This week’s announcement that the Roman Catholic Church will welcome disaffected Anglicans en masse is of primary interest to members of the two Christian communions. But this religious realignment is also a reminder to supporters of equality for women and gays and lesbians that they must literally preach to the converted if they are to win believers to their cause.
Pope Benedict XVI has offered the Anglicans a special status within Catholicism that will preserve their traditions and allow married Anglican priests to continue their ministry. Those likely to accept are animated by opposition to innovations including the ordination of an openly gay bishop in the United States, blessings for same-sex couples in Canada and the Church of England’s decision to allow female bishops.
Is it to much to expect editors of newspapers to understand the idioms they use? They write : “But this religious realignment is also a reminder to supporters of equality for women and gays and lesbians that they must literally preach to the converted if they are to win believers to their cause.”
The phrase “to preach to the converted” means to preach to those already in agreement with you. Thus, if one wishes to gain adherents to one’s cause, one must preach to other than the converted.
Since the editorial board has such a poor understanding of the idioms of the English language, it is probably not surprising that their attempt at theology is even shakier.
Franz, you may be right, and perhaps journalistic boilerplate took over at the expense of sense. However it might be that the writer was more subtle, and meant that the lobbies mentioned must preach to Christian believers and thus attempt to convince the (Christian) converted.
[blockquote] Under the 1st Amendment, churches in this country can’t be forced to alter their doctrine or to stop preaching against the supposed immorality of homosexuality. [/blockquote]
That sounds ominous to me — we are only protected from the progressive police as long as the 1st Amendment is in place?
Well, that, and the good sense of our fellow citizens.
Mmm – maybe we are doomed, after all . . .
It is not surprising to read an editorial supporting making liberalism on social issues the new orthodoxy. But, frankly, I was surprised by the ignorance, lies, and clear distortions in this editorial. It is no more “religious intolerance” to maintain that homosexual activity is a sin than it is “religious intolerance” to maintain that adultery, theft, or murder is a sin. And since this is a free country any person can choose to worship at the LA Times secular Cathedral anytime they want to. The intolerance is on the part of the secular media which seems determined to crush traditional Christian morals and replace it with their secular orthodoxy.
In addition there are plently of Christian denominations and individual parishes which have been corrupted by the media’s loud and pervasive megaphone. So let those who hate Christian morals and traditions go to these places to worship and obey the god of their own creation and preference.
There’s always trouble, it seems to me, when people mash the issue of women’s ordination and the issue of ordaining sexually active homosexuals together as one big equal rights issue. In truth, they’re related issues, but critiqued differently.
They are related because of a certain logic. a) If gender doesn’t matter for Holy Orders, then it doesn’t matter for Holy Matrimony. b) If gender doesn’t matter for Holy Matrimony, then the consummation of said marriage cannot be sinful. Ergo, c) ordination of sexually active homosexuals is no trouble.
But each one is problematic for very different reasons. The ordination of women is largely a matter of ontology. The argument: Is a woman ontologically capable of being ordained to the priesthood? A similar question for analogical purposes: Is a man ontologically capable of being a mother? This is why, for example, JPII argued that the RCC is not capable of ordaining women — it isn’t as though they know it’s possible, and they’re just choosing not to do so.
Now, for sexually active homosexuals, the questions are: a) Are those [i]acts[/i] sinful? and b) Can a person in a state of unrepentant sin participate in the sacrament of Holy Orders? Only the acts of the will are at issue here; Baptism (we are taught) cleanses us of any sin that doesn’t involve our wills. That is, I have not committed a sin for being [i]inclined[/i] to gluttony, but only when my will engages that sin.
In its purest form, the debate isn’t about whether women or sexually active homosexual men have a particular skill set that straight men have, and they’re unduly being denied access to a job. It’s a question of how a sacrament works in two different scenarios. And, incidentally, once you water down your sacramental theology to the point where Holy Orders isn’t really a sacrament and a given sin isn’t really a sin, the game is lost–which is, I think, what has largely happened in The Episcopal Church.
Now, I should think I’ve demonstrated that this can be discussed civilly, which I don’t think the LA Times is willing to consider. Oh, well.
I recall about 20 or so years ago, the mantra the left kept trumpeting like a broken record was that we can’t be judgmental. No one can impose his or her own morality on anyone else, and we have to be tolerant, they said.
Now, it seems we’ve left that sentiment far behind. The Left now unabashedly imposes its own morality on everyone else. The writer of this article seems to take it as a given that homosexuality, and all the other innovations and departures from tradition both in and out of the church are now established as the norm, believed by any and all average citizens, and that it’s only this peculiar, and most likely sinister minority of anachronistic, ignorant, hateful squares who think