Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 3:52am

PopeWatch: Lavender Mafia

Father Z reminds us that perhaps the most powerful element among the powers that be at the Vatican is the Lavender Mafia:

 

At the Jesuit-operated organ Amerika I saw on 18 September an op-ed by San Diego’s (Berkeley Jesuit trained) Bishop Robert McElroy:

Bishop McElroy: Attacks on Father James Martin expose a cancer within the U.S. Catholic Church

The “C” word.  No, that’s not dramatic. But, hey, he got your attention.

Let’s have a look at His Excellency’s piece with my usual emphases and comments.

Father James Martin is a distinguished Jesuit author who has spent his life building bridges within the Catholic Church and between the church and the wider world. He has been particularly effective in bringing the Gospel message to the millennial generation. When we survey the vast gulf that exists between young adults and the church in the United States, it is clear that there could be no more compelling missionary outreach for the future of Catholicism than the terrain that Father Martin has passionately and eloquently pursued over the past two decades. There are few evangelizers who have engaged that terrain with more heart and skill and devotion.  [We are not going to admit the premise that that there is a “vast gulf that exists between young adults and the church” in the traditional community. As one writer put it recently, tradition is for the young.  In one “old Mass” community after another, you find a predominance of young people, growing in numbers with new families. While some promote this sort of outreach, others promote outreach through defending homosexuality.]

Last year Father Martin undertook a particularly perilous project in this work of evangelization: building bridges between the church and the L.G.B.T. community in the United States. He entered it knowing that the theological issues pertaining to homosexuality constituted perhaps the most volatile element of ecclesial life in U.S. culture.  [To me, “evangelization” includes the content of our Catholic Faith.  If the bishop thinks that talking about homosexuality is perilous, I invite him to step into the shoes of those whom he is about to condemn and try the increasingly perilous activity of defending the Church’s doctrine on faith and morals.]

It was this very volatility that spurred Father Martin to write his new book Building a Bridge: How the Catholic Church and the L.G.B.T. Community Can Enter into a Relationship of Respect, Compassion and Sensitivity. Using a methodology that is fully consonant with Catholic teaching, [Is it? Is innuendo part of that methodology?  For example, when you look at the preview available through Amazon (they almost always provide a brief sample), after his dedication Martin has an “epigraph” citing Ps 139, “For it was you who formed my inner parts”.  This can be nothing other than the innuendo that people who have same-sex attraction are made that was by God, and, if they are made that way by God, then what they do is okay. In that “epitaph” Martin doesn’t say that, but his meaning is clear.] employing Scripture, the rich pastoral heritage of the church and an unadulterated realism [?] that makes clear both the difficulty and the imperative for establishing deeper dialogue, Father Martin opens a door for proclaiming that Jesus Christ and his church seek to embrace fully and immediately men and women in the L.G.B.T. community.

Building a Bridge is a serious book, [Janet Smith pointed out that it is pretty short, being “essentially an expanded talk”.  HERE] and any such work invites substantive criticism and dialogue. This is particularly true with a complex subject like the relationship of the L.G.B.T. community and the church. Many analyses of Father Martin’s arguments have pointed to important problems that do not have easy answers and to the reality that dialogue must always proceed both in respect and in truth.

But alongside this legitimate and substantive criticism of Father Martin’s book, there has arisen both in Catholic journals and on social media a campaign to vilify Father Martin, to distort his work, to label him heterodox, to assassinate his personal character and to annihilate both the ideas and the dialogue that he has initiated.  [Of course no one would want to do that.  No one would want to suggest that people who have different ideas are, for example, a disease involving abnormal cell growth.]

This campaign of distortion must be challenged and exposed for what it is—not primarily for Father Martin’s sake but because this cancer of vilification is seeping into the institutional life of the church. [Finally, we get to it.] Already, several major institutions have canceled Father Martin as a speaker. Faced with intense external pressures, these institutions have bought peace, but in doing so they have acceded to and reinforced a tactic and objectives that are deeply injurious to Catholic culture in the United States and to the church’s pastoral care for members of the L.G.B.T. communities. [We know that the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher begged off.  The national major seminary called Theological College at CUA begged off.  However, so did the Bishops of England and Wales, who found a way to beg off having Fr. Martin address Cafod.  These are not insignificant institutions.]

