The Crisis Of Church Abuse

The Crisis Of Church Abuse

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

Luxembourg Cardinal Jean-Claude Hollerich, a Jesuit who leads the pan-European Catholic bishops’ conference, has called for a change in the Church’s teaching on homosexuality.
The report appears in America Magazine, a Jesuit publication (James Martin, SJ, often criticized for his pro-homosexual views, is the magazine’s “Editor at Large.” He is not related to the late Fr. Paul Mankowski, SJ, the author of Jesuit at Large, a book which we recently reviewed in this space).
In an interview with Germany’s Catholic News Agency (KNA), the president of the Commission of the Bishops’ Conferences of the European Union (COMECE), said he considered the Church’s assessment of homosexuality relationships as sinful to be wrong.
“I believe that the sociological-scientific foundation of this teaching is no longer correct,” Hollerich said. The cardinal said it was time for a fundamental revision of Church teaching, and suggested the way Pope Francis had spoken about homosexuality in the past could lead to a change in doctrine, according to America Magazine.
Hollerich’s phrasing immediately caught my eye, because the Church’s sexual doctrine is not based on sociology or secular science. Quite the contrary. Auguste Comte founded sociology and positivism in the mid-nineteenth century. Comte was an atheist who developed an extensive, value-free system that denied both Catholic teaching and Natural Law, giving us the morality-free social sciences that prosper in today’s dystopian, postmodern culture.
Hans Kelsen, the founder of Legal Positivism in the early twentieth century, applied Comte’s metaphysical nihilism to the law. Kelsen lived through both world wars. He later insisted that Auschwitz and the Soviet Gulags were valid under existing law at the time. He could not criticize them as unjust because justice, he said, is “an irrational ideal.”
Commenting on Hollerich’s startling statement, Fr. Jerry Pokorsky writes in CatholicCulture.org that the cardinal’s remarks “not only condone sodomy. They reveal a contempt that logically extends to the Church’s teaching on marriage and the New and Everlasting Covenant. So far,” he goes on to observe, “there are no corrections from senior Church officials. Why not?”
Pokorsky then crafts a helpful neologism to identify a problem that goes far beyond Hollerich:
“ ‘Diversity, equity, and inclusion’ represent the precepts of a Godless secular religion that abuses the Church with the arrogance of the Devil’s temptation: ‘Ye shall be as gods’ (Gen. 3:5) We are guilty of Church abuse when we expect the Church’s faith and morals to change to fit our lifestyles and expectations,” Pokorsky writes.
“High-level ecclesiastical complicity in Church abuse disrupts the teaching apostolates of faithful priests and laity. We can no longer ignore the elephant in the room, pretending good-faith disagreement in our preaching and catechesis.”

To Biden’s Goons, It’s
The Thought That Counts

The truck caravans shutting down Canada’s capital have received support from millions in Canada and beyond. The ruling elites are not pleased, and the Cancel Brigades have been hard at work.
After the truckers raised $10 million on GoFundMe, an Internet fundraising tool, the company seized all the funds and threatened to give them to its own favorite charities. When threatened with costly lawsuits, it quickly refunded every donation in full.
In the days since, a new site, GiveSendGo, quickly raised several million for the truckers.
Our state media has cooperated as well, disparaging the truckers when they couldn’t ignore them. And ignore them they have: In a replay of Waukesha last week, David Zegarac, a 42-year old Canadian, drove his car into a crowd of caravan supporters, wounding four. You haven’t heard about that from the fake news networks because Zegarac was a member of the Marxist group Antifa. Like the black racist killer in Waukesha, Zegarac was the “wrong kind” of terrorist.
Canada’s truckers are objecting to the country’s punitive vaccination mandates, but authorities clearly have something else in mind.
On January 28, Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly warned that “those not present who are inciting such behaviors [as damaging property] online could also face punishment. . . . We have the capability and commitment to pursue investigations and prosecutions well after the demonstrations have ended,” he said.
Well, that could mean anybody. Is Chief Sloly taking a page from Nancy Pelosi’s playbook?
Consider: More than a year after the incursion at the Capitol, ninety percent of the illegal subpoenas issued by Pelosi’s “January 6th” Star Chamber have gone to people who weren’t even in Washington on January 6, 2021. Like Chief Sloly’s countless potential targets, any random Trump supporter anywhere can be a Pelosi target.
Moving quickly to lend its support, Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has provided new and virtually unlimited grounds for prosecuting ThoughtCrime.
From the DHS website:
“The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories, and other forms of mis-dis- and mal-information (MDM) introduced and/or amplified by foreign and domestic threat actors.”
Here are the agency’s definitions:
Misinformation is false, but not created or shared with the intention of causing harm.
Disinformation is deliberately created to mislead, harm, or manipulate a person, social group, organization, or country.
Malinformation is based on fact, but used out of context to mislead, harm, or manipulate.
Armed with this idle blather, Big Brother won’t have to decide what’s true or false — according to the Department’s own definitions, that doesn’t matter. It’s apparently the motives that count, and those the Thought Police can determine with ease as they pursue political opponents of the administration with ease.
Over at the Department of Justice, Attorney General Garland has lent his helping hand, identifying domestic “white supremacists” as America’s Public Enemy Number One. While real terrorists steam unhindered across our southern border, Garland has branded mothers of children in government schools as his prime target. But he’s not stopping there. He might well turn his guns on critics of Bidens mask-and-vaccination programs next.
When incarcerating dissenters, Garland’s Goons will cite DHS’s “MDM” — a brazen program created by a cabal of unelected bureaucrats. MDM is now the Biden Administration’s working definition of “ThoughtCrime,” designed to harass, intimidate, silence, and paralyze its political opposition.
Meanwhile, as the Late Bob Dole famously asked in 1996, “Where’s the outrage?”
Well, instead of challenging this brazen attack on the First Amendment, Republican lawmakers have been cheering Joe Biden’s collapse in the polls. They’re almost euphoric, chirping gaily about all the initiatives they’re going to launch when they’re in charge on Capitol Hill next year.
After all, isn’t the GOP a slam dunk for huge gains in November?
Don’t hold your breath. America’s increasingly desperate Left is not going to roll over and play dead. After all, as Ivan Karamazov observed, “If there is no God, then everything is permitted.”
And Vladimir Lenin made that “everything” mandatory: “Whatever serves the Revolution is ethical.”

Leftovers

Here in Virginia, A.C. Cordoza, a newly elected Republican Member of the House of Delegates, recently asked to join the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus. He was denied entry.
Apparently, like Clarence Thomas, Mr. Cordoza was “the wrong kind of black.”
“My Black voice came to the table, and it was rejected. I don’t know what to do. I’m a legislator, I’m Black, and I want to help the Black community,” he says. “Maybe I need to start my own caucus, the Virginia Non-Leftist Black Caucus.”
Mr. Cordoza, a veteran and a cybersecurity engineer, recently posted Internet attacks depicting him as a “Coon” and an “Uncle Tom.”
Winsome Sears, the first black woman ever elected to serve as Virginia’s lieutenant governor, has suffered similar attacks since she was nominated last year.
Perhaps Virginia’s Catholic bishops, both of whom commemorate February as “Black History Month,” could use the occasion to condemn publicly these racist attacks