More overheated rhetoric over Fr. Thomas Reese leaving America magazine at the Chicago Tribune. The tone suggests that Inquisition’s stormtroopers will be going through the headquarters of all these dissident publications soon.
For one thing, Reese resigned from his post. There has been no public acknowledgement that he was removed under pressure from the Vatican or Pope Benedict specifically, despite the article’s statement of that as a fact. No one has been on the record as saying that he was removed at the request of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.
And it’s not like his replacement, Fr. Drew Christiansen, is some orthodox clone put in his place. Christiansen isn’t likely to vary much from the way Reese was running things.
Also, we can shoot down the claim that Reese was only allowing debate on “controversial Church teachings.” There are some things which Catholic priests and theologians are obligated to do and one of them is to publicly support Church teaching on settled matters and not go printing public debates that include prominent Catholics dissenting from those teachings. It creates a lack of understanding about the unity of the faith and can cause scandal for the faithful, who could be confused into thinking that settled matters of teaching are really up for debate.
Perhaps what really upsets them is that the Church stubbornly refuses to bow down to their god of Post-Modernism. In that sense, this endemic fear and hatred of the Church by the academic crowd is understandable as an old fashioned war of religions. One day what we call the culture war may be know as the Forty Years War.
I just cannot understand those who claim a Catholic publication is expected to provide space for dissenting views from the Magisterium. Indeed the way it is put, such publications “have an obligation” to provide for these views. You would think that this is the only space such views have to be given an airing.
It is not as if such views, be they by “know all” journalists lacking knowledge of even the most fundamental and basic Catholic teachings, anti-Catholics, dissenting Catholics or the pretend “faithful” VOTFers, are not given ample space to the point of nauseam in the MSM without any opportunity for the exposition of the Magisterial point of view and its justification. Even where an MSM publication feels an obligation to put a so called Catholic point of view, it usually calls one or another of the usual “so called Catholic” dissenters they have on their phone index to give a view. We all know who they are: you can count them on one hand and their agenda is getting very, very boring!!! it is so predictably the same old garbage.