My archbishop's continuing to help the drive to end same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, with a letter that defends the effort and the Church's teaching:
It is never easy to deliver a message that calls people to make sacrifices or to do difficult things. Sometimes people want to punish the messenger. For this reason we priests at times find it difficult to articulate the Church’s teaching on sexual morality. We must never deliver the message in a self-righteous way, but rather with compassion and humility. It is important to express the moral teachings of the Church with clarity and fidelity. The Church must be Church. We must teach the truths of the Gospel in season and out of season. These recent times seem to us like it is “out of season”, but for that very reason it is even more urgent to teach the hard words of the Gospel today.
Abp. Sean also announced he's passing up a controversial awards dinner of the local Catholic Charities, because the honoree is the mayor of Boston who has been pushing the gay and sex-ed agendas on the schools for years. Protests against the award probably made a difference, so I suppose we lay people have to keep pointing out these problems. Is that a sad reality, or just one of our gifts to the Church: that we can tell the hierarchs when they foul up?
Follow-up: Sometimes people are a little too eager to tell the bishop he's fouled up. Take, for example, CWN's headline for the story ("Boston archbishop raps discrimination against homosexuals"). It gives the prominence to the conciliatory things the Archbishop wrote, and downplays the Christian challenge he was presenting. From that, one might get the impression that he were going P.C. and saying things only to please the unbelievers. I think the editor's missing the point of the exercise. In stating both the "hard" and the "soft" aspects of Church teaching, the Archbishop is defending Catholic doctrine against the errors of the non-believers, and defending the Church from the false accusations they throw at her. This is how you engage in apologetics.
