I have to wonder: why is the editor-in-chief of Boston’s gay newspaper—which is very hostile to the Church—writing articles defending the Tridentine Mass Community and the closing Holy Trinity Church?
Gay activists defending Traditionalists. Makes your head spin.
Susan Ryan-Vollmar is editor-in-chief of Bay Windows, a sister publication of the South End News. The News has been covering the situation at Holy Trinity, which is in the South End of Boston. But it seems unusual to have Ryan-Vollmar writing an op-ed summarizing the history of the dispute over Holy Trinity and the Latin Mass community in the South End News. She says her connection to the parish is that her maternal grandparents, now deceased, worshipped at the parish. But is that enough to give her an attachment to it?
Or is she taking the opportunity to make hay, trying to continue efforts to turn faithful Catholics against their archbishop and the archdiocese as her own newspaper, Bay Windows, has been doing for years, most notably because the Church is their major opponent in efforts to legally create the fiction of same-sex marriage?
Put aside the deflating reality that the religious leader of the Boston Archdiocese, a position once revered by all Bostonians regardless of faith, has been reduced to issuing press releases about being in full compliance with policies ensuring that priests will not molest children. Instead, focus on what it must be like to be a Catholic in this Archdiocese. An ordinary lay Catholic who has managed to keep their faith throughout this grotesque spectacle. Imagine that they’ve been told that their church is going to be closed. Imagine that the reasons given for the closure don’t make any sense — and a financial audit confirms their worst suspicions. Imagine being stonewalled and lied to by Archdiocesan administrators like Bishop Richard Lennon (who now leads the diocese of Cleveland).
The people who built Holy Trinity deserve so much more from the Archdiocese. Taken in the most generous possible light, the Archdiocese’s treatment of Holy Trinity’s parishioners has been a lesson in learning that faith is not about place. Of course, Holy Trinity’s parishioners already understand that. All they have been asking for is an explanation that simply makes sense. At this juncture, it’s clear that they’re never going to get it. Sadly, that isn’t even the most tragic element of this ordeal. The real tragedy is that those who run the Archdiocese don’t have the humility to understand what they’ve done. [emphasis added]
Seems clear to me that’s what’s going on. If I were a member of Holy Trinity parish or the Latin Mass community, I wouldn’t be happy that Ryan-Vollmar was trying to appear to be on my side. The old saying is that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Do you really want the archdiocese to be your enemy?
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