Quebec Priests Bash Church on Homosexuality - Real Problem is the Bishops

[Crumpy]

This issue garners a lot of heated debate and publicity, and for a lot of good reasons.

But, there doesn’t seem to be any end of such issues. I don’t know where the euthanasia issue stands in Canada. but, that is still and up-and-coming issue in society much like prostitution and drug use. Why not legalize those things, too. There’s a group (and probably always has been) speaking sympathetically about sexual activity with minors. and, what else is next? incest? and group marriage?

There’s a loss of a sense of absolute morality and a tremendous preference for relativistic morality underlying all these.

It seems that “relativistic morality” is an oxymoron – a denial that there is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

 

[Petergee]

All the argumentation attached to these texts does not convince us. One speaks there about “natural law” as if it dealt with a given as immutable as it is obvious. For our part, we consider that human beings have not yet finished seeking and discovering their “true” nature. The human condition is grasped only by means of a precise cultural bias which does not cease evolving/moving in time. Thus, that which was “natural” in a civilization and at a previous time can appear unacceptable now. Of course, this speaks of an evolution which spreads out over much time, and it is necessary to speak about it in terms of centuries rather than years. Let us take an example: slavery endured for centuries as natural, even in the Church, whereas it appears to us today as “against nature”.

Well, I suppose this translation makes their “human nature” argument seem just slightly less preposterous. Then again, why pick the example of slavery of all things? That notorious previous case where some American pastors in the 16th-19th centuries chose to tolerate a gross public sin, in the teeth of centuries of condemnation from the Church as a whole. And THIS is the one example which these 19 presbyters have chosen to convince us that they are right and all the Popes and bishops for 2000 years, and the Bible, are wrong?

A partial excuse for the bishops’ inaction may be that these 19 are clever enough never to actually say outright, “We believe homosexual acts are morally right”, they just continually hint at and imply that that is their belief.

 

[Colm_O_Higgins]

Ani Ibi:

I don’t see the problem with the section which you quoted. Vatican II was an opening into the world.

The paragraph insuates that the Church should change its teachings on faith and morals because some philosophical strains popular in Western soceity deem them archaic.
Ani Ibi:

I have read the letter carefully. Of course on matters of faith and morals I disagree with the conclusions drawn therein. Nevertheless I applaude its courage or – if you will – its audacity.

Hmmm, you applaud the decision to write a letter which attacks the Church, and will no doubt lead people deeper into sin? I don’t think you could call submitting a letter to a media outlet whose editorial board, like 99% of the mass media, supports the watering down of Christian and conservative mores, a courageous or even audacious act. If anything, the letter is banal and predictable.

 

[jdnation]

Ani Ibi:

This commentary is detraction by innuendo. It does not even attempt to provide evidence. It just goes straight for the jugular by means of guilt through association; the association comprising placement in the same unfortunate sentence.

No, this kind of accusation imho is not worthy of Catholic dialogue.

My :twocents:

Are you referring to the part where it suggests that the Bishops would be compromised because of past misdeeds?

Otherwise it clearly shows why it is unwise to allow homosexuals into the priesthood. We can’t afford to take chances nowadays… which will be too bad for those who do have potential…

 

[jdnation]

Colm O'Higgins:

The paragraph insuates that the Church should change its teachings on faith and morals because some philosophical strains popular in Western soceity deem them archaic.

That’s precisely the trouble many have with Vatican II… it changed the Church’s approach towards its goal. Perhaps it was well meant… a way for the Church to reach out into the world, but the result is that instead, the world is creeping into the Church.

“Pope Paul VI himself admitted only eight years after the Council, “the opening to the world has become a veritable invasion of the Church by worldly thinking. We have perhaps been too weak and imprudent.” Only three years after the Council, Pope Paul VI had admitted that “The Church is in a disturbed period of self-criticism, or what could better be called self-demolition.”40 And in 1972, in perhaps the most astonishing remark ever made by a Roman Pontiff, Paul VI lamented that “from somewhere or other the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God.”41”
40. Speech to the Lombard College, December 7, 1968.
41. Speech of June 30, 1972.
The Devil’s Final Battle Ch 6

 

[setter]

Eileen T:

One of the effects of sin is a Dulling of the Intellect.

