I got obsessed with something which was a huge (good) distraction for a couple of days, but now that’s all settled…and i have stuff due tomorrow. I’m also trying to process that whole bishops’ meeting thing. Open thread on that, if you like…
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I was thinking last night that in some respects the situation with the Bishops, particularly with the life issue, is a classic case of “too many cooks in the kitchen.”
Their hearts and minds are in the right place. But it’s hard to achieve uniform results nationwide when the message varies, even slightly, from region to region.
The stew, as the saying goes, gets spoiled.
In some respects, the situation with the Bishops, nationally, mirrors the situation, locally, in certain dioceses—where the positions of the parish pastors often vary significantly from the positions of other pastors and indeed the local Bishop.
I live in the Archdiocese of Chicago which Cardinal George once called (in an interview on “Chicago Tonight”) “ungovernable.” It’s ungovernable because the priests in the Archdiocese are allowed (by canon law, I believe) very wide latitude in their parishes. The Chicago Tribune ran an article some years ago, discussing GIRM, in which a local priest was quoted as saying that there is a “roll your own smoke your own” environment in Chicago parishes. Catchy phrase, eh? But this priest had a point, and it’s equally applicable to the Bishops: how can anything be achieved when authority is not centralized?
I occasionally use a business analogy when I talk about this problem in the Church. Starbucks or McDonalds would not have achieved their mammoth success if their products were not distributed to consumers in a uniform way. Their “distribution systems”—their franchises—are well oiled. In contrast, the Church’s distributions systems, the parishes, do not uniformly distribute the Church’s “product,” and of course in some cases parishes do not even distribute the “product” accurately!
With a broken distribution system, it is no wonder that the Church encounters problems with its teachings.
Thank God that the Church does not have a uniform “product”……………………we would miss the broad range of styles of worship, theology and spirituality.
Mike’s outlook reflects the problematic aspects of the Roman Church, as opposed to the Catholic Church. Our problem is that we have suppressed variety too long. There are other churches within the Catholic Church and they are not museum pieces, but living traditions, with different liturgies, theologies and spiritualities.
The problem with the Western Church is that it has virtually marginalized all the variety within it and halted the development of new rites and spiritualities. Cardinal Ratzinger had some good ideas about allowing the Western Church to continue to develop naturally. We haven’t heard much about that lately.
“The problem with the Western Church is that it has virtually marginalized all the variety within it and halted the development of new rites and spiritualities.”
Ha! Sez you…
First, no Eastern Church is developing new rites. We did that 40 years ago. It’s so yesterday. Go back 2k or live now.
Second, find out where the nearest School of Community is, live with those folks a little bit, then come back and tell me how the development of “new…spiritualities” has been halted in the Western Church.
Jim-
I don’t want to take the “product” analogy too far. There’s certainly a baseness to comparing Catholicism to the retail world. And beyond that, all analogies invite attacks directed at the true similarities of the things compared, and therefore tend to lead discussions away from the point.
I would say, however, that thinking about the Church as a “distribution system” is not a useless exercise. Evangelism, it seems to me, is just that. And the “product,” if you will, is the “Good News.”
Do we disagree about that?
Mike
No……we don’t disagree……….agreed that the “product” is the Good News……still alive and unwrapped.
Mike,
Try and impose that kind of ‘product discipline’ on bishops and you would get screaming like you haven’t heard yet!
(And it wouldn’t fly with our current Pope who is an advocate of the bishop’s role in his diocese.)
I work for the church and was on the board of two different national organization of lay ministers. We broached a few times the idea of a portable pension. (Now, when you put in enough time in one diocese, you’re pretty much locked in there until you retire – or you forfeit a lot of accrual on your pension. If a job beckons, or your family needs you in another place, or whatever, one can feel a bit ‘trapped’ without any portability.)
However, when we tried to bring it up, we were told that it would be easier to discuss women’s ordination than a portable pension!
And it is 20 years later, and no, we don’t have a portable pension system. That would be too much of a ‘violation’ of the independence of the bishops.
