Thought For The Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Unfortunately the evasion of responsibility at the highest levels for things gone bad, knows no ends, until things are so bad there’s no escape.
The American Catholic Church is in need of Examination of conscience on a regular basis.
Bishops who shy away from supporting a brother Bishop who was targeted for removal outside of normal discretionary measures, imho, means that the body of bishops need to separate themselves from fear.
Courage with mercy in the face of admonishing a superior.
Fear attracts the evil one.
“Laity! Make the laity do it!”
So, when you subject any layperson to endless training on how not to rape abuse and sodomize the kids, with the underlying message that we indeed need to be told such things, is it any wonder that the charitable laity drift off after continued insult to their character?
Who does that leave in the laity to take charge of things? The ones who want to take charge of things. That’s part of why our parishes are plagued with paid and unpaid laity who are there because they are interested in being in charge. The good to be done is tandem only, or indeed secondary to the desire for control which is a sin of pride.
Now go and tell me again how the Church has seen worse. Still. Not. Convinced.
It’s no reward to be the best of show in a crappy show. The church has had leaner times but these are my times. I expect better than are in charge now. And why’d I have to be trained to NOT as use kids. The problem is with the clergy not the laity.
The evidence against most accused priests is so sketchy that bishops were bound to make mistakes. That having been said, it’s not difficult to think of cases where the evidence was adequate and the bishop responsible dithered or played treat-and-transfer. (John Geoghan and Paul Shanley in Boston, James Porter in Fall River, Maurice Grammond in Portland, and Rudy Kos in Dallas). More to be condemned was the collapse in discipline in seminaries after 1965. See Leon Podles personal account of why he left seminary in 1966. See also Rudy Kos history with the seminary in Santa Fe. Other bad actors are bishops who do not make the rounds of their dioceses, who do not promote satisfactory liturgy, who tolerate piss poor vocations promotion, who tolerate known homosexuals among the priest corps, who allow Catholic schools to decay into collecting pools of affluent people who have no interest in the historic faith, who do not exemplify satisfactory preaching, and who distribute inane diocesan news sheets that no one reads.
Fr. VanHeusen is a diocesan priest for the Diocese of Raleigh, currently assigned to a college Newman center in NC. This may have had some impact on his praise of U.S. colleges/universities. By the way, the Raleigh diocese still counts at least a dozen seminarians, so something good must still be happening in a state where you see many more protestant, mainly Baptist, churches around than Catholic ones.