Election Issues

                                                       Election Issues

The presidential race has been clarified finally by the withdrawal of Ron Paul from the Republican race. So now things get serious. Up to this candidates at least paid lip service to the old principle that you don't soil your own nest, though it seems to have been mainly lip service.

 A few younger politicians actually seem to have tried to discuss issues rather than personalities and hopefully this will benefit them in the long run.  Jimmy Carter was elected president because people saw him  as honest and moral. They eventually get tired of scandal and sleaze in high offuce and

Why Catholic

                                              Why am I still a Catholic?

I blogged the other  day about my concerns with the negative publicity the Church hierarchy is attracting recently, about rigid  responses to nuns, priests and laity and cover-ups by bishops which are clearly dishonest. 

After one has spent pages detailing the failures of Church leaders to live up to the ideals of Christianity, it is necessary to say why I am still Catholic. Every day I run across people who ask “why are you still a Catholic?” The simple answer is Peter’s: “Lord, to whom should we go? You have the words of eternal life!” But those words are increasingly difficult to distinguish in all the clamor and debate today.

As one realizes that the Church only gives us the principles but we must make our own decisions as to their application, right and wrong are no longer simple obedience to another human, be they bishop or pope. Before God

The Irish Church

The Church in Ireland

I have not written much  here lately as I have been writing about the crisis I see developimg in the Church in recent months. We have reactionary responses by bishops to their flocks, a clamp-down by Rome on women religious and the silencing of priests in Ireland for daring to question the edicts of curial big-wigs in the Vatican. All of these are in contraventiom of Vatican II but probably sweet music to the members of  the Society of St. Pius X.

But today's news is a different story. It comes from "Holy Ireland", the land of traditional orthodoxy, where when Rome said "Jump", they asked "How high?" A few daring priests asked "Why?" and decided to meet to discuss a response.  They felt there would be few willing to speak up, at most  they hoped for 100/200. They finished with over 1000, not just priests but lay Catholics, men and (whisper it) even women who felt they too were Church and had a voice. These people had read the Documents of Vatican II, had read the Bible and used their God-given brains under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to understand them.They seem to think that Christ told His Apostles at the Last Supper t6hat they were to serve the Church, not to rule it.

What has the world come to?

Stand by for further bulletins.

The Servant Church

My favorite writers on the Church are Adrian Dulles and Edmund Schillebeeckx, neither of whom were notable liberals. Both have significantly influenced my concept of the Church as well as that expressed by the Bishops at Vatican II, Dulles in delineating various models of Church, Schillebeeckx in forming my vision of the Church as the Body of Christ who acts and speaks through it in the world today. Richard P. McBrien’s “The Church” is probably the best and most readable book on the subject in fifty years. When I started to formulate my vision for the Church of the future, not the heavenly New Jerusalem, but the church down and dirty in its members, I tried to put that vision in words in the context of the world today. I think it is the same vision as that expressed by Vatican II in the document De Ecclesia (About the Church).

My vision harks back to the early church we find in the Acts of the Apostles. It is the church described by Paul who wrote, “Have that mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross”. (Phil 2:5-8). It is the church of the ghetto and

Times they are a changing(1)

From time to time we all need to look around and see where we are going. We need to do so in the Church as well as in our personal lives. At my age we will find that things have changed not once but many times and we must constantly reevaluate these changes.For the next few days I plan to share my vision of how the church in Florida has changed in thr last fifty years. I would love to get your feedback.

I said before that one can never go back, but an institution and its leaders can go backward. To my mind the community that is the Church in Central Florida has not gone backward. Its members are still active and committed to living and sharing their faith in their communities. Many priests and many parishes, despite the handcuffs of a rigid ecclesiastical bureaucracy, are doing truly wonderful things to help the poor and needy, the migrants and the homeless, to support missions abroad, to

Listen and get involved

I forget now what I wanted to tell you! How often do we find ourselves in this position? It can be very frustrating as we lose a thought that we felt a moment ago was significant enough to share it with another. To make it worse we were probably interrupted by someone sharing a valuable insight into the dog's need to take a walk! Why do people always interrupt me on those rare occasions when I'm thinking? These rare thoughts are such precious gems of wisdom so thoughtlessly squandered.

And we then waste so much time trying to regain that momentary, fleeting vision, so fleeting that we did not have time to put it in words. I can drive all the way to Orlando trying to recall it without success, unless I'm distracted ny my wife's screaming: "Billie, the light is red". Now I'll never have the opportunity to share with Mario Rubio how to solve the country's economic problems.

It's a sad fact that brilliant minds cannot get a hearing when boring blow-hards grab the floor and

laicization & bishops

We’ve talked about “laicization” and the dismissal of priests from the active ministry, but it might be interesting to dig a little deeper into what the implications are. Back in grade school I learned that three sacraments cannot be repeated, they are conferred permanently. As I recall the image was that they put an “indelible mark or stain” upon our soul, somewhat “like indelible ink”. These sacraments were Baptism, Confirmation and Holy Orders. Their effects were irreversible. I’m not a Graham Greene fan and I’m not suggesting that he is an expert on the details of Catholic sacramental theology, but I seem to remember that this was a basic element in his depiction of the “whiskey priest”. This was a distinction between “ex opere operato” and “ex opera operantis” in traditional theology, a distinction between the work done and the one who did the work.

So it seems that laicization does not deprive the priest of his priestly powers, specifically the power to preside at the celebration of the Eucharist, it merely forbids him to do so. Given that the penalty is usually imposed as a consequence of the priest’s disobedience to an order from a superior, bishop or pope, such a prohibition is unlikely to prevent him from doing what his conscience tells him is