Top down uniformity is not our polity and it really never has been. (For awhile, it sort of looked that way with the growth of modern communications and transportation. But Vatican II reasserted the role of the bishop.)
And that’s what we have.
Bureaucracy breeds mediocrity. The crazy system of governing that we call the USCCB is so limiting that excellence is almost an impossibility. Surely this is not the idea of the Holy Spirit when it somes to the exercise of the Office of Bishop. Something on a collegiate scale in needed to address regional liturgical issues, regional issues of law, etc. However, we seemed to have devised a very effective means for sqcelching the inspirations of the Holy Spirit in various diocese (nothings gets people excited like sending an idea to committe). That is why the power and unity of message seems to be gone. When we are lead by the Spirit and not majority vote, things happen, men are converted. Just look at the difference between Cardinal George’s opening statement and it’s forcefullness and the final satement that he wrote after everyone had their say. Maybe the Bishops could form a commmitee to see how they might eleviate some of the bureaucracy.
The retail analogy, I am sorry to say, is jusr awful.
The Church is not retailing anything. The liturgy is adoration and praise of Jesus Christ in the Holy Trinity. It is faith in action because the person adoring is in Love with the Person of Jesus.
Lovers say I love you a thousand times as long as they are in love. Once they start looking for variety the love affair is over.
Some bishops and some others also want an open marriage, their faith is gone because their love is gone. They crave, desire variety in their adoration because the object of it keeps changing, say from Jesus to the self?
To take another angle on the “retail” analogy: if you want to buy a car, pro ejemplo, you have a view variety from mini-Coopers to Cadillac Escalades and every thing in between. You want a radio/CD player, OK. You want a surround sound theatre quality system, fine. Yet with all the variety there are basics that all cars have: engine, transmission, steering, doors, windows.
What we seem to have in the US Church like an auto company trying to build a car with many of the options but missing engines, transmissions. et al.
The liturgy, the catechism and church teaching are the basics that we all need. Spiritualities, ministries and apostolates are the options. We need to keep make sure we all have the basics and not confuse the radio for the engine–or vice versa.
Brian
Jim,
I think you’ve missed the efforts by Pope Benedict to reform the liturgy, i.e., to move it away from all those “styles” you like, so that Catholics can worship God in a reverent, dignified manner that is linked to Catholic tradition.
Cardinal Ratzinger’s notion was not about allowing the Western Church to develop “naturally,” but to allow the liturgy to develop “organically,” i.e., so the NO could inherit the riches of the Gregorian Rite, not so that everyone could go crazy and inflict their own personal agendas on the liturgy and on Catholic theology. You might also consult the document he wrote for the CDF on the work of the theologian: “Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian.” This is not about doing your own thing, either.
A way must be found for a more democratic exercise of authority in the church. The current top down model, an aging hierarchy ranting about absolute spiritual power does not meet the present situation and bodes ill for the future.
Why was the strident posturing of so many Bishops quietly ignored? Simply because it does not resonate with many in our culture. And the screamers were giving a free pass to a political party that had much blood on its hands, a party which had bankrupted the nation and its allies.
There is nothing in Scripture to proscribe a more democratic exercise of power in our church. Parishes should be allowed to select their own pastors and Bishops. To concentrate all power in the Papacy condemns us to medieval personnel practices. See the evidence in not being able to recruit priests. We blew it big time when we allowed JP2 and others to subvert the intent of Vatican 2.
Mike
I endorse your analogy because you did not intend many of the things that are being attached to it. Those who oppose you are perhaps ascribing areas of ecclesiology to your corporate metaphor that you never intended.
Morals…when it is the subject of infallibility as abortion is (EV sect.62) should be uniform in treatment. You were not commenting on liturgy nor were you saying that we literally should “sell” the abortion position. Aquinas constantly spoke of how a certain expression was true in some senses and false in others. We ought to look for the true sense first.
