Now "Let Your Yea Be Yea and Your Nay, Nay" Becomes the Case of the Disappearing Yes: A Church in Which Bullies (and Liars) Are Allowed to Win

As Sarasi points out in a comment here a while ago, Catholic News Agency is now reporting that "a spokesman" of Cardinal Marx has contacted CNA and requested that CNA issue a "correction" of its translation of his remarks to the Bayerischer Rundfunk interviewer we've been discussing here in the past several days. CNA has now published the "correction." It reads,

Karin Wendlinger: So you really can imagine that there might be a way to bless homosexual couples in the Catholic Church? 

Cardinal Marx: There are no general solutions and I think that would not be right, because we are talking about pastoral care for individual cases, and that applies to other areas as well, which we cannot regulate, where we have no sets of rules.

Notice anything missing in this "correction"?

But not even the many detractors of Cardinal Marx (and CNA) who followed the hard-right anti-LGBTQ Longerneckerian wing of the U.S. Catholic church in attacking Marx (and CNA) denied that he responded to Karin Wendlinger's question by saying, "Yes," and then, "There are no general solutions, etc." I heard that "yes" when I listened to the interview. So did they, though they wished in every way possible to interpret it as a "no."

I suppose if people richly represented everywhere in Europe and North America today can rewrite history by pretending that the Holocaust never happened and by expunging all reference to it, and if the top pastoral leader of a church can say in 2018 that he has never had news of a bishop's complicity in abuse when a multi-page letter outlining that complicity was handed to him in 2015, we might as well expect this behavior from "the German bishops' conference." 

The bullying wing of the U.S. Catholic church has been remarkably effective, after all, in assuring that a priest of the mild demeanor of Father James Martin has had one lecture after another removed from Catholic premises. Why should the German bishops be immune to the same kind of bullying from the same set of folks — aided and abetted by "centrist" Catholic religion journalists?

Bullying works. And lying works.

As long as people give in to the bullying and refuse to challenge the lying.

Though what you have left when you go down that road is hardly worth preserving, after you've allowed the bullies to do their dirty work.

I suspect, by the way, that the preceding English translation of Cardinal Marx's interview is what Cindy Wooden at Crux is pointing to when she states the following:

The German bishops conference released an English translation Feb. 7 of remarks Cardinal Reinhard Marx of Munich and Freising, conference president, made during a radio interview Feb. 3.

If so, note that the CNA statement does not represent the "correction" that "a spokesman" of Cardinal Marx asked CNA to make as an English translation issued by the German bishops' conference.

(My thanks to Sarasi for dubbing this story "the case of the disappearing ja.")

The graphic at the head of the posting is from the Flickr photostream of Brandi Redd who has made it available for online sharing under a Creative Commons license.