Fr. Tim could have written precisely the same comment about the Canadian Catholic bishops. He has been doing a little digging into the back issues and has discovered the precise moment of their lapsation.
The "definitive break" made by the Tablet newspaper/magazine from the teachings of the Catholic Church came in...
wait for it...
1968.
Can you guess what "issue" the Tablet and the Canadian hierarchy have in common?
They both abandoned the Holy Catholic Faith in the same year for the same reason.
And I am sure I'm not the only one to have noticed what I have called the "bleed out" effect. Once a body of the Catholic Church, whether a 150 year-old Catholic newspaper or a national hierarchy, has repudiated the Faith on one specific point, the apostasy bleeds out into the rest of the teachings. The original point of departure may have been birth control, and there may have been a feeling, as there probably still is, that there could be "dissent" from the Faith on that one but loyalty in all other respects, but heresy and apostasy is like a virus. It may start in one single cell, but it won't stop there.
I read my way into the Catholic Faith. I started at 17, with all the same loathing that so many of my contemporaries take as read. I had, however, an idea that something must be true and I determined to find out what that was. I started reading, more or less randomly, and examining what the Church had to say for itself. I was about five years into this project when I remember realising that everything the Catholic Church teaches depends upon everything else. Contrary to what the Church's internal enemies have proposed, the nature of the thing is such that it is impossible to choose which bits you like and chuck the rest. This interconnectedness made the Catholic Faith an all-or-nothing proposal.
After that it was all downhill.
We must not also forget to give due to the part of how religious liberty turned Canada into a cesspool. In 1968, the Canadian Bishops Conference told the Justice Minister of Canada, John Turner (who was a Catholic), that it was not possible for a Catholic to "impose" his moral views on the civil law: nor was it possible for the Canadian Government to act "in an unfair spirit of partisanship" or to "impose the profession of any religion" - such as the Catholic religion - on its citizens. The Vatican II teaching on religious liberty supposedly prevents any government from passing laws based on Catholic morality.
ReplyDeleteThe result was after the Canadian Bishops advised Mr. Turner, in 1969 he liberalized Canadian laws on abortion, homosexuality, divorce, prostitution and pornography.
One wonders who is signing their paycheques.
ReplyDeleteReally glad you made it all the way down to the bottom of the hill!
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