By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK
As Holy Week is upon us once again, and we join in with the condemnation of the crowd, crying “Crucify Him, Crucify Him,” we relive the betrayal of sin which marks every human life. We accompany the Lord Jesus Christ on His way of the cross and journey with Him all the way to Calvary. We stand with Mary and the few faithful disciples who did not abandon the Savior. We make reparation for our sins and ask for the grace that we may never sin again so as to risk losing the love of our divine Lord.
That same drama of faith and betrayal is played out every day in the Church and in the world. The cardinals and bishops who have fallen in love with the world and its idols are calling for crucifixion as they seek to universally legislate their betrayal of Christ and His moral teaching in regard to sexuality and marriage. They do this by using the Synod on the Family as a “Trojan horse” to insert their personal addiction to experimentation repeatedly into the life of the Church.
The silly season of experimentation and innovation ushered in by Vatican II’s aftermath has proven a dismal and spectacular failure. Doubling down on disrespect for the liturgy and the sacraments is unworthy of our shepherds who should understand it is a betrayal of those who are weak in faith, the least among us, as well as a source of confusion for everyone else. For malicious change agents it serves to further leverage their alien agenda.
Recently a Catholic teacher in New Jersey, Patricia Jannuzzi, became embroiled in controversy after she posted comments supporting traditional marriage on her Facebook page. I read the comments and, even by liberal standards, could find nothing ad hominem or hateful there.
She said, in effect, the same as the Holy Father has already stated several times, that every child deserves a relationship with both a mother and a father.
Actress Susan Sarandon inserted herself into the imbroglio — her nephew is an alumnus of the school and his comments on the controversy served to draw her in — and then the bishop caved. Though the bishop claims the fact that the teacher in question will continue to receive salary and benefits until August means that this does not qualify as a termination, Jannuzzi’s lawyer told her family that she will be on administrative leave receiving salary and benefits until August, but will not be rehired to teach this September.
Is Susan Sarandon now, in effect, the bishop of Metuchen, N.J., the diocese where this took place? That a Catholic teacher who is a faithful witness has gotten a public slap-down after Sarandon browbeat her on social networks leads observers to conclude that passing a public beauty contest in the media is more important than supporting Catholic teaching.
Our obedience to the divine mandate requiring love of those with same-sex attraction has the same importance as our faithful public witness also to the truth about marriage and family. The bishop’s duty to encourage love of every human person which he is so careful to defend in the case of this teacher is at the same time violated by his discriminating act against her for standing up publicly against the redefinition of marriage.
Persecutions will come, but that they should originate with a Catholic bishop against a Catholic who is an outspoken lay witness is a scandal. The only conclusion the faithful can draw from this event is that all those who claim it is “open season” on faith and morals are correct. A chilling effect on Catholic teaching on marriage will be the only result of Bishop Bootkoski’s termination of this teacher.
The disagreement among cardinals and bishops which first surfaced during the preparatory Synod on the Family in Rome last year has since taken on greater public proportions with the publication of the book on marriage, Remaining in the Truth of Christ: Marriage and Communion in the Catholic Church, by five cardinals and some others. The emboldening of German episcopal flirtations with schism can certainly be traced to Walter Cardinal Kasper’s dominating public profile at the first synod. Reinhard Cardinal Marx of Germany subsequently entered the fray with gusto in making the following comments:
“We are no subsidiaries of Rome. Each conference of bishops is responsible for pastoral care in its culture, and must, as its most proper task, preach the Gospel on our own. We cannot wait for a synod to tell us how we have to shape pastoral care for marriage and family here.”
If a cardinal’s statement threatening that if Rome will not act to approve Communion for the divorced and civilly remarried, then Germany will act on its own is not a threat of schism, then I don’t know what is.
Paul Josef Cardinal Cordes, former president of Pontifical Council Cor Unum and, like Marx, a member of the German Bishops Conference, fired back by means of a letter published by Tagespost taking aim at Marx’s provocations. He began by questioning Marx’s credibility in matters of ecclesial communion, recommending Marx had better consider the confusing effects of his comments and recommending a different venue for them:
“As a social ethicist Cardinal Marx may know much about the dependency of branches of large corporations. In an ecclesiastical context, such statements should rather be left to the village pub.”
He went on to remove universal matters of ecclesial communion and sacramental theology from the unilateral competence of individual bishops or conferences of such:
“Undoubtedly, the president of the German Bishops Conference has such competence for questions like the new edition of a hymnal [Gotteslob, a new edition recently released in the German-speaking world], or for decisions on pilgrim routes to Altötting [Marian shrine]. However, the debate on the problems of remarried divorcees is another matter. It is bound to theology, which forms its center.
“Therefore, even a cardinal cannot, almost as in a coup, separate pastoral care from doctrine — unless he wants to ignore the meaning of the words of Jesus, which oblige us in faith, and the binding definitions of the Council of Trent.”
Perhaps the synod fathers will take inspiration for upholding the inviolability of divine will in matters of faith and morals from the courageous witness of men like Cardinal Cordes who concluded thus:
“This problem does not touch directly most of the members of the Church practicing the faith. May the pastors assembled in Rome this autumn also instruct these men and women on how their marriage can root them deeper and deeper in the faith in Jesus Christ, so that they may become for many contemporaries witnesses of God’s power in the life of men. Maybe it will even occur to the synod fathers to express their respect to those who, out of fidelity to the marriage vows once made, do not enter any new union. Also they exist.”
Yes, faithful Catholics do exist. Perhaps, as Sacred Scripture demands, we can better invest effort in taking care first of the members of the “household of faith” trusting that, as we do so, they will then have what they need to themselves go out to serve, thereby helping the Church take better care of those who are weak in faith and struggling to live out moral teachings.
In this way we can hope that the needs of those who have failed to live out marriage and family life according to God’s plan and the impetus of the New Evangelization will simultaneously be better accommodated.
May you have a blessed Holy Week. Thank you for reading and praised be Jesus Christ, now and forever.
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