Because the Catholic hierarchy seems to expect to be taken seriously in other areas of public life, where they threaten to withhold the sacrament or even excommunicate catholic politicians who favor stem cell research or reproductive rights. Or when their clergy preach the evils of gay sex and push for legislation to make it illegal. To name only a few current worldwide examples.
If an organization wants to make their beliefs a basis for public policy, then the public has a right, if not a responsibility, to examine and form opinions on those beliefs.
And I thought that Orwell based the Ministry of Truth on Stalin! Silly me.
As for me, I respect the books, the statues, the stained glass windows and the buildings. The people and the belief system are a bunch of nutters, in general. I have a lot more respect for the subset who admit that they might be wrong, though.
Limbo was never a teaching of the church; it was theological speculation to reconcile different views of particular situations. It has been widely accepted by the church for forty years, or more, that Limbo was a dead end concept.
Qodgop gave you some reasons to comment on this affair. Those are good reasons but I also have a simpler reason.
You claim that this is a strictly internal affair. However it was the basis of a front page story in the Los Angeles Times. I’m quite sure that the Times doesn’t send reporters around to churches in the area to listen to sermons and discover which of them are engaged in internal disputes. Ergo, someone in the congregation made the dispute public.
Whenever I see a news item I feel free to comment on it anywhere I choose and a forum titled Mundane Pointless Stuff I Must Share looked like a pretty good place to comment. If that causes you heartburn I guess that’s your cross to bear.
If people don’t want to be mocked for doing silly things they shouldn’t publicize the silly things they do.
I was just this Sunday at a Mosaic (downtown L.A.) service at which the head pastor made his main point be that religion is a construct that gets in the way of people getting to Jesus, and allows others opportunities for power and control.
You’ve got to be kidding. Unitarians? I mean, I know they tend to be more free-spirited than other denominations, but services in the nude? Now, I know there are some pagans that do that, but I always figured Unitarians were a little more… I don’t want to say “prudish”… reserved?
I thought novenas got you fast-tracked out of Purgatory, which your salvation assured you an eventual exit from anyway, that being the nature of the place?
Moving during Mass isn’t a sin. Having the “wrong” stance is not a sin. Masturbating during Mass would be, at the very least, disrespectful to your co-parishioners but those guys in the article sound like they’d condemn my parish’s Children’s Mass in a heartbeat. Kids are not just encouraged to sing, but even to gasp dance!
Some people need to get their heads out of their arses: the closeness of colon to ear, while nice for warmth, keeps you from listening accurately. Some of these people happen to be priests shrug
In my experience, priests in the USA tend to have higher horses than those in “Catholic Spain”. I think it’s because in Spain they’ve never defined themselves as “we are the opposite of those heathens there”. In America, I’ve met Catholic priests who berated people for wearing a medal (and then wondered why they couldn’t get Hispanics to teach sunday school); Catholic priests who refused to give you confession without an appointment that would have taken several weeks (btw, the refusal IS a sin, in theory you could walk up to a priest in the middle of consecration, say “father I need confession now, I’m in mortal sin” and he’d have to drop the consecration). Never ran into those specific kinds of stupidity in Spain, and God knows I’ve had my share of stupid priests around here (like that one who answered any theological question with “Jesus loves you” - well, yeah, but what does that have to do with what I asked?).
Sorry, don’t grok that idea at all. Not in my experience.
Granted, the sky-clad thing hardly occurs in the average congregation, but the UU-pagan movement is a significant minority in the denomination nationwide, and they do that stuff. And when they do, they tend to attract other UU’ers.
You may be up to something there. Maybe it has to do with Catholicism in the USA never having gotten past the “minority” on-the-defensive worldview – always the church of immigrants, and always fighting a battle against religious assimilation, against having the kids just abandon religion altogether or turn to the dominant Protestant current… or even worse ;), begin to think that if America’s a democracy, then the Church should be one, too.
The authorities in the particular diocese/parish to which the article refers seem to be falling all over themselves trying to make some kind of point on this last issue, and in the process missing the bigger, more important “point”
My ‘problem’ with your OP is the opening. You sound like every noisy neighbor ala Mrs Kravitz. “Look at those Catholics argueing about kneeling.” Of course people of all faiths argue about the minutia. Kirk VS. Picard, the DH rule, the off sides rule, and many, many others.
Just because the Times made a story about it, doesn’t make it true. People who are kneeling are not perfroming a mortal sin, no matter what some bishop said.
The sad fact of the world is that all media is a total freak show, but rather than people with rare birth ‘defects’ we just watch the freaks. It is a freak of a Catholic offiicial that would cry ‘mortal sin’ at someone choosing to kneel during a traditional point of kneeling. It is a freak that cries a Jihad on America, it is a freak that goes on American Idol or Survivor or any of the other ‘Reality’ television. News reporting is all about telling us about the absolute fringes of the world because that sells better. I remember a time when the cranky news host was the freak. Morrton Downey Jr., in his original incarnation, was a freak. Now the airwaves are full of freaks, running the show.
I also hate the ’ no lame pit threads’ rule. This thread is that, a lame pit thread. If you put it in the pit, it would have been moved anyway.
Refresh my memory, which politian was excommunicated by the Church? Or witheld the sacrement? Which ‘Church’ official said that was the new policy?
Or was it just some crank with no real authority?
Zebra, they threaten excommunication and the witholding of sacraments. To my knowledge, none of these threats have been carried out. No, I’m not going to provide a cite. If you were paying attention during the last presidential election, you would have read the news about it.
Many Catholic voters take these officials pronouncements seriously and vote accordingly. That affects public policy. This, and many other things, makes the Catholic Church open to criticism.
As Mencken said, “We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.”
I said “threatened”. And here’s an example by bishops and an archbishop. I would expect that they are not cranks with no real authority. A Cardinal is considered to be a Prince of the church, no? http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/new.php?n=6706
but those guys in the article sound like they’d condemn my parish’s Children’s Mass in a heartbeat. Kids are not just encouraged to sing, but even to gasp dance!