Courtney McGrailOpen to the possibility that Dr Finn is “a good man” whose decision to have a kept in ministry a priest whose computer contained images of child abuse may have been a serious mistake due to “bad advice and murky circumstances”, he says the possibility that a good man has been compelled to step down is a genuinely good thing.
“That is how accountability works,” says Mr Gobry. “The way it works is that the buck stops with the man at the top, period, because the only alternative is endless buck-passing.
“And if Bishop Finn is as good a man as his supporters say, he understands and accepts that; and if he is a Christian man, he understands that God’s love and grace do not depend on whatever happens to his ecclesiastical career.”
Lessons
David Gibson at cruxnow.com draws five lessons from the Finn saga, not the least of which is that “there are few bishops in office today who have shielded predators the way bishops did in the past”, such that Dr Finn was an anomaly.
The next thing on the agenda, he says, must be “a system for investigating and disciplining bishops that would work for prelates around the world”, with this system, as Boston’s Cardinal Sean O’Malley has said, being such that it holds bishops accountable while avoiding “crowd-based condemnations”.
As Marie Collins said on Twitter, “Things are moving slowly as I have said many times but they are moving in the right direction!”
At ‘Cosmos The In Lost’ at patheos.com, Artur Rosman lies the blame for the current same-sex marriage frenzy squarely at the feet of Catholics who have sentimentalised our theology of marriage.
Arguing that the Catholic theology of marriage shifted in the 20th Century from a neoscholastic one to one of “nuptial mysticism”, he points to a Crisis article that argues that if religious life is always seen as a renunciation and marriage a positive good, given our innate desire for marriage, discerners will usually choose marriage when faced with a choice, while “religious orders shrink and die”.
It can surely be no coincidence, he argues, that the gay Catholic blogger Andrew Sullivan, who “grew up within this atmosphere of upwardly trending commitment to marriage” was perhaps “the first person to propose the then novel notion of gay marriage in his The New Republic piece ‘Here Comes the Groom’”.
In that 1989 article, Mr Rosman points out, Mr Sullivan “proposed gay marriage as a ‘conservative’ partial solution to a whole bunch of post-AIDS crisis problems of the gay community”. Whether or not Mr Sullivan was the originator of the idea, he certainly did more than most to popularise it, and as Mr Rosman says, “Believe it or not, this was a marginal position back in 1989. The gay community saw it as imposing heteronormativity upon them, simply, as selling out.”
Such opposition, of course, has not gone away, ludicrous and insulting attempts to portray the gay community as a monolithic hive-mind aside.
A January 2012 ComRes poll in the UK suggested that only half of Britain’s gay people wanted the legalisation of same-sex marriage, with a quarter being opposed to the idea.
Summing up, Mr Rosman says: “Gay marriage was NOT a secular idea. The idea was first publicly advocated by a Catholic who grew up with a conservative and marriage-oriented theology.
“If you’re so inclined,” he says, “blame a Catholic today for the all the wedding cake controversies.”