Do you know the meaning of the word “cathedral”? It is derived from the “cathedra” or chair of the bishop. A bishop can no more co-opt his own chair than the Pope can co-opt the Vatican, the President can co-opt the Oval Office, or you can co-opt your own house you own.
Not to become pedantic with regard to co-opting, but yes, a president, a pope and a bishop can co-opt their office by making it subject to their personal desires and wants. Obama did it, Holder did it, Lynch did it, the Renaissance popes did it, cardinals like Richelieu did it, and the Arian bishops did it. There is no claim about the impeccabllity of the holder of the office to be inferred or guaranteed merely because the chair of the office is highly regarded or even safeguarded.
In any case, my position with regard to this event isn’t that it was necessarily a bad idea, but that the responses from both sides go a long way to highlighting the real issue – the intransigency of human beings with regard to picking and defending their own side. The reformers were clearly intransigent when they moved from wishing to reform or define doctrine to getting rid of anything they, themselves, did not agree with, as if the entire edifice of the Church was theirs, and not God’s, to determine. Some hierarchy of the Church may also have shown their own brand of intransigence by being unwilling to pause and listen and pray concerning God’s will on how to properly face the issues at hand.
Perhaps that same intransigence was played out by both sides in the cathedral and here again in this forum by our own insistence insisting that ours is the proper understanding and the opposing view is simply in error. Where is God’s perspective allowed to be considered, if we simply assume it aligns perfectly with our own?
I am not saying that you are at fault here, but that all of us are to some degree and that is why we each continue to push our own point of view when we ought to be listening at times such as these to where God is asking us to be. It is especially in difficult instances such as these where so much is at stake that we ought to be far more attuned to God rather than to our own ideas, emotions or goals.
There very likely are points to be made in all sides, but the still small voice of truth stands quietly in the middle waiting for the noisey chatter to abate.
Perhaps the lesson to be learned has more to do with disciplining our capacity to listen and understand rather than to speak and inform.
