Dickering with a Bunch of Clowns

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        For the past forty years the Vatican apparatus has been wasting its time by engaging in endless "ecumenical dialogue" with the representatives of Protestant sects that grow loonier by the day. One of the Vatican’s dearest "dialogue partners" is the increasingly ridiculous Anglican Church, whose American counterpart, the Episcopal Church, is even more ridiculous. (We are not talking about the heresies and immoral teaching that abound in Anglicanism and Episcopalianism, but simple ridiculousness.)

        Consider a recent report in The Herald Sun on the "consecration" of Rev. Gary Gloster as an Episcopalian "bishop." The report comes by way of a caption to a photograph of the event:

Rev. Gary Gloster and his consecrators, including the Rt. Rev. Edmond Browning (behind Gloster), presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, sport red clown noses during a ceremony at Duke Chapel to ordain Gloster as Suffragan Bishop. Gloster, who has used a clown in his ministry, has spoken on the importance of laughter and play in faith.

        And here, worth at least a thousand words, is the photograph:

        These men are delighted to depict themselves, quite literally, as a bunch of clowns. Yet it is clowns like these with whom the Vatican has been dickering for the past forty years. No, not all of the Vatican’s "dialogue partners" wear rubber noses; but all of them preach religions that are more or less clownish mockeries of the one true religion found in the Catholic Church.

        So, the question arises: How much longer will the three-ring circus of ecumenism go on? How much longer will Vatican representatives continue to engage in senseless theological discussions with people who do not even agree that abortion is murder? How much longer will the Vatican bureaucracy continue to turn its back on the constant teaching of the pre-conciliar popes that the only way to true Christian unity is what Pope Pius XII called "the Catholic truth" of the return of the dissidents to the one true Church?

        We are witnessing indeed the diabolical disorientation of the Church remarked by Sister Lucy. Those who have access to the truth in all its fullness - the leaders of the Catholic Church - are stumbling blindly with the blind on an ecumenical road to hell, refusing to extend the simple invitation that those outside of the Church enter Her without delay for the salvation of souls. Instead, the Vatican continues its endless dickering with clowns. At least in the case of the Episcopalian laymen who "consecrated" Gary Gloster a "bishop," they had the honesty to wear rubber noses.