The Catholic Thing

 The American bishops drew a crucial distinction in a statement on President Biden’s Inauguration Day between things on which they can cooperate and “dialogue” with the new administration and those on which they cannot. Those distinctions were absolutely necessary to avoid the impression – amounting to grave scandal – that they had no problem with a self-proclaimed “Catholic” taking steps to further abortion, homosexuality, or transgenderism, all of which have been criticized by Pope Francis as a kind of “ideological colonization” in the developing world, but also in developed nations.

So far, however, almost no one has paid attention to potential dangers in the other half of the bishops’ Inauguration Day statement, those issues on which the Biden administration is supposedly “good” – immigration, environment, racism, etc. – as if other approaches to dealing with these matters than the usual progressive pieties are “bad.”

The bishops need to pay careful attention to what they and the administration mean – and even the wisdom of entering into various controversies – when they “dialogue” about social problems in this highly polarized period. For example, they just commended Biden for promoting “racial equity” in housing and prisons.  Equity sounds like good-old American equality. But in the current lexicon of Critical Race Theory and Critical Legal Theory, “equity” means something far different, and far closer to the ideological extremism of Black Lives Matter than Liberty and Justice for All.

In fact, racial “equity” is in multiple ways the antithesis of “equality.” That the bishops do not seem to be aware of this shift in meaning – or may even have advisers who are deliberately advancing this novel notion of justice, which President Biden was already pushing in his Inaugural Address – bodes ill for how they are going to enter into truthful “dialogue.”

To put this in a somewhat simplified form, according to “racial equity” wherever a group – defined by “race” – is “over-represented” or “underrepresented” in some sector, it must mean that there’s some concealed injustice because equality of opportunity has not produced “equity” in outcomes.

The slightest reflection, however, shows that this is a crude way to evaluate the complexities present in a whole society.

To take a relatively neutral example, 70 percent of the players in the Superbowl last night (and the NFL generally) are black, even though black people make up only 13 percent of the population. (Should Colin Kaepernick apologize to the NFL, since football is one of the most “progressive” sports?)

Too Catholic to be a Bishop

 From "The Catholic Thing". Read the whole thing.

The political season, alas, we always have with us now, but last week it took a turn in earnest.
Father Robert E. Morey, a courageous priest in South Carolina, denied former Vice-President Joe Biden Holy Communion owing to the longstanding public scandal of his support for unlimited abortion. To my mind when Biden, as vice-president, performed the wedding ceremony for two gay White House staffers, it was a cynical move for LGBT support, but far more importantly another brazen scandal demanding a response from the Church. He has been essentially defying the American bishops for decades, knowing that it’s highly likely they won’t dare put him on the spot.
Reactions to that priest’s act fell, as always happens, along the usual political lines. But this is not a political matter. It’s a question of whether the Church, as it claims, takes seriously the most serious things, namely the nature of the Eucharist and what it means for someone to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.

There have been various dodges from the Church hierarchy on this matter. New York’s Cardinal Timothy Dolan, for example, remarked that he would never judge the state of someone else’s soul. But that’s not what is involved in the Biden case and many others like it. The question is whether to allow someone who has publicly adopted positions – and acted on them – that are directly contrary to the teachings of the Church and constitute grave scandal – to go along just like any other Catholic.

Scandal does not mean, as it does in the tabloids, that you’ve done something spectacularly wrong. In Catholicism, it means a public stumbling block that confuses people, Catholic and not, about grave matters like abortion and God’s intentions in creating the two sexes.

Idolatry and Pope Francis

 Pope Francis, at the Chrism Mass:


We must be careful not to fall into the temptation of making idols of certain abstract truths. They can be comfortable idols, always within easy reach; they offer a certain prestige and power and are difficult to discern. Because the “truth-idol” imitates, it dresses itself up in the words of the Gospel, but does not let those words touch the heart. Much worse, it distances ordinary people from the healing closeness of the word and of the sacraments of Jesus.

Father Gerald Murray responds in The Catholic Thing:



 These words are troubling. An idol is a false god. Idolatry is rendering worship to something other than God – a grave offense against the First Commandment. Idolatry is essentially man worshipping himself through the medium of some created reality. He makes the choice of what idols are important to him. His false god is his own creation, and thus it serves him. This is the complete reversal of the true worship that man owes to his Creator
 
Dogmatic and moral truths come from and lead to God. The truth banishes error, especially idolatry, because all truth is found in the Word made flesh. What is true is good and beautiful because it unites us to the good and beautiful God. He created us so that we may know Him by knowing the truth that He is.

Given this, is it possible to make the truth into an idol? Can Catholic dogmatic teachings and the truths of the moral law become false gods that we worship so as to gain “a certain prestige and power”? It’s not possible. The truth as taught by the Church is what unites us to the true God and frees us from the errors of idolatry. Truth is not an idol, it is the remedy to idolatry.
Pope Francis states that “the ‘truth-idol’ imitates, it dresses itself up in the words of the Gospel, but does not let those words touch the heart.” Is the Gospel obscured or falsified by truths taught by the Magisterium of the Church – which are drawn from that Gospel?
 
Francis states that this “truth-idolatry” in fact “distances ordinary people from the healing closeness of the word and of the sacraments of Jesus.”

Here we have the interpretative key to what I think he is getting at. He is defending his decision in Amoris Laetitia to allow some people who are living in adulterous unions to receive the sacraments of penance and the Holy Eucharistic while intending to continue to engage in adulterous relations.
This doctrinal and disciplinary innovation, which contradicts all previous papal teaching and legislation, was confirmed as his unequivocal intention in his letter to the Argentinian bishops of the Buenos Aires region.