German Bishops Continue to Shut Down the Church Militant

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Play glasses on a pretender

Play glasses on a pretender

The German Bishops have just formally announced what many bishops in the U.S. would like to see; we will no longer screen ‘catholic’ employees for faithfulness.

This is generally the case already, but with this official change in Church law, the Germans are making sure that no-one ever fires or refuses to hire someone for a Catholic reason.  It’s a nightmare and it’s coming here quickly.

With potentially far-reaching consequences, the bishops of Germany have voted by more than a two-thirds majority to relax Church labor laws to allow civilly remarried employees or those living in same-sex unions to retain their jobs with Church institutions.

In an announcement Tuesday, the German bishops’ conference in Bonn said the majority of bishops had ruled that immediate dismissal will only be a “last resort” for employees who are divorced and subsequently “remarry” or those living in a registered partnership.

Until now, such employees were required to be dismissed from such employment, although the rules were often ignored. The Church is the second-largest employer in Germany.

“An automatic dismissal may now in future be ruled as out of the question,” said Alois Glück, president of the Central Committee of German Catholics, the country’s top lay Catholic organization. From now on, he said, any public violation of loyalty to Church teachings must be examined on a case-by-case basis.

As limited as his reach seemed to be, can you imagine this kind of thing happening if Pope Benedict hadn’t become sidelined?  It would be unfaithful to lay the blame of any of this on Pope Francis, right?  He’s too holy to let that happen.  It’s amazing how much he’s just like the Pope we would get if they sort of muscled Pope Benedict out, isn’t it?

The amendment, when enacted by a bishop, explicitly overturns a 2002 ecclesiastical law, which stipulated that all Church employees need to be loyal to the magisterium. Glück said the change “represents a substantial paradigm shift in the application of ecclesiastical law,” adding that the new regulation will “open the way” for decisions to be made in accordance with “human justice.”

The lack of unanimity among bishops means the new regulation is left to Germany’s 27 bishops to implement the reform in their dioceses. But in practice, it could be unlikely that any bishop will be able to resist the new measures. According to the official statement, the bishops’ conference is setting up “an additional working group” to examine the question of whether the Church’s labor law can be “more institutionally oriented” in a bid to make it a nationwide and uniform labor structure. The bishops’ conference has also instructed dioceses to publicize the changes in their diocesan newsletters. This is required to formally enact the law.

“I expect and hope this will happen everywhere,” Cardinal Rainer Woelki, the archbishop of Cologne, said in a May 6 interview with Katholisch.de. The cardinal, who headed the committee that drew up the new law, said the first objective of the amendment is to ensure “compliance with lived practice,” but denied the amendment in any way undermines the principle of the indissolubility of marriage.

Caritas Germany, which employs 591,000 staff, welcomed the change. President Peter Neher said Church institutions need a “broader understanding of the concept of loyalty” and that ecclesiastical labor law should reflect how the Catholic Church “stands alongside” those who live broken lives.

Everything is always about Caritas.

The erasure of the Faith is never an organic thing.  It’s always a top-down leveraged affair.  The Christian Faith is natural.  It functions and it lives.  Murder, on the other hand, requires some force.

 

 

Liberation Theology Has Never Been Catholic, Until Now

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'Martyred for the Faith' just because he defended the poor and oppressed

‘Martyred for the Faith’ just because he defended the poor and oppressed

John Zmirak responds to the recent revelations by a powerful KGB defector that Liberation Theology, so emulated and resurrected by the Franciscan Pontificate yet suppressed until now, was formulated in Soviet Russia.  After recapping the story and some well-known responses, including John Allen’s accusation that the United States exported forms Protestantism south, he writes:

Whatever problems one might have with Pentecostalism, it is genuinely Christian, which Liberation Theology isn’t. It’s scarcely theology. And it doesn’t liberate. In Latin America, it served or serves as the pious fig-leaf for nasty dictatorships like the Sandinistas’ in Nicaragua, and the Chavistas’ in Venezuela. Its watered-down American version — popular among leftists who still claim to be Catholic — offers political cover for pro-abortion, anti-marriage lawmakers, who hope they can buy back their souls by dispensing some extra food stamps and reducing their carbon footprints.

Much worse than Liberation Theology’s worldly effects are the spiritual poisons it trades in: toxic envy, gut-gnawing resentment, a craving for the chance to mete out violence, a scorn for thrift and honest work and an acid cynicism that reduces every human relationship to a swap of money or power. All this in the name of Jesus.

These old lessons should be well-remembered in our time.

It doesn’t seem that Communism or Liberation Theology have waned today.  Instead they have quickly become so pervasive in the world and in the Church that a free faithful alternative no longer exists with which to compare them.  The Faith is so rare and the propaganda machine is so vast, we are now almost entirely immersed in calculated lies.

Put briefly and starkly, Liberation Theology treats Jesus as a proto-revolutionary who came to save the poor from social injustice. The Kingdom of God is the earthly paradise which we will construct from the ruins of Satanic capitalism. The church serves the role of the Party, as the vanguard of the sacred class chosen by History (oops, I meant to say “Jesus”) to overturn the wicked “structures of sin,” and put the Sermon on the Mount into action at the point of a bayonet. The meek shall inherit the earth, once we’ve rounded up all the non-meek into gulags and confiscated their land. You know, the way the Soviets saved Ukraine from greedy farmers in the 1930s.

