Search on Google for "Catholic", and you'll probably get this ad:
Are Catholics doomed.
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NR's John Derbyshire, an eminently reasonable and tolerant Episcopalian, is having second thoughts about tolerance itself. With this week's approval of Canon Robinson, he has realized that the homosexualist lobby is not as willing as he is to leave others a broad sphere of private opinion, but demands approval and aims to silence opposition. In such a situation, truly libertarian tolerance is not possible: one side or the other -- the normal or the abnormal -- will dominate.
Perhaps our grandfathers were wiser than us. Perhaps there are some things that we, the normal majority, SHOULD, deliberately and consciously, disapprove and marginalize.My favorite lesbian, the iconoclastic Camille Paglia, was interviewed for three hours on C-SPAN last Sunday, and offered a relevant insight. Although she's in a ten-year-long relationship, and her partner recently gave birth, she is not a supporter of "same-sex marriage". Paglia understands that marriage is essentially a religious rite, and as she is an atheist, it does not correspond to her beliefs. She observes that societies that give official sanction to homosexuality through "marriage" are generally decadent, and this worries her, because she wants Western civilization to survive. She argues that the principal civil effects gay people want (the ability to inherit, to be involved in medical decisions, etc.) can be achieved through wills, power-of-attorney agreements, etc., so the clamoring for marriage is unnecessary -- and even sometimes hysterical.
Back to Derbyshire: he worries that the same trends wrecking the Episcopal Church are underway in the Catholic Church. He's right: but Catholics have a reason for hope. Unlike Episcopalians who believe as a matter of course that Church councils can err and have erred -- that the official teaching Church is fallible -- Catholics believe that the official teaching Church is protected by a gift of the Holy Spirit who keeps her from accepting and embracing error in her doctrines. If this doctrine is true, the Catholic Church will always survive, preaching the Gospel, and the gates of Hell shall not stand against her.
"Remember: every sect in the world feeds off of the Catholic Church. Our Holy Catholic Church is like a great and extremely precious unpolished diamond, from which every so often somebody takes a particle and polishes it-not without the help of the evil one-so that it begins to shine better than the great unpolished diamond. And this shine draws men, dazzles them and deceives them, so that the particle necessarily is worn out and comes to nothing. This is the game of deception, which appears and reappears with time. Jesus warned us to watch out for it!"
A quote attributed to St. Pio of Pietrelcina in the book Stories of Padre Pio by Madame Katharina Tangari.
Judging by the search-engine hits that lead people to our site, some of our readers are probably wondering why we haven't commented on the current fuss in the Episcopal Church. Poor things: they only seem to attract public attention when they're in the process of jettisoning another element of the Christian faith.
This time, as you know, the fracas is over whether they'll approve as a bishop a (1) openly gay (2) divorced minister, who is (3) in an active non-marital sexual relationship. Once upon a time, those would have been three disqualifications for the Biblical office of bishop, but that is no longer the case.
The story took a soap-opera turn today, when a male accuser from the past popped up to call the Reverend Canon, in an interesting choice of words, a "skirt-chaser".
What will happen? Will conservatives sway some last-minute votes and keep the status quo in place? Will Robinson slip through anyway? Will Canterbury try to hold things together with a "two province" solution that lets the Episcopal Church split, but keeps both parts in the Anglican Communion? Will Third-World Evangelicals go along?
The outcome doesn't affect the Catholic Church much at all: the ECUSA has not been a reliable partner in ecumenical relations for some time, and whether they stay together or break up, the resulting bodies don't seem likely to be much more internally coherent than the current EC. But I could be proved wrong.
