UNITED STATES
Winona Daily News
Leslie Hittner
I am appalled! Employees of the Catholic Church all over this country are being told that if they express their beliefs with respect to same-sex marriage, artificial birth control, abortion and other politically sensitive issues that the Catholic Church has a position on — and if those statements are not in accordance with the beliefs and teachings of the Catholic Church — they will be fired.
So much for free speech in the United States. Are similar threats being made elsewhere in the world — Rome, for instance?
One has to wonder when one of the Church’s worldwide leaders, Raymond Cardinal Burke, former bishop of La Crosse and former Archbishop of St. Louis, can make preposterous and outrageous statements about Catholic men and women and still retain his position as patron of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta — itself a demotion from his previous position in the elite Roman Curia.
But then, maybe his statements are in accordance with the beliefs of the church. Maybe he has not overstepped his bounds. Yes, maybe his statements reflect the culture of the vast majority of men in positions of power in the Catholic Church — in Rome and elsewhere around the world.
What did Burke say, do you ask? I will not go into a lot of detail, but feel free to check the Jan. 9 La Crosse Tribune or the Jan. 7 National Catholic Reporter.
In a nutshell — and I mean that literally — Burke asserts that the Catholic Church has suffered a shortage of priests, endured much priestly sexual abuse and experienced a feminization of the church in general because of — get this — the feminist movement in the last half of the 20th century.
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