Pride and Presumption

Isn't life wonderful! Besides the fact that we are blessed to live another day, we have the opportunity to do rightly what we failed to do yesterday, to make amends, and to practice the virtue of charity towards others who are created in the image of God. And it is with our faith and our hope that we can live this love of God and charity toward our neighbor.

I was forwarded a recent anti-bishop screed in the Chicago Sun-Times witten by Eugene Cullen Kennedy, who happens to be a former priest and professor emeritus of psychology at Loyola University Chicago.

This is all one needs to know (former priest, psych prof) in order to understand the editorial headline "Catholic bishops vs. grown-ups." Here is great example of lack of charity. Lots of former priests presume to be instruments of teaching authority, however, most have fashioned esteemed pedestals for themselves (at least in their own minds and in the minds of the unwary).

Kennedy writes:

The nation's Catholic bishops warned their people last week that the choices they make in the voting booth are something like the sins they admit in the confessional. In an approach that even friendly commentators would hardly describe as subtle, the bishops warned that how a Catholic votes will have "an impact ... on the individual's salvation."

Apparently Kennedy sees a problem with the truth - had the bishops said something like "A Catholic risks his eternal salvation when voting for anyone other than a Democrat or Socialist..." (I know, they're the same these days) - I'll bet (if I were a gamblin' man) we would have heard nary a peep from this ex-priest...

But we still need to see how Kennedy's "grown-ups" will respond to the moral teaching of the Church as enunciated by the bishops:

The reason they [the bishops] feel good is...because they think they have reasserted control over their people. Their idea of what has been wrong with the church is what other authorities, including church teaching, declare to be right: that mature faith is integrated as a master motive into the lives of believers so that, on their own, they consult theological principles and follow their consciences in making moral choices that include how they vote on Election Day.

And did not bishops not provide a means for the people to "consult theological principles" so they could properly form their consciences, many of which have been maliciously malformed by dissenters, ex-priests, heretics, psycholpgical 'experts', and other anti-Catholic bigots? The problem for Kennedy, it seems, is that the bishops may be on the right track (or spur leading to the right track) - finally - and this frustrates those opposed to Church teaching.

Kennedy claims:

They [the voters] don't need to be told -- as if they had not reached the age of reason -- about the gravity of the choices about war and peace and life and death they make when they vote.

Apparently, they do - as evidenced by the number who support and vote for those who advocate the extermination of the unborn - a global holocaust - as well as the murder of the sick and dying. Is this murderous rage not a war against the innocent? Where is their peace?

The former priest continues:

Many men who wear miters think the best way to lead the church to 2025 is by returning it to 1925. They want to repeal Vatican II and magically bring back the devotions and practices of a wonderful but permanently ended era in American Catholicism.

Of course, the Sun-Times won't question him on where he obtains his "facts" to support this claim - truth being unimportant and irrelevant to moral relativists. Then such a statement by an ex-priest is not new.

They [the bishops] apparently feel it is dangerous for Catholics to be adult and to take responsibility for their decisions. They seem uneasy conversing with a generation of Catholics who know as much or more theology as they do.

Again, there is nothing which supports this claim - it's merely a figment of his own over-active imagination which he perceives as truth. I can't help but wonder if he conjured facts in his classes to inculcate in the minds of his students, depriving them of the truth?

And unless a Catholic's theology is in accord with right reason and in accord with the teachings of the Church, it is meaningless, at the very least, and quite possibly, dangerous to one's immortal soul.

Most bishops...will realize they are dangerously eroding rather than recovering their authority by treating grown-up Catholics as children.

If these "grown-up" Catholics listened to Christ and His Church, maybe they wouldn't need to treated as children - but then, don't a number of quack psych professors (and others) prefer to confirm a sinner in his sin so as not to injure the sinner's self-esteem?

May God protect us from those who wish to pervert the truth and protect our good bishops and priests who fearlessly teach us Your Truth and remind us of our duties to God and our neighbors!

Kennedy's opinion piece is here.