Say you’re a Canadian archbishop and president of your country’s bishops’ conference. Nineteen priests issue a widely read open letter declaring their opposition to an element of Catholic doctrine. Would your natural reaction be to say, It’s too bad they chose to make a public spectacle, but life goes on?
It is if you’re Archbishop Andre Gaumond of Sherbrooke, in an article linked by Jeff Miller. He also says that this is no reason to throw them out of the Church.
The same article says that one of the priests says he hopes the letter “will open up dialogue on the issues.” As Jeff so correctly observes, why should we open up dialogue on a matter that is a settled doctrine?
Hey let us also open up dialogue on other settled Church teaching. How about the divinity of Christ for example or the natures of Christ. Or how about the the Church’s love for the poor? Let’s us dialogue about charitable efforts for the poor. Dumping these charitable efforts could really help the bottom line of most parishes. Maybe we can find 19 priests tired of running soup kitchens, etc that could write an open letter in support of cutting off the poor and opening up dialogue on the issue.
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Well,
Soup Kitchens are not a matter of doctrine. It would be much easier to justify shutting them off than changing the doctrine suggested by the Canadian priests. For example-soup kitchens don’t work and never have-could be a good reason to cut them off.
JBP
To be perfectly blunt, I joined the Catholic Church because of its history of excommunicating heretics and public sinners. St. Paul wrote of them that we aren’t even to eat with them (1 Cor. 5). Every time I hear of bishops shrugging their shoulders when presented with prima facie evidence of heresy and objective mortal sin, and refusing to excommunicate, my faith in this Church being the true Church shrinks a little bit.
Can’t we see what is happening here. The progressives are forcing the Holy Father to declare a truce, like Paul VI did in 1968 over birth control. This truce had allowed priests and religious to completely ignore the church’s teaching on contraception and now we have activists who are invested in keeping active homosexual lifestyles strong in the church advocating for another truce.
My question is: How will the new pope react? Like Cardinal Ratzinger or like Paul VI, and quite frankly, it sounds to me like he could be another Paul VI.