Same-Sex "Marriage" and the Catholic Church

The Irish giving hearty approval to same-sex "marriage," as I took note of in my previous post, is another sign of the sad decline and influence of the modern Catholic Church. It seems that Frank Bruni of The New York Times, at least somewhat, agrees with me.

Though Bruni--the openly homosexual, former restaurant critic turned op-ed columnist (in other words, the typical path to advancement with the liberal media)--frames this decline in much more positive terms than I do, the evidence is unmistakable.

There are now 20 nations that have given legal status to same-sex "marriage." Those include, Belgium, Canada, Spain, Argentina, Portugal, Brazil, France, Uruguay, Luxembourg and Ireland. As Bruni notes, these nations don't share a continent, or a language. "But in all of them, the Roman Catholic Church has more adherents, at least nominally, than any other religious denomination does."

As I noted, as of 2011, over 84% of Ireland identified as Roman Catholic. As Bruni put it,

"Irish voters nonetheless rejected the church’s formal opposition to same-sex marriage. This act of defiance was described, accurately, as an illustration of church leaders’ loosening grip on the country.

"But in falling out of line with the Vatican, Irish people are actually falling in line with their Catholic counterparts in other Western countries, including the United States.

"They aren’t sloughing off their Catholicism — not exactly, not entirely. An overwhelming majority of them still identify as Catholic. But they’re incorporating religion into their lives in a manner less rooted in Rome...in Europe and the Americas in particular, the church is much more fluid than [Rome]. It harbors spiritually inclined people paying primary obeisance to their own consciences, their own senses of social justice. That impulse and tradition are as Catholic as any others." (Emphasis is mine.)

In other words, as was noted last week, such "Catholicism" shows tremendous (if not complete) "indifference" towards truth, sin, salvation, and judgement. In other words, a "fluid church" is no church at all. In fact, and almost certainly unbeknownst to Bruni, a "fluid church" sounds much like a church built on shifting sand instead of solid rock. 

As Jesus said in Matthew chapter 7, 

"Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of mine and does not do them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it."

And great has been the fall of the Catholic Church and Mainline Protestant churches, who have abandoned truth in the name of "relevance" and "tolerance."  At least some within the Catholic Church seem to recognize this. Upon the outcome of the Irish vote, Italian Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican Secretary of State, said he was "deeply saddened by the result." He added, "The church must take account of this reality, but in the sense that it must strengthen its commitment to evangelization. I think that you cannot just talk of a defeat for Christian principles, but of a defeat for humanity."

In other words, the "reality" of the vote in Ireland should be a wake-up call to all who follow Jesus. As more and more are calling good evil, and evil good, it is getting easier and easier to compromise with the truth. The road to eternal life seems to be getting more and more narrow and harder to find, while the path to destruction is attractive, well-lit, wide, and busy with travelers. Do not be deceived!

(Update: Just after posting this, I came across this piece from Joanna Moorhead of The Guardian. Like Bruni, she captures well the liberal worldview when it comes to the church and the truth. In complete contradiction to my take (a "fluid church" is no church at all) on what destroys the church, Moorhead declares, "The gay marriage vote has forced Catholic leaders to face a simple reality: that a church without worshippers wouldn’t be a church at all."

Of course, instead of the "bride of Christ," she sees the church much like a business. Thus, if you want people to continue to come, you must give them what they want, or at least tell them what they want to hear. Because, as she puts it, its time that the church got on board with "what most of us believe, which is that truth and right are more likely to be found in common consensus than in autocratic dictatorship." Because, as we all know, Jesus always looked to what was popular, before He decided what was "truth" and what was "right.")

Copyright 2015, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

How to Kill Christianity

Much has been made of the recent Pew poll that highlights America’s religious landscape. What has drawn the most attention is the apparent decline of Christianity in the U.S. “The Christian share of the U.S. population is declining,” began the piece. Many liberals took gleeful notice. The Institute on Religion and Democracy’s Mark Tooley noted, “Secularists and their fellow travelers are ecstatic. The secular utopia about which John Lennon crooned is impending. Christianity is finally dying!”

