To: Tom Homan, Director, Immigration and Customs Enforcement
Dear Mr. Homan:
On November 12, a reporter asked you about allegations by some Catholic bishops’ that your “massive deportations” were “inhumane.”
In your reply, you said, “The Catholic Church is wrong.”
Mr. Homan, the Catholic Church isn’t wrong – the Catholic Church is the Mystical Body of Christ.
But, if the Catholic Church isn’t wrong, who is?
Unfortunately, the bishops are.
Here’s why.
When it comes to politics, both the bishops and the laity should be encouraged to express a variety of opinions on prudential issues.
What are “prudential” issues? They are those on which good and faithful Catholics can disagree. When it comes to politics, there are countless issues great and small with particulars that fall into that category – from tax rates and zoning laws to war and peace.
On such issues, the average bishop can be just as right – or just as wrong – as the average layman can. And when it comes to politics, the prudential judgments of an informed prelate carry no more authoritative weight than the opinions of informed Catholic laymen on the same issues.
Of course, issues dealing with Magisterial Truth lie in a different category.
For instance, the Church’s teaching on marriage, family, and children might be controversial, or even unpopular, but they are magisterial.
Every bishop, on the day of his consecration, has made a solemn oath to “accept and hold each and everything definitively proposed by the Church regarding teaching on faith and morals.”
The bishop is called to teach these truths whether they are “in season or out of season,” as Saint Paul puts it:
“Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine.” (2 Timothy 4:2)
Many of today’s bishops find that command to be challenging.
That’s because many timeless truths regarding marriage, family, and children are rather unpopular these days. In fact, some of them have simply not been taught for half a century, even though the teaching has been repeatedly reaffirmed through the ages.
When Pope Paul VI promulgated his encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968, our bishops simply stuck it in the bottom drawer. And why not? My goodness, the Sexual Revolution and The Pill were taking our secular culture by storm.
So the hierarchy abandoned that teaching. But how to fill the rather sizable hole that was left in their teaching priorities?
And ever since, our shepherds have embraced the agenda of the Democrat Party as “the Teaching of the Church.”
Continue reading at Shenandoah Sodbuster