By DEXTER DUGGAN
It was a nightmare image. Smugly smiling Pope Francis gives a thumbs-up as he wears a mitre emblazoned with the rainbow colors of homosexual radicals.
It wasn’t an image done by the Pope’s detractors. It was an approving editorial cartoon in the United States, drawn by a gratified pro-homosexual left-winger after the recent Synod on the Family.
The Pope actually promoting homosexuality? Whatever the message in Rome turned out to be, left-wing media again were adjusting it to fit their agenda.
The synod started with inarguable awareness that families around the world suffer under demands that they must surrender to aggressive secularism. But the prelates’ gathering in Rome hadn’t covered much territory before it appeared the synod itself was surrendering and would approve families doing so, too.
Were families threatened by, among other phenomena, anti-Catholic homosexual activism? Before long, in the October 13 midterm report, the solution switched into welcoming and valuing homosexuals.
Then synod prelates began speaking up to say the narrative in the news was being twisted; these weren’t the thoughts of many of them, having to be expressed behind closed doors.
Maybe the prelates’ course correction in public would have succeeded on its own. However, it certainly didn’t hurt that in the Internet age, faithful Catholics and other sympathetic observers around the world could see almost instantly what was happening, and could raise their own voices immediately in defense of authentic Church teaching.
Gone was the day when newspaper subscribers had to wait to react until after reading the coverage the next morning — by which time manipulative liberal reporters back in Rome already would be ramping up their slant on the previous day’s events.
Before the Internet, dominant left-wing media could have left orthodox prelates convened in Rome feeling stranded, portrayed in the news as a tiny faction rejecting Catholics’ overriding sentiments worldwide. But that strategy didn’t work now.
Everyone’s a sinner with temptations and struggles, certainly including the homosexually troubled and the divorced. As even Pope Francis would say: If the Church were to tell all its sinners to leave, there’d be no one remaining under its roof.
But the critical questions always have been: Are they trying to reform their lives? Or insisting there’s no need to reform?
Certainly in the globally influential United States, the left-wing secular media have been largely successful at setting the U.S. Catholic Church’s political agenda to conform to Democratic Party left-liberalism, from a ham-fisted, mandatory national medical monstrosity — albeit without Obamacare’s abortion — to nation-destroying immigration “amnesty.”
Perhaps editors think that if they just keep up the pressure, the Church will make a complete surrender, not only a halting one, on moral issues, too.
It’ll be a year before the synod officially resumes. Orthodox Catholics can work at becoming better prepared from the outset next time. But their opposites will be at work up until next October, too. Pope Francis will have the final word on the synod’s conclusions. Yet some were still left wondering: On whose side do his deep sympathies lie?
Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke, one of the orthodox heroes of the synod, unfortunately had to express apparent uncertainty when asked by The Catholic World Report (CWR) if he agreed with the assessment of some secular media that Pope Francis suffered a “synod setback on gays.”
The online news magazine on October 19 said Burke replied, “I have no evidence regarding the Pope’s thinking in the matter or regarding his alleged support of a relaxation of the Church’s teaching.”
No evidence on the Pope’s thinking about some core Church beliefs? Indeed, online religion-news aggregator PewSitter.com bustled every day with conflicting stories about synod events, including the question of just where the Pope stood.
Notably, however, the final synod document did remove the midterm report’s most contentious language, about “valuing” homosexuals. And that final document affirms that there “is no foundation whatsoever” for equating homosexual marriage with heterosexual marriage.
The Wanderer asked some orthodox Catholics for their thoughts as synod events unfolded. While these Catholics may be feeling better after corrections were made of the reporting of prelates’ views, they’re sure to be ready for more action in 2015 if necessary.
Kathy Sinnott, a Third Order Dominican in Ireland and international radio contributor, reminded The Wanderer that even the first Pope made serious missteps.
“We must pray for Pope Francis,” Sinnott said in an email. “But people who assume that the Pope will do the right thing forget that the Church, no less than ourselves, must live the life, death and Resurrection of Jesus.
“At the critical moment of the passion and death of Jesus, Peter is all over the place,” she said. “He swears to defend Jesus at the Last Supper, but he falls asleep in the Garden. When Jesus is being arrested, he slashes out with a sword and injures not a solider but a hapless servant. He runs away in fear.
“Pulling himself together, he comes back but, at the first threat, he folds, denying Jesus and compounding that denial as the pressure mounts, twice more and with oaths,” Sinnott said. “He runs again and cowers in hiding. When Jesus rises, he won’t at first believe. You get the picture.
“We can expect no less from a Pope when the time comes. Has the time come? Only God knows!”
However, she continued, “Jesus knew all this would happen and tells Peter, ‘Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm thy brethren.”
The answer for Catholics, Sinnott said, is to turn to Jesus’ Mother: “Run to Mary in all this confusion and you will stay with Jesus and His Mystical Body the Church.”
The Wanderer asked Jim Holman, publisher of the online California Catholic Daily, if he found news from the synod to be confusing or disturbing.
Holman replied that the best indication would be to look at reader response by “educated, churchgoing Catholics” to an article his site reprinted from The Catholic World Report by Fr. D. Vincent Twomey, SVD, professor emeritus of moral theology at the Pontifical University of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, Ireland.
