A Lutheran Pastor of my acquaintance has told me of his discomfit when engaged in official ecumenical dialogue with Catholics – because the Catholic representatives all too often can't wait to bad-mouth and criticise the Catholic Church, the Pope, Cardinal Pell, and so forth, and are only too glad to proclaim their love for Bp Morris, while ostentatiously rejecting Catholic doctrine and morals.
I hear of a similar sorry incident that occurred only the other day.
Thank God, there are Catholics who love the Church and her teachings as being those of Christ, rather than hating Sancta Mater Ecclesia, setting up their own imagined Christ as an idol in place of Our Lord, and eagerly following, not the truth, the way and the life, but a lie that is sterile and leads out into the waterless waste.
I think of one ex-priest who in my hearing opined that the relics of St Thérèse (then being brought on a visit to Tasmania) were fit only for boiling up to make soup. What a nasty blasphemer!
Or again, I recall a fellow who went to try his vocation in the Melbourne seminary back in the bad old days of the eighties: he left after a week or so, because every night the staff and students were drunk, and there wasn't even daily Mass. In a seminary! (When the future Cardinal Pell was Rector there for a few years way back then, he had a tremendous fight against staff and seminarians when he tried to reintroduce daily Mass, in Corpus Christi College if you please.)
Or again, I recall a fellow who went to try his vocation in the Melbourne seminary back in the bad old days of the eighties: he left after a week or so, because every night the staff and students were drunk, and there wasn't even daily Mass. In a seminary! (When the future Cardinal Pell was Rector there for a few years way back then, he had a tremendous fight against staff and seminarians when he tried to reintroduce daily Mass, in Corpus Christi College if you please.)
Far too many of the clergy and religious are parasites, happy to suck the sap while spreading false teachings. Were they to cease the pretense of playing Catholics, and set up their own church in which they might freely do as they list, no one would go to it: hence their determination to benefit from the perquisites of power. Personally, I would prefer to see them honest men, who would either depart or repent: but they are blind and see not.
It takes little consideration to realize that, in a clerical and religious culture that winks at doctrinal dissent, there is place also for moral turpitude. How can X, who preaches quite other than the Catholic faith, reprimand Y, who has suspiciously close relations with parishioners? Both are guilty of differing forms of disobedience: it was only the employment of the secular courts in recent times that caused abusers to be removed and punished. Perhaps a "truth in advertising" test case could be mounted against a priest who pretends to teach the Catholic religion, yet in fact propagates alien beliefs?
It takes little consideration to realize that, in a clerical and religious culture that winks at doctrinal dissent, there is place also for moral turpitude. How can X, who preaches quite other than the Catholic faith, reprimand Y, who has suspiciously close relations with parishioners? Both are guilty of differing forms of disobedience: it was only the employment of the secular courts in recent times that caused abusers to be removed and punished. Perhaps a "truth in advertising" test case could be mounted against a priest who pretends to teach the Catholic religion, yet in fact propagates alien beliefs?
As Chesterton said, it must be so hard for those without moral principles to know how to act.
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P.S. I was feeling rather angry and disillusioned when I wrote this.
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