Two updates in Michael Sean Winters' blog series for the USCCB meeting (updates to the two to which I linked in my initial posting about this series this morning): the first of the two reports is on the morning session, in which Salvatore Cordileone of Oakland and William Lori of Bridgeport figured largely. As I've noted in many previous postings, Mr. Cordileone is leading the charge for the bishops in their battle against marriage equality for gay citizens, and Mr. Lori is spearheading the "religious liberty" initiative of the USCCB, which claims that the rights and religious freedom of the bishops are being curtailed as marriage equality is enacted in some states.
Even so, Winters notes that he doesn't read the bishops' current sessions or agenda as representing in any sense an attack on the Obama administration--despite the fact that Mr. Dolan, the head of the bishops' conference, used (and here) the word "attack" twice and the word "assault" twice in his 29 Sept. letter to the U.S. bishops, as he described what he thinks the federal government is now doing to the bishops, vis-a-vis marriage equality and religious exemptions for Catholic groups resisting health coverage of contraception for employees.
The second of Winters' reports has to do with USCCB committee elections.
Could the bishops and what they have to offer the Catholic people and the world be more beside the point right now? More uninspiring?
It's astonishing to see the turgid, irrelevant, gospel-betraying political-as-religious rhetoric and actions offered to us by people who live on another planet from us (and a planet of astonishing power and privilege at that, though they claim to be our servants) presented as timely and spiritually enriching. It's anything but.
The more these men talk and act, the more they suggest to me (and, I suspect, to many others) that they have long since lost their spiritual moorings. (Addendum, later in the day: For spiritual inspiration, I'll be looking, instead, to people like the dozen or so faith leaders arrested by the police at Occupy Oakland early today.)
The more these men talk and act, the more they suggest to me (and, I suspect, to many others) that they have long since lost their spiritual moorings. (Addendum, later in the day: For spiritual inspiration, I'll be looking, instead, to people like the dozen or so faith leaders arrested by the police at Occupy Oakland early today.)
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