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Thursday, November 3, 2016

Embracing Adulterers, LGBT: San Diego Synod Puts Pope’s Words into Action Featured

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Groups met on five different issues in the first San Diego synod since 1976. Photo by Chris Stone Groups met on five different issues in the first San Diego synod since 1976. Photo by Chris Stone
Saying the Roman Catholic Church should have “no stigmas,” Bishop Robert McElroy reached out to divorced people and gays at the end of the San Diego diocese’s first synod in 40 years. Groups met on five different issues in the first San Diego synod since 1976. Photo by Chris Stone

“That’s just not what we should be about,” McElroy said Sunday of the marginalization that has been felt by some of the county’s 1.4 million Catholics.

He said the two-day meeting of 125 parish delegates — priests and lay people — was the first in the nation aimed at translating Pope Francis’ pronouncements about family and marriage issues into action.

Carol Gamara of St. John the Evangelist in University Heights found hope in the change in attitudes expressed at the diocesan headquarters in Bay Ho. As a divorced Catholic, she says, she’s felt deprived of full participation in the church.

“The church should embrace people where they are at,” she said. “There’s no opportunity for growth if we as a society shun people or don’t acknowledge them for where they are in their lives. There’s more to an individual than what they see.” READ MORE HERE


REMNANT COMMENT: Well, Carol, sounds like maybe you shouldn’t have gotten divorced and remarried.  That’s kind of your problem, isn’t it? And for every Carol out there, we can point to a thousand faithful Catholics whose marriages failed and yet for whom “for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, until death do us part” actually meant something. It's called a vow, Carol.

You should feel “deprived of full participation in the church,” since you broke your vow and didn’t respect the Church enough to follow her rules. You’re a public adulterer.  And the reason Holy Mother Church makes you “feel deprived” is because you are deprived, and there’s a stigma attached to such deprivation. But that stigma is your best hope, Carol, since it might just eventually prompt you to stop living in sin, fix your situation, and get back on the road to salvation.

“The Church should embrace people where they are”? Really? Does that include rapists and child molesters? How about Nazis? People who smoke cigarettes?  

Has the whole world turned into a whining, self-absorbed kindergarten? Catholics were once such strong people. We knew where the boundaries were and we accepted the rules of the game. Many of us broke the rules, too, but then we knew how to accept the consequences without whining to the world about how the “big” “bad” “meanie” Church needs to change her millennia-old moral code—based on God’s law and the law of nature— so I won’t “feel deprived” anymore.

Sheesh, Carol, grow up!

So now Francis’s revolution, as laid out in Amoris Laetitia, is green-lighting public sinners who want to stay in their sinful lives but also feel good about themselves.

On the moral level, what the Church of Francis is doing is tantamount to the big liberal state handing out needles to drug addicts (rather than helping them get off drugs), teaching “safe sex” to teenagers (rather than chastity), and allowing the protestors to burn down their own city (rather than enforce the law and stop the protest).

Say what you will about Francis, one thing is undeniable: He's is a rabid liberal, whose policies will do for the Catholic Church what big government liberalism has done for the inner cities of America.
 


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Last modified on Thursday, November 3, 2016
Michael J. Matt | Editor

Michael J. Matt has been an editor of The Remnant since 1990. Since 1994, he has been the newspaper's editor. A graduate of Christendom College, Michael Matt has written hundreds of articles on the state of the Church and the modern world. He is the host of The Remnant Underground and Remnant TV's The Remnant Forum. He's been U.S. Coordinator for Notre Dame de Chrétienté in Paris--the organization responsible for the Pentecost Pilgrimage to Chartres, France--since 2000.  Mr. Matt has led the U.S. contingent on the Pilgrimage to Chartres for the last 24 years. He is a lecturer for the Roman Forum's Summer Symposium in Gardone Riviera, Italy. He is the author of Christian Fables, Legends of Christmas and Gods of Wasteland (Fifty Years of Rock ‘n’ Roll) and regularly delivers addresses and conferences to Catholic groups about the Mass, home-schooling, and the culture question. Together with his wife, Carol Lynn and their seven children, Mr. Matt currently resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.