A small Catholic college in Massachusetts has been pressured by the local bishop into canceling an invitation to Sen. Ted Kennedy’s widow, Vicky Kennedy, to deliver the school’s commencement address because of her support of abortion rights and gay marriage.
Worcester Bishop Robert J. McManus also told officials at Anna Maria College that the school should not give Victoria Kennedy an honorary degree. The bishop’s spokesman said that Catholic institutions “should be honoring Catholics for their consistent public positions with the church, not for contrary positions with the church, especially on core issues such as the right to life and the sanctity of marriage.” The bishops have resurrected the discredited old ban on contraception to help the Republicans fight Obama’s modest efforts at health care reform.
In simple truth, most of the American “Catholic” bishops are in schism.
They are moral heretics. Because of their undisguised embrace of the Republican cause and their opposition to President Obama’s modest health care plan, they are not “good news for the poor” (Luke 4:18) as Jesus defined his mission, not “good news” especially for poor children, not “good news” for those whom God has made gay, not “good news” for the sick and the elderly, not “good news” for that trinity of persons that the Hebrew Bible (Jesus’ Bible) had an obsessive concern for, “the orphans, widows, and immigrants,” and not “good news” for the “peacemakers” whom Jesus called “God’s children.” (Matt. 5:9)
The bishops are not “good news” for those they insultingly label un-Catholic and outside the cor ecclesiae (heart of the church), the many Vicky Kennedys of the Church who dare to reject the pelvic zone orthodoxy the bishops have substituted for Jesus’ “good news.”
To such bishops we owe prophetic instruction, not homage; forthright criticism, not fawning respect.
And when they dress themselves in lavish cardinal red and call themselves “princes of the church” let all the people shout out “Shame!”