Of course, this is far from the case, as Tooley later reveals. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, points out that it’s not Christianity that’s dying, but rather “near Christianity” that is teetering. “Good riddance,” Moore concludes.

The denominations that have lost the most “near Christians” are Catholic and Mainline Protestant. According to the Washington Times, “for every person who joined the Roman Catholic Church, six others were departing.” Additionally, in the last 50 years, the proportion of Americans belonging to one of the “Seven Sisters of Mainline Protestantism” has plummeted from one in six, to one in sixteen.

From the Anglicans at Jamestown, to the Pilgrims at Plymouth, and the Puritans at Massachusetts Bay, virtually all of the Mainline Protestant churches in the U.S. can trace their roots to those who literally founded America. The principles of American democracy were born in Mainline churches. The revivals during the Great Awakening were preached by men from Mainline churches. Many of the first colleges and universities in the U.S. were founded by Mainline churches. What’s more, eight of the first fourteen U.S. Presidents were Episcopalian. The spiritual and political roots of America are deeply embedded in Mainline Protestantism. What a tragic fall!

So this begs the question, why have the Catholic Church and Mainline Protestantism seen such a collapse? Moore reveals the answer when he notes that, what the Pew poll really reveals is that we have “fewer incognito atheists” in America. “Those who don’t believe can say so—and still find spouses, get jobs, volunteer with the PTA, and even run for office. This is good news because the kind of ‘Christianity’ that is a means to an end—even if that end is ‘traditional family values’—is what J. Gresham Machen rightly called ‘liberalism,’ and it is an entirely different religion from the apostolic faith handed down by Jesus Christ.”

Of course it would be the denominations most infected with liberalism (Is there anything liberalism can’t corrupt?) that have seen the greatest decline. As Tooley put it, “Mainline Protestantism lost its way when it forgot how to balance being American and being Christian, choosing American individualism and self-made spirituality over classical Christianity. Nearly all mainline seminaries had embraced modernism by the 1920s, rejecting the supernatural in favor of metaphorized faith integrated with sociology and political revolution.”

Such watered-down theology has produced ear-ticklers like John Shelby Spong, Marcus Borg, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Gene Robinson, and the like, along with heretical nonsense such as the Jesus Seminar. For decades men (and women) like Spong and Borg made quite a name for themselves by rejecting the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, His atoning death and resurrection, every miracle recorded in the New Testament, and so on. In other words, in a tragic attempt to make themselves “relevant,” such men and women rejected virtually every tenet of the Christian faith, all the while still calling themselves “Christians.”

Unsurprisingly, it’s heretics such as these who’ve overseen such a precipitous decline in their denominations. After all, who wants to attend a church that rejects the supernatural and offers little more than worn-out platitudes and self-help advice? Who wants to attend a church that doesn’t talk about the forgiveness of sin (much less the existence of sin) and the hope of eternal life? Instead of pointing people to eternal truths, these liberal congregations have concerned themselves with “social activism.”

To a significant extent, the same thing has happened to the Catholic Church in the U.S. Though the American Catholic Church, unlike most of her liberal Protestant counterparts, has (for the most part) opposed abortion, same-sex “marriage,” and the rest of the radical sexual agenda of the left, sadly many Catholics have been all too willing to use big government activism as a substitute for charity.

As Paul Rahe put it, many years ago the Catholic Church in America “fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor.”

Additionally, rabid anti-death penalty advocate Sister Helen Prejean, the inspiration of the Susan Sarandon movie “Dead Man Walking,” is doing little for the cause of “individual responsibility.” In an attempt to help Dzhokhar Tsarnaev escape the ultimate responsibility for his murderous crimes, Sister Prejean testified last week in the penalty phase of the notorious Boston Bomber.

In spite of the lack of any public expression of remorse, Prejean testified that she felt that Tsarnaev was “genuinely sorry” for his crimes. Like her Catholic cohorts who advocate for the likes of Obamacare, Prejean mistakes “state paternalism” for true charity. (Nothing says “state paternalism” like clothing, housing, and feeding a mass murderer for decades.) Again, borrowing from Mark Tooley, “Was she concerned more about his eternal soul, or his physical life, and her political cause? Let’s pray the former, but the latter seems likelier. If indeed the latter, Sister Prejean is an archetype for the modern church’s indifference to eternity, and judgment, in favor of therapeutic protection and affirmation.”