Today’s NY Times on page 19 had a lengthy piece on a priest being excommunicated soon by the Vatican for ordaining a woman. Here is what I do not get. We can’t even get Rome or the Pope (canon law gives him supreme and immediate jurisdiction over all dioceses) to block all erring-on-abortion – Catholic pols from Communion as a symbolic discipline that informs them of the seriousness(Cardinal George says the Eucharist should not
be a battle field). Yet a priest who served in foreign countries for 36 years is excommunicated for an ordination of a woman that only a fringe group will ever take seriously anyway because it is invalid from the get go. Even some supporters of women’s ordination will not take invalid ceremonies as useful. So Rome won’t do a thing to Catholic pols supporting objective murder but Rome will act if a priest ordains a woman in a faux exercise.
The unintended message to the general world is that Rome is far more serious about women not being priests than Rome is about abortion. The world does not only watch what one says in documents (aborion is evil)…the world watches what you do about it. Right now Rome acts when a priest ordains a woman….and has yet to act really (aside from words on pols) against those pols who support abortion choice and that softness of Rome toward them started decades ago with Cuomo and Ferraro….not last year. That is why their numbers have grown to over a hundred Catholic pols since Cuomo….because nothing happened to Cuomo. If a teacher does not punish one child for throwing spit balls, expect a snowlike blizzard of them within a hour….from many children.
I think the problem is that throughout the ranks of the clerics, there is a lack of understanding of, what we in the military call “commander’s intent.” A hierarchical organization that is dispersed in space and time and that must rely on local leadership and execution to further the goals of the hierarchy, can do so effectively, if local leaders know the commander’s intent – what his vision is of the goals, of what needs to be done – then they can use their own judgment and initiative to make decisions adapted to local context that fulfill the commander’s intent.
Problem is, within the Church today, many of the local leaders – parish priests, even some bishops – do not share the “commander’s intent,” at all, and some actively dissent from it and so undermine the Church (“ungovernable”). The way you solve this is through personnel – clerics who subvert Church teaching and policy must be removed.
Tom Kelty – “A way must be found for a more democratic exercise of authority in the church.” I have found a way for you: join a Protestant church where you heart clearly already is, you heretic.
I agree with Brian Sullivan. There are certain aspects of Catholicism that are really “core,” and they need to be uniform throughout the parishes and dioceses. Accordingly, Bishops and priests need to be entirely on the same page, in much the same way that they are on the same page in terms of the precise words of the Eucharistic prayers, etc.
On the life issues, the “foundational” aspect of life is a “core” aspect that needs to be uniform. Bishops and priests need to be on the same page not only about the primacy of the life issue, but about WHY it’s foundational.
And they’re not. Especially at the all important parish level.
So the “product” is not being distributed properly, and hence “sales” suffer.
Tom Kelty:
I’ll bet that it does not resonate because as Jesus said ” my Kingdom is not of this world.” People mistake the here and now for the then and there. You must worry about your salvation not in the here and now but in the Kindom come.
“A way must be found for a more democratic exercise of authority in the church.”
No, not really. Unless you dogmatically hold democracy to be inherently superior to other forms of governance (like hierarchy) which is a memo Jesus apparently missed.
“an aging hierarchy ranting about absolute spiritual power does not meet the present situation”
Where are you getting this???
“Why was the strident posturing of so many Bishops quietly ignored? Simply because it does not resonate with many in our culture.”
You mean our spoiled, immature, narcissistic, I-want-it-now, overfed, spiritually comatose culture? The one inventing new sins on a daily basis? The reason our culture doesn’t “resonate” with the Truth is because the culture is stuffed full of crap. Stuffed things don’t resonate.
“There is nothing in Scripture to proscribe a more democratic exercise of power”
And nothing to suggest it.
Parishes should by no means be allowed to hand pick the priests and bishops that tickle their ears. If you think the problem is that the pope has too much power, you and I have been living on different planets.
We blew it when we allowed freelance liturgical “experts” and amateur theologians to ignore the actual *teachings* of Vatican II in favor of some private fantastical fever-dream they had called “the Spirit of Vatican II”.
I agree with Bill Bannon. The failure of the Church to act against Catholic politicians, and indeed its own priests who create confusion about Church teaching (e.g., Andrew Greeley), sends the wrong message, and perpetuates the problem.
