CCCB President on Websites Confronting D&P: "they're not part of the church, they're not Catholic"

[didymus]

Lifesite News:

CCCB President on Websites Confronting D&P: "they’re not part of the church, they’re not Catholic"

By John-Henry Westen
OTTAWA, June 25, 2009 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Despite a June 22 press release stating that neither the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCCB) nor Development and Peace (D&P) would be commenting on the results of a recent investigation of five of D&P’s Mexican partners until the results were made public, the President of the CCCB, Archbishop James Weisgerber, has been making the rounds of the media in the last several days, giving numerous interviews on the topic.

The archbishop has given separate French and English language interviews to Salt and Light Television, as well as interviews to Zenit News, the Catholic Register and Catholic News Service (CNS) on the results of the investigation into the CCCB development arm, which was caught by LifeSiteNews.com (LSN) funding numerous groups around the world engaged in pro-abortion advocacy.

Michael Swan, with CNS reports that the archbishop reversed the decision not to comment prior to the release to all bishops saying: “This thing is heating up. Before we release all the recommendations, I’m just giving an overall impression, given the fact that the group found no difficulty.”

In the interviews the archbishop stated that the recent investigation found nothing amiss with Development and Peace’s funding of its Mexican partners. The Catholic Register, in an article also written by Micheal Swan, its associate editor, reported that the “Canadian Bishops clear Development and Peace of any wrongdoing.” Lastly, a Zenit report by Salt & Light TV correspondent David Naglieri, was titled, “Probe Clears Canadian Agency of Funding Abortion.”

. . . . .

Archbishop Weisgerber has repeatedly expressed the same sentiment in his other interviews.
The Catholic Register reports: “The role of web sites in stirring controversy has become a challenge for bishops.” Weisgerber told the Register: “These bloggers who claim to be more Catholic than anyone – I think first of all they’re not part of the church, they’re not Catholic in the sense that they have no mandate, they have no authority, they have no accountability. And they speak very, very definitively about what it means to be Catholic, and they’re followed by so many people.”

Ahem. Where to start?
Karl Keating and Fr. John Zuhlsdorf are “not Catholic”? Please.
As for mandates, how about Jesus’s command to go and preach the Good News?

 

[Neil_Anthony]

It’s such a terrible scandal Who would have thought that the head of the canadian bishops would attack Lifesite News!? Where do you turn when your shepherds behave this way?

 

[TMC]

Lifesite News:

Ahem. Where to start?
Karl Keating and Fr. John Zuhlsdorf are “not Catholic”? Please.
As for mandates, how about Jesus’s command to go and preach the Good News?

It’s such a terrible scandal Who would have thought that the head of the canadian bishops would attack Lifesite News!? Where do you turn when your shepherds behave this way?

Lifesite News is continuing its long tradition of printing articles that are reasonably accurate, albeit spun heavily, but giving them extremely misleading headlines. Read in context, its clear that the Archbishop is saying that bloggers and websites, including Fr. Zuhlsdorf and Karl Keating, do not speak for the Church. That is undeniably true.