Sister Prejean is a great illustration of why the Catholic Church in the U.S. is in steep decline. Just as with its promotion of government healthcare, or a litany of other programs that push state paternalism over personal responsibility, for decades now the Catholic Church in America has shown “indifference” toward eternity and judgement. Thus, anyone fervently seeking the truth on such matters is drawn elsewhere.

By and large, the churches that are growing in the U.S. are those that unapologetically present the truth. Of course, a large or a growing church isn’t always a measure of a healthy and holy church, but when one is sincerely seeking the spiritual truths that we all at one time or another crave, most of us “seekers” know the truth when we hear it and see it. This doesn’t mean that the majority of us will embrace such truths. Jesus Himself warned us that this would not be the case.

Don’t be surprised to see the decline of Christianity continue. As it becomes more difficult and dangerous to be a follower of Christ, more and more people are going to find the “wide road” described by Jesus quite appealing. This is especially the case when so-called “Christians” are pointing the way.

(See this column on American Thinker.)

Copyright 2015, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Why is the Catholic Church Surprised?

In the months prior to the 2008 U.S. Presidential election, then candidate Barack Obama said, “The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).” FOCA, as co-sponsor Barbara Boxer described, “supersedes any law, regulation or local ordinance that impinges on a woman’s right to choose. That means a poor woman cannot be denied the use of Medicaid if she chooses to have an abortion.”

Back in December of 2008, just after Obama’s election as U.S. President (winning 54% of the Catholic vote), I noted that, according to New York Post columnist Ray Kerrison, Obama’s commitment to the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) “dominated [the U.S. Catholic Bishops’] discussions at their annual convention in Baltimore last month.”

In his column Kerrison said that FOCA “would also compel taxpayers to fund abortions and provide abortions in military hospitals. Most provocatively of all, it would force religious hospital and health-care institutions to perform abortions in violation of their convictions.”

Kerrison added that, “If President-elect Barack Obama goes through with his campaign pledge to sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act, holy hell is going to break loose.” He concluded that, “FOCA means war.”

Of course, FOCA never made it out of Congress. Thus, Obama never got the chance to keep his pledge to sign the infamous bill, and the “war” with the Catholic Church had to wait a few years.

Furthermore, while a member of the Illinois state Senate, Obama opposed a bill that mirrored the federal Born-Alive Infants Protection Act (BAIPA). He took to the floor and gave the only speech against the bill, saying, “I mean, it—it would essentially bar abortions, because the equal protection clause does not allow somebody to kill a child, and if this is a child, then this would be an antiabortion statute.” (What?! We need the “equal protection clause” to tell us that we shouldn’t kill our children?!)

The Catholic Church teaches that health care is “a basic human right,” and has been very supportive of the idea of the U.S. federal government implementing universal healthcare. Enter Obamacare. For months leading up to the final passage of Obamacare, Catholic Bishops lobbied heavily for its passage—minus federal funding of abortion. Once House Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to add the Stupak amendment to the House version of Obamacare, the Bishops were onboard.

Though the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops opposed the version of Obamacare that passed (because of the removal of the Stupak amendment), they did not support GOP efforts to repeal it once republicans took control of congress. Also, some Catholic leaders supported Obamacare in spite of the lack of the Stupak amendment.

Regardless of previous positions on Obamacare, and in spite of Obama’s recent retreat, the Catholic Church is now in an all out war with the Obama administration over contraception. This begs the questions, why the outrage now? What did they expect?

In other words, there was no reason to believe that Obama was going to be anything other that a radical liberal on social issues. The time for “war” with Obama was BEFORE he was elected leader of the free world. However, in partnering with democrats and liberals, it seems that many within the leadership of the Catholic Church have for far too long been willing to violate my proverb that, “It is no act of charity to be generous with someone else’s money.”

Or, as Paul Rahe recently put it, the American Catholic Church decades ago “fell prey to a conceit that had long before ensnared a great many mainstream Protestants in the United States – the notion that public provision is somehow akin to charity – and so they fostered state paternalism and undermined what they professed to teach: that charity is an individual responsibility and that it is appropriate that the laity join together under the leadership of the Church to alleviate the suffering of the poor.”