If laws are routinely broken, and the violations are not penalized, sooner or later the people will conclude that the law is optional or altogether inapplicable.
Now, let me continue with my “distribution system” analogy. Let’s assume that there’s a Starbucks on the corner of my local town that decides to go off the reservation. It stops following the recipe for latte, and starts serving hot dogs and greasy hamburgers. What do you think “corporate” does to that store? And what damage does Starbucks suffer from the renegade’s behavior? The answers, I hope, are obvious.
But what happens to a priest, like my pastor, who refuses to follow the Church’s teachings on life, and encourages his parishioners to vote for Barack Obama? Nothing. Which encourages such behavior to happen again.
On certain issues (as Bill aptly pointed out, I’m not talking about liturgy here, but really mostly the life issues), the Church’s “distribution system” is broken.
Mike:
Are you suggesting that business is a good model for the Church? Do you believe in the nonsense about the “invisible hand”?
Jim-
I’m not suggesting a “business model” for the Church per se. I want to emphasize that.
However, I am suggesting that the Church could look to business models for general guidance about the problems it encounters in matters such as life issues.
If the Church is serious about reigning in the “roll your own smoke your own” culture of the local parishes, it must do the kinds of things that a corporate HQ would do to a renegade franchisee. It must tighten up its “distribution system.”
If the Church chooses not to do this, then the logical consequences will follow, and the Church must accept those consequences. The Church may not be heard to complain about them.
As the saying goes, you shall reap what you sow.
I’m an action oriented person. I despair over all of the talk about problems in the Church. Sometimes it seems as though Catholics have decided that nothing can be done about the problems, and that we’re all relegated to complaining on blogs. But that’s simply not so. There are solutions, and they can be implemented. As my grandmother used to say, where there is a will there is a way.
Mike
Tom Kelty’s wish for a more democratic exercise of power in our church isn’t necessarily incompatible with Mike’s wish for a better distribution of the Gospel message. It is wishful thinking to believe it an automatic improvement, but still.
The interesting point about the retail analogy is that dioceses are closer to franchises than to company stores. To the extent the franchise governs its own affairs in harmony with “corporate”, it can be let alone. On the other hand, that system only works if corporate is ready to ride herd on, or yank the franchise from, a disobedient franchise.
The problem is that Rome is unwilling to use the power of discipline for any purposes other than “inside baseball” clerical issues. Yes, I know it’s open heresy to ordain women, but isn’t it also open heresy to call abortion a fundamental right? And if Rome is (rightly?) shy about disciplining laymen over heresy, couldn’t she at least do something about the Drinans and McBriens?
Craig-
I agree.
In my parish, the pastor publishes Richard McBrien’s column every week in the bulletin. Just before the election, we were treated to McBrien’s column in which he declared that Catholics could vote for Obama with impunity. One parishioner produced this column to me, with highlighting, as support for his argument that his vote for Obama was OK.
Now, by way of example, would it be that difficult for the Bishop to tell my pastor to stop publishing McBrien’s column?
We’re not talking about rocket science here. And yet the Bishops walk on egg shells with the pastors. Wouldn’t want to intrude or offend.
Again, reap what you sow.
Mike
“We’re not talking about rocket science here. And yet the Bishops walk on egg shells with the pastors. Wouldn’t want to intrude or offend.”
Mike,
You have touched here on what is one of the great unspoken side effects of the vocations crisis — and, yes, there still is a crisis. Bishops don’t have a bullpen to go to……..and they remember the great exodus of priests in the 60’s and 70’s. They let pastors get away with all kind of things, just because they fear their leaving.
A bishop’s principal control over priests is the power to assign and re-assign: yet they don’t exercise the power because the priests have figured out ways to dig in at their parishes and resist re-assignment………………an experienced pastor can stay on forever in most dioceses and resist any change. Why? The bishop has no one suitable to replace him.
In addition, the older pastors for some reason are reluctant to mentor the young priests and often just let them drift. Instead of developing future pastors, they frequently just create in the younger ones the desire to get their own parishes so they can do whatever they want.
All of this would be different if our rectories were full of priests………..it’s a shame, really.
