Madam,We now have a Pope in Rome who implicitly says that gay people represent a greater threat to the world than climate control; who has reconciled a Society of Saint Pius X bishop who is a holocaust denier; and who has appointed an Austrian bishop who believes that God flooded New Orleans because of the city’s tolerance of homosexuality and liberal sexual mores.
In his short time as Pope, Benedict has managed to offend and alienate the world’s Islamic, Jewish, liberal Catholic and LGBT communities – and God knows how many others.
Here in Ireland we have a Roman Catholic Church with a dark legacy of clerical and religious sexual abuse and Magdalen Laundry activity and the covering up of that abuse and activity by hierarchy and religious superiors.
To this day we have at least one bishop who has blatantly failed to observe both the civil and ecclesiastical rules for reporting and managing clerical sexual abuse and insists on staying in his post with the support of some of his colleagues.
In spite of all of this, the Roman Catholic Church, in Ireland and internationally, insists on regulating every detail of bedroom, reproductive and sexual life; tells married people and women that God could not possibly be calling them to priesthood; refuses to allow married priests to return to ministry, preferring instead to close down parishes; refuses a second chance to people whose marriages have broken down; tells gay, lesbian. bisexual and transgendered people that they are “disordered”; and informs Anglicans, Presbyterians, Methodists and all other Protestants and believers that their churches and faiths are not real churches or faith communities at all.
Am I the only Catholic in Ireland who believes it is way past time that we told our Roman colonialists and their Irish branch managers where to go and reconvened an Irish Catholic Church, independent of Rome, while preserving all the essentials – the Bible, the sacraments, the priesthood, and our rich heritage of Irish spirituality and mysticism, while at the same time being open to the new? “Is not the Kingdom of Heaven like a householder which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old?” (Matthew 13:52.) – Yours, etc,
The way things are going here at home and worldwide I totally agree.
ReplyDeleteLike with some major corporations which is what the Church seems to have turned into, keeping their Clergy IN JOBS no matter what or how they break the rules, collecting cash and holding on to wealth down through the generations, forgetting that when they are ordained they do so to SERVE their flock and not put self first at all times, when there are abuses brush them under the carpet and move the bad guys around for as long as they can get away with it, abuse their authority that would not be tolerated in other professions, have people bow and sprape to them with undeserved adoration because they have conned the local laity through their manipulation, asking the laity to be flexible while they rule with a rod of iron - you do it their way or are excluded from communion etc., still after all this time they are total control freaks dishing out laws on morals that they do NOT follow themselves. Telling legally married couples how to conduct their sex lives while they who are NOT meant to have sex lives by the vows they took at ordination have sexual partners, go on couples holidays, possibly have fathered or mothered children (in case of Nuns) yet still look down their noses at the married couples in their Churches.
It is time to disband the Church and start again.
We are still looking at Parish Priests who feel ONLY THEY are the Church. We are sick and tired telling them that the laity and parishioners in the community ARE the Parish and the Church they are supposed to act at all times in the best interests of those people who are the Church and mind their flocks that were given into their care at ordination.
Where have we gone wrong to let these religious away with SO MUCH FOR SO LONG? It was the power they once held over us when they screamed hell and damnation from their pulpits at us and we believed it all (worse fools we) while they lived off the fat of the land and abused, broke laws and had sexual affairs and we put them on golden thrones and gave them halos.
By the look of things the thrones have now crumbled to dust and the halos have lost their tarnish and the adoring crowds are filing out of the Churches where they were brainwashed and have now taken control of their own lives and can see all the corruption within that they used to not question while they wore their rose tinted glasses for half a lifetime.
We must start again and clear out the rot.
Bishop Buckley is right.
Clerical Whispers are right to publish his views. I love your no discrimination site whatever your critics on certain stories say.
God Bless You.
Such a church as Bishop Buckley extols exists not only in the world, but actually in Ireland! I write about the Reformed Catholic Church. Bishop Buckley and those interested could do well to visit it's website, www.reformedcatholicchurch.org
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