The contraception mandate is classic example of “state paternalism.” It is exactly what one gets when the people surrender that kind of power to their government. If liberals remain in power, the result will be no different when the issue comes to marriage or any other matter precious to Christians and other like-minded Americans.

Left unfettered, the slow creep of liberalism knows no bounds. As Mark Steyn recently noted, “In Sweden, expressing a moral objection to homosexuality is illegal, even on religious grounds, even in church…In Canada, the courts rule that Catholic schools must allow gay students to take their same-sex dates to the prom.”

Elections have consequences. If Americans continue in their willingness to surrender more of their liberty in order to receive another entitlement, we will even further embolden those, who, while claiming to serve us, are seeking to become our masters.

(See this column on American Thinker.)

Copyright 2012, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Catholic Bishop’s Tardy on FOCA Outrage

Where was this outrage two months ago? Where was this outrage six months ago, or 18 months ago? On December 8 of this year, columnist Ray Kerrison (see column here) of the New York Post wrote that “Obama's commitment to FOCA (Freedom of Choice Act) dominated [the U.S. Catholic Bishops’] discussions at their annual convention in Baltimore last month.”

Writing a few months ago, I noted that Barack Obama said, “The first thing I'll do as President is sign the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA).” FOCA, as co-sponsor Barbara Boxer has said, “supercedes any law, regulation or local ordinance that impinges on a woman’s right to choose. That means a poor woman cannot be denied the use of Medicaid if she chooses to have an abortion.”

The National Organization for Women (NOW) has stated that “FOCA will supersede laws that restrict the right to abortion, including laws that prohibit the public funding of abortion.” NOW adds that, “FOCA prohibits states from enacting laws intended to deny or interfere with a woman's fundamental right to choose abortion,” which would include laws that limit the access of minors to abortion.

In his column Kerrison notes that FOCA “would also compel taxpayers to fund abortions and provide abortions in military hospitals. Most provocatively of all, it would force religious hospital and health-care institutions to perform abortions in violation of their convictions.”

Kerrison also states, “If President-elect Barack Obama goes through with his campaign pledge to sign into law the Freedom of Choice Act, holy hell is going to break loose.” He adds that, “FOCA means war.” It should have meant war BEFORE Obama got elected.

Catholic Bishops are stepping up the combative rhetoric. Kerrison points out that “US bishops have always been united in their moral condemnation of abortion. But they have stopped short of flexing political muscle, evading a head-on confrontation. That may now change.” Too bad they didn’t do more political “flexing” BEFORE Obama got elected.

Kerrison quotes the Bishops’ saying things like, “[FOCA] would threaten Catholic healthcare institutions and Catholic Charities. It would be an evil law that would divide our country and the church should be intent on opposing evil. Chicago's Auxiliary Bishop Thomas Paprocki…said flatly that if the Obama administration attempted to force Catholic hospitals to provide abortions, they'd shut them down rather than comply. ‘This is not a matter of political compromise or finding some common ground,’ said Bishop Daniel Conlon of Steuvenville, Ohio. ‘It's a matter of absolutes.’” Too bad more Catholics didn’t go to the polls with such a mindset.

Catholics voted for Obama over McCain to the tune of 54% to 45%. Obama’s 54% is two points higher than Bush’s Catholic support in 2004. Twenty-seven percent of the U.S. electorate is Catholic, with significant numbers in battleground states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. I doubt that Catholic support for Obama would have been as great if Catholic Bishops had taken this grave a tone BEFORE Obama got elected.

We should not be surprised. Obama was given a pass on many issues. Perhaps a closer look at exactly what he was saying, how he had voted, and with whom he associated would have given not only Catholics, but a majority of Americans a different view of him.

With Obama due to take office in less than a month, we can’t afford to continue to look back and wonder what would have happened if he had received more scrutiny. However, it is worth noting that, just like all of our major decisions in life, elections have consequences. We all can learn from our mistakes. Here’s hoping the lessons of the Obama administration will not be too painful.

Copyright 2008, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com