The following video hit home with me.  The American Bishops have  been defining “social justice” not according to the documents of the Church but instead according to the Democratic party for many years now.  Because of this error, the care of the poor has been shifted from the Church to the government. True charity given freely has been replaced by forced taxation. Subsidiarity has been replaced with big government. The Christian serving Christ in the poor has been replaced by a hireling who follows rules and has little time or incentive to care about the individual.  Human dignity suffers, opportunity for growth in virtue is lost, and the poor are trapped in a system that pays them to remain victims and does nothing to lift them up and increase their human dignity and encourage them to grow as persons.

Anytime a Catholic disagreed with this practice they were attacked by the Bishops and many fellow Catholics as uncaring, cold, heartless, selfish and even un-Catholic. Those who continued to object were slighted, ignored and disrespected. Persistent objectors were sometimes even punished for insisting that the documents of the Church did not match this “government as the means of helping the poor” mentality.

So here is the video that hit home for me today:

This is only one issue of many where our Bishops were far more socialist than Catholic in their teaching on social justice.  Now that the first amendment protections of religion have been eroded by the very “social justice” errors promoted by our Bishops they cry out and insist the Faithful follow them and fight.  The image of crickets chirping fits the response of a laity betrayed too often.

FIRST major point I would like to make to the Bishops is that the people who love the permissive stances on birth control are unlikely to follow a Bishop finally teaching properly on birth control into the spiritual breach.  Good luck on that one.  The Bishops have educated (or not) the average Catholic into being no different from the rest of the contraception loving, abortion accepting, sexually libertine culture.  Those who insisted on Church teaching were attacked as rigid, inflexible and immature in their morality and the Bishops permitted and even joined in these attacks.

SECOND major point is that some Catholics HAVE been fighting for the Catholic Faith.  They have passed orthodoxy down to their children in spite of heretical CCD programs and mostly secularized parochial schools. They have been fighting for the Catholic Faith as found written in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, encyclicals and Church documents; the Scriptures and Tradition have been their guide in what to teach.  In return, their Bishops joined in with those who dislike clear transmission of orthodoxy in abusing these families as they fought to pass the faith to their children intact. These families have been disrespected and accused of being dissident.  Is it any wonder that these lay persons have no trust in the hierarchy?

THIRD, the irony is very powerful here.  Our Bishops have played all nice-nice with heretics and been harsh against those who follow Church teaching and NOW they need an army of Faithful lay persons to follow them in this battle to preserve the First Amendment. The Bishops want to rally the troops they have alienated. How are these Lay persons to know that they are not about to be hung out in the wind and abandoned by their Bishops when they capitulate?

Please pray for our Bishops and for a restoration of trust.