A friend sent me a tweet from a bishop the other day condemning this or that action. We are living in an age where the bar of expectation is so low that we see a "courageous" tweet as worthy of admiration.
I'm sad to say I have stopped expecting much of anything from our bishops except a kind of administrative functioning. I wrote in a past article somewhere that I stopped thinking "the bishops have our back" long ago. I also have grown weary of "strongly worded statements" as I wrote in Converts Are Made By Witness, Not Pastoral Letters.
But it looks like the bishops may have a chance to redeem themselves if they are to take a unilateral and unequivocal stance in denying, in a spirit of charity and for the salvation of their souls, pro-abortion politicians who obstinately persist in advocating for such egregious threats to life and formenting the sin of public scandal. The bishops have the chance to not only draft some kind of statement, but actually enforce it on a national level.
Will they do so? It remains to be seen. My thinking is that ship has sailed a long time ago, but if given the grace of courage and fortitude, they have the opportunity to surprise us and salvage what credibility they may still possess by nature of their divine appointments.
My friend Peter Kwasniewski expresses my own thoughts well on the matter:
"Can one watch the USCCB without horrifying fascination at its dialectic of paralysis and its bureaucratic inefficacy?
Here is a body of men entrusted with upholding the divine law, the natural law, and the law of the Church, voting democratically whether or not they will teach and enforce the divine law, the natural law, and the law of the Church. Here is a body of men who inherit the name and power of apostles, deliberating about whether or not the slaughter of infants in the womb is enough to merit the withholding of the glorified Body of Christ, which is eaten by heretics to their damnation.
The USCCB makes it possible at once to perpetuate the useless documentation of platitudes and to hamstring the real efforts of individual bishops to proclaim and protect the truth. Those who say that the issue of communion for pro-aborts must be left to the discretion of individual bishops are effectively shelving the entire question, because politicians are from one diocese but live and work in another (or in several). The responsibility falls through the cracks.
What is needed here is a unanimous and exceptionless national policy. The lack of such is perceived, rightly I would say, as an implicit statement that the Church's teaching is of little or no importance and may not even be true, and, moreover, as an implicit denial of the Church's own authority in this area, which is superior to that of the State in regard to the moral law, divine revelation, and ecclesial government.
Now that certain pro-abortion "Catholic" politicians are boldly defying the bishops, we will see if they are capable of concerted action as befits successors of the apostles, or if (once again) they will settle for the mouthing of idle reminders sponsored by a mere majority in a voting body. The truth of Christ should never be seen as the subject of a voting body."
There is no doubt if they do not back up their words with action, they will be railroaded over and dismissed just as easily as they always have for the past half-century. If they do, they will endure a beating in the public square, and I'm not sure all of them are up for a pummeling.
There is a great scene in Of Gods And Men where the old Trappist monks in Algeria are put in this position of having to dig in and take a stand. The Abbot acts like a true father, but the monks are still rightly scared and concerned for their future. The monks are asked "do we stay or do we leave?" And they vote to stay.
I hope and pray our bishops will do what's right and have the courage to lay it down in a way that backs up what most of us who believe in the True Faith have been trying to do on our own, but without the office or clout. They have it, and canon law supports it. They are in a difficult position, in large part to their own decisions over the past decades not to enforce something that should have been enforced all along, and need prayer. If they don't do something meaningful, they will lose whatever shred of credibility they possessed, and such pro-abortion politicians will be emboldened and act like the Philistine Goliath taunting the Living God. If they do back up their "statements" with meaningful action, they will take a beating for it for sure. But maybe it will help contribute to a renewal in the Church in the end. After all, converts are made by witness, not pastoral letters.
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