Thursday, July 28, 2011

St. Joseph's Parish in Ottawa: An agenda of dissent

I just recently broke the story of St. Joseph Parish's Young Adult Group invitation to the Gay Pride Parade.

I just poked around their blog to see what else I could find. Consider this entry:

St. Joseph’s Parish is in the midst of fine-tuning its new communications strategy. An important part of this process included asking parishioners at all masses, including students and young adults at university mass, to tell us what draws them to our church. We received a wide array of responses, but some of the adjectives that kept coming up in dozens of responses included: welcoming, friendly, progressive and liberal. Here’s how our parishioners and guests see St. Joseph’s Parish:

Invitation to be the Spirit – not shackled by prescriptive Catholicsm but open to the paths of the mystics – accepting – weekly reinforcement of us in God and God in us.
...
Equal partners ( women – men, lay-religious; young-old) parish members make decisions, take responsibility are accountable – no clericalism
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Social justice inclusiveness, re-claiming Catholicism

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Care for the poor, everyone having a place, liturgy, deep, meaningful, communal, progressive, Living the Spirit of Vatican II

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Realistic, 21st century – catholic teaching while respecting the history of a 2000+ year old tradition – hopefully not going backward. Should St. Joe’s begin to return to the proceedings of the church prior to Vatican II – I will reluctantly say farewell.

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A dogma-free place and community of worship, a faith-celebratory place


Why is this kind of heterodoxy allowed to happen? How do you expect the faith to be transmitted, when the people in charge don't make it a requirement.

There are tons of other churches they can "dogma-free" and not be "shackled by prescriptive Catholicism".

Catholicism is what the Church is about.