Do you believe in the nonsense about the “invisible hand”?
Jim,
There’s nothing nonsensical about the “invisible hand.” You misunderstand Adam Smith’s use of the term. It doesn’t mean that free markets will work efficiently always and everywhere; it simply means that they will work under certain conditions. In general, they work pretty well without central planning to produce the goods and services valued by society. Do you really believe that if government disappeared tomorrow, there would be no one making and selling things? That there would be no one buying anything?
The misunderstanding of basic economics in this country is appalling. Except for libertarians, no one argues for complete deregulation and free market economics. There is always a role for government to regulate risk, information asymmetries, and the potential of monopoly power. Adam Smith never meant by the “invisible hand” metaphor that everything turns out just fine if government never steps in. I encourage you to look up Leon Walras and Vilfredo Pareto to understand the concept in greater detail.
I believe there is a real distinction between The Church and mankind.
I’m no theologian and this is probably over simple but:
The Church has one mind, and is divinely inspired by God.
Man, while created lovingly by God, has no real idea what IS the mind of God but often talks as if he does.
We must let The Church speak. We must, as men (and women), get the heck out of the way as often as possible.
And I mean our human egos – whether we are Bishops, Pastors, Deacons, or laity – we have human egos that we conflate with God. This is hubris. And it causes us no end of problems.
We have a human ego that we must work to set aside so that we can actually DO God’s work.
If I thought for one minute that the USCCB was actually in charge of the Bishops, or doctrine, I’d be so out of here it’s not funny.
As it is they present me with a constant temptation to swim the Bosporus! The only thing that keeps me believing that I can be Catholic in the US is the fact that our Bishops are in communion, (at times by the mere legality, not the reality of obedience) with the Pope.
Without Petrine minisrty, I would have been long gone from Catholicism as I find it in America, and gone to the Orthodox.
Wanting a more democratic structure for the Church is like wanting a Jesus who decides to open the wide gate. It is not different than the builders of the Tower of Babel. Why they even mimicked the language of God…Let us make a tower and make a name for ourselves… In ancient culture, naming something gave one dominion over it…man wanted dominion over himself. Let us make the CHurch in our own image.
It is no different from women saying they have a ‘right’ to the priesthood. Because 21st century sensibilities say women have the same rights as men, we as fallen human beings believe that what we say should be applied to the Kingdom as well as to Caesar.
It seems to me that while I would love to see pro abortion politicians barred from communion, it is with our clerics that the weeding out should begin or the discipline if you like.
They are responsible for the souls in their parish. We count on them to teach the truth. Even today, when priests fail, we are far more hurt than if any other person in our life fails us. They should be teaching from the pulpit. I have yet to hear anything about the Real Presence, why we believe it, how to understand it etc from the pulpit in my church…and I have been going there for almost 10 years. Abortion? Heck no. The most we get is a small blurb in the bulletin about Promoting life month and we allow BirthRight to collect donations at our doors about once a quarter. But a homily on it…silence. Most Catholics get their understanding of the faith from other non educated Catholics, like Nancy Pelosi.
Ordaining a woman is tantamount to treason, it is in direct defiance of the Church and the priest’s place in it…priests don’t ordain…so yes, he should be excommunicated because he is the father of his flock and he is gives far more scandal than a politician. Think of the politicians as Eve and the priest as Adam. Adam was given the commandment not to eat of the tree, he was to guard the garden and his helpmate. He was to explain the commandment to her (he did a crappy job because she couldn’t even identify where the Tree of the Knowlege of Good and Evil was!); it was his responsibility to keep them from harm He left her out to dry and then instead of saying, ‘No, I won’t eat this and begging for forgiveness for her and himself, the coward ate the forbidden fruit and blamed the entire situation on the woman. The priest like Adam is responsible for teaching us the commandments, for knowing them and defending them to us and for us.
