DRINK!!
Whenever we play the Episcopal Drinking Game around here, a lot of you papistical, mackeral-snapping Mariolators probably feel left out. Oh fudge cake, you sadly think to yourselves. I sure wish we could have a chance to drink ourselves into a drooling stupor like all those cool Anglicans get to.
Well here’s some fantastic news! Now you can! Introducing the Roman Catholic Church Drinking Game! Since regularly-occurring liberal Catholic buzzwords either don’t exist or have not yet been recorded and since no one in the Roman Catholic Church ever uses the phrase “live into,” this drinking game is a little different.
What you do is to read a piece of liberal Catholic writing. Every time you run across some emotionally-overwrought prose, some barely-suppressed hysteria, some turn of phrase that makes you want to send The Good Doctor $500 if she’d only bring back Braxton’s Lear, that kind of thing, you down a shot of your favorite 40-proof beverage.
Last one conscious wins. Let’s warm up with this Jamie Manson blog post at the the National Catholic Reporter. I’ll even include the title:
Bishop against gay marriage tapped to reform LCWR
The Vatican investigation into U.S. women religious, which began in 2009, is finally bearing its first toxic fruit.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops announced Wednesday it has named Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain to lead a five-year reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). The reforms include a revision of the LCWR’s statutes, a review of its programs (including, in all likelihood, Vatican approval of topics and speakers at their annual general assembly) and reviews of their liturgical norms and relationship with NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby.
Sartain has made headlines in recent months for his recommendation that parishes in his diocese collect signatures for petitions supporting Washington state’s referendum against same-sex marriage.
This “doctrinal assessment” has been initiated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Their greatest concern about LCWR’s programming? You guessed it: They’re not explicitly anti-gay and anti-women’s ordination.
LCWR representatives have not yet commented publicly on what is undoubtedly an unprecedented moment of crisis for the conference.
Got a buzz on yet? If you do, this reaction from Joan Chittister should have you calling in sick in the morning.
“Within the canonical framework, there is only one way I can see to deal with this,” said Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, who has served as president of the group as well as in various leadership positions. (Chittister also writes a column for NCR.) “They would have to disband canonically and regroup as an unofficial interest group.
“That would be the only way to maintain growth and nourish their congregational charisms and the charism of the LCWR, which is to help religious communities assess the signs of the time. If everything you do has to be approved by somebody outside, then you’re giving your charism away, and you’re certainly demeaning the ability of women to make distinctions.”
Chittister said she was deeply distraught at news of Sartain’s appointment and the order for LCWR to revise itself.
“When you set out to reform a people, a group, who have done nothing wrong, you have to have an intention, a motivation that is not only not morally based, but actually immoral,” she said.
“Because you are attempting to control people for one thing and one thing only — and that is for thinking, for being willing to discuss the issues of the age … If we stop thinking, if we stop demanding the divine right to think, and to see that as a Catholic gift, then we are betraying the church no matter what the powers of the church see as an inconvenient truth in their own times.”
In attempting to take such control of people’s thinking, she said, “You make a mockery of the search for God, of the whole notion of keeping eyes on the signs of the times and of providing the people with the best possible spiritual guidance and presence you can give.
“When I was a child in this town, I was taught that it was a sin to go into a Protestant church. In my lifetime, the church, to its eternal credit, admitted that it was wrong. The scandal and the sin is that it took 400 years to do that.”
Chittister said women religious have been trying since Vatican II “to help the church avoid that kind of darkness and control … they have been a gift to the church in their leadership and their love and their continuing fidelity.
“When you set out to reform that kind of witness, remember when it’s over who doomed the church to another 400 years of darkness. It won’t the people of the church who did it.”
Thanks, Cha-Cha. Big ups to Father Z.
Well here’s some fantastic news! Now you can! Introducing the Roman Catholic Church Drinking Game! Since regularly-occurring liberal Catholic buzzwords either don’t exist or have not yet been recorded and since no one in the Roman Catholic Church ever uses the phrase “live into,” this drinking game is a little different.
What you do is to read a piece of liberal Catholic writing. Every time you run across some emotionally-overwrought prose, some barely-suppressed hysteria, some turn of phrase that makes you want to send The Good Doctor $500 if she’d only bring back Braxton’s Lear, that kind of thing, you down a shot of your favorite 40-proof beverage.
Last one conscious wins. Let’s warm up with this Jamie Manson blog post at the the National Catholic Reporter. I’ll even include the title:
Bishop against gay marriage tapped to reform LCWR
The Vatican investigation into U.S. women religious, which began in 2009, is finally bearing its first toxic fruit.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops announced Wednesday it has named Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain to lead a five-year reform of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR). The reforms include a revision of the LCWR’s statutes, a review of its programs (including, in all likelihood, Vatican approval of topics and speakers at their annual general assembly) and reviews of their liturgical norms and relationship with NETWORK, a Catholic social justice lobby.
Sartain has made headlines in recent months for his recommendation that parishes in his diocese collect signatures for petitions supporting Washington state’s referendum against same-sex marriage.
This “doctrinal assessment” has been initiated by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Their greatest concern about LCWR’s programming? You guessed it: They’re not explicitly anti-gay and anti-women’s ordination.
LCWR representatives have not yet commented publicly on what is undoubtedly an unprecedented moment of crisis for the conference.
Got a buzz on yet? If you do, this reaction from Joan Chittister should have you calling in sick in the morning.
“Within the canonical framework, there is only one way I can see to deal with this,” said Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, who has served as president of the group as well as in various leadership positions. (Chittister also writes a column for NCR.) “They would have to disband canonically and regroup as an unofficial interest group.
“That would be the only way to maintain growth and nourish their congregational charisms and the charism of the LCWR, which is to help religious communities assess the signs of the time. If everything you do has to be approved by somebody outside, then you’re giving your charism away, and you’re certainly demeaning the ability of women to make distinctions.”
Chittister said she was deeply distraught at news of Sartain’s appointment and the order for LCWR to revise itself.
“When you set out to reform a people, a group, who have done nothing wrong, you have to have an intention, a motivation that is not only not morally based, but actually immoral,” she said.
“Because you are attempting to control people for one thing and one thing only — and that is for thinking, for being willing to discuss the issues of the age … If we stop thinking, if we stop demanding the divine right to think, and to see that as a Catholic gift, then we are betraying the church no matter what the powers of the church see as an inconvenient truth in their own times.”
In attempting to take such control of people’s thinking, she said, “You make a mockery of the search for God, of the whole notion of keeping eyes on the signs of the times and of providing the people with the best possible spiritual guidance and presence you can give.
“When I was a child in this town, I was taught that it was a sin to go into a Protestant church. In my lifetime, the church, to its eternal credit, admitted that it was wrong. The scandal and the sin is that it took 400 years to do that.”
Chittister said women religious have been trying since Vatican II “to help the church avoid that kind of darkness and control … they have been a gift to the church in their leadership and their love and their continuing fidelity.
“When you set out to reform that kind of witness, remember when it’s over who doomed the church to another 400 years of darkness. It won’t the people of the church who did it.”
Thanks, Cha-Cha. Big ups to Father Z.
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