L'Osservatore - Addendum



Fr Ray Blake comments on the article in L'Osservatore Romano which I blogged about yesterday here. The conclusion Fr Ray draws is thought provoking:
If the L'Osservatore article is correct, and there is no reason to imagine that it is not, or that it is just reserved to Rome or Italy, it would seem that despite popular acclaim of journalists and those outside or the edge of the Church that the clergy as it says 'high and low' -and presumably the committed laity- will quickly forget Francis, most of them of course will still continue when Francis moulders silently in his tomb amongst his predecessors.
'In the end the Lord wins'.
Read Fr Ray's full post here.

Jeffrey Mirus has some more pertinent observations here.
Whenever people speak or write in this way it is because they wish to justify some position or course of action which is likely to meet greater resistance if it is clearly articulated. For Catholics, it is always at least potentially dangerous to say flatly: “The Church is wrong in teaching that behavior X is always immoral or that doctrine Y is always true.” Instead, Catholics who sell their souls to the dominant culture undermine Catholic beliefs by accusing those who wish to clarify them of “repetitive thinking without vitality.”
The rule is simple: Never directly contradict what the Church teaches. Instead, insist on opennesswhile attacking the character of those who seek clarity.
As a prime example, consider the Cardinals who asked to speak with Pope Francis about several serious questions which seemed to be blurred in the text of Amoris Laetitia. The Pope refused even to grant them an audience. Instead, in various interviews he denounced persons who raise such issues as “rigid”, as incapable of understanding the good he is trying to do—as being so stupid, apparently, that they have missed the whole point. Unsurprisingly, those who seek preferment, including the most prominent contributors to Vatican publications today, take exactly the same line.
Note that such material is always published not as a rigorous argument but as a kind of celebration of the new order—a recognition, perhaps, of “the favorable moment…the Lord is giving to his community.” For this reason, the point of contention is never clearly identified with Church teaching. Instead, it is identified with the cramped and backward mentalities of those who, by defending the Faith, somehow prove that they do not want it to flourish. What, after all, is the first reason given for the sad failure of so many priests and bishops to appreciate the vision of Pope Francis? They have attained, wrote Cirignano, only a “modest cultural level”. 
Truly, we should not be smiling after all. We should be laughing out loud.

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