It sounds like thinly veiled Marxist theory, and that’s exactly what it is. As Norman Cohn and Eric Voegelin showed, Marx himself seized the Christian vision of a New Jerusalem after the Second Coming, dragged it into politics, and dressed it up in a white lab coat as a “scientific” prediction of a this-worldly utopia. Instead of the Second Coming, he inserted “the Revolution,” and in place of the Christian church he plugged in the proletariat and the Party. For decades, idealists around the world were willing to conspire, betray their country, go to prison, die — and wherever they came to power, to kill their fellow men by the tens of millions, and imprison millions more, to force Marx’s kingdom to come.

Leftism is always relentless, not because it works, but because it’s evil. They never learn or give up.  There is no reason to stop trying and hating when you have an eternity before you.

The sordid failure of materialist Marxism to fulfill any — even one — of its messianic promises posed a problem for people who were still, for their own reasons, drawn to revolutionary fantasies that entailed gaining power, confiscating other people’s property and silencing them by force. History, it is perfectly clear, is not inexorably driven to produce a dictatorship of the proletariat. It took Soviet tanks to remind the workers of Hungary and Poland of what was good for them. It demanded concrete walls and barbed wire to stop the common people from fleeing “people’s” regimes by the millions, to live instead in wicked capitalist lands where they would be exploited. What to do, if you still find reality intolerable, and crave a revolution?

You turn to magic. You create a “god from a machine.” You twist people’s faith in Christ into the self-confidence of a conquering social class. You drag down their hope for heaven, and rope it to wishes for cheaper gas and more cassavas. You teach them that real love, tough love, amounts to a cold-blooded calculation about maximizing utility: To make that liberating omelet, Jesus wants you to crack some heads. Perversely, as Marxism by natural means began to collapse all around the world, liberation theologians tried to revive it by calling it Christian.

Look for this in the Pope’s goals, in his allies, and in his rhetoric.  You won’t have to look hard.

 

 

 

Weigel: You Bickering Zealots Miss the Point of the Climate Encyclical

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George Weigel thinks Catholic conservatives are spending so much time in petty bickering they don’t see the miracles in the Pope’s upcoming encyclical. We’re just like the Apostles battling over Zealots.

On and on they go for weeks, while paying virtually no attention to these episodes in the Lucan account: the Annunciation by the Archangel Gabriel and Mary’s Magnificat; the story of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem; the presentation of the infant Jesus in the Temple, the prophecies of Simeon and Anna, and Simeon’s Nunc dimittis; the finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple; the Gadarene swine, possessed by demons cast out by Jesus, who go charging into the lake of Galilee; the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector; the story of Zaccheus’s conversion; the parable of the wicked tenants; the story of the Good Thief, whom Jesus forgives from the Cross; the story of the disciples who meet the Risen Lord on the road to Emmaus; and the ascension from Bethany. What with the spin battles over “Simon who was called the Zealot” — spin battles set in motion months before the Gospel was published — the combatants ignore almost everything that is unique, and most that is important, about Luke’s telling of the story of Jesus.

Which we would, I hope, think a shame: For the sake of scoring points in an ideological tug-of-war, the combatants missed the main point of Luke’s Gospel and the distinctiveness of its perspective on the life, teaching, ministry, and Resurrection of the Lord.

Something like this, I suggest, has been underway for months now in anticipation of Pope Francis’s forthcoming encyclical on humanity and the natural world. Late last year, a third-tier Vatican official with a taste for gauchiste politics and self-promotion gave an interview to the Guardian, suggesting that the encyclical would be, in effect, a papal endorsement of the U.N.’s approach to issues of climate change: a piece of spin the leftist British paper was more than happy to highlight, although doing so required the Guardian to take a brief break from its usual Catholic-bashing. Thanks to the Internet, an article based on that interview instantly leapt the Atlantic, and, just as instantly, Catholic skeptics about both climate-change science and Pope Francis went into panic mode, warning that the pope was going to write something that would align Catholicism with Al Gore, Tim Wirth, and the worshippers of Gaia. None of the parties to this dispute, which has now continued for almost half a year, has seen a draft of the encyclical. But all of them are quite sure that it’s a “global-warming encyclical” — just as my fictitious combatants in the first century were sure that Luke’s Gospel was all about the Zealot party — and have taken up the rhetorical cudgels accordingly.Nothing to see here.

An enormous UN conference, a series of meeting with the Obama EPA Chief, and a mountain of ridiculous statements are all just silly fears and fantasies.  The Global Warming Encyclical will be a new deposit of Christian wisdom.

Weigel goes on to blame the blogs, blame the press, blame Francis, his socialist language, and his predecessors.

Finally he blames the Vatican Press Office then tells us we’re all going to miss the point.

But I’m also reasonably confident that a lot of this is going to be missed by those who have already made a huge investment of time, energy, and credibility in taking what will be one facet of a comprehensive papal discussion of humanity and the natural world and making it into the whole story. As I suggested a few months after his election, Pope Francis has become a global Rorschach blot, onto whom are projected an extraordinary number of hopes and fears, fantasies and anxieties. This Rorschaching of the Pope has gotten to the point where, now, it’s very difficult to find the real man and his authentic teaching amidst the pre-spin, the spin, and the post-spin. That the Vatican press office has proven incapable of coping with this is another sign that the deep reform that Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope to undertake has yet to be achieved in full. And that deficiency is, alas, likely to be on full display when the pope’s encyclical is finally released.

A Rorschach blot!  I’m critical but I wouldn’t call Pope Francis that.