These readers “do not seem confused; horrified is a better word” about news at the synod, Holman said. “Now, the ‘uneducated’ churchgoing Catholics are probably very confused, based on what I have read.”
Nearing the conclusion of his article posted October 15 by CWR, Twomey wrote: “Of the many glaring omissions in the reports (e.g. chastity is not mentioned once), the most striking is the absence of any reference to holiness as the goal of all Church teaching and pastoral practice. [Peter] Cardinal Erdo’s report does mention sanctity once — albeit in passing — but otherwise it is exclusively concerned with assuaging people’s feelings by showing sympathy to every possible irregular situation.
“This might help overcome the negative image of the Church’s teaching on sexuality, and as such would be welcome, were it not in fact scandalous, in the strict sense of leading people astray from God (cf. Matt. 18:6),” Twomey wrote. “Sad to say, the Synod’s (now not-so-hidden) agenda feeds into a bigger agenda, which is that of a secular society that threatens the traditional family to its very foundations.”
Some Catholics in the San Diego area responded to The Wanderer’s request for comment about the synod in progress. A couple of them pointed to a commentary by local orthodox pastor Fr. Richard Perozich, related to the synod’s topic of Catholics unable to receive the Eucharist. It appeared at the Renew America blog.
Perozich wrote: “When a lifestyle choice has separated a person from full communion with God and the Church and from Holy Communion, that person needs to take advantage of the mercy in the Church as they can: in the sacrament of Penance, in the process of seeking a tribunal’s decision on the validity of a marriage, of seeking the sacrament of Matrimony, all the while striving to live the chaste life and taking all steps to do so.
“Whether a baptized person is living outside the Commandments or within them, that person is still a Catholic and has recourse to the Church for prayer, mercy, and ways to repent and change the lifestyle so that intimate union with God in Eucharist is possible,” he wrote.
“A pastoral practice that allows sin to be mixed with grace is neither pastoral, nor compassionate, nor merciful. Any such accommodation would teach others to abandon biblical guidance, to follow human desire, and to separate themselves from God,” Perozich wrote.
Humanae Vitae
Dissent Revisited
Southern California Catholic activist Therese More cautioned against paying serious attention to “interim comments” at the synod that cause people anxiety, then she related dissidence at the synod to dissidence within the U.S. Catholic Church when Pope Paul VI issued the encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968 against contraception.
The U.S. dissenters sometimes were called “AmChurch.”
“To me, the watershed event of the AmChurch was the lack of episcopal correction of the 80, or how many, ‘theologians’ who signed the full-page New York Times ad rejecting Humanae Vitae three short days after it was promulgated,” More said.
“With the loss of the Catholic bully pulpit, ‘Katie, bar the door’,” and within a few years, in 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court legalized national permissive abortion, she said.
Activist Larry Greenbank pointed to evidence that initial remarks attributed to the synod simply paralleled comments that already had been prepared.
“When I realized that the relatio document (which parallels the original synod working document) was released before the bishops could comment, then I was even more alarmed,” Greenbank said. “The original working document was released in June. I even went through the online Wayback site to get an old copy of the working document from July. It had not been changed.
“The working document does not identify pastoral care for homosexual persons, but rather ‘gay couples,’ as if having sex qualifies a ‘gay couple’ as married,” he said. “Deviant and sinful behavior has nothing to do with marriage or family. It has nothing to do with Catholic life at all. This synod was a progressive secular-humanist agenda from the beginning. I believe it was with Francis’ approval. . . .”
Greenbank told The Wanderer: “I believe that failure to identify this progressive humanist agenda in Western politics, and in clerical politics, and the failure to strip these liberals of positions of authority, in schools, in colleges, in political office, and in the Catholic Church (which is the teaching authority of Christ) will mean the end of the free republic and religious freedom in the West.
“We must identify the deconstructors and support the builders. The Church will survive, but our families, and our country, will not,” Greenbank said.
“I believe this attack is much more alarming, not only because of the stakes but because it is at the same time diabolical, and it strikes at the very root of our family, our Church, and our nation,” he said.
Demoralizing The Faithful
One of my California family, Mary Mastrangelo, said a headline caught her eye with wording to the effect, “Vatican signals change in views on homosexuality.”
“The headline was the typical ‘grabber’ type, disturbing to faithful Catholics and elating for those who have been hoping for the Church to fall apart since Vatican II,” she said, adding:
“How can you ‘accept and welcome’ without some people thinking that the next headline will read: ‘Vatican signals homosexual behavior is A-OK’? Also, how can people know they’re doing wrong if they don’t hear it? They may not listen, but they should hear it….
“I know that the Holy Spirit won’t allow devilish mischief to hold sway, but I worry about the picture that was presented,” Mastrangelo said. “Attacks on the Church have gone on practically forever, but today’s 24-hour news cycle sticks it in one’s face constantly.”
Referring to an organization of people with same-sex attraction who follow traditional Church teaching, she asked, “How would the people feel who, for example, belong to Courage? Nothing demoralizes folks who struggle to stay true to the Church than media trumpeting that things are changing now! The Church is finally getting up to date. You’ve been an idiot all these years for staying faithful.”
And an Arizona Catholic priest told an informal gathering of parishioners that synod news “can be a little unsettling. It’s unsettling to me,” but God remains with the Church.
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