Tuesday, July 01, 2014

Canada’s Bishops Fiddle While Justin’s Star Rises


Some pundits laugh when the suggestion is made that Justin Trudeau might one day be Prime Minister of Canada. He’s just too much of a pretty boy, not ready for prime time.

But that’s wishful (conservative) thinking. Justin’s star is indeed rising.

Make no mistake about it, as Prime Minister of Canada, Justin will finish what his father started. In fact he’ll go one step better! He’s already proved that. And Canada will sink further into its moral abyss, one engineered mostly by all the “devout” Catholic Prime Ministers who strangely knew nothing about the concept of the “common good” of society.

Nor do all the other rank and file Catholic politicians raised up on the milk of pseudo-catholicism. One wonders whether, in fact, the Catholic Bishops themselves know much about such a concept. According to Karl Keating of Catholic Answers, MOST of them have no knowledge of the writings of Benedict XVI,  John Paul II, or even Vatican II!

A few years ago, during the reign of Benedict XVI, these scholars, a man and a woman, were appointed by the Vatican to high posts connected with a then-current synod of bishops. Working closely with the bishops both before and after they came to  Rome and with the Roman authorities who arranged for the synod, the pair discovered something surprising: most bishops who come to synods are unprepared to teach anyone much of anything.

You, like me, probably think the role of a synod is for bishops to think deep thoughts and to conclude their gathering with published findings and marching orders that go out to the world's many dioceses. That may have been what Rome had expected when synods began to come into regular use some years ago, but realities "on the ground" have upended those expectations, according to the two scholars.

What the Vatican discovered is that the world's bishops—not all of them, but most of them (emphasis mine)—simply haven't done their homework. At this previous synod, it turned out that most of the bishops showed no knowledge of the writings of Benedict XVI or of his predecessor, John Paul II. Many of them hadn't even read the documents of Vatican II! (This was more true for bishops from Third World countries, but it applied to bishops in Europe and North America too.)

How could such unprepared men expect to know the depth of what Benedict and John Paul had been teaching if they never read those popes' encyclicals and their other writings? How could these bishops maneuver well in the modern world if they hadn't even become familiar with what was promulgated at Vatican II?

It proved to be an awkward realization for Rome. The men who were expected to go out and spread the word didn't even know what the word was. And so the synods quietly have become something else. Instead of being sessions at which learned bishops issue teachings for the masses, they now are sessions at which the bishops themselves are taught the teachings.


Maybe this explains why the Catholic Bishops of Canada unleashed such a Pandora’s Box in 1966 when, unbelievably, they declared then-current legal restrictions on the use of contraceptives to be “harmful to public order and to the common good.” Of course that travesty of justice (and outright denial of Catholic teaching) was followed up in 1968 with the rejection of the Pope’s teaching as expressed in Humanae Vitae. Since then a blackout from the Bishops on the subject of the moral law, accompanied by unrestricted abortion, has devastated Canadian society.

During the 38 year reign of renegade Catholic Prime Ministers in Canada the Catholic Bishops didn’t take decisive action to discipline any of them by means of Canon law provisions and Vatican directives. Nor did they make efforts to control the fallout from such severe scandal by rightly molding the consciences of the everyday lay Catholic, especially the politician. Indeed, there’s been a long history of defending the renegades, even, more recently, pretty boy Justin.

And now we hear some Bishops are concerned because of a pro-abortion policy instituted by Justin Trudeau. Was Trudeau’s action really a surprise? It’s impossible to believe that both Trudeau’s priest and his Bishop were unable to determine his position on abortion, if they were interested in finding out. And don’t you think they should have been interested? Clearly, up to this point, nobody with spiritual oversight over Justin really thought his soul was in danger. Again, how is that possible?

But, nevertheless, that’s the current pseudo-catholic paradigm in Canada.

And for the good of Canada’s future, saving Trudeau’s soul ought to be a top priority with the Bishops.



2 comments:

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

This one is interesting:

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/marriage/mf0041.html