Thursday, October 22, 2009

National anti-Catholic Reporter




Every time somebody sends me a link to something from the National Catholic Reporter that is spiritually disordered, when I'm reading the piece, my soul takes a trip to the disordered plane the author occupies. The mental fog they've sent out into the stratosphere tries to roll into my well-being. Whatever malice they have for the teachings of the Church or the people who evangelize them sits on my chest like a hundred pound weight. I feel like I've descended into hell and I can't get away from it soon enough.

Today, somebody sent me a link to a story an individual named Jamie L Manson writes about the magnificent invitation to be in full Communion with the Roman Catholic Church.

This glorious victory for the Roman Catholic Church and the hundreds of thousands of Anglicans who have been hoping this moment would come for the last ten years is met by a nitwit piece labeling Christ's Church as the institution of misogynists and homophobes.

At this beautiful moment of unity, this young woman stands at the doors to blockade and discourage, foaming at the mouth, Misogynist? Homophobic? We’ve got the church for you!

Of course, this poor misguided soul starts off with a valid observation about the Franciscan luminaries who handled the sex addict priest leaving victims all over town for decades:

Ms. Bond, who was impregnated and abandoned by a Catholic priest, cannot get funding for her son’s brain cancer treatments. The priest receives little disciplining from his superiors. She is told by the Franciscan order, who never encouraged the priest to leave the ministry, that they have already gone “far beyond what the law would require,” in their financial support. They also reminded her that, by speaking publicly, she is in jeopardy of paying a penalty because she is in violation of a confidentiality agreement that she signed years ago.



Which reminds me, in upcoming coverage of the scandals of the Boston Archdiocese, I'll be doing a few pieces on the duplicity of the Cardinal and Bryan Hehir running around town as arbiters of "justice" while at the same time telling sick and retired priests to go scratch their backsides with a broken bottle.

Something to look forward to.

I digress.

Manson hijacks the Franciscan Fromps and the indecent accounts of the conduct of his superiors, and proceeds to build a straw man.

Married Anglican priests and seminarians are provided with their own sacred structure, called "personal ordinariates," to enhance their spiritual care and guidance. They earned this special privilege by being vociferously misogynist and homophobic.

A woman is punished by Catholic superiors for her relationship with a priest, while married Anglican priests who are anti-woman and anti-gay are welcomed more fully into the Catholic clerical fold.

This week the Catholic church seems to have reached another low point in its perennial war on sex. However, in this latest twist of events, one form of sexual activity has been legitimized: married sex between male Anglican priests and their spouses who have reached qualifying levels of misogyny and homophobia.

Ironically, it was Gene Robinson -- whose courageous assent to the bishop’s seat in the Episcopal church first elicited the Anglican firestorm and threat of schism over the ordination of out gays and lesbians -- who first showed me that the relationship between misogyny and homophobia runs deep.





How come you never hear these folks connect the dots from the prohibition against prostitution to prostitutionophobia? Taking the Lord's Name in vain and vulgarophobia?

Oh, come on lady. If you're going be a cheerleader for sleeping around, have the decency to not to exploit the teachings of Christ's Church as some kind of boogeyman hating gays and women.

Destroy you own soul, bait and capture your sexual partners to destroy theirs. Have a field day but for the sake of human salvation and the suffering of Christ that won it - leave the teachings of the Church as the journey to towards salvation.

Some day, I sure hope somebody can adequately explain to me how the theology in the Bible where a woman baits a man into sin can escape us at the critical moments in our lives when we are baiting people into sins.

While many have interpreted the Adam and Eve story as a chronicle of birth, life and death, a closer reading also reveals that it is an account of the beginning of our shame towards our sexuality. Before taking the fruit, the man and the woman are said to be naked and unashamed. After realizing their nakedness, they hide from God, mistakenly convinced that God, too, will be embarrassed by their exposed genitals.


If you can bear with us for a brief moment and perhaps take your mind off of genitalia, there is a deposit of faith in the Catholic Church waiting to enlighten and enrich you. Shame about sexuality is the furthest thing from the Mind of a God who would impart such a deeply meaningful gift to be used with fidelity to the teachings of Church and the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

When I see a young girl being so spiritually abused by the grown ups operating the National Catholic Reporter, I'm hard pressed not to see the story of Adam and Eve in the failure of the Ordinary in the See where the National Catholic Reporter is located. He might as well be holding out the apple. The name Catholic belongs to the faithful and it should never be permitted to exploit young women and men and bait thousands into sin.

I can't imagine something crossing my own threshold in front me, watching my children buy into some drivel and doing and saying nothing about it.


Good luck with that.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Carol, I trusted my kids to public schools and put them in a religious ed program at a parish run by an ultra-left pastor. Now, years later, and there isn't anything I wouldn't give to go back and reverse the damage. All I can do is pray, for them and for the next generation.

Anonymous said...

I know what you mean about reading NCR and Vox Nova types. I can't give them space in my head either.

Prostitutionophobia - love it.

Thanks for breath of fresh air.