Joan Venocchi is ready to throw in the towel. She’s finally realized that no matter how hard dissenting Catholics work at it, the Church is not going to change her teachings. She says that liberals who keep going to Mass in the hopes of effecting a change in the Church’s “outdated” teachings are deluding themselves. Well, yes they are. But that doesn’t mean they should just leave.
Instead, they should be asking themselves why. I’m not one of those people who says that if people don’t like the Church’s teachings they should just leave. If I’m convinced of the truth of those teachings, then as a Christian I want all people to know the truth and to come believe in the Gospel. I want all people to be saved and to experience the joy of being Catholic.
The problem here is that people who reject the Church’s teachings, like Venocchi, are not simply believers who reject the Church’s teachings. They are, by and large, people who don’t understand it. Take the flap over gay adoptions. In all of the reporting, what we’re told is “The Vatican says gay adoptions are immoral and ‘do violence’ to kids and so it’s bad.” Those are the rules, like or it lump it, they seem to be saying. That’s not good enough.
A teaching moment
Technorati Tags: Catholic, dissent, doctrine, liberalism
If only people like Joan Venocchi, Peter Meade,
Fr. Bryan Herir,Fr. James Keenan S.J., James Post, Fr. Walter Cuenin and all of the power-brokers who are demanding change in the teachings of the Catholic Church regarding marriage and family life, would decide to open their minds and hearts to learning why the Catholic Church teaches these beliefs! They could be learning so much by joining the study groups that are being established in many parishes for parishioners who want to learn about God’s plan for human love through studying The Theology of the Body ,and other works of Pope John Paul II and which also reflect the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI.
Unfortunately their minds and hearts are shut down and they refuse to realize that they have much to learn. They think that any of us who are trying to learn more are the ones who are ignorant. They accuse us of being “homophobic!” There is such a wealth of knowledge and understanding that is available to us to realize why family life is based upon the complementarity of the male and female spousal union and how this union reflects, in a dim way, the relationship of the Father,Son and Holy Spirit in the Trinity.
The immense richness of this search into the reasons for God’s plan for human love is a treasure that the powerbrokers have totally missed because they are looking only for earthly treasures. How tragic!!
Joan Venocchi’s article only allows two possibilities: A) The Catholic church changes, or, B)She and her catholic friends who support abortion, sodomy, and female ordination leave.
I am well aware that there is an army of “Boston Catholics” who believe that change of this nature is inevitable, “just a matter of time”, that they can “sing a new Church into being”, in the corrupted words of the beautiful hymn Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.
But nobody is looking for the third possibility. They could convert. To Catholicism.
Obviously, the Church means something to them. They would all have left already were this not true.
So, why not believe that they can give up their hardness of heart which allows them to remain indifferent to child murder, soul murder, and the corruption of innocents?
Why not believe that He who can do anything can even bring them home?
I actually thought Ms. Vennochi’s article revealed a rare moment of clarity and said so on my Blog. Especially the part about how the Church thinks in centuries, not in news cycles.
The fact of the matter is that the type who thinks the Church needs to change don’t have to leave the Church, because they are already out of it, i.e. out of Communion. This is an important realization because you will never get to where you want to go unless you realize your not there already!
I don’t think this is all that uncommon now, and I don’t think we can do a darned thing about it. I know more ex-catholics than catholics by a margin of at least 10 to 1.
For years, there’s been this fear of offending and having people leave. Well, catechesis, participation, obedience, reverence and all the rest of it have gotten so bad because of our timidity, guess what? People are leaving by the droves because they don’t understand why they’d ought to stay anymore. So much for all the caution.
Pay now or pay later. It’s more expensive to pay later. Too bad we didn’t have the brains to think of that 20 years ago, eh?