And mine as well. The demonization of liberals is another part of the experience here. “Conservatives” don’t place themselves all into the reactionary right-wing, so why do they lump all liberals as left-wing Troskyite crazies?
Yes, you. Liberal/conservative are political terms; orthodox/heterodox refers to faith.
Probably.
:yup:
Please see post # 9 of this thread. You are quite simply incorrect.
Nope. According to my dictionary, the first definitions of liberal and conservative regard approaches to thinking in general, not politics. Like someone else noted, this has already been discussed in earlier posts. Liberal and conservative are not exclusively political terms. It seems rather er, rigid or unliberal of you to insist I use your preferred terms.
OK I understand but I suspect this may have just been “we’re tired of beating this dead horse” syndrome rather than uber-orthodox becoming worked up over the question being asked…how DARE they???
Well I haven’t seen that level of presumed mysogyny here but I won’t argue that point. Frankly being honest I prefer to receive from the priest rather than ANY lay male or female. Why? I don’t know, I guess because he is the priest. I know if I sit in a certain pew that I’ll get the priest for communion. If I sit there knowing that I am stratetgically placed to receive from the priest does that mean I am rejecting the Church’s teaching?
Well if you’d read the rest of my ‘ridiculous statement’ you’d understand I was not referring to this board but to the statement by a poster that liberals in general are open minded and like to listen to all sides of an issue.
No I think it’s quite orthodox.
…i’m very tolerant of welfare payments where they are warranted… as for the rest, I guess you being against gay sex means you storm the bedrooms of gay people and stop them having sex… i don’t know a soul who is in favor of abortion unless you make a living doing that… you probably just need to relax some… maybe a vacation is what you need…
flameburns,
Thanks. I don’t read anything even close to all of the threads in the forums, of course, but I seldom see such things posted by people professing to be PRACTICING CATHOLICS. Obviously I may have overlooked countless threads of the sort you mentioned. Please do note, in case you missed it, that I am addressing the issue of people who identify themselves as active-not fallen-away or former–Roman Catholics and who advocate and defend such things as you mention as compatible with their Catholic faith. I realize that there are Protestants posting on the board. I am myself a traditionalist Anglican, not a Roman Catholic. I realize there are former Catholics who are now practicing whatever other faith and who will say they left Catholicism over ‘x’ or ‘y’. My question was focused rather more narrowly, if you please. While one is ‘once a Catholic, always a Catholic’, a person who clearly identifies themselves as a ‘former’ Catholic, now practicing Buddhism or Wicca, is clearly not muddying the waters of what ‘is’ or ‘is not’ taught by the Roman Catholic Church.
If you mean by calling my assessement of the truth of the faith “Medieval” like that espoused by Duns Scotus, Albert the Great, Aquinas, Thomas A Kempis et al, then I will accept the moniker with with pride,humbled that you deemed my articulation worthy enough to be associated with an age that passed on the truth of the faith in such an illuminative fashion. But those that you describe are not Liberal in that they may offer another approach to the Truth that is more …what?..Open to the opinions of men? More accommodating to proportionalism or expediency? I’m really not sure of the point you’re trying to make. But I do know this…Just like God Himself encompasses male/female as well as all other binaries, so “catholic” in its universal sense collapses, supersedes,and underscores all binaries. Thus the Catholic Church cannot be defined as liberal/coservative. To do so is reductive and causes us as a result to view God deductively. There are some aspects of the faith that might be considered "liberal, " such as its social justice teaching, but to extract that teaching from the entirety of the faith and focus on it entirely breeds liberation theory which embraces Marxism, and as such is antithetical to the faith. So we cannot isolate one aspect of Catholicsm to the detriment of others. When we do, we then to to gloss it with the vocabulary of the secular society.When we apply such gloss, however, it tarnishes the entire Church and it tends to desacrilize the Church, so that she is no more than a political/social entity at the mercy of those whose opinions hold the most sway. Persisting in looking at the Church through the cultural lens of liberal/conservative occludes our vision, and if our vision is clouded, how can we take out the splinter in eyes of the Culture? Once again, we are Catholic or not…not liberal, not conservative, not black, white, etc. …just Catholic. We are creating a new Tower of Babel with our language,and we will not be able to talk to one another if we keep this up…and you do know what happened to the original one.
I am indeed one of those lost souls, and I would have changed my party affiliation to independent long ago if I didn’t live in a state that doesn’t allow registered independents to vote in primaries. As one of my enlightened students said, perhaps it would be better to stay as I am and use my voting power in favor of the pro-life Democrats who do exist.
Cecilia:
Stellina: I am the original poster to this thread. My question was genuine and not a provocation of any sort. Check my profile: I am not a Roman Catholic, liberal or otherwise. I was and am a tad puzzled by the cognitive dissonance between the ‘Catholicism’ depicted in much of the mass media–where there is reported to be great weeping and wailing and gnashing of gums over the ‘archconservative Pope’–and the actual beliefs one can typically find among Roman Catholics on this board. In fact–I cannot think of a single forum, Protestant or Catholic, nor even any chattroom to which I have belonged, whence I could say that I have ever seen a ‘liberal Catholic’ post and defend his/her dissent from their professed Church. I can read Andrew Greeley’s novels, of course, wherein his ‘hero’ Blackie Ryan goes about solving mysteries in the midst of vast numbers of devout but highly liberal Catholics. But Blackie Ryan ‘lives’ in a fantasy world of Greeley’s own making–and I suspect it is the selfsame fantasy world in which MOST liberals spend their lives, a nonexistent place where their views represent the majority opinion. I suspect such a place does not exist in any part of the ‘real’ world, save perhaps in tiny corners of academia, of the self-aggrandizing mass media, of California, Canada, and perhaps New York City.
At this moment, you are right. But, things will change, even if slowly.
Do we not believe in all the commandments?
Why did you introduce this into the discussion?
Morality is legislated each day. Some good morality and some evil.
No one is saying my way or the highway, but some are saying wink, wink, it is all good as long as your heart is in the right place…