Father Joseph Bachand: Will you now accuse Pope Benedict XVI of "evil"?

Writing for the Associated Press, Nicole Winfield is reporting that, "Pope Benedict XVI issued a blistering denunciation Thursday of priests who have questioned church teaching on celibacy and ordaining women, saying they were being selfish in disobeying his authority.


Benedict made the rare and explicit criticism from the altar of St. Peter's Basilica in his homily on Holy Thursday, when priests recall the promises they made when ordained...In his homily, Benedict said the dissidents claim to be motivated by concern for the church. But he suggested that in reality they were just making 'a desperate push to do something to change the church in accordance with (their) own preferences and ideas.'...He said Jesus always followed true obedience to God's will, not 'human caprice.'.." (See here).

Several years ago, when I expressed concerns over La Salette priests promoting the ordination of women to the ministerial priesthood during a vocation retreat, a La Salette Provincial [Father Joseph Bachand, m.s.] accused me of engaging in "evil." Father Bachand had been involved with the infamous St. Luke Institute.

While Fr. Bachand considered my defense of Church teaching as “evil,” Dr. Germain Grisez explains that, “Where religious assent is known to be due, it is a sin to withhold it. Here this sin is called deliberate nonassent. To communicate such nonassent to others with the intention of encouraging them to share in it is a more serious sin, called here sinful dissent.”

It should come as no surprise that dissent within the Church leads to polarization and undermines truth which is the principle of the Church’s communion. In its Instruction on the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian, No. 40, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said that, “The Church ‘is like a sacrament, a sign and instrument, that is, of communion with God and of unity among all men’ (LG, 1). Consequently, to pursue concord and communion is to enhance the force of her witness and credibility. To succumb to the temptation of dissent, on the other hand, is to allow the ‘leaven of infidelity to the Holy Spirit’ to start to work.”


The warning of Pope Paul VI, given during his Homily at Holy Thursday Mass on April 3, 1969, has been largely ignored by confused clerics like Fr. Bachand and the laity who follow these selfish guides:

"There is talk of renewal in the doctrine and in the conscience of the Church of God; but how can the living and true Church be authentic and persistent if the complex structure that forms it and defines it a spiritual and social 'mystical body', is today so often and so gravely corroded by dissent and challenge and by forgetfulness of its hierarchical structure, and is countered in its divine and indispensable constituent charism, its pastoral authority? How can it claim to be a Church, that is a united people, even though locally broken up and historically and legitimately diversified, when a practically schismatic ferment is dividing it, subdividing it and breaking it into groups which are more than anything else zealous for arbitrary and fundamentally egoistical autonomy, masked by Christian pluralism or liberty of conscience?"

Related reading here.