By striking a pose of public neutrality on the major issues of the day, homosexuality, gay marriage, and capital punishment, both the American Bishops and the Papacy have left their flock defenseless against the continually louder and defiant charges that Catholics who hold on to core, Natural Law concepts are fundamentalists, obstructionists, promote injustice and are bigoted.
Instead, when Bishops and priests continue to publicly proclaim the clear and ever-present evil of abortion, they render dissent to that issue, a veil of legitimacy.
Endorsing public neutrality toward recent developments relating to both the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts of America, as well as the recent Supreme Court decision relating to marriage, our Bishops have destroyed the meager defense, respectability and support from vitriolic accusations against those who continue to support the “silent” teachings of the Church.
After a two year study responding to grave Catholic concerns about the Girl Scouts of America and their affiliation with Planned Parenthood, the Bishops rose to magisterial heights to pronounce that they would neither support nor oppose Catholic involvement in the Movement.
Similarly, as the top leadership of the Boy Scout Movement established equality between its heterosexual and homosexual members, the Bishops again chose to neither condemn nor support involvement in that Movement. Robert E. Guglielmone, Bishop of Charleston, and Episcopal Liaison to the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, produced a frivolous, if not actually lame analysis of the issue. He concluded that the new equality between heterosexual and homosexual scouts was basically acceptable. The new policy, he however admits, declares that youths publically advocating a homosexual tendency or lifestyle can henceforth receive Catholicism’s “Ad Altare Dei” medal, scouting’s highest Catholic award.
All this is in contrast to the Southern Baptist Convention, which immediately severed all ties with the Boy Scouts of America.
Gay marriage remains another wall of silence created by the Bishops. It signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethronement of Christian principles by denying the core concept of Christian cosmology and ultimately the relationship of God and his creation. Except for a few early, whimpish notes of disapproval by the Bishops of America, Catholic laymen remain isolated and abandoned, confronting this terminal assault on marriage and the sanctity of the family unit.
What is primarily at stake in the Church’s accommodation to Modernity is that it primarily strikes at Catholic identity. The basic tenets that reasonable and rational Catholics publicly stand for collectively, and in the eyes of the world, have been eliminated from discourse in the public forum.
Legitimate surveys clearly prove that a majority of Catholics now approve capital punishment, contraception, divorce, and favor equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals. The lack of strong condemnation of gay marriage from the pulpits in defense of the sanctity of marriage strikes a fatal blow to marriage and the primary unit of society, the family.
Silence in the face of total and wanton attacks on the very foundation of Natural Law principles is tantamount to surrender. Modernity has successfully marginalized Christianity!
--Xavier Rynne
