I truly don’t know what is going on here. I’m not real active. I’m a member of a spirituality group that meets a couple of times a month; I just signed up to be a pastoral care minister visiting at a nursing home until I get trained and then probably will transfer over to visit the folks at the Vet’s Hospital and the Soldiers Home.
But I only know what I read in the papers and here in this forum.
I guess the thing that is most disconcerting for me is the attitude of the Bishops and priests.
I see a huge amount of criticism of people who are moving into the lay apostolates that were authorized by Vatican II. Many of these no doubt go to extremes and should be counselled. But the Archbishop doesn’t seem to like this independence at all.
Apparently they’re not obedient enough.
There is a family here in town that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of its own money for the construction and operation of a UHF Catholic television channel. It carries 24 hours of EWTN and a little bit of local programming. Family members are there daily to run announcements for various parishes.
There are only four or five broadcast Catholic local televison stations in the entire country. We have one. The Archdiocese has a “communications” budget that is just huge. How much of that goes to Channel 19? Zippo! The station is too conservative!
When Gibson came out with his movie last Winter, the reaction from the Chancery was absolute silence in terms of promoting it. Every Protestant (well, most) were ecstatic about the POTC. The most you would hear from my Pastor and the Chancery was that they were afraid that we were going to go off and kill every Jew we could find.
Are they that out of touch with their flock? There were a couple of meetings at my Parish to discuss the movie. The Liturgist made the presentation at one. The tenor of his presentation was in the form of questions and answers. He was convinced that we were shallow idiots. He asked, “How many have seen the movie (POTC)?” And a goodly number raised their hands.
Then he asked “How many have read the book (the Bible)?” And he truly was flabberghasted that the same number of people raised their hands.
He with his fancy degree was of the opinion that we had never read the Bible and were theologically illiterate and had no business going to a movie like that. He wanted to put us in our place. The reason he thought that is that he knew that the Church had not been teaching us anything. What he didn’t know was that we decided to learn on our own.
He had to drop his entire presentation and revert to questions from us.
The Pastor then brought in a Rabbi to warn us about pogroms and anti-Semitism.
The hierarchy has absolutely abandoned us these past 40 years and they talk to us so little that they don’t know what we’re up to.
And we’re the ones trying to adhere to the Faith.
And the cafeteria Catholics who pick and choose on their own what to believe, why, as long as they subscribe to the “social ministry” of the Church, they leave well enough alone. Don’t rock the boat
Among the scarier things is that this Archdiocese is pretty well run, administratively. The bills are paid. The “Crisis” hit here, as elsewhere, but not to the extent of some of the other locales. And insurance paid most of the bill. We’re not closing parishes very often, in fact we regularly open new ones. Schools are being built. The social ministries are wonderful. Perpetual adoration flourishes.
So the Physical Church appears to be well taken care of here.
But many of us are concerned about the Spiritual Church.
I really don’t know much about Regnum Christi or the Legionaries of Christ. I do get daily meditation prayers from the Legionaries in my email. There’s nothing wrong with those.
We all have different needs. Let’s all pray for each other.