Still waiting...

Six years ago, I asked in this blog why Nancy Pelosi had still not been denied the Eucharist for her public, clear, and defiant persistence in supporting abortion in her congressional votes. Back then, we Catholics were told to be patient because the then-Archbishop of San Francisco was taking a "pastoral" approach to her correction.

Six years on, and Ms. Pelosi is still flaunting her leadership against even the slightest limitation upon abortion. No statement condemning her behavior has been forthcoming. No statement noting her self-excommunication under Canon Law and consequent inability to receive the Eucharist has been forthcoming. No repentance. Not even an acknowledgement that her actions are in contradiction to Church doctrine.

How long, O Lord, how long?

Pope Francis on Life, for real

Our liberal friends in the Catholic Church thought they heard a major policy change in Pope Francis' widely-quoted off-the-cuff remarks back in September, when he seemed to downplay the importance of the issue of abortion. Too bad they weren't paying attention the very next day, when, speaking with carefully-chosen words to a gathering of Catholic OB/GYNs, he said:

The third aspect is a mandate: be witnesses and speakers of this "culture of life" . Your being Catholic entails a greater responsibility: first of all to yourself, to be committed to being consistent with the Christian vocation; and then to contemporary culture, to contribute to recognising the transcendent dimension in human life, the imprint of the creative work of God, from the very first moment of conception. This is a commitment to the new evangelization that often requires going against the current, at a cost to the person. The Lord counts on you to spread the "Gospel of life."

Read the rest: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/edward-pentin/popes-strong-words-in-defense-of-the-unborn#ixzz2laPjneTF

It bears repeating that even in the earlier casual statement, the Pope was simply reminding Catholics that preaching Christ must always come first, before we try to advance any social issue.

"Without Me, you can do nothing," Our Lord said, and Francis was just reminding us that He meant it.

"An exciting ride"

If Francis really is in the line of Cardinals Martini and Bernardin, as Russell Shaw remarks, we are indeed in for "an exciting ride" in the Catholic Church. Exciting, that is, in the sense that skidding your car into a freeway guardrail is exciting. And to claim that the Church has been too confrontational over the past forty years is to ignore the shabby record of silence of most American and European bishops on any subject that might get them bad press, or even a few scowls from the more dissident members of their flocks. If Shaw is right, Francis' path isn't new; what's new is that we now have papal validation of the worthless habits of thought that have led to so much decline.

For eight precious years of the pontificate of a certain Emeritus Pope, it looked like the "long, melancholy, withdrawing roar" of this blog's namesake poem had finally fallen silent, and that the Sea of Faith was poised for a new flood tide. But with each passing month of Francis' reign, that hope seems to have been, at best, premature.

I posted a portion of these remarks first in the combox of the Alateia website, where the article appeared.

Cdl. O'Malley uses the business end of the crozier

CatholicCulture.org reports that Cardinal O'Malley of Boston has forbidden a dissident Austrian priest to speak at a parish in his diocese. Good going, Cardinal. That shepherd's crook you've got is not just to nudge the sheep gently, but to take a mighty whack at the wolves trying to get into the sheepfold. Encore!

To repeat a metaphor I've used many times before: If a Chevy dealer asked to use a local Ford showroom to make a sales presentation, what Ford dealer in his or her right mind would let them? No real Chevy dealer would even have the chutzpah to ask. But for some reason, people who want to tear down the Catholic Church, and remake its practices closer to their hearts' desire, never seem to lack for it.

A rallying point in KC

Praise for Bishop Finn's action to rein in the notoriously dissident National Catholic Reporter from Michael Voris at ChurchMilitant.tv:

There remains virtually no area of Church teaching that the heterodox gang at the "Distorter" [MV's apt sobriquet for NCR] hasn’t—well—distorted. A rundown of their regular contributors should give plenty of evidence as to their extraordinarily NON-Catholic slant. 

Fr. Richard McBrien, for example—a man so delusional about what Catholicism is that when he wrote his book Catholicism—which he still, by the way, uses to teach from at Notre Dame—the U.S. Bishops condemned it. And that was years ago. 

Imagine: being so liberal that the US Bishops’ Conference actually condemns your work! Heck, that honor is almost exclusively reserved for orthodox faithful Catholics. So you know McBrien’s opus had to be really rotten. 

Then there is the pro-gay, never-met-a-Church-teaching-on-sexual-morality-she-wouldn’t-throw-overboard Sister Joan Chittister, a radical feminist who suffers from an obvious case of Pope Envy. As in, she wants to be Pope. 

The list of sad stories of shipwrecked faith goes on and on over at the Distorter, and for years—decades actually—they have used their incredibly shrinking newspaper as a sounding board for every personal grievance imaginable. All under the banner of "social justice" and the "New Church" and "Power to the People" kind of sloganeering. 

In reality, they really are little else than the dying embers of failed liberalism, but who still have a nasty and poison tongue which they turn against good bishops, faithful laity and the Church in general when She professes immutable dogmatic truths.

National Non-Catholic Reporter

Bishop Finn has dropped the hammer on that perennially ugly dissident publication, the National Catholic Reporter (not to be confused with the estimable National Catholic Register, which is now owned by EWTN). He has publicly told the magazine's editors to stop advertising and characterizing the Reporter as a Catholic periodical, reiterating an order issued by the late Bishop Helmsing of the same diocese forty-five years ago—which, true to form, the Reporter has ignored for the same forty-five years.

This story gives a summary with extensive quotations; see the full essay by Bishop Finn here.

Oh, and naturally he's been the target of vicious personal attacks as a result. Pray for him. And also for the long-deceived (and deceiving) editors, staff, and writers at the Reporter—they need prayer too, although for far different reasons than Bishop Finn.

By the way, you might check to see if your parish offices subscribe to the Reporter. If so, a request to stop spending parish money on a non-Catholic periodical might be in order...