There can be little doubt how far the Church in the United States has fallen. As this article explains, "A North Carolina Roman Catholic school is holding a meeting today to address the concerns of parents and students who say they are outraged about remarks a visiting nun made criticizing homosexuality, divorce, and sex outside of marriage during a recent speech.
Dominican Sister Jane Dominic Laurel, who often speaks to high school and college-age students on matters of sexuality, gave an hour-long presentation to students at Charlotte Catholic High School on March 21 called “Masculinity and Femininity: Difference and Gift.” School officials told the Catholic News Herald she spent about half her allotted time discussing homosexuality, blaming its rising influence in part on fatherless homes created by divorce and extramarital sex.
Although the Catholic Church has always held both homosexual behavior and sex outside of marriage to be gravely sinful, students and parents at the Catholic school reacted to her remarks with shock and anger, launching both an online petition and a letter-writing campaign calling the sister’s words “offensive and unnecessarily derogatory.”
“We the students of Charlotte Catholic High School would like to issue a formal complaint regarding Sr. Jane Dominic’s speech given on on [sic] Friday, March 21st,” the petition begins. “We found some of ideas [sic] expressed to be both offensive and unnecessarily derogatory. We are incensed that you knew the content of this speech and allowed these ideas to be expressed in a school that should be preaching a message of love and acceptance.”
“As rational people, we know that most homosexual people lead healthy, normal and productive lives like their heterosexual counterparts,” the students wrote. “We resent the fact that a school wide assembly became a stage to blast the issue of homosexuality after Pope Francis said in an interview this past fall that ‘we can not [sic] insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptives [sic] methods. We are angry that someone decided they knew better than our Holy Father and invited a speaker who addressed the issue of homosexuality to our school to speak twice in the course of one school year.”
Students weren’t the only ones outraged by the sister’s remarks. Parents have supplemented the students’ petition with an e-mail campaign targeting the Diocese of Charlotte, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, and the Vatican with complaints about Sr. Jane’s speech.
“In my home, there was outrage, embarrassment, sadness, disbelief, and further reason for my 16-year-old to move as far away from her religion as possible and as soon as she can,” wrote divorcee Shelley Earnhardt, according to the Charlotte Observer.
These students and parents are merely displaying their ignorance. As Cardinal George Pell of Australia correctly noted, "Some secularists seem to like one way streets..Their intolerance of Christianity seeks to drive it out not only from the public square, but even from the provision of education, health care and welfare services to the wider community. Tolerance has come to mean different things for different groups." His Eminence has also said that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights correctly articulates the proper relationship between the individual, the family and the association and the state.
This was precisely the point I was making in my response to the persecution of Father Alphonse de Valk at the hands of the Canadian Human Rights Commission which may be found here.
This dictatorship of relativism seeks to impose its immoral agenda on Christians in the name of "tolerance." But this "tolerance" is a sham. It is simply an attempt to make an idol out of a false conception of freedom. Our Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI explained that, "..what clearly stands behind the modern era's radical demand for freedom is the promise: You will be like God...The implicit goal of all modern freedom movements is, in the end, to be like a god, dependent on nothing and nobody, with one's own freedom not restricted by anyone else's...The primeval error of such a radically developed desire for freedom lies in the idea of a divinity that is conceived as being purely egotistical. The god thus conceived of is, not God, but an idol, indeed, the image of what the Christian tradition would call the devil, the anti-god, because therein lies the radical opposite of the true God: the true God is, of his own nature, being-for (Father), being-from (Son), and being-with (Holy Spirit). Yet man is in the image of God precisely because the being-for , from, and with constitute the basic anthropological shape. Whenever people try to free themselves from this, they are moving, not toward divinity, but toward dehumanizing, toward the destruction of being itself through the destruction of truth. The Jacobin variant of the idea of liberation...is a rebellion against being human in itself, rebellion against truth, and that is why it leads people - as Sartre percipiently observed - into a self-contradictory existence that we call hell. It has thus become fairly clear that freedom is linked to a yardstick, the yardstick of reality - to truth. Freedom to destroy oneself or to destroy others is not freedom but a diabolical parody. The freedom of man is a shared freedom, freedom in a coexistence of other freedoms, which are mutually limiting and thus mutually supportive: freedom must be measured according to what I am, what we are - otherwise it abolishes itself."
