COWLEY, CATHNEWS, THE CARDINAL - AND CHLOE

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Oh, the joylessness of Joy. 

The celebrated children's author who believes that having an affair would have made ex-Bishop Charles Drennan "a much better bishop" was called out today in the Manawatu Standard by a victim of abuse.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/manawatu-standard/opinion/116714177/author-joy-cowleys-victim-blaming-unacceptable

Cowley is quoted by the abuse victim as asking if young women think a 'vow' of celibacy grants immunity to breaking that 'vow'. First up, Cowley should know that diocesan priests don't make a vow of celibacy (that's for religious, in monasteries), they make a promise. 

But the victim says the answer to that question is "a resolute yes. A teenager should be able to trust a priest not to be lying when claiming to be celibate and to have strong morals". 

Of course she should. But the answer to Cowley's question is 'no': because she wasn't talking about the way things should be, she was talking about the way things are, and the way young women are not taught morals, not even in so-called Catholic schools, the reality is that some young women are titillated by the challenge of a priestly conquest, and of a bishop, so much the better. 

However, no matter which way you look at it, sex between a bishop and a young woman is abuse. The abuse victim is calling on Cardinal Dew to condemn Cowley's implied imputation of complicity on the part of the young woman, and because Cowley has conducted retreats for diocesan priests, that call is entirely justified.

If the abuse victim found Cowley's comments in CathNews "disturbing", what on earth would he/she have made of her chat last week with Radio New Zealand? Cowley opined that the late teens were "an appropriate age" to have sex with a much older bishop: that would be okay."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/401084/priest-s-sexual-relationship-would-make-him-a-much-better-bishop-children-s-author-joy-cowley

"You know," she said, "people fall in love. I don't think this man would have had sex with anyone he wasn't in love with.".

It simply takes one's breath away. This is the woman - married to an ex-priest - who conducts retreats for priests. (Is that how she knows, as she claims, that "the majority of priests have sex"?) How can our bishops stand for this?

Being "in love with" someone absolutely does not necessarily mean that you love them. Not in the way that Jesus Christ has commanded us to love, "as I have loved you". Loving someone in the Christian, Catholic sense means doing all that one can to lead that person to Christ and so to eternal joy with Him. To love as a Christian is an exercise of the will, not of feelings! 

How could breaking the Sixth Commandment - and in the bishop's case, bringing to bear on the unfortunate young woman in question not only his advantage of maturity but also his clerical prestige - be love as Jesus Christ defines it? If a personable bishop - some might perhaps say cool, as his open-necked shirts conveyed - were to tell a very young woman that an affair was on the cards, she'd need strength of mind and will beyond her years to turn him down. 

On the other hand, yes, Cowley's right in saying that "women flirt with priests". But if she's right also in saying the majority of priests have sex, then we see very clearly the sort of quality of formation for priests, both in the seminary and ongoing (witness Cowley) that the NZ Bishops have provided in the years since Vatican II: formation by apostates, of apostates.

It's been said of this bishop that he was never to be seen in the cathedral praying, and that on Holy Thursday nights, after the Mass of the Last Supper,  he would take a stroll with a band of disciples, returning after an hour to pray the Divine Office. "What? Could you not watch one hour with Me?" (Mt 26,40).

If a bishop has affairs, and a priests' retreatant says that makes him a much better bishop, what looms very large is the sin of apostasy*. Sacred Scripture, our Sacred Tradition, the Catechism of the Catholic Church and moral teaching all state that the breach of a priest's promises, and sex outside marriage, constitute the mortal sin of fornication.

The bishop, and the priests' retreats' director, have obviously foresworn the devout life that Christ demands of his Church - and apostasy follows that rejection of His Cross as surely as night follows day.

Before we faithful lay people and priests stray from the way the Lord has marked out for us with His bloody footsteps, could we all please wake up and face these hideous facts, and denounce apostasy and heresy when we see and hear it, and stay away, if we have a choice, from Masses where apostasy and heresy are the plat du jour?

We in Palmerston North Diocese no longer have a bishop to appeal to (a direct consequence of apostasy) and as someone remarked on this blog, Cardinal Dew's ideas on the future of the Church in the current Welcom read more like Chloe Swarbrick's on the future of the Greens, so to Do Something About It we need to appeal to the Apostolic Nuncio.

Mind you, the Nuncio reports to a pope who recently hosted a pagan idol worship ceremony in the Vatican to launch a synod denounced by Cardinal Gerhard Muller as "false teaching … representing a radical U-turn in the hermeneutics of Catholic theology". In other words, apostasy.

So what are we supposed to do about it? We are supposed to pray. Get down on our knees. "Pray always". 

True joy is to be found in Jesus.

*Apostasy is "a general defection from the Faith, a going away from Christ in a general way, and the many truths of the Faith" (Cardinal Raymond Burke).



Anonymous says:

Your piece re Cowley is excellent, it must take you hours to compose.

Our numbers at Ashhurst are growing steadily. Years ago people came because they wanted tradition. Now some come because they don't want the NO, and the NO church philosophy.

Leo says:

Calling her Mrs Joy Cowley interests me. She was that after she married her first husband, whom she divorced. Her second husband died, and she subsequently married Fr Terry Coles. I guess to the secular world, she would be Mrs Terry Coles. But you might be right to call her Mrs Cowley.

I say: 

Who called her 'Mrs Joy Cowley'? Not I.