Exactly, especially the bolded.
How this article can be called “excellent” or “splendid” is beyond me. There’s some awesome bits in there about Cardinal Tobin’s life and his devotion to the souls he pastors, but it’s obvious the article (and its author) has an agenda to push with all its insinuations on the characters of many other prelates in the Church. So what if Cardinal Myers
preferred to be called “Your Grace”? That, and they give no evidence of him
preferring to be addressed as such, and even if he did I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if he wasn’t addressed by that title, as the article insinuates.
I also don’t like how the article tries to paint everything in the Church as “liberal” or “conservative”, as many people in secular culture (because that’s what this newspaper is; highly secular and critical of the Catholic Church in all aspects) are wont to do today. It’s not about being “liberal” or “conservative”; it’s about one’s commitment to orthodoxy. But secular news organizations don’t care much about fidelity to orthodoxy, do they?
Because if they did, they wouldn’t insinuate things like this:
Granted, fancy lifestyles
absolutely should be “out of style”. But read that again. This author actually tries to make the insinuation that Pope Francis “has made clear” emphases on abortion and SSM are “out of style”…? Ridiculous! Pope Francis is a son of the Church! These issues can only be said to be “divisive” in the eyes of those that see the Church’s teaching on these issues as out of touch, or even morally wrong (as many secularists in the West
do in fact perceive these issues)…
In an interview with Vittorio Messori, Pope St. John Paul Il said, "It is difficult to imagine a more unjust situation [the legalization, as well as the act, of abortion],
and it is very difficult to speak of obsession in a matter such as this, where we are dealing with a fundamental imperative of every good conscience — the defense of the right to life of an innocent and defenseless human being.”
Also, in a
2003 document released by the CDF, St. John Paul II approved of the following mentality:
Do we
really think Pope Francis believes these modes of thought are out of style? Of course not. This is another example of the New York Times pushing their liberal (and heterodox) agenda as they try to paint the Church (or what they and other news organizations such as the Washington Post and National Catholic Reporter call “the institutional Church”) as stuck in the mud, reactionary, and an enemy of progress. What the Times has posited here is completely inaccurate of how the Church views many of the hot-button issues of our culture, and the insinuations it paints of past cardinals and prelates also proves to be untruthful, as we can see in the examples given by Tantum Ergo. The Church’s emphasis on issues such as abortion and the truth and reality of marriage will never “go out of style”, and Pope Francis will never make it clear that such issues are, somehow, out of style.
It’s also ridiculous that formality is “out of style” as I always am respectful and formal when I meet with the bishops of my diocese and neighboring dioceses, and to say that Pope Francis has made clear that doing such things as this, as well as addressing our bishops as “Your Excellency”, are out of vogue is absolutely absurd.