I am not defending the pro abort politicians, but when JFK was allowed to get away with compartmentalizing his faith (though I really don’t think he had any) it was all over but the shouting. Our priests don’t teach the faith for all kinds of reasons. Most of them are afraid of losing parishoners and having their parishes closed. American priests are American first, they fall into the same trap that most individualistic, narcissitic, 21st century westerners do, they have created God in their own likeness. It is the human thing to do. It feels better, it is more inclusive. It is wrong. As I see it, the priest makes a committment to Christ and to the Church, one that while it confers a gift on him also puts far greater responsibility on him as well; far greater than that of the laity. To whom much is given, much is expected.
One more thing, institutions don’t mess us up, we mess them up. I came back to the Church because she has a Pope and a Magisterium…they are a gift not a hindrance. Our Church gives us a wide road, we can vere left and right, but she provides guard rails to keep us from flying over the edge when we speed. If you don’t like guardrails, there are thousands of protestant denominations to cruise.
Craig-
The other thing I’ll add is this: if the Church can’t accomplish the simple, it can’t accomplish the difficult.
Mike
RevertMom struck a chord with me.
I am also a revert having left the Church for 26 years and coming back in 1996. I just “drifted” back attending Mass sporadically, then every week.
If I hadn’t educated myself about what the Church still taught, I would not have been able to tell by attending Mass on a regular basis. I attended 3 or 4 parishes in my area until settling on the parish that I joined so I didn’t get a one-parish perspective.
In the 12 year period since I returned, there has only been one priest – himself a revert – that talked about any of the hot button issues like cohabitation and abortion. He was summoned “downtown” and was “spoken to” because he was alienating too many parishioners.
Isn’t this the opposite of what should be happening?
Revert Mom
Be careful of your last paragraph:
“One more thing, institutions don’t mess us up, we mess them up. I came back to the Church because she has a Pope and a Magisterium…they are a gift not a hindrance. Our Church gives us a wide road, we can vere left and right, but she provides guard rails to keep us from flying over the edge when we speed. If you don’t like guardrails, there are thousands of protestant denominations to cruise.”
Don’t let your faith depend on men however highly ranked or you will leave when they fall as Pope Alexander VI and his 23 year old married (to someone else) mistress and his six previous illegitimate children in 1494 probably caused some of the nascent Protestant Reformers to leave rather than work from within Catholicism on issues like simony. They had a hard time calling him…your Holiness.
Separate the infallible and less than infallible but good writings and moments of the Pope and Magisterium….. from their existence as human beings wherein they can fail from negligence or weakness as administrators…..both of which have an effect on the world and on the Faith being accepted by others.
We have this odd thing going around the defensive version of Catholicism in the Catholic world: that only local Bishops and priests and lower-than-priests laity err in behaviour…. and that on the other hand, the Magisterium and Pope are to be protected from that same accusation of messing up at all costs even if they virtually sleep through a half century of scandal.
Catherine of Sienna did not agree with that view that Popes are perfect in se… and she berated a Pope respectfully but severely by letters which can be easily enough found on the net if you google it or research it in a Catholic library. St. Antoninus in the 15th century when writing his “Summa Theologica Moralis” dismissed the opinion of the Vatican curia on a certain financial moral issue because he noted that a substantial number of the curia had mistresses and therefore why need he deal with their objection to his view on usury. Paul in Galatians criticized Peter saying….”I withstood Peter to his face for he was deserving of blame”. Two Popes….Nicholas V and Alexander VI in bulls…. virtually wrecked Latin America for centuries by givng Iberia cart blanche to despoil and enslave in the new lands if they met resistance. Simply read the apropo passage in the middle of paragraph 4 of “Romanus Pontifex” to Portugal of Nicholas V in 1452 on line (Vox Nova much against their own grain….unintentionally has it listed to the right as papal social teaching…the irony is amazing)….Pope Alexander dittoed those rights for Spain later in “Inter Caetera”…1494.
