News Item: : Catholic Guilt(y)
(Category: Torch of The Faith News)
Posted by admin
Wednesday 19 April 2017 - 10:33:28

Notwithstanding his position as the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, we hear that Diarmuid Martin used his Good Friday Way of the Cross, as well as his Easter Sunday sermon, to disparage the Catholic Church and faithful.

And so, the faithful who attended those ceremonies hoping to enter prayerfully into the Easter mysteries, were instead exposed to the spectacle of their local Davos-attending prelate describing Catholicism as a ''faith of prohibitions'' and a ''religion of fear''.

Having bemoaned the Church's past treatment of single mothers, orphans, and those he described as ''gays and lesbians'', Martin also went on to lament the way in which Catholics can be ''so judgmental'' towards, ''those whom we decide have failed and those who drift outside our self-made ideas of respectability.''

Whilst it is true that spiritual pride and premature judgment of others are things to be avoided, and there has been a Jansenist streak in some aspects of Irish Catholicism, it is nevertheless distinctly odd to witness a supposedly Catholic Archbishop speaking of ''self-made ideas of respectability''.

Does that kind of rhetoric give any evidence of a belief in the Decalogue as a divinely revealed mystery; or that we should be exhorted to live by its precepts?

Actually, nothing could be more representative of a ''self-made idea of respectability'' than the present trend of jumping on populist band-wagons and ''virtue signalling'' support in the direction of homosexual ideology and its purveyors...

In recent decades, it has also become popular among trendies in Ireland and elsewhere, to scoff at the Church as though it were merely the source and provider of a phenomenon popularly derided as ''Catholic Guilt''.

I heard this brilliantly refuted some years ago, with the astute observation that all people have guilt, but it is the Catholics who deal with it!

In light of Archbishop Martin's crowd-pleasing - should that be mob-pleasing? - Easter semons, it is informative to study the overall trajectory of his public leadership in recent years.

And so, when Dublin's Mater Misericordiae University Hospital agreed to co-operate with Enda Kenny's new abortion act, Archbishop Martin claimed to have no powers in the governance of the hospital.

And this in spite of his status as the Hospital's president!

I think the correct and appropriate expression here would be to say, and that loudly, ''Oh, give us a break, Archbishop!''

Since then, and with the hospital's governing board confirming in 2015 that it has not altered its 2013 agreement to perform abortions on the premises, Archbishop Martin has merely temporized, ''sought clarification'' and even gone so far as to praise the hospital for its ''great tradition of caring for very difficult pregnancies and doing it well within the ethos of the hospital for years.''

Yes Archbishop, but what of the babies who may be being slaughtered there now under your episcopal nose? Have you nothing to say of the sacrilegious mass-murder of babies on your own turf, during your own watch? Perhaps a Good Friday meditation on the figure of Pontius Pilate would have been more in order.

Then there was the Archbishop's decidely odd stance during the build up to the ''legalization'' of ''homosexual marriage'' in Ireland.

It will be remembered that Archbishop Martin had spoken in favour of legal protection for homosexual ''civil-unions''. He also suggested that the Church had to have a ''reality check'' and change with the times.

In the days leading up to the infamous referendum of 2015, Irish Catholics hoping for some solid leadership from Archbishop Martin were left high and dry when he told the Irish Times that he had, ''no wish to stuff my religious views down other people's throats''.

We always thought it interesting that he seemed to have failed to see that, with such a lamentable response, the lacklustre Archbishop had done just that...

Even when the hearts of Catholics and other people of goodwill were left bleeding, whilst the elites of Ireland embraced sodomy with a massive alchohol-fuelled party in Dublin, Archbishop Martin could only comment, ''I appreciate how gay and lesbian men and women feel on this day. That they feel this is something enriching the way they live. I think it is a social revolution.''

Revealing, hey?

And, as Church Militant has recalled, the seminary at Maynooth, where Archbishop Martin and other Irish bishops sit on the Board of Trustees, has been plagued in recent years by a homosexual sub-culture; as well as accounts of orthodox students being persecuted for their defence of the Real Presence of Jesus Christ in the Most Holy Eucharist and for expressing a desire to kneel for the Consecration.

All of which sounds like the very same kind of issues that opposed me in Ushaw seminary in the late 90's...

Permit us to say that, in light of this readily visible trajectory of Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, it would appear not that he has too much of a sense of Catholic guilt, but rather that he needs to acquire one.

And as we noted above, everyone has guilt, but Catholics deal with it.

St. Patrick - Pray for us!

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This news item is from Torch of The Faith
( http://www.torchofthefaith.com/news.php?extend.1623 )