Yesterday I took time away – mostly – from the blog and email. I checked in only long enough to approve comments in the queue, etc.
Of course today lots of things are going “DING”, whimpering for my attention. Most of them are – as things are these days – bad.
One piece at LifeSite was especially gorge raising.
VP of German Bishops Conference wants to bless homosexual couples
What wrong with these guys?
Okay… sorry. That was a unguarded moment in which my naturally buoyant optimism peaked out through my increasingly battered carapace.
We know what’s wrong with these guys.
GERMANY, January 10, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – Bishop Franz-Josef Bode, the Vice President of the German Bishops’ Conference, has called for a discussion about the possibility of blessing homosexual relationships. [Note the incrementalism.] He believes there to be “much [that is] positive” in such relationships. [How ambiguous.]
The new statement from Bishop Bode comes in the wake of a recent interview given to the German journal Herder Korrespondenz by Cardinal Reinhard Marx – President of the German Bishops’ Conference and papal adviser – in which he [Marx] proposed that the Catholic Church rethink her teaching on sexual morality in which he argued against “blind rigorism.” For him, it is “difficult to say from the outside whether someone is in the state of mortal sin.” Marx applied this statement not only to men and women in ‘irregular situations,’ but also to those in a homosexual relationship. [Everything is gray. How many shades of gray, I wonder.]
There has to be “a respect for a decision made in freedom” and for one’s “conscience,” claimed Marx. He said that one has to take into account the “concrete circumstances,” while still remembering “one’s own responsibility in light of the Gospels.” Of course, added Marx, one also has “to listen to the voice of the Church.” [Oh yes, we blow the dust off of a book and look up what the Church once taught… well… officially taught… wink, nudge… and then, having “discerned” for a while, maybe even “struggled” for a while, we do whatever the hell we want.]
[…]
B as in B. S as in S.
When, in the context of suggesting that something to which the Church has always said “No!” is being touted as something to which Church should now suddenly say is “Okay!”, you see mentions of “concrete circumstances”, you know you have verged into “bearded-Spock” parallel Church, or perhaps rather “Kasper church”, in which philosophy has been replaced with politics.
“Lived experience” is advanced as a trump card over “truth”.
The scholar Robert Stark pointed out that those who talk about bending the Church’s teachings (and practices) to “reality” claim that truth can vary from place to place and time to time. What might have once been true doesn’t necessary need to be true now.
The German/Kasperite/Rahnerian approach replaces the philosophical grounding of theology with politics (majorities can determine truth, and that might diverge from what people thought in the past). Truth changes according to shifting mores, values, etc. To hell with reason (e.g., syllogisms, etc.).
Some people think that the “perfumed princes”, to borrow some jargon, who interpret Ch. 8 of Amoris laetitia in a way that is inharmonious with Familiaris consortio will now ramp up a direct attack on Paul VI’s teaching in Humanae vitae about artificial contraception.
Proposals like that of this German bishop and Card. Marx about bending “blind rigorism” and blessing homosexual unions is part and parcel of both manifestations of infidelity. If they can succeed in separating the procreative act from procreation, then anything goes.
That’s what some of them want: anything goes.
Which is, of course, game over for Catholic teaching on faith and morals.
Frankly, I don’t believe that most of those who propose things out of harmony with the Church’s perennial teaching are farsighted or smart enough to have consistent long-range plans in this regard. Like this VP, they are being swept along on the mudslide triggered by those uphill from them. The effect is, however, still dangerous.
UPDATE:
“What happened?”, some of you ask over and over again.
There are a few books which are helpful in this regard. Picking up on a comment, below, an essential book which explains what happened is…
The Rhine Flows into the Tiber: A History of Vatican II by Ralph Wiltgern
If you haven’t read this, then you probably don’t know what went on during and after Vatican II, how the agenda was hijacked.
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The Rhine keeps flowing.
Dear William,
let’s leave the Frenchmen out of this ;-)
Father Z, have you ever heard of a book entitled, “In the Murky Waters of Vatican II”? I read it quite a few years ago and I was impressed with the documentation, footnotes, etc. that the author used to support his premise. I can’t find it at the moment to get the author’s name, but it was quite an expose of the “hijack”.
Some days when reading Church news, I’m not even sure I have the words to pray beyond simply “Lord, have mercy.” And I’m just a lay person, not a priest or bishop who probably reads more Church news.
I worry most for my children. Our Catholic schools here are decent, but what will happen in the next few years as the fault lines in the Church are increasingly exposed and the Church seems to limp toward schism?
It’s been done before. Confer “Adelphopoiesis,” which history and theology I would enjoy reading from your vantage.
[First, just because it was done in some places doesn’t make it a good practice. Second, in the history of the Church there have been all sorts of strange things. Third, it wasn’t done in the East. Fourth, it faded out of use. Fifth, today because of different circumstances it would be a monumentally stupid thing to try to introduce, along the lines of “deaconettes” (whatever they were).]
I’m with e.e.
I have to be honest and say that tolerated and seemingly promoted daily examplea of heresy and heterodoxy from major players in the hierarchy is challenging my faith. These increasingly public inconsistencies and unravelings are the kind of thing that affect my sleep.
There is an argument to be made that the German church is teetering on the edge of schism.
These appeals to conscience make me think of a scene from the Pirates of Penzance where Frederic tells the pirates that he loves them like brothers but as soon as he is no longer a pirate it will be his duty to destroy them all. The Pirate King replies, “Well, Frederic, if you conscientiously feel that it is your duty to destroy us, we cannot blame you for acting on that conviction. Always act in accordance with the dictates of your conscience, my boy, and chance the consequences.”
As leaders of the Catholic Church shouldn’t these Shepherds be trying to warn and lead people away from the fires of Hell? They shouldn’t be holding their hands and telling them, “we respect your conviction to your conscience.”
Thanks for the outline. I am not blowing smoke in saying that I’d appreciate the full treatment from you on adelphopoeisis, as you have done on deaconesses. As a non-believer my interest is not a form of advocacy.
Father chose a photo to illustrate a “moral mudslide” in our Church, but the photo was of a Montecito house that could have been of Roy Rohter, who was killed in this real mudslide days ago. His wife survived. He was the benefactor and co-founder of the classical school St Augustine Academy, and the Catholic Textbook Project, the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, as well as others, including Thomas Aquinas College (which survived the Thomas fire). One cannot imagine the horror of those who perished. Please pray for them all. And for those in the hierarchy of our Church, that their moral mudslide not sweep away more souls.
I seem to recall a story about a man and a woman who decided, in freedom, to eat the forbidden fruit of a tree in the middle of a garden somewhere. I wish I could remember, how did that turn out for them?
“Adelphopoeisis” says what it is — the “making” of “brothers”.
It is a Christian version of a brotherhood ceremony. Instead of you and your friend pressing minor finger cuts together so that you become “blood brothers,” or mingling drops of blood in each other’s cups of drinking wine (I think that is how the Byzantine Huns did it), the Eastern side of the Church had monks or Huns do this.
Incidentally, most legal codes in countries and tribes that had blood brotherhood believed that it created a real fraternal relationship, so no marrying each other’s sisters. And of course, no personal incest with each other, either.
The idea of adelphopoiesis as a homosexual union was modern, recent, and created by one single scholarly excuse for an academic, solely for his own agenda. He basically pretended that everything about Eastern monks and nuns was actually all about wild sex. Sewage, in other words.
Wine cups and sworn blood brothers = the Hunnish tribes.
“Monks or Huns” = “monks or nuns.”
Sorry for the autocorrect confusion!
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