Mark,
I do not find your words painful, and I should hope that others do not. I am sorry that you, a Catholic, have chosen a public forum like this to express your opinions contrary to the teaching of the Holy Father.
No one who reads his response can believe that he is being honest when he said, "I do not find your words painful, and I should hope that others do not." Anytime any Catholic holds "opinions contrary to the teaching of the Holy Father" all Catholics should find such an act painful regardless which side they believe is correct.
What I find very troubling about Fr. Angelo's response is that he seems to have learned nothing from the pedophile scandal this decade. For example, Fr. Angelo ends his post by accusing me of creating "scandal." He also said:
Even if there were a basis for your contention, which I do not for a second grant, then responsible, humble and qualified theologians whose consciences were so convicted should, according to the proper domain of their mandate, discuss this within scholarly and magisterial circles.
I wonder if Fr. Angelo would tell someone who claimed to be molested by a priest that he or she would be creating scandal if he or she went public with his or her story. Would he tell them, "Even if there were a basis for your contention, which I do not for a second grant, then responsible, humble, and qualified bishops whose consciences were so convicted should, according to the proper domain of their mandate, discuss this within scholarly and magisterial circles"?
The doctrine that Fr. Angelo holds is what caused the pedophile scandal in the first place. Pray, pay, and obey was force fed Catholics for generations as a response to Protestants. No one questioned the priest because the bishop appointed him. No one questioned the bishop because the pope appointed him. No one questioned the pope because God appointed him. Therefore, if a Catholic questioned the priest he or she was enviably questioning God. Sadly, a practice that was created to protect souls became the instrument of their harm. In addition, it has kept many a Protestant out of the Church and added fuel to their fire against the Church because the doctrine is not biblical, nor supported by history. Also, it was just such a doctrine of false obedience that led to the wide scale dissent after Vatican II.
Fr. Angelo holds the pray, pay, and obey doctrine and sees someone like myself as professing, "rogue opinions to the faithful in the pews contrary to the teaching of the Holy Father." What happened to our new practice of “transparency”?
What we have here is not just a dispute about Mother Teresa's cause for canonization. It is a dispute about what it means to be a Catholic. Fr. Angelo represents a model of the Church as a dictatorship--the pope as Holy Furor. I represent a model of the Church as a family--the pope as Holy Father. You cannot question the furor but you can question your father. The Church is a dynastic succession of one father to another passing on a faith. If the father of the family fails to hand on what grandpa told him the grandkids and the children of the family have the right and the duty to speak up to dad and ask him to explain. The faith is not the property of the father; he is only the caretaker of the faith. So, he has no right or authority to bark out orders of obedience based on the faith if he is in disobedience to the faith.
Pope St. Gregory said:
“If people are scandalized at the truth, it is better to allow the birth of scandal, than to abandon the truth (Hom. Super Ezech. vii).”
Is what I have said scandal to you or scandal to me
more in the next post
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