In the name of "tolerance," the New World Order seeks to impose its rebellion from truth on all. It will not tolerate any dissent, any disagreement. Coercion is an acceptable tool in a dictatorship. Soon, the New Order will use violence to achieve its goals and not just coercion and propaganda. In the end, every dictatorship must rely on violence in its vain attempt to hold onto power.
The students and parents at Charlotte Catholic High School reacting violently against Sister Jane Dominic Laurel have succumbed to moral relativism and radical homosexual agitprop. One has to wonder how they can honestly consider themselves to be Catholic.
Related reading: The media ignore the homosexual dimension of the problem of child sexual abuse
Yesiree, those kids are receiving a fine Catholic education for their parent's dollar! If I had a kid attending Charlotte High, I would demand a refund!!!
ReplyDeleteThe Cardinal Newman Society reports: "Calling for schools and universities committed to catechesis and evangelization, Pope Francis makes his first significant statements as Pope regarding Catholic education in Evangelii Gaudium, his apostolic exhortation released Sunday. With significance for the work of The Cardinal Newman Society to promote and defend faithful Catholic schools and colleges, Pope Francis identifies education as a solution to secularization: The process of secularization tends to reduce the faith and the Church to the sphere of the private and personal. Furthermore, by completely rejecting the transcendent, it has produced a growing deterioration of ethics, a weakening of the sense of personal and collective sin, and a steady increase in relativism.These have led to a general sense of disorientation, especially in the periods of adolescence and young adulthood which are so vulnerable to change. …We are living in an information-driven society which bombards us indiscriminately with data—all treated as being of equal importance—and which leads to remarkable superficiality in the area of moral discernment. In response, we need to provide an education which teaches critical thinking and encourages the development of mature moral values. (64) The Holy Father praises Catholic schools and colleges for their contributions around the world, yet acknowledges that those contributions are often not appreciated when they are counter-cultural, as is often necessary to remain faithful to Catholic teaching: Again and again, the Church has acted as a mediator in finding solutions to problems affecting peace, social harmony, the land, the defence of life, human and civil rights, and so forth. And how much good has been done by Catholic schools and universities around the world! This is a good thing. Yet, we find it difficult to make people see that when we raise other questions less palatable to public opinion, we are doing so out of fidelity to precisely the same convictions about human dignity and the common good. (65) The emphasis of Evangelii Gaudium is on evangelization—“the proclamation of the Gospel in today’s world”—and Pope Francis has much to say about the role of Catholic educators and experts in evangelizing the culture. He urges theologians to dialogue with other disciplines, the hallmark of Blessed John Henry Newman’s vision for the Catholic university and the faithful Catholic colleges recommended in The Newman Guide. By informing the sciences and other disciplines with Catholic theology, Pope Francis says, “water is changed into wine” and the other discipline “becomes an instrument for enlightening and renewing the world”: Proclaiming the Gospel message to different cultures also involves proclaiming it to professional, scientific and academic circles. This means an encounter between faith, reason and the sciences with a view to developing new approaches and arguments on the issue of credibility, a creative apologetics which would encourage greater openness to the Gospel on the part of all. When certain categories of reason and the sciences are taken up into the proclamation of the message, these categories then become tools of evangelization; water is changed into wine. Whatever is taken up is not just redeemed, but becomes an instrument of the Spirit for enlightening and renewing the world."
ReplyDeleteWhy don't we hear about such nonsense in the CFP or from local pulpits? Because they are too busy capitulating to the culture.
ReplyDeleteImagine if our "leaders" here in Worcester could actually muster the courage required to take a stand for the Church's moral teaching?
We need a militant leadership. But for now we are being punished with a weak and morally corrupt status quo which cannot steel itself to oppose the current zeitgeist.
What a shame.
William, that's why I stopped giving to my parish and the "Partners in Charity" fund. Instead, I donate to orthodox religious communities and organizations.
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