When Mr Rohr exhorts us to a closer walk with God, to be more faithful to the greatest commandments, to the beatitudes, to the gospel, who can argue? This has been the continuous message of saints and others down through the centuries. Renewal, as the Church teaches, is always necessary, an ongoing labor. We all need to love better but mentalities, based on the plain old concupiscence and selfishness and pride that are ever-present in human affairs, has often negatively influenced our relationships with God and neighbor. A misunderstanding- and suspicion even -of God and His love, based on the “distorted image” of Him that man first conceived at the Fall according to the catechism, lies at the heart of misguided behavior by Church members including leaders at times, along with a wrong emphasis within her teachings even though the teachings , themselves, are perfectly on target. For example, depending on our emphasis when teaching, God can come off primarily as vengeful, vindictive, and aloof or kind, loving, patient forgiving, etc.
But the Church has been addressing this issue better in the last 50 years than ever before IMO, even as abuses have occurred; it takes time, centuries, for humans as a body to enter more fully and authentically into the light that Jesus shed, to be transformed, to blossom into beings who love as He does, to actually* heed and practice His words*, the words that they themselves preach.
But if Mr Rohr then extends that message to mean that loving one’s enemies equates to tolerating virtually any and all behavior, we have a problem. Is the Church being less loving by taking a strong pro-life and anti-contraception stance-or is she being more so? Is it wrong to distinguish between good and evil-and to seek to exclude evil from our presence? Isn’t that the purpose to begin with? Shouldn’t participation in the Eucharist involve a change in us, towards God and goodness and love and away from the opposites of those? Shouldn’t it stand to *mean *something when we partake, whether or not the majority of the partakers may be partaking hypocritically, perhaps having become too comfortable with the world and its often misplaced values? Weren’t the drunkards and tax collectors whom Jesus loved and mixed with still obliged to change their ways, to follow Him, to become new creations themselves? Yes, we’re to love first, but that doesn’t not mean we don’t identify sin as sin, and expect something better.
If Mr Rohr, OTOH, really doesn’t believe that abortion and contraception are sinful to begin with, then he needs to be honest and make that clear.
“A man of conscience, is one who never acquires tolerance, well- being, success, public standing, and approval on the part of prevailing opinion, at the expense of truth.” --Pope Benedict XVI
