Dissent Catholic Profs are "grave" threat to Religious Liberty

Dissent Catholic Profs are ‘grave’ threat to Religious Liberty
In pursuit of the truth - cinops be gone - Friday, Nov. 30, 2012

By Patrick B. Craine, South Bend, Indiana, Nov. 23/12 (LifeSiteNews.com)

“Catholic professors and public officials who rebel from Church teaching on key issues such as abortion and marriage represent a “grave” threat to religious liberty. [They are also heretics to the “Catechism of the Catholic Church.”] “We have witnessed that some instructors who claim the moniker ‘Catholic’ are often the sources of teachings that conflict with, rather than explain and defend, Catholic teachings in the important public policy issues of the day,” said Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano. “This, my brothers and sisters, is a grave and major problem that challenges the first freedom of religious liberty and the higher purpose of the human person.”

“In an address at the University of Notre Dame, the papal nuncio said the Church is weakened and thus “more easily persecuted” when she is divided by Catholic faithful who support “a major political party [with] intrinsic evils among its basic principles.”….

Now here is a serious example by Frank Bruni in the New York Times on March 19, 2012, titled, “Many Kinds of Catholics.” -- “American Catholics have been merrily ignoring the church’s official position on contraception for many years, often with the blessing of lower-level clerics. When my mother dutifully mentioned her I.U.D. during confession back in the 1970s, the parish priest told her that she really didn’t apologize or bring it up again. Which was a good thing, since she had no intention of doing away with it. Four kids were joy and aggravation enough.

“Despite church condemnation of abortion and same-sex marriage, American Catholics’ view on both don’t diverge that much from those of Americans in general. These Catholics look to the church not for exacting rules, but for a locus of their spirituality with rituals and an iconography that feel familiar and thus comfortable in matters religious, as in “Wizard of Oz,” there’s no place like home, and Catholicism is as much ethnicity as dogma something in the blood, and something in the bone. The Catholic hierarchy, meanwhile, keeps giving American Catholics fresh reason for rebellion.

“Because we all know that the statements and blessings of “lower-level clerics” should always take precedence over the teachings of the Church, articulated and expressed by popes, bishops, and faithful lower-level clerics. The surprise isn’t that there are Catholics, even priests, who deny Church teaching, the surprise is that we are expected to take each denial as a sign of vibrant, rich meaningful Catholicism, as if the greatest virtue ever demonstrated by a Catholic is to knowingly reject Catholic teaching and real virtue.”

For Bruni, being Catholic is about a feeling, a vague sense of comfort, and “something in the bones” - perhaps because so little is evidenced in the brain or the soul. His scowling, defiant piece is a perfect example of what Gregory means when he writes “The pullulating pluralism reinforces the relativizing impression that all religion can only be a matter of individual, subjective, and irrational personal preference… “It isn’t just a failure of faith, it is a complete failure to believe that truth can be known, found, grasped, considered, held, contemplated, love, and lived. In the words of Abp. Fulton Sheen.

“Minds no longer object to the Church, because of the way they think, but because of the way they live. They have no difficulty with the Creed, but with her Commandments; they remain outside her saving waters, not because they cannot accept the doctrine of Three Persons in One God, but because they cannot accept the moral of two persons in one flesh, not because infallibility is too complex, but the veto on Birth Control is too hard, not because the Eucharist is too sublime, but because Penance is too exacting. Briefly, the heresy of our day is not the heresy of thought, it is the heresy of action.” ….

George H. Kubeck, Pro-life needs to save marriage and the Catechism of the Catholic Church.