The concerted attack on Father Martin’s work has been driven by three impulses: homophobia, a distortion of fundamental Catholic moral theology and a veiled attack on Pope Francis and his campaign against judgmentalism in the church.

The attacks on Building a Bridge tap into long-standing bigotry within the church and U.S. culture against members of the L.G.B.T. community. The persons launching these attacks portray the reconciliation of the church and the L.G.B.T. community not as a worthy goal but as a grave cultural, religious and familial threat. Gay sexual activity is seen not as one sin among others but as uniquely debased to the point that L.G.B.T. persons are to be effectively excluded from the family of the church. Pejorative language and labels are deployed regularly and strategically. The complex issues of sexual orientation and its discernment in the life of the individual are dismissed and ridiculed.  [Go back through that and substitute the term “Tradition Loving Catholics” or “T.L.C.”, and make an appropriate adjustment.  That’s how the catholic Left treats the T.L.C. community.*  Also, while I think we all admit that we can all treat all people better, I must add that telling people that their sins are not sins is not a way to treat them well!]

The coordinated attack on Building a Bridge must be a wake-up call for the Catholic community to look inward and purge itself of bigotry against the L.G.B.T. community. [Interesting word choice: purge  What comes to mind immediately?  The German philosopher Paul de Lagarde wrote, “I have long been convinced that Jewry constitutes the cancer in all of our life; as Jews, they are strangers in any European state and as such they are nothing but spreaders of decay.” ] If we do not, we will build a gulf between the church and L.G.B.T. men and women and their families. Even more important, we will build an increasing gulf between the church and our God. [And if prelates of dioceses don’t embrace what St. John Paul II commanded by his Apostolic authority and show respect to traditional Catholics and give a wide and generous application of the legislation concerning traditional expressions of our liturgical worship, they are responsible for a widening gulf between the church and our God and will perhaps even contribute to real schism.]

[This is where I have some real concerns.] The second corrosive impulse of the campaign against Building a Bridge flows from a distortion of Catholic moral theology. The goal of the Catholic moral life is to pattern our lives after that of Jesus Christ. [Augustine reminds us that Christ, being perfect, isn’t the best model for us.  He recommended the lives of the saints.  But… let this pass.] We must model our interior and exterior selves on the virtues of faith, love, hope, mercy, compassion, integrity, sacrifice, prayerfulness, humility, prudence and more. One of these virtues is chastity. Chastity is a very important virtue of the Christian moral life. The disciple is obligated to confine genital sexual activity to marriage.

[You could hear this next word coming, right?] But chastity is not the central virtue in the Christian moral life. Our central call is to love the Lord our God with all our heart and to love our neighbor as ourselves. Many times, our discussions in the life of the church suggest that chastity has a singularly powerful role in determining our moral character or our relationship with God. It does not.  [Let’s be clear about this.  The Bishop just wrote that chastity, which “very important” does NOT have a “singularly powerful role” in determining our moral character or our relationship with God.]

This distortion of our faith [namely, that chastity has a “singularly powerful role”] cripples many of our discussions of sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular. [I think he means that we shouldn’t insist in our discussion that homosexuals abstain from same-sex acts.] The overwhelming prism [the things that project rainbows?] through which we should look at our moral lives is that we are all called to live out the virtues of Christ; [Okaaaaay.  Christ was chaste. Christ was not a homosexual.  Also, Christ’s exemplary display of virtue in Scripture did not exclude the flipping of tables and the whipping of people with cords.] we all succeed magnificently at some and fail at others. [I admit that I haven’t been good at whipping people with cords lately.] Those who emphasize the incompatibility of gay men or lesbian women living meaningfully within the church [WOAH!  Who says that?  That’s smacks of the proverbial straw man.] are ignoring the multidimensional nature of the Christian life of virtue or the sinfulness of us all or both.  [WOW.  There is a lot to unpack here.  As Janet Smith mentioned in her critic of James Martin’s “expanded talk”, it takes a lot of words to examine something that is briefly put.  I’ll comment further, below.]

The third impulse behind the campaign against Building a Bridge arises from a rejection of the pastoral theology that Pope Francis has brought into the heart of the church. Regarding the issue of homosexuality, in particular, many of those attacking Father Martin simply cannot forgive the Holy Father for uttering that historic phrase on the plane: “Who am I to judge?” The controversy over Building a Bridge is really a debate about whether we are willing to banish judgmentalism from the life of the church. Pope Francis continually reminds us that the Lord unceasingly called the disciples to reject the temptation to judge others, precisely because it is a sin so easy for us all to fall into and one so injurious to the life of the church. [I think we can dismiss this out of hand.  Criticisms of James Martin’s agenda have nothing to do with Pope Francis.  Gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.]

