"Something Is Wrong in the Hierarchy": The Vortex

Michael Voris is not pulling any punches these days. The Vortex of September 11 is 10 minutes long and lays out very clearly where the bishops have failed us in providing leadership against the evil machinations of the Obama administration. I’ll give you some excerpts (in italics); the full script is available here.

There is such a twist of irony in this campaign. The nation's bishops on the one hand stage this great PR campaign against the HHS mandate in Obamacare, but on the other hand do everything they can possibly to do aid his re-election.

Not all the bishops of course, but a large number of them. And certainly as one collective body – the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the USCCB – they do.

Was this ever more evident than at the Democratic Convention last week? Speaker after speaker, proclaiming to be Catholic, went up to that microphone and proclaimed their love for child-murder, contraception, Planned Parenthood, same-sex marriage and so forth…A non-stop flow of people calling themselves Catholic – using the name Catholic – and not one single peep from one bishop anywhere in the country. Where is the condemnation for using the word Catholic from the USCCB?

Heck, where is the concern and care for the souls of millions of people watching that farce being led to believe, by the deafening silence from bishops coast to coast, that these are legitimate Catholic espousing legitimate Catholic positions.

Image from this site.

Voris then takes the bishops to task for the invitation Obama to the Al Smith banquet; for their failure to defend Paul Ryan against the media attacks; for their stand on the issue of illegal immigration (Voris says: “...ILLEGAL – as in crime, as in criminal); their attitude toward the liturgy which suggests that “anything goes”…except, of course, the Traditional Latin Mass. Read the script or watch the video; he makes these points very well.

Voris concludes by pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. He’ll be castigated by many for this, but the bishops themselves would be hard-pressed to present evidence to the contrary. Voris says:

Something is terribly wrong in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church in the United States.

Wining and dining with the enemies of Christ; allowing dissidents virtual free reign; clamping down on faithful Catholics; allowing untold abuses at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass; supporting and helping to stay in power a party dedicated to the Culture of Death; all in the name of some prudential policy judgments that have proven absolutely ineffective in their stated goals of fighting poverty.

It leads one to believe that this simply can’t be just…a series of missteps and bad calls. If it was all just dumb luck – just chance – you would expect that there would be some significant representation of good solid moves: that a bishop would mistakenly not only allow, but actually promote and OFFER the traditional Latin Mass – not just grudgingly permit it.

You would expect that at some point, some bishop…somewhere…would step up and say, “These Catholic politicians are barred from Holy Communion”.

You would expect that priests who go around preaching that the Church’s teachings are wrong would be silenced and dumped; that heterodox universities would have the title Catholic stripped from them; that the Mandatum – demanded by Rome – that theology professors must vow to teach in accord with Catholic teaching would actually be enforced; that pro-life groups in dioceses would be given a place of pre-eminence. And so on.

But virtually nowhere is this happening, and there is nothing to suggest that it is going to happen anytime soon…if ever. No trend…no indicators…nothing.

Occasionally, we hear a nice Catholic-sounding speech from a prelate here or there. We see an interview in which past sins are admitted, but nothing is suggested or done to fix the problems resulting from those sins. Instead what we see are campaigns designed to whip up the faithful to support an American constitutional principle while the underlying intrinsic moral evil is completely ignored. It’s as if the concern is more jurisprudence than the salvation of souls.

In fact, ALL of this looks like the salvation of souls isn’t even on the table anymore – almost as if none of the leaders (or very few of them) actually really believe in Hell anymore.

At some point, reasonable people have got to start wondering.

Indeed.