Updates on yesterday's blog about the fight between the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and the DC City Council:
Local DC columnist, Petula Dvorak, a Roman Catholic calls her church to account and says that the Catholic Church has left her--and countless other DC Catholics--"heartbroken."
The Right Rev. John Chane, the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, pretty much says that his church will help pick up the slack if the Catholic Church walks away (seems like a return volley in the ongoing Vatican-Anglican argument, too).
Whatever happens in this case could, according to several news sources, set a national precedent for other states that adopt same-sex marriage as they try to work out accommodations with religious organizations.
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Stand for thr faith my Catholic brothers and sisters.
If "the faith" involves ditching the poor of a city because it doesn't encode the Catholics' narrow social doctrine into law, I'd question whether that "faith" was in any way definable as Christian.
Can you picture Jesus Christ telling the sick "I'm sorry, I would heal you, but I can't because I disagree with your city's rules"? I sure can't. The Roman Catholic Diocese should be ashamed of themselves. I pray that the Holy Spirit brings them to repentance and they rescind their threat.
Oh, and praise God for Diocesan Bishop John, who unlike the Roman Catholic Diocese seems to truly know what following Christ is all about. Again, the Episcopals are embarrassing the Roman Catholic Diocese by demonstrating that love will triumph over hate and acceptance over bigotry. I pray the authorities in the Roman Catholic Diocese feel this shame deeply in their hearts, repent of their sinful ways, and stop holding the poor hostage in their misguided demand that we shape our laws around their narrow doctrines.
All of this reminds me of the infamous National Lampoon ad that showed a dog with a gun to his head with the caption, "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll shoot this dog."
I find it troubling that the Catholic church has no problem with providing partner benefits for those employees who have divorced their first spouses and remarried without annulment, yet objects to two men or two women who love each other and commit to each other being able to provide for each other.
You can't take both positions.
Unfortunately, this is the product of the same attempt to involve the laity that produced the early generation of progressive involvement in the latter '60s through the '80s, except now the more aggressive part of the laity is the right, and the same people who complained about politicization of bishops during those decades now demand politicization in the form of enacting right-wing policies, in a typically right-wing fashion, from the bishops. Just as bishops were responding more from pressures from their immediate surroundings then, so they are now -- in the guise of providing 'leadership'. But this is the reverse of what protestants imagine it to be, because they don't recognize the degree to which the Catholic episcopate following Vatican II, told to be more open & consultative, turned first to professional experts in social work, psychology & law, and then to pressure groups, to determine their decisions, and the problems of insularity that consultation was intended to remedy instead produced pure defensiveness at first and now, pure unthinking reaction.
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