The gulf between the L.G.B.T. community and the church is not primarily based on orientation; it is a gulf created by judgmentalism on both sides. [No. We don’t accept this premise.  The gulf is not based on the orientation of homosexuals towards people of the same sex (which the CCC restates is “disordered”, and not just “different”.  The gulf is a matter of excusing or permitting or exalting homosexual acts.  And as far as both sides are concerned, I haven’t seen a lot of outreach from the other side.] That is the real starting point for a dialogue between the Catholic Church and the L.G.B.T. community in the United States today. Father Martin should be thanked for pointing to this reality, not shunned. [I don’t see how not being invited – or being dis-invited is “shunning”.  If that is the case, then I’ll be waiting for the Bishop’s article about how I’VE been treated recently by a certain important prelate with whom he is often grouped.]

 

Go here to read the rest.  Pope Francis embraces a wide range of Leftism, but it is striking how his appointees always have a common allegiance to normalizing relations with homosexual groups that have nothing but contempt for traditional Catholic sexual morality, and how nothing raises their ire more than those within the Church who do adhere to the traditional Church teaching regarding homosexual acts.  The same forces that produced predator priests and protective bishops have as their ultimate aim the Church embracing sexual perversion as normal and good.

 

 

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Philip Nachazel
Philip Nachazel
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 4:20am

Chastity IS the channel to “Love our Lord with all our heart and to love our neighbors as ourselves.” The Bishop is not bridging a vast gulf that exists, rather he is creating a wider gulf by dismissing the lifeline that will help the disordered soul. Chastity.

He, the Bishop, is crippling the advance of peace within the hearts of these confused souls. Let your yes be yes and no be no. Instead the Bishop is weakening the work that Christ will do through the great gifts of chastity. https://couragerc.org/courage/

The Truth will set us free.

Greg Mockeridge
Greg Mockeridge
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 4:23am

That’s my bishop. :face palm:

Penguins Fan
Penguins Fan
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 4:41am

To quote Bugs Bunny, “What a maroon!”

Art Deco
Art Deco
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 6:33am

Fifty years of this. I do wonder how long it will take the Church to recover.

I’m not expecting a reformer Pope ‘ere I shuffle off, but if we’re blessed with one, step one should be to dissolve the Society of Jesus. Remove their faculties en bloc and have them apply for incardination in situ according to exacting standards. Put the rest out on the curb.

Mary De Voe
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 6:54am

The human soul, the breath of God in mankind is created perfectly perfect, the soul of a child of God, made in the image and likeness of God, created in perfect innocence, moral and legal innocence, the standard of Justice among men, the state.
Same sex attraction or homosexuality is disordered, an act of “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”, disordered in the sense of not being able to “increase and multiply” and fill the earth. The same sex attracted individual is innocent of his disability.
Sodomy is a free will act of man that stains his sovereignty, his discipline, over himself and become an addiction. Addiction is a violation of man’s free will, the image of God in man. The addiction to sodomy changes the sodomite’s relationship with God, which is called religion. (Religion is man’s response to the gift of Faith from God in worship in speech, press, peaceable assembly and free association)
Obliterating the face of God in the soul, perfect innocence, the addiction to the vice of lust in the practice of sodomy degenerates the human being, and with him and through him, all of society and that of our constitutional Posterity, all future generations.
The denial of the human soul by atheism is the greatest task the Catholic Church must face. This battle must be won. When the transcendence of man is denied, all unalienable, innate human rights are denied. There is no ground that can be surrendered to the devil, without the loss of heaven.

Mary De Voe
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 7:06am

Father (not my father) James Martin’s “bridges” lead straight to hell, aided and abetted by Greg Mockeridge’s bishop. The office of Bishop is one who carries the Word of God. Miscarrying the Word of God is obliteration. The souls in hell are not annihilated. The souls in hell are obliterated.

ken
ken
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 7:28am

A bridge to what? Since there is no notion of reformation of life the message seems to be, “Come back to the Church; we’ll assist you on your road to hell.”

