A Pope Away From a Perfect Church is an article in today's American Spectator and it implicitly exalts "conservative" views on policy and leadership by dismissing liberal views as "being without life" and running a victory lap just to rub dissenter noses in their superiority. I do not know what good we do for the body of Christ by drawing conservative vs. liberal battle lines. I do not endorse the current trend of bending theological principles to advance political policies now in vogue -- but please don't call me a conservative because of it. I am open to the notion of ordaining women as deacons because there is sound scriptural precedent for it -- but please don't call me liberal because of it. My comment to the article follows.
Nathan has a point. Those who see themselves as conservative seem to delude themselves as a group holding a monopoly on virtue and sound leadership. A large portion of "conservatives" are those who place themselves front and center at Our Lady of Authority Worship; they parrot the policy laid out by those in authority, they heap praise and fealty on the Pope and his minions, they rush to minimize and distort the horrors committed under the watch of those in authority, and they fiercely attack those who seek improvement in Church leadership.
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I am impressed with the skillful challenge Cardinal Dolan has pursued on Obamacare regulations -- yet I am shocked at how much tedium and minutia is offered up at meetings of the USCCB. I am intrigued at Benedict's postures toward improved relations with Eastern Orthodox, but his lording over us with "consubstantial with the Father" and other quibbles with the English Mass is demeaning.
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It puzzles me that special overseers need to be appointed to compel reforms for our nuns when no such overseers were necessary for Legionnairies for Christ, Opus Dei, or dioceses riddled with scandal or bankruptcy. It also puzzles me that males in authority refuse to acknowledge their own scriptures and at least give females a seat at the table among those ordained as deacons. I hardly think that the abuse scandal would have been covered up so well and so long if we had a contingent of deacons who were also mothers.
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And the unyielding policy of refusing communion to those who are remarried seems harsh and callously detrimental to the children raised by such persons. Let us find another sanction, and let us find a way to deploy the sacrament of reconciliation to restore these people to some level of communion with the Church.
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And finally, when does the leadership aggressively reverse our Church postures of comforting the comfortable and neglecting the afflicted? A small minority quietly perseveres in mission work, while the priorities remain expanded luxuries at our churches and maintaining Catholic schools that only the rich can afford.
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So now I suppose the conservatives will advocate that people like me need to be silenced and relegated to some kind of re-education program to get our minds and our Faith right before facing the crushing judgment of the conservative church's grand and glorious God.
