We have to remember to thank God and the “conservatives” for helpfully helping to demonstrate – and nearly every day – the point I’ve been trying to make clear all this time; that what we think of as “conservative” Catholicism, that odd hybrid of selective doctrinal orthodoxy on sex and Americanist relativism in politics – is not going to work. That in fact, this pontificate is the product of that delusional attempt at a “third-way” compromise between the traditional Catholic Faith and Modernism.

So, thank you, Bishop Gomez, the “conservative” Opus Dei bishop of Los Angeles, for helping.

Los Angeles Archdiocese promotes LGBT agenda at ‘Religious Education Congress’

When Mahoney left office in 2011 in disgrace following revelations of his protection of priests accused of child sex abuse, he was replaced by Archbishop José Gomez, a former Opus Dei priest perceived as a conservative. Expectations were high that Gomez’s administration would lead to a reversal of Mahoney’s policies. However, almost seven years later, the Religious Education Congress continues to promote Mahoney’s dissident agenda with apparent impunity, at the expense of the Church’s doctrines on life and family. 

There are some helpful questions to be drawn out of this report:

Why does the installation of a “conservative” never make the slightest difference to the overall problem?
What is “conservative” in the current context? What does the expression mean?
Where did “Catholic conservatism” come from? What are its parameters?
Why have the “conservative” bishops so uniformly failed to respond to the crisis of this pontificate?
What does Hilary mean by “the conservatives won’t save us”?

The “conservative” proposal for Catholics – I repeat, mainly Catholics of the US with some small spillover in Canada – came out of the polite agreement between Catholics and Protestants who joined forces in an uneasy truce in the 1980s during the Reagan-Thatcher-JPII-era Culture Wars. Remember the “Moral Majority”? Remember Operation Rescue? That stuff. That was when Protestants joined the pro-life movement that had been started by Catholics. The consensus was that we had a common enemy in the pro-abortion secularists and that we should work together to combine political strength to combat them and abortion.

That lasted until the end of the 90s, and the effective end of the JPII era, when the pope was too infirm to be the imposing force in the Church that he had been. The Long Slide began, and the apparent political unity of Catholics in the US evaporated out from under “conservative” Catholics, without anyone ever having clearly delineated exactly what a “conservative Catholic” was. This is why, now, we see that “conservatism” is exactly what the name suggests; a movement that attempts to “conserve” the status quo, whose guiding principle really has nothing at all to do with orthodox Catholic doctrine. In fact, it is nothing more than a mechanism for slowing the ratchet-effect of Modernism.

“Conservatism” in the Church is going to fail anyone still clinging to its un-defined, more or less non-existent principles, since by our time those principles have dissolved down to one thing: the Pope. “Conservatism” is now nothing more than company-man papolatry. Or “papal positivism”. It is, by its nature, relativistic, a house built on sand. And as a descriptor in the Francidian age it is an utterly useless term.

As I’ve said a few times…

How were Jorge Bergoglio and his friends able to accomplish so much so quickly? Because “conservatism” itself is a sham. Many of the bishops and other Church leaders so often thought of as “conservatives” only carry that label within an extremely narrow frame of reference, much of it generated by the secular media. In no other age of the Church, for instance, would a man like Charles Chaput have been regarded as a “conservative.” The position is by its nature relativistic; you are only a “conservative” depending on who is standing next to you.

Read more here

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