the reason for my faith. I trust in God to guide him so when he teaches in a way which requires assent, I trust God will prevent him from teaching error.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
Thoughts On the Growing Injustice Against Christianity In America
We’re told that judges have no right to refuse to impose laws they feel to be unjust, civil servants have no right to refuse to participate in a state sanctioned activity they feel is unjust, pharmacists and doctors are denied conscience protection and businesses have no right to refuse to do something which goes against the moral convictions of the owners. But, they do not apply this to themselves. Thus, we’ve seen governors and attorney generals who refused to defend/enforce the laws defending the traditional concept of marriage.
Americans seem to be so blind to the fact that the these arguments are only applied in one direction, denying religious freedom to Christians with a moral conviction that a law is wrong, while giving license to any other group (ethnic, gender, religion, sexual preference). What we have is the replacing the rule of law with diktats aimed at favoring the allies of politically approved ideas and harming those opposed to these ideas. The sad thing is, in the past we have lionized people who stood up to the state and said, “I will not comply with an unjust law.” These heroes in American history recognized when a judicial ruling or a law was unjust because it forbade them doing what they felt morally obligated to do.
The common tactic to justify this injustice is to try to link their cause to the Civil Rights Movement. For example, proponents of “same sex marriage” try to point to segregation laws in the 19th and 20th centuries and claim that the belief that marriage can only exist between one man and one woman is the same thing as oppressing African Americans. But that is a false analogy. The two sides are not equivalent. One can affirm that a person has rights as a human being without indulging a moral behavior believed wrong. But the Civil Rights movement existed because the laws of the time denied the fact that African Americans had certain rights as human beings.
In fact, the banning of interracial marriage (so often equated with the defense of traditional marriage) was a legal invention that invented an artificial barrier between male and female on the basis of determining that one ethnicity was inferior to another. That intention to discriminate is not present in the defense of traditional marriage. The defense of marriage recognizes that male and female runs across all national, ethnic and religious lines and those categories do not change what marriage is.
But “same sex marriage” does change what marriage is, by denying the complementarity of the genders as what marriage is intended to accomplish. The concept of “same sex marriage” reduces marriage to a legally recognized sexual relationship—something we do not accept as a valid definition of marriage, and something we will not cooperate with.
However, rather than actually try to discuss our concerns, the tactics today are very much similar to the attacks on Christianity in the times of Pagan Rome…making false accusations about what Christians believe in our opposition to what is morally wrong. Then, like now, Christians were charged with “hatred.” In that case, the charge was “hatred of the human race.” Here, it is “hatred” of the people who benefit from something we call morally wrong. The fact that we deny the charge is ignored—just as it was ignored in Roman times. If we will not do what those in authority want, we can expect to suffer whatever people can get away with inflicting on us (even when the Imperial government of Rome did not persecute Christians, many times governors and mob rule did).
Christians were accused of false crimes like cannibalism and incest in the times of Pagan Rome. We are accused of hating women and people with same sex attraction. Then and now, we deny these charges are a part of our belief. If anyone who professes Christianity committed such crimes, they would be acting against what the Church teaches. The fact is, while loving a person means treating them with all the dignity which belongs to being a person, this love does not require us to do for them what we believe is morally wrong.
Note this distinction. Contrary to accusations, we reject the claim that we support the mistreatment of people because of their actions and reject the claim that our refusing to support what we believe is morally wrong is rooted in hatred. We also reject the antics of extremists who invoke the name of Christian while actively doing things our religion forbids against those we believe do moral wrong.
America has a choice to make. Either our nation can act like the Roman Empire (except using lawsuits, fines and prison instead of lions) unjustly persecuting us because we refuse to do what we think is morally wrong, or it can act like what our Founding Fathers intended in limiting the government—forbidding it to interfere with our moral obligations to do good and avoid evil.
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