“Struggling to understand”? Or are they getting the message loud and clear?

Every day I stare at Facebook in growing shock and horror at what is being said in the left-wing Catholic press. I mean, it’s really out there. It is so out there, I am wondering how I am ever going to look these people in the face again. How long have these people not believed in the sacrament of marriage?

Take one story I saw. It’s a sad story. It was related and published by a priest. It is about a Catholic woman who married a Catholic man at 22 , and they had twins. But the husband was injured in a car accident, got addicted to pain killers and then the bottle. He became a real jerk, uncontrollable. He was violent to his wife, they separated, he went from bad to worse, killed a cop, ended up in jail. Apparently he doesn’t give two hoots for wife and children now, and so presumably didn’t care that she divorced him. The woman tried to get an annulment, but she couldn’t: no grounds. It’s what your husband was (or what you were) like when you marry him that matters to the Tribunal, not what happens years later after he’s hurt in a car accident.  So the woman just civilly married another Catholic divorcé, the “only father” her children now know, and they wept together, barred from the Blessed Sacrament, as “their” children received their first communion. Isn’t that awful? Obviously all our sympathy should be for them, with none left over for the unfortunate husband and father languishing in prison, presented to us by the priest-author as an irredeemable piece of trash.

I could not believe my eyes.

As I have pals in the left-wing Catholic press, I feel like a child whose brother or sister has committed some terrible infraction, some offense that will lead to a spanking, like shaving the cat or tying the baby to a branch in the pear tree. _Just wait until Dad gets home! _But the assumption seems to be that Dad is never coming home, or that Dad has died and Mum has taken up with wild-and-crazy Uncle Pete. Somehow, I can’t quite believe it.

Similarly, I am astonished by the new, highly conciliatory tone on sexual relationships between homosexuals, and I wonder what that is all about – unless there is about to be a huge, global outing of whatever percentage of the priesthood it is that is homosexual. (My schismatic co-national thinks it is 30%-50%, and even if he doesn’t name names in his forthcoming book, he has certainly named names to formerly mutual friends in Toronto.) If there is going to be a Huge Global Outing then I can see why certain clerics may have begun to hint that gay is okay.

Although naturally one would like to get rid of the Lavender Mafia, whose strength lies in us not believing that it exists, I am not so sure the Huge, Global Outing will be so good for the Church. Because Ireland. Because Belgium. Because the parish that applauds its priest when he comes out of the closet may strangely begin to shrink and then disappear entirely.

My head hurts. I’m off to the café to study Polish.

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