See this post from NRO’s Rod Dreher on The Corner.
…the mood among orthodox RCs here is grim. This “hapless bench of bishops,” as Bp. Bruskewitz called them tonight, couldn’t even agree that the role of dissent and homosexuality in this catastrophe was worth studying.
More to come from Rod on Monday.
This is not what we were hoping for from our Bishops. At least not what me and my Catholic friends and family in communion with the Church were hoping for. I applauded Bishop Gregory’s statement at the beginning of the conference. However, there were not only bad decisions that led up to this conference, there were also bad ideas, beliefs and practices. We discuss them all the time. They include dissenting ideas and practices regarding such things as:
Liturgy
Confession and Sacramental participation
The Church teaching on human sexuality
The role of the clergy
The role of the laity
Abortion
It all comes down to what the Catholic Church teaches and what dissenters believe should be taught. This includes the voices of dissent inside and outside the Church. Let’s remember that in centuries past dissenters were called “heretics” and “schismatics.” I am shocked and dismayed that the Bishops couldn’t agree the role of dissent was worth studying. How is it not worth studying?
More from another piece by Mr. Dreher:
The ideological schism within Church ranks will likely only intensify, particularly if the sense grows among orthodox Catholics that the bishops do not want to address the homosexual problem, and the “lavender mafia” corruption of the seminaries, where much of this abuse starts. Similarly, as Phil Lawler points out, the bishops have said nothing about the Vatican’s recent mandate that the bishops recommit themselves to Catholic teaching.
That is also at the heart of this scandal. The liberal Appleby made an excellent point in his address to the bishops, saying that the crisis began, in a sense, with the 1968 papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which forbade artificial birth control for Catholics. A large majority of American Catholics rejected the ruling, and a large majority of American bishops (and priests) declined to defend and promote the teaching. This event, Appleby said, marked the beginning of the bishops and the laity living in bad faith.
As Lawler, who agrees with Appleby on this diagnosis (if not the solution), wrote yesterday, the bishops “have, in short, ‘looked the other way.’ Over the years the habit has become ingrained. On one issue after another — contraception, homosexuality, abortion — bishops have developed the practice of looking the other way, papering over the gap between teaching and practice. Meanwhile, the ordinary Catholic faithful became accustomed to this mode of behavior, so that they began to view bishops as distant, abstracted figures. And so we come to today’s scandal.
“Yes, the path leads back to Humanae Vitae. And we wish to address the fundamental causes of today’s distress, we cannot avoid that history.”
This is why anybody who thinks the Friday vote on sex-abuse policy will be the end of the matter is dreaming. The battle for the Catholic Church in America has only just begun.
Perhaps I should be hoping and praying instead of blogging.