I feel such sadness for individuals who are stuck in habitual sins (as I have been), but have only anger for members of the Church who look to enable people in their sins.

Rather ironic that the vast majority of proclaimed saints in the Church have been members of the clergy when it seems the clergy are often leading the laity towards darkness.

David
David
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 7:49am

Well, I don’t think we’ll be hearing a sermon on contraception, the wreck it’s made in society and how the Church has an answer -from Bishop Robert McElroy any time soon. Coincidence???

Pinky
Pinky
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 10:35am

Apropos of nothing, I just have to share this with my fellow Catholics. My building cafeteria has a limited menu on Friday, even more limited for those of us who abstain from meat. Last Friday, I had a bowl of macaroni and cheese. Today, it’s pizza and Cracker Jacks. I can’t tell if I’m offering something up or turning 12.

Dale Price
Dale Price
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 10:44am

Greg Mockeridge:

No offense, my good man, but it appears to me you don’t have a bishop. At least not a Catholic one.

Dale Price
Dale Price
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 10:48am

“Fifty years of this. I do wonder how long it will take the Church to recover.”

As you say, we won’t see it.

Don L
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 11:28am

“…talking about homosexuality is perilous…”
Isn’t saying the truth that people don’t want to hear, exactly what got Jesus crucified?

Bob Kurland, Ph.D.
Admin
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 11:47am

This too, will pass. As Queen Christina of Sweden apochrophally (sp?) said, “the Church is true–look at how it’s survived all the bad priests and popes.”

Greg Mockeridge
Greg Mockeridge
Friday, September 22, AD 2017 4:54pm

No offense taken, Dale. If there are any real bishops left in the U.S., they’re retired,

At least McElroy has the guts to not hide his toxic leftist ideology under a veil of orthodoxy the way bishops like Chaput, Gomez, Dolan, and practically every bishop who is feted by the “orthodox” Catholic establishment routinely do.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Saturday, September 23, AD 2017 3:12am

My impression of Dolan is not ‘toxic leftist’ but ‘ecclesiastical careerist’. About 15 years ago, Fr. Paul Mankowski wrote an article with the title “Tames in Clerical Culture”. On the same time, Msgr. George Kelley placed a piece in Catholic World Report on ‘lions’ and ‘foxes’ in the episcopacy. My guess would be that the dysfunctions of the episcopacy generally observed are summarized in these articles. A third article on homosexuality in the Church and the impulse toward vandalism among embittered clerics might complete the set.

Greg Mockeridge
Greg Mockeridge
Saturday, September 23, AD 2017 4:16am

Well, Art, the terms “ecclesiastical careerist” and “toxic leftist” are pretty synonymous nowadays. And that trend started long before Jorge Mario Bergoglio mounted the Chair of Peter. In Dolan’s case, his Alsharptonesque race baiting calumnious shot at the State of Arizona over its immigration law (an act of a toxic leftist if there ever was one) took place in 2010, almost three years before Francis was elected.

The Church hierarchy has been a fish that has rotted from the body up.

Mary De Voe
Saturday, September 23, AD 2017 7:04am

Pope Francis is our SHEPHERD, not our owner. The Church is the Body of Christ, all the saints in heaven, the faithful on earth and the suffering souls in purgatory. The saints in heaven abhor the addiction to sodomy. The suffering souls in purgatory testify against sodomy. The faithful here on earth suffer with Jesus the indignity, the disintegration, the insult of sodomy against the free will and integrity of the sovereign person. Love outside of the virtue of chastity is not possible
Jesus cautioned us to test everything. Jesus loved us to the end.
Popes and bishops and priests are to forgive sins and bring Jesus Christ to us on the altar at Mass. If Pope Francis is refusing to acknowledge the sin of sodomy, Pope Francis will have to suffer the sodomite’s hell, which would be to practice sodomy in hell for eternity. It will be the same of the users of contraception, to practice contraception in hell for eternity. Boring.

Edie Eason
Edie Eason
Saturday, September 23, AD 2017 7:26am

Don L – Right On!

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Saturday, September 23, AD 2017 7:49am

He dropped off 3 (Justice, Temperance and Fortitude) the 4 cardinal virtues and replaced them
“We must model our interior and exterior selves on the virtues of faith, love, hope, mercy, compassion, integrity, sacrifice, prayerfulness, humility, prudence and more..”
I notice prudence kind of trails off at the end.

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