BAD BISHOPS, BAD POPES

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"It's now obvious that Pope Francis is deeply implicated in terrible scandals."


Damian Thompson has just departed his job as editor-in-chief of the UK's Catholic Herald. That is his first tweet "as a free man". 

He continues: "My concern isn't theological: it's the spectacle of a corrupt pope, something I never expected to see in my lifetime."

Thompson and his boss, British business Rocco Forte - married to Princess Michael of Kent - disagreed on the opinions voiced by Thompson in an EWTN interview on the upcoming Amazonian Synod. "Cancel this wretched synod", is what he said (in part).

And what do you know, he had a go at the UK Bishops for their weakness on the right to life. Fancy that. Our NZ Bishops are not alone! 

But that pales into insignificance when compared with Thompson's nerve in criticizing the Amazon Synod's working document for Austrian Bishop Erwin Krautler's justification of infanticide on "cultural" grounds. 

This morning I stood for a couple of hours or more on the footpath outside Hastings Hospital with Kate Cormack of Voice for Life. Thursday is Hastings Hospital's infanticide day and a pro-life outreach is maintained in the hope of preventing death and destruction, not just for the baby but for the baby's family and our nation.

We were under surveillance. A guy spent a good ten minutes on the other side of the street with a camera aimed at us. We smiled. I took my hands off my hips. Expect a pro-abortion liberalization story in some rag shortly.

Kate and I wondered why it's so hard to get people to stand there, in support of women like the teenager we saw driven in by a young man in a sports car who drove himself out again a minute or two later, on his own. Maybe to have a flat white, and take his mind off things.

If our bishops gave our people the lead they would follow. Imagine if Bishop Charles Drennan were to stand on that footpath and pray with us. The faithful would flock to join him.

Imagine if Pope Francis stood outside a hospital in Rome in support of women scheduled to kill their children that day. Would bishops all over the world not do the same? And their people likewise? And for how much longer would this holocaust endure?

But actually the time arrived a little while ago for the faithful to find their backbone and stand up for their Lord and God Jesus Christ and for the truth, as they have done in previous ages.

A new book, Bad Shepherds, should paradoxically give us heart. Bad bishops - including bad popes - have been and gone before now, while their people soldiered on and kept the faith, cleansing the Church and by God's grace making her holy once more.

*Bad Shepherds - The Dark Years in Which the Faithful Thrived While Bishops Did the Devil's Work.


*by Rod Bennett (Sophia Institute Press)

Anonymous says:

Our Bishop Drennan is a man who takes to the street.  He marched around the Square with a mostly rag-tag group of lefties at the protest on the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement.  He even addressed the crowd.  

It seems TPP was an appropriate Catholic issue to demand his presence. Murdering unborn children gets only token attention from the Catholic hierarchy, and certainly no street marching these days.  

I don't see much on international trade agreements in Sacred Scripture, but there is much on the sanctity of life. Oh well.

Bob Gill says:

But if Bishop Charles Drennan were to stand on that footpath outside Hastings Hospital, I wonder if he, like Father Bryan Buenger when he left New Zealand last week, would proudly be wearing his clerical collar in public?

I say: my cousin Fr Brian - of whom I am quite 'ordinately' proud - always wore a clerical collar. He was a holy priest.