The Dissident and the "National Catholic Reporter"

The Dissident and the “National Catholic Reporter” # 1
In pursuit of the truth – www.cinopsbegone.com – Thursday, June 2, 2011

Preface: Do you remember the time, once a Catholic always a Catholic? Today, we have about 30 million ex-Catholics in the U.S.A. What caused this horrendous scandal? I may be fed up with the prostitution by the CINOP of Catholic identity but the author James Hitchcock has written a fascinating and insightful two part essay titled, “The Failure of Liberal Catholicism.”

James Hitchcock is a professor of history at St. Louis University. The Catholic World Report, May and June 2011 has the two-part series. I just ran off part 1 – six pages and part 2 – seven pages via access to www.CatholicWorldReport.com. It is a must read.

It seems we have others specifically in the Catholic media prostituting Catholic identity. It is common sense and reasonable for Catholic writers to take a stand. Censor the CINOP and admonish him or her not to use the Catholic label when running for public office. This is fair and honorable.

May I share with you excerpts from James Hitchcock’s first essay in this two-part series?

“No one has yet managed to transcend or synthesize the concepts “liberal” and “conservative,” however inadequate those words are for denoting beliefs. Conservative Catholics define themselves in terms of obedience to Church authority, acceptance of official teachings, and a strict personal morality, especially in matters of sexuality, while liberals offer a more expansive idea of the Church, a purportedly liberating understanding of what it means to be a Catholic.

“The conservative claim is more modest than the liberal claim, because conservatives do not offer themselves as spiritual paragons – a conservative Catholic can readily admit to being a bad person in need of redemption…

“A former publisher of the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) in effect defined liberal Catholics as those who “embrace all God’s people… loving … welcoming… open… tolerant… Our greatest fulfillment as Catholics is a sense of community, whatever baggage and difference we carry … for everyone under a very big tent…”

“An NCR editorial refers to “right-wingers” who write “windy, disgruntled, and largely unpublished letters to the editor,” a description that, except for “unpublished,” exactly describes the paper’s own letters column: Example:

‘… the church trying to saddle the laity with its bleak view of marriage by citing some looney malarkey about Adam and Eve…’ ‘Our popes since John XXIII have been just plain pathetic. Most of the U.S. bishops … are just as bad… These aristocrats do not give a hoot about the Eucharist except for posturing…’

“One NCR contributor, Jamie Manson, calls the denial of ordination to women ‘profound spiritual violence’ and charges the Church teaches that ‘women’s bodies defile the Eucharist,’ and an NCC editor, Rich Heffern, charges that ‘pathology underlies the Vatican’s insistence that an all-out priesthood is necessary.’…

“Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, a former editor of the liberal Catholic journal Commonweal, admitted that despite the fact that Weakland took no action against predator priests and used diocesan funds to pay off his blackmail male lover, he remained for her and almost ideal bishop.” … [To be continued]

George H. Kubeck, I consider the priests involved in sexual abuse; hidden and deliberate terrorists of our Catholic Faith. They had no business entering the priesthood. They entered to harm the Catholic Church.