The late Holy Father JPII commented on this phenomenon of “the loss of the sense of sin”:

I asked two years ago in an address to the faithful - “Is it not true that modern man is threatened by an eclipse of conscience?” Too many signs indicate that such an eclipse exists in our time. … When the conscience is weakened the sense of God is also obscured, and as a result, with the loss of this decisive inner point of reference, the sense of sin is lost. This explains why my predecessor Pius XII one day declared, in words that have almost become proverbial, that “the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin.”

The loss of the sense of sin is thus a form or consequence of the denial of God: not only in the form of atheism but also in the form of secularism. If sin is the breaking off of one’s filial relationship to God in order to situate one’s life outside obedience to him, then to sin is not merely to deny God. To sin is also to live as if he did not exist, to eliminate him from one’s daily life. A model of society which is mutilated or distorted in one sense or another, as is often encouraged by the mass media, greatly favors the gradual loss of the sense of sin. In such a situation the obscuring or weakening of the sense of sin comes from several sources: from a rejection of any reference to the transcendent in the name of the individual’s aspiration to personal independence; from acceptance of ethical models imposed by general consensus and behavior, even when condemned by the individual conscience; from the tragic social and economic conditions that oppress a great part of humanity, causing a tendency to see errors and faults only in the context of society; finally and especially from the obscuring of the notion of God’s fatherhood and dominion over man’s life.

The restoration of a proper sense of sin is the first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis looming over man today. But the sense of sin can only be restored through a clear reminder of the unchangeable principles of reason and faith which the moral teaching of the church has always upheld.

catholic-pages.com/morality/sin.asp

 

[setter]

I am left wondering, how does one (these individual priests) eventually (by the grace of God) go about repenting and making reparation this obviously extensive broadcast public scandal for the Church?

 

[Aureole]

setter:

I am left wondering, how does one (these individual priests) eventually (by the grace of God) go about repenting and making reparation this obviously extensive broadcast public scandal for the Church?

I would assume that they would go to the Confessional, get absolution, and start performing their ministerial duties as a priest.

 

[setter]

Aureole:

I would assume that they would go to the Confessional, get absolution, and start performing their ministerial duties as a priest.

I was thinking more along the lines of “making amends” for the sin (scandal to the Flock), not in the sense of exacting a “pound of flesh”, but in "making up’ or reparation for the damage caused. I am left wondering if a public statement of renounciation of a formerly proclaimed stance of dissent, along with obediantly carrying out one’s ministerial duties, would be deemed necessary.

1459 Many sins wrong our neighbor. One must do what is possible in order to repair the harm (e.g., return stolen goods, restore the reputation of someone slandered, pay compensation for injuries). Simple justice requires as much. But sin also injures and weakens the sinner himself, as well as his relationships with God and neighbor. Absolution takes away sin, but it does not remedy all the disorders sin has caused. Raised up from sin, the sinner must still recover his full spiritual health by doing something more to make amends for the sin: he must “make satisfaction for” or “expiate” his sins. This satisfaction is also called “penance.” (CCC)

 

[cheese_sdc]

Jeffrey:

Those priests should be excommunicated if they refuse to teach according to doctrine.

That’s the answer! Kick out anyone that doesn’t agree!

That’ll sure make the Church better.

 

[Joe_Kelley]

cheese_sdc:

That’s the answer! Kick out anyone that doesn’t agree!

That’ll sure make the Church better.

Jesus seemed to think so. Matthew 18:15-17
**If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. **

[16] But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.
[17] If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

 

[setter]

cheese_sdc:

That’s the answer! Kick out anyone that doesn’t agree!

That’ll sure make the Church better.

It is not a matter of “anyone that doesn’t agree”, but about a group of priests who took a solemn vow “I believe everything contained in God’s word, written or handled down in tradition and proposed by the Church. … I also firmly accept and hold each and every thing that is proposed by the Church definitively regarding teaching on fauth and morals”, and who publically gave a cause for public scandal to the Flock entrusted to their care. It does no service to the Church to minimize the impact and responsibility of their individual collective action.