These are strange, even surreal, times, as Bishop William Lori observed during his Feb. 27 testimony before the House Judiciary Committee (see front page). “Ever since the [HHS contraception] mandate has been announced, fair is foul, and foul is fair,” Bishop Lori, the chairman of the U.S. bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee on Religious Liberty, told the House committee.
“‘Choice’ suddenly means ‘force,’” he added, expressing frustration with the partisan characterization of the bishops’ position as an attempt to bar access to contraception. “This is not a matter of whether contraception may be prohibited by the government. ... Instead, it is a matter of whether religious people and institutions may be forced by the government to provide coverage for contraception or sterilization, even if that violates their religious beliefs.”
President Obama’s contraception-mandate dispute has become fodder for abortion-rights groups now fighting a rearguard effort to shore up public support for their cause. But it has also exposed long-simmering internal dissent against Catholic teaching on faith and morals.
Thus, a church-state debate has morphed into a fifth column effort by self-identified “Catholics” to ally with a hostile administration against appointed Church leaders.
“You may not do evil that good may come of it.” The Church’s consistent teaching on moral absolutes was rejected a half century ago when many Catholics chose to use birth control after Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae. Then, as now, the faithful were led astray by theologians and other prominent Catholics who rejected the teaching authority of the Pope. Some would go on to oppose Catholic moral teaching on abortion, euthanasia and embryo-killing stem-cell research.
Today, these divisions are in plain sight. Faithful Catholics flinch as the bishops struggle to defend the free exercise of Catholic institutions, while hostile political forces cite the opposing position of self-appointed Catholic spokesmen and women like Daughter of Charity Sister Carol Keehan. (See related story on page one.)
Now, as abortion advocates and their allies on Capitol Hill seek to bring down their primary adversary, we witness some Catholic women religious, who inherited an institutional ministry to the sick and needy, seeming to disavow this distinctive, even countercultural religious mission as unjust to the poor or to women. Why did they accept responsibility for these institutions if they reject the religious and moral principles on which they were founded?
In a Feb. 26 column, Cardinal Francis George of Chicago noted the bishops’ distinctive role as teachers of faith and morals: “The bishops of the Church make no attempt to speak for all Catholics; they never have. The bishops speak for the Catholic and apostolic faith, and those that hold that faith gather around them. Others disperse.”
The Catechism states that “the Roman Pontiff and the bishops are ‘authentic teachers, that is, teachers endowed with the authority of Christ, who preach the faith to the people entrusted to them, the faith to be believed and put into practice’” (2034).
While some prominent Catholics dispute the bishops’ rejection of the Health and Human Services mandate and subsequent “accommodation” by the president, they do not hold ultimate responsibility for securing the religious identity of these Church-affiliated institutions, and thus should submit to the bishops’ judgment and keep silent.
Instead, they have thrown their lot with the partisan enemies of religious freedom, attacking one of the central legacies of the Church in America. As George Weigel wrote in a Feb. 28 column, “The most significant contribution to the universal Church of pre-conciliar liberal Catholicism in America was the development of a Catholic theory of religious freedom — which led, in due course, to Vatican II’s epic Declaration on Religious Freedom.”
Today, Weigel charges, the spectacle of Catholics providing “political cover to a gross infringement on religious freedom by a federal government … is a grave breach of ecclesial communion in itself. It also represents a tragic betrayal of the best in the liberal Catholic heritage in the U.S., even as it illustrates the utter incoherence into which post-conciliar liberal Catholicism in America has tragically fallen.”
Mark Brumley: Aren't You Ashamed?
Matthew Warner: Ask Fr. Barron: What to say to Catholics who struggle with Church teaching?
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While the below canons may not apply due to ignorance, I think it may be our duty to point out the automatic excommunicatory nature of denying a tenet of the faith like the immorality of contraception:
Can. 751 Heresy is the obstinate denial or doubt, after baptism, of a truth which must be believed by divine and catholic faith. Apostasy is the total repudiation of the christian faith. Schism is the withdrawal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or from communion with the members of the Church subject to him.
Can. 1364 An apostate from the faith, a heretic or a schismatic incurs a latae sententiae excommunication.
More :)
http://thecatholicvoyager.blogspot.com/2012/02/who-speaks-for-church-teaching.html
“Corruptio optimi pessimum est, says the proverb: ‘the corruption of the best is the worst’ ... who wonders why Jesus wept.
Well said. We need for our Bishops and faithful religious, along with the Holy Father, to continue being the visible examples of Christ’s love in the world. Each of us need to asked a stand on this issue. Will we stand with the light of truth entrusted to the Body of Christ in his Church or stand with the darkness of this world. I pray for the faith of the Church and all those who truly seek God.
This is the logical “fruit” of the hierarchy’s negligence in proclaiming from the rooftops the truth about conjugal love and the danger lurking within the culture of death. Obama is merely exploiting the divide which has been in our Church since the 1960’s: the “invisible” schism has been forced into the light. If the bishops took their responsibility seriously to be teachers and preachers of the faith, they wouldn’t (nor shouldn’t) be arguing this issue from a political standpoint, but from the moral one. If their only response is to appeal to the second amendment, how in heaven are those Catholics who cluelessly(?) stand on the side of the administration ever going to have the opportunity to understand the reasonableness of Church teaching?
I agree with this article and especially with the cited observations of George Weigel. If only our bishops had promoted real preaching and teaching the past 50 years. Imagine a homily that declares contraception, abortion, convenient divorce and remarriage, and same sex relations as sin. My parish is in the archdiocese of Chicago. Recently a deacon delivered a homily against same sex relations. He had to submit a strong apology to the bulletin the following week. Get real bishops.
I am wondering if there are a lot of Catholics who don’t know that the Church teaches artificial contraception is a sin, or the degree of sin that it is. At Mass most everyone goes to Communion. Are many of them using contraception and if so, how are they advised about it? On abortion, Clare Booth Luce once wrote that it would kill off our own society and make us a minority with reduced influence. I think artificial contraception may be having the same effect. I pray more sincere Catholics will realize how undermining the Democrats’ agenda is and vote them out of office.
Bishop Lori is the Supreme Chaplin of the Knights of Columbus. The Homosexual-marriage bill only passed because two N.Y. senators switched their votes after being bribed by the socialist mayor of N.Y. Both of those senators were KNIGHTS ! The good Bishop never addressed that & he & the Supreme Knight refused to eject these two Judas’s from their Councils, causing many good Knights to resign in protest.
Likewise, Cardinal George has Sinsinawa Nun’s in his Diocese working inside abortion clinics & he does nothing ? Good leaders respond to every crisis, not just the one’s they pick & choose !
The past is done and some of this bishops are long dead. Let it rest and get on with your own responsibility. These are dark times and we as lay people are called to fast and pray for our shepherds, for the church, for the faithful and the unfaithful. Love is our measuring rod not. Let us take up our own baptismal responsibilities before we condemn the weaknesses of others.
What I don’t understand is why Sister Carol Keehan has not been kicked out of the Church. She does not represent the Church very well. You can’t pick and choose what you are going to believe in(especially for monitary gains). Maybe I am missing something,if I am please clear it up for me.
The Vatican and all what is under her umbrella is about to perish.
“so powerful a city, in one short hour your doom has come upon you.” - revelation
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