One Year Ago Today, the U.S. Cardinals Issued a Statement

Have they forgotten?

Have we forgotten?

The cardinals' statement in its entirety is available here (second item).

In response, I noted that the cardinals were providing a measure by which it could be determined if they really meant business or were just full of... um... hot air. Specifically, I took up one facet of "certain basic principles" which the cardinals reaffirmed "in communion with the pope":

5) Given the doctrinal issues underlying the deplorable behavior in question, certain lines of response have been proposed: a) the pastors of the Church need clearly to promote the correct moral teaching of the Church and publicly to reprimand individuals who spread dissent and groups which advance ambiguous approaches to pastoral care....

To explain, here follows a lengthy quotation from my column of April 29, 2002.

Some Tests for the American Bishops:
How the Laity Can Score Them

Talking is all we got, so far. The bishops will have to show us that they can “walk the walk” as well as “talk the talk” — assuming some of them can manage to continue to do even that. Honesty and courage in action: they will be required, every day, every step of the way. Every national meeting, every diocesan meeting, every press conference and pastoral letter, will require honesty and, perhaps as never before in the USA, courage in action. Those who are falsely called “dissenters” — who are, in reality, quite happy assenters to any and every doctrine at odds with the Catholic faith — will scream in fury if the bishops actually take the steps necessary to regain their “moral authority” and restore the integrity of Catholic faith and life in the USA. And every syllable of every furious scream will be faithfully reported in a mainstream media that hates authentic Catholicism as much as “dissenters” do.

The next year will show us what future the bishops of the USA really have planned for Catholics in America. During and after the bishops’s semi-annual meeting in June, mainstream media, and perhaps the bishops in response, will want to talk only about what policy will be put into place to deal with “pedophile priests”. That will be, as logicians might say, necessary but insufficient.

We have the cardinals’ own words to show us how to judge the bishops’ response: “The pastors of the Church need clearly to promote the correct moral teaching of the Church and publicly to reprimand individuals who spread dissent and groups which advance ambiguous approaches to pastoral care.”

• How many theologians, who promote error if not outright heresy, will be publicly reprimanded in the next year? (Will the famous on-TV-a-lot-these-days Fr. Richard McBrien, a theologian at Notre Dame, be among them?)
• How many bishops will be publicly reprimanded in the next year for giving encouragement and support to homosexual behaviors that the Catholic Church condemns as sinful? (Will Thomas Gumbleton, auxiliary bishop of Detroit, be among them?)
• How many groups will be publicly reprimanded in the next year for the same reason? Or for some other reason connected with Catholic moral teaching on, say, pre-marital sex, extra-marital sex, divorce and remarriage, abortion, or artificial contraception. (Will Dignity, an organization of homosexual activists, be among them?)
• And how many of these reprimands, of whatever kind they may be, will actually contribute to clearly promoting the correct moral teaching of the Catholic Church?

I submit that, if the answers tally up to zero — as I suspect they will — we shall know that the U.S. Cardinals’ Statement was merely words.

It has now been a year. So far as I know, nothing whatever — nothing whatever — has been done to begin to implement what the cardinals wrote about. Absolutely. Nothing. Whatever.

Okay, I'm a small-town boy: maybe I'm out of the loop. True, things could be going on behind the scenes, of which I could not be aware. And, maybe I'm expecting too much, too soon.

Now, the Bush administration took 14 months to "rush" to war, and a whole, entire month to demolish a despotic regime that had been firmly ensconced in power for a couple of decades on the other side of the world. But the likes of Bush and Cheney and Rumsfield and Powell and Rice aren't in charge at the USCCB.

So far as I know, the closest we have come to anything like implementation of the cardinals' statement is that (1) a Californian bishop suggested — I believe that "suggested" is a fair characterization — that the pro-abortion "Catholic" governor should refrain from receiving Holy Communion and (2) a South Dakotan bishop declined to either confirm or deny that he had ordered a pro-abortion "Catholic" senator to stop calling himself Catholic.

Is that all I should have expected so far? Perhaps. It's only been a year. At his first birthday, a child might be expected to crawl about on the floor, and poop in his diaper, and puke on his bib.

After a year, we've gotten the equivalent from our bishops. No?

Lest We Forget

“The pastors of the Church need clearly to promote the correct moral teaching of the Church and publicly to reprimand individuals who spread dissent and groups which advance ambiguous approaches to pastoral care.” (U.S. Cardinals, April 24, 2002)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 04/24/03 11:47:49 AM
Categorized as Religious.