We are living in a time when many Catholics seem to be eager to exclude their fellow Catholics from access to the sacraments due to the imperfection of their grasp of doctrine, their moral life, or even their aesthetics.
Here in my country, for instance, there is a big push to kick out Catholics for perceived wrong views on such matters as abortion or gay marriage, or for support for things like Black Lives Matter.
We are told by some that merely voting for a Democrat should result in excommunication.
A couple of years ago, some Amazonian Basin Catholics who went to Rome seeking better access to the sacraments were rewarded for their pious efforts by having some guy with close ties to an Austrian group founded by an ex-Nazi huck their little statue of Our Lady of Amazon in the Tiber. Apparently, failure to have the same aesthetics as a Euro-bigot made both them and the Holy Father guilty of “idolatry” (and therefore ineligible for the sacraments too).
The itch to turn sacraments into reducing valves for keeping out the Impure rather than seeing the gospel as an offer of the love of God to sinners and broken people seems to run deep these days.
But it was not always so.
Take the Centurion who came to Jesus seeking healing for his slave (Matthew 8:5-13).
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4 Responses
Great stuff Mark… Unfortunately the “Catholic Weekly” no longer allows one to read your article without a subscription. I can understand their need to protect intellectual property, but can the complete article be duplicated on your blog? Just sayin’
Mark’s contract with The Catholic Weekly almost certainly prohibits that. They’re paying him to provide content for them, not to provide the public with a way to avoid their paywall.
This is the modern internet.
– joel
One wishes that The Catholic Weekly provided for the purchase of a single article. To have to subscribe, when you are only planning on reading the one article. Quite a few places have done that – you can purchase just the article you wish to read. Perhaps, Mark, you could ask them about that?
Gotta make a living! You provide plenty of other content, so I’m happy!