This instinctive and badly flattering protection of the Magisterium as always perfect can be found on EWTN in Fr. Charles Conner on the great heresies. Listen to him and then check up on some of his contentions like he made two nights ago that the secular governments and not the papacy burned heretics at the stake in the early 13th century….true…but he then leaves out for the rest of the talk the following half century when Popes commanded the burning at the stake. Then read the Catholic Encyclopedia on the net at New Advent on Inquisition which has the complete 13th century…here is the breaking point to late 13th century:
“In this way Gregory IX may be regarded as having had no share either directly or indirectly in the death of condemned heretics. Not so the succeeding popes. In the Bull “Ad exstirpanda” (1252) Innocent IV says:
When those adjudged guilty of heresy have been given up to the civil power by the bishop or his representative, or the Inquisition, the podestà or chief magistrate of the city shall take them at once, and shall, within five days at the most, execute the laws made against them.
Moreover, he directs that this Bull and the corresponding regulations of Frederick II be entered in every city among the municipal statutes under pain of excommunication, which was also visited on those who failed to execute both the papal and the imperial decrees. Nor could any doubt remain as to what civil regulations were meant, for the passages which ordered the burning of impenitent heretics were inserted in the papal decretals from the imperial constitutions “Commissis nobis” and “Inconsutibilem tunicam”. The aforesaid Bull “Ad exstirpanda” remained thenceforth a fundamental document of the Inquisition, renewed or reinforced by several popes, Alexander IV (1254-61), Clement IV (1265-68), Nicholas IV (1288-02), Boniface VIII (1294-1303), and others. The civil authorities, therefore, were enjoined by the popes, under pain of excommunication to execute the legal sentences that condemned impenitent heretics to the stake.”
____________________________________________
History presents the good and the bad; propaganda presents only the good.
Watch for the latter even at apologetics sites…check them in a good library.
We need to be Catholics without pulling untruthful tricks to present the image of perfect Popes and perfect magisteria. They are intellectually not morally perfect when they access the charism of infallibility….but they are not perfect morally or intellectually in their role as administrators per se…though some of them can rise to that.
Only the lightly read will be impressed with history-with holes….and we are running out of primitive groups to convert. In two more intellectually advanced countries…Japan and China…we are one percent.
Your faith should not depend on the Pope being wonderful.
If they fall, you should remain in the church which is not about them but about Christ working through his Bride who is not perfect as Mary was perfect….Vatican II Lumen Gentium says the Bride will not be perfect til the end of time. Mary was perfect from the get go. We ought not to confuse the two….one was His mother….one is His bride.
Jim-
Your comment about the shortage of priests, and how it affects the actions of Bishops, is certainly true.
I can only say that I would expect a failure of courage, brought on by personnel shortages, from a true “business.” But I expect more from the Church.
When a Bishop fails to take action in connection with a parish that is wayward, because he thinks that the shortage of priests leaves him no choice, it’s a reflection of a “capitulation” mindset: the problem can’t be solved.
I understand this mindset. It’s logical, in a way, and it’s also an understandable reflection of human nature.
My response is that the problem CAN be solved. Not easily. Not without some ruffled feathers and some degree of inconvenience to the diocese and parishioners. But it can be solved.
And because the Church is far more than a “business,” and parishioners are far more than “customers,” the problem must be solved. There is no other choice.
Mike
I’ve almost come to the conclusion that there is not a priest shortage at all. Think about it. Vocations are not set by men, they are set by God, and God will always call to vocations the proper number of men needed by his Church. If not enough men heed the call God will call more until enough say yes.
So if there is not a priest shortage why do we not have enough priest for our parishes? Maybe because we have too many parishes full of people who would walk if authentic Catholic theology was proclaimed there.
Hence Benedict’s statements about a smaller, more orthodox Church. Perhaps he sees a time when Rome will have to take the hard line. When that happen expect to see priest and perhaps even bishops walk along with some of the faithful, and a great number of “cultural” Catholics as well.
So what’s the end game then? Very much fewer parishes and maybe even dioceses, filled with orthodox Catholic faithful and good orthodox priests. And probably a Church more ready for the battles ahead, which will happen no matte what Rome or the bishops do.
“I’ve almost come to the conclusion that there is not a priest shortage at all.”
One way to solve a problem is to declare that the problem does not exist. Well done.
Of course, what about those souls throughout the world and even in our country that need to hear about their salvation through Christ? No problem……a smaller, more orthodox Church is really all we need.
Yikes!