Congratulations, Editor and Publisher, ... (Main Forum)

by Brian Coyne , LINDEN, NSW, Sunday, May 01, 2011, 23:19 (750 days ago) @ herbie

Herbie, I also highly recommend the article by Gary Lockwood published in Crikey I've just been singing the praises of in this string: www.catholica.com.au/forum/index.php?mode=thread&id=74020#p74020 . I honestly think that article exposes why no return to Vatican II is possible in the Church. Most Catholics are simply not political. In other language: most Catholics are not zealots and pharisees. These people who have brought down Bill Morris are. They are properly described as having a taliban mindset and nothing whatsoever will shift them. Christ went to extraordinary lengths to describe (and condemn) the behaviour but today it has infilitrated to the very highest levels of the institution. Most bishops, in my experience are not "political animals" and are played like chickens in a chicken run by those who are politcal animals through and through like Big George. These people are able to manipulate entire political parties, entire nations (as happened in the totalitarian experiments of the 20th Century*), and now even an entire institutional church as long-lived as the Catholic Church, from exceedingly small bases of numerical support. Most ordinary pewsitters — and probably most priests and bishops — are totally politically apathetic and naive.

If I was a bishop I'd feel so strongly about this latest Bill Morris development that I think I would caucus amongst my fellow bishops and call a strike amongst all the still participating faithful of attending Mass one Sunday — a little like what the NSW bishops did in the 1960s in Goulburn where they shut the Catholic schools and sent everybody down to enrol their students at the local public schools. That soon brought the governments to the table and so we ended up with generous funding of Catholic Education in this country. This issue is as equally serious as that in the way the entire Church, built by the blood, sweat and tears of basically the Catholic working classes of this country have been taken over and literally stolen by this tiny unrepresentative minority. Unfortunately the ranks of the priesthood and bishops have been decimated of men with real leadership qualities. One of our leading, retired archbishops is reputed to have said recently that "the gene pool has dried up" referring to the difficulty the Nuncio faces today in finding suitable bishops as leaders. I think he is spot on. I doubt if any of them would stand up although I have heard on the grapevine that Philip Wilson, the President of the Australian Bishops Conference, has been a staunch defender of Bishop Morris in these dealings with the Vatican. I believe this is now a serious moral issue. What we are watching is the literal stealing of an entire institution and the handing of its entire infrastructure over to a tiny minority that is no way representative of the broad "Body of Christ". These men do have to start "finding and following their consciences". If they still believe in a last judgment one day there will be an accountability for all this and they had better be pretty sure that they didn't put loyalty to temporal individuals ahead of loyalty to the moral laws in the choices they made.

*I find it fascinating that our two most recent popes were brought up under totalitarian regimes. Gary Lockwood makes the point in his article — and I know this has even been admitted by Santamaria himself and some involved at high levels in his various endeavours — that they deliberately adopted the political tactics of the communists they opposed by, for example, operating in secret "cells" and various forms of vote and branch stacking. One might draw some parallels between that and the way JPII the Great and BXVI, even though they profess to be so violently opposed to totalitarianism have, in practical effect, brought about a totalitarian church!

Brian Coyne
[Editor & Publisher]