AMERICAN CATHOLIC COUNCIL: #7...LAST OF THE LETTERS?

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There were so many letters about the AMWERICAN CATHOLIC COUNCIL Meeting that I have to break up the blogs so there not too long. In fact, I think I have blogged about this one event more than any other topic or issue…cause’ I like the issue?

One letter writer, Gerald Patrick Maloney of Southfield (good Irish Catholic) echoed what I was saying about Archbishop Allen Vigneron, who threatened to defrock priests who attended the meeting mass but allows a priest arrested and convicted on sexual charges to minister at mass in local parishes.

Mr. Maloney quotes Mathew 23:24: “You blind guides. You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” And I hope we can all see the absurdity that is Archbishop Vigneron.

Amy Wieleba of Novi, defended the mass at the meeting against claims of “serious liturgical abuses” saying that a layperson gave a “Gospel reflection” and not a “homily” which can only be given by a priest…OK?

Carol Lemelin of St. Clair Shores took the Free Press to task for missing the point of the meeting and just reporting on the controversies. She said that they should have been concentrating on the Catholic Church trying to reverse Vatican II and going backwards where no one wants to go. That was a valid point that I have stressed many times but the Free Press needs to sell papers so they will always concentrate on what readers want: juicy controversy?

The two sides were very distinct; no grey areas…your’ either with us or against us.

In the history of Christianity, there were hundreds if not thousands of dissenting views of what was true and what was not; orthodoxy or heresy. Obviously, ideas branded heresy were the ideas that lost the battle and orthodoxy (truisms?) obviously the ideas that won so it is not a battle between what is right or wrong, or what is historically true or false or even doctrinally true or false; it is which side has the power to remain standing in the end.

To ask the Church for a dialogue is pointless unless you have power and clout and you will have neither if the majority of Catholics keep believing that their leaders are divinely ordained even though some of them are really, really bad human beings.