George Weigel, a papal biographer, has slammed choices two cardinals recently made, quoting St. Augustine’s condemnation of negligent shepherds.
He was responding to Cardinal Blaise Cupich’s nomination of a radically pro-choice senator for a “lifetime achievement award” and how Cardinal Stephen Chow, SJ, of Hong Kong denied the communist government’s strangling of Catholicism.
According to Weigel, during September in the Liturgy of the Hours, clergy read St. Augustine’s On Pastors, a text that includes a rebuke to shepherds who neglect their flocks.
“You have failed to strengthen what was weak, to heal what was sick and to bind up what was injured, that is, what was broken,” the saint wrote. “You did not call back the straying sheep, nor seek out the lost. What was strong you have destroyed. Yes, you have cut it down and killed it. The sheep is weak, and so, incautious and unprepared, it may give in to temptations.”
Augustine added later, “But what sort of shepherds are they who for fear of giving offense not only fail to prepare the sheep for the temptations that threaten, but even promise them worldly happiness?”
What then, Weigel wrote, might St. Augustine say to Cardinals Cupich and Chow?
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