I have come to the conclusion that nobody born after 1960 and raised "Catholic" has the slightest idea of what this 2000 year old religion is about. The "Vatican II" Catholics are not in any significant way different from contemporary Episcopalians.
The archbishop has had the gall to assert actual Catholic teaching rather than "pastorally" just going along with the flow. He describes things as "gravely evil" that are described in these words in, guess what, The Catechism of the Catholic Church. This makes him "divisive and intolerant" and the kids don't like him. He's not "true to our values and your namesake."
His crime: he's not a mirror of San Francisco culture. And as for someone like St Francis of Assisi, these folks have only a cartoonish and sentimental bird-bath notion of a really quite medieval and very Roman Catholic saint, one of whose constant attitudes was absolute compliance with the hierarchy. His famous Canticle of the Sun ends with the line "Woe to those who die in mortal sin!" He was galactically distant from Franco Zefirelli's hippie.
And among his other crimes, apparently His Grace turns a deaf ear to (notice the caps) "our Retired Priests."
How are these people different from a populist version of Henry VIII, who reduced the Church to a department of the civil government and English culture?
I may not practice the Faith anymore, but I sure as hell know what it is.
The Tolerant find the archbishop intolerable.
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'via Blog this'
3 comments:
LOL, when I read SFGATE, I thought they were calling this San Francisco Gate because it is some kind of controversy in San Francisco. Also, I thought his statements about sex were funny. So, double LOL.
The Monsignor of my Parish back home was disliked until a young liberal priest came in with his acoustic guitar. He was not at all a bad singer and he was kind or adorable but, nobody really wanted to jazz things up there and he could not read the parishioners at all.
-A
I think I have to agree with you. I have a friend who was quite Catholic, until about a year ago, when he started asking himself the Hard Questions (Problem of Evil, etc.) and found that all of his education had left him utterly unprepared for them. He's currently agnostic. He is aware of my spiritual fence-sitting. He remarked, "You know the best way to make somebody stop being Catholic? Send them to Catholic school." Which is really true. I went into high school knowing more theology than many seniors. Look at me now.
Catholic education right now is a joke. The (mostly female) teachers go on and on about the stories in the Bible, without going much into the historical context, and the doctrine is spoon-fed. The thorny doctrinal problems are left unexamined; ironic, seeing as we were deemed capable of "accepting" the doctrine of transubstantiation in grade school. We were confirmed en masse at a certain age, often as a graduation requirement in parochial schools, without consideration for whether we could make the sign of the Cross, let alone whether we understood (and accepted) the Church's stance on issues like abortion and homosexuality.
The Church has only itself to blame for its decline.
-Sean
You're the best.
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