Bishops See "Problem" with Ordination of Homosexual Episcopalian "Bishop"

by Christopher A. Ferrara

        In a previous column I discussed the absurd doings of ARCIC, the utterly useless Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission, which tries to produce worthless "agreed statements" in which the Catholic and Anglican parties "agree" on doctrinal matters, each according to their own understanding. In other words, they don’t agree at all. But such is the stuff of ecumenism: "agreements" that produce no agreement and a "search for unity" that has resulted in greater disunity than ever between Catholics and Anglicans.

        The new "ecumenism" which has invaded every aspect of Catholic thinking since Vatican II must be diabolical, as its effect is to blind the participants to the reality that there can be no unity between Catholics and Protestants unless the Protestants accept the entirety of Catholic doctrine, thereby becoming Catholics themselves. As the popes put it before Vatican II, the only way to Christian unity is the "return of the dissidents to the one true Church." (cf. Pius XI, Mortalium animos)

        Not for present-day Catholic ecumenists is such a common-sense approach to the question of Christian unity. On and on they go with their ecumenical confabs, pretending that the assorted protestant "churches" with which they endlessly palaver are something other than the rotting corpses of humanly founded institutions that they really are.

        A truly laughable case in point is the recent statement of Bishop Steven E. Blaire, the "ecumenical spokesman" for the U.S. Bishops Conference, concerning the vote by the Episcopalians to elevate to the status of "bishop" one Gene Robinson, an open homosexual who lives in sin with another open homosexual. Blaire’s response to this abomination was to call it "a departure from the common understanding of meaning and purpose of human sexuality and the morality of homosexuality as found in sacred scripture and the Christian tradition."

        A departure? Blaire would hardly say that the cold-blooded murder of one’s spouse is a "departure from the common understanding of the value of human life as found in sacred scripture and the Christian tradition." But this is how ecumenists speak when it comes to treating the obvious moral and doctrinal decrepitude of Protestant sects, which obviously have no intention whatsoever of achieving unity with the Catholic Church on any but their own immoral and heretical terms.

        Blaire went on to complain that the installation of a practicing homosexual "bishop" by the Episcopalians has "serious implications in the search for Christian unity." That’s like saying that the murder of one’s spouse has serious implications for the marital union. Good grief.

        And what about the "serious implications" of the refusal of all the Protestant sects to accept the authority of the Pope and the Magisterium, or the "serious implications" of Protestant condonation of murder in the womb, contraception, divorce and remarriage, or the "serious implications" of the fact that Protestant sects have no ordained priesthood nor any true hierarchy that could be unified with the Catholic hierarchy even if, by some miracle, there were an agreement on doctrine.

        Serious implications. What a joke. How much longer this running joke of the past forty years will go on, only God knows. But one thing is certain: God is not amused by the ecumenical follies ushered in by Vatican II. And God will not be mocked.