A Dream Bishop Rallies His Troops

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Feb 03, 2012

“As your bishop, I come to you with an apology, a prayer, and a mission. We face a grave threat from the government of the United States, the threat of the most powerful government in the world attempting to force Catholics to participate in actions which both Faith and nature teach us are profoundly immoral. I am referring here to enforced complicity with contraception, including abortifacient contraception, and sterilization.

“But these represent just one aspect of the war that is being waged in our country, led too often by the courts, the legislature, and the policies and bureaucracies of the executive branch of our federal government, against the gift of life, and against the importance to the social order of belief in God and the natural law; yes, even against the very witness of Christ and His Church—a witness that values do not find their sources in the decisions of men, that spiritual good does not originate in the State, and that morality in the service of life is a most precious gift.

“I begin with an apology. For years I have focused our public policy efforts on peripheral issues while politically ignoring our country’s long slide into secularist hostility to Christian principles. I have put my trust in the political values of enemies of the truth, I have enjoyed being the token bishop in their deliberations, and I have cherished the first place at banquets with the rich and powerful. I have played the game, as it is said, and have lusted for recognition as a player at the highest levels.

“Meanwhile, I have neglected the Church. For years, outstanding lay people and exemplary priests, deeply concerned about the decline of Catholic values in both the Church and the culture, have tried to tell me that we needed better preaching, more reverent sacraments, faithful schools, health care that did not compromise Catholic principles, and an insistence on fidelity among clergy, universities, religious communities and even parishes. But I have ignored and even deliberately stonewalled these people, repeatedly dismissing their pleas for help. I took refuge in the various imperfections I found in them. I preferred to blame them for the abrasive specks in their eyes so that I could pretend not to see the log in my own eye (Lk 6:42).

“Thus did I allow the wolves to have their way with the flock! How well did our Lord say of me: “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! because you shut the kingdom of heaven against men; for you neither enter yourselves, nor allow those who would enter to go in” (Mt 23:13). I stand before you now, in sackcloth, in ashes, in tears.

“So much that I have sought and defended in these sad days of decline has been but empty air. Yet I failed to see what Scripture itself foretold:

For they sow the wind,
and they shall reap the whirlwind.
The standing grain has no heads,
it shall yield no meal;
if it were to yield,
aliens would devour it. (Hos 8:7)

“Now, my dear faithful Catholics, we are reaping the whirlwind. What little yield we have, aliens have come to devour. And in all of this I acknowledge my own fault.

“But I also have a prayer. My prayer is that God, and you, will forgive me and strengthen me for the reckoning to come. How ironic it is that so many of us, and myself most of all, have allowed our consciences to be dulled! We no longer even perceive how wrong are these actions which the government now forces upon us. Too many of us already approve or even practice voluntarily what the government now demands. Yet how wrong, how horrifying, is the deliberate frustration of the procreative ends of the marital act, which withers our very capacity for love! And how wrong is the taking of innocent life in exchange for our own pleasure and ease!

“I have long taught that these things were wrong, of course, but I have not placed the natural and supernatural requirements of life and family at the center of my ministry. I have not demanded that Catholics deepen their understanding and recommit themselves to what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ in the most important and intimate areas of their lives. Like Our Lord I have enjoyed the company of sinners; but unlike Our Lord I have not called them to conversion.

“And now, to be sure, we are reaping the whirlwind. The time of disdain for Christ is past; the time of active persecution has begun. I had hoped not to see this in my lifetime, yet by my own weakness I have hastened the day. My prayer, once again, is that God will forgive all of us, starting with his bishops, starting even with me, and strengthen our resolve to turn again. For now that we are put to the test, we may yet respond as did Joshua. May God give us one more chance to decide in His favor, even in the midst of these modern Amorites who surround us! For I speak to you now in the words of Joshua of old:

And if you be unwilling to serve the LORD, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your fathers served in the region beyond the River, or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you dwell; but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD (Josh 24:15).

“Now to the mission I have come to offer you. I not only pray that you will choose the LORD, but I call you to do so. I call you to stand up as lay members of Christ’s faithful, as stalwart sons and daughters of the Church—to awaken and to use all of your votes and all of your political influence to reverse this horrendous course of our government, this war against nature, this violation of the Christian conscience, this denial of the rights of both God and man. And I call you not to this one battle only, but to be relentless in your witness to the truth and in transforming our culture into a culture of life.

“I call you to rededicate yourselves to Christ and His Church, to begin anew your proper vocation of transforming the world and renewing the whole secular order in Christ. I call you to be signs of contradiction to the world, and to demonstrate with your courage, your love, your lives that “there is a God in Israel” (1 Sam 17:46)—that there is a God in the Catholic Church.

“Rally, my people. Rally and rise! To me, Catholics! In God's name, I am your priest, and in His name I am both a prophet and a king. To me, then—to your bishop—and so to Our Lord Jesus Christ!”