The Flying Buttress, 9/25/05

The Flying Buttress +Dissecting dissent in the Cincinnati Archdiocese+

The Be-, or not to Be- (whatever works for you) -atitudes

+The great liberal apostasy among the leadership of the Cincinnati Archdiocese is fed, in part, by a symbiotic relationship with the theologians at our three “Catholic" universities: Xavier, University of Dayton, and Mt. St. Joseph.

+These local theologians – those featured in the (Occasionally) Catholic Telegraph are only the tip of the iceberg - take great pride in denying the very existence of the absolute truth, divine revelation, clarity of doctrine, and authoritative tradition upon which the Church rests, while promoting and insisting on the moral superiority of relativism, collegial PC and “creative" reasoning, ambiguous secularized doctrine, and ethical nuancing (upon which their careers and egos rest). In other words, the discredited banner of liberation theology still flaps boldly in the prevailing Marxist winds of Cincinnati.

+Serendipitously, The Buttress, always on the lookout for renegade theology, has come into possession of an unauthorized copy of the galley proofs of what is apparently a new compendium by Cincinnati’s liberated theologians. Scheduled to be published by an unknown think tank called the Institute for Advanced Catholic Dissent, it consists of several theologians’ translations of the sayings of Our Lord. The manuscript has no title yet, but proposes two on its title page:

“My Faith, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?"

“Our Egos Were Burning Within Us"

+As our headline indicates, this issue presents Cincinnati’s translations of the Beatitudes. In order to protect the identity of the liberated, we have used four archetypal theologians, each representing a current of liberated theological thought (Editor’s note: local theologians may fit into more than one archetype, or even into all of them):

Theologian A: Catholic beliefs are not absolutes; the Catechism is not the Word of God.

• Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they have no black and white answers.
• Blessed are the meek, for theirs is a choice among personal value systems and alternate lifestyles.
• Blessed are they that mourn, for they can be comforted by multiple paths to salvation.
• Blessed are the merciful, for they shall honor tolerance, diversity, and inclusive language.
• Blessed are the clean of heart: they have no need of the Sacrament of Reconciliation.
• Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall dumb down the Faith in the name of ecumenism.

Theologian B: the mandatum implementing Ex Corde Ecclesiae is a new inquisition.

• Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they shall be excused from obeying ecclesiastical authority.
• Blessed are the meek, for they shall evade the accusations of right-wing vigilantes.¹
• Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall have recourse to dialogue.
• Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall not lose their academic credibility.
• Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall feign confusion over the meaning of being in full communion with the Church.
• Blessed are ye when you are reviled and persecuted by the Curia for espousing academic freedom.

Theologian C (Jesuit): advocates social and environmental justice, and freedom of genital expression and identity² (sic).

• Unduly favored are the spiritually underdeveloped, for they consume less than their share of the earth’s resources.
• Unduly favored are the assertively challenged, for they shall attract hordes of social justice “advocates" ³ and serve on lay ministry advisory boards.
• Unduly favored are they that hunger and thirst for justice, for they can enumerate the Church’s crimes.
• Unduly favored are the merciful, for they shall forgive all Third World debt.
• Unduly favored are they that suffer persecution for sexuality’s sake, for they shall corner the Church with hate crime legislation.

Theologian D: Jesus Seminarian.

• Merely symbolic are the 18% of the sayings of Jesus which are not legendary accretions and mythic embellishments.
• Merely symbolic are the Gospels, because they record things which couldn’t possibly have happened.
• Oh what the hey, merely symbolic is the entire life of Jesus, “a secular sage who satirized the pious and championed the poor."

NOTES: 1. Cincinnati theologians’ code for groups which promote orthodoxy, like Adoremus and Catholics United for the Faith.

2. Isn’t that what you’d advocate if you were a homosexual?

3. In the original Aramaic, “parasites."

Cardinal George Pell on the dictatorship of relativism

VISIT www.priestsforlife.org