The Boston Globe used its editorial page today to stump for Voice of the Faithful, its favorite thorn in the side of the Archdiocese of Boston. The editorial gives free advertising for their Mass on Boston Common this Sunday and then says: “Voice of the Faithful provided an emotional sanctuary for Catholics trying to cope with the depth of the clergy sexual abuse crisis.“No, what it did was provide a sanctuary for those who don’t like Church teaching and her hierarchical structure to use the cover of the Scandal to press for a heterodox agenda first spawned by Call to Action.
The Globe, incredibly, then says that there are signs that VOTF is growing stronger without giving a single fact that backs it up. The reality is that for two years, VOTF has been claiming to have 30,000 members worlwide, a figure that has never increased from its earliest days and which was based almost entirely on its email list. And even if you grant them that number, they’re still a drop in the bucket compared to authentically Catholic groups like Opus Dei, the NeoCatechumenal Way, Focolare, and the Knights of Columbus. All that sustains VOTF now is that everytime the media needs an opposing point of view to a bishop’s statement, they run to them. Without that free advertising, they’d be nowhere now.
The fact that VOTF is now, as you point out, little more than a media creature is precisely why your Ab. will not interfere in this “mass” they are throwing. It’s the old “ignore them and they will go away” response the Church has favored through much of its history. The fact that this strategy usually works, as it most likely will in this case, begs the question of the fate of all of those may lose their souls in the mean time. Thus simply leaving VOTF alone to die by the actuary tables is not, in the true sense of the word, pastoral.
The “ignore them” approach might work if the event were to flop and expose VOTF as a bag of wind. Speaking of wind, Sunday’s forecast is: “Cloudy, periods of rain. Highs in the low 70s and lows in the upper 50s.”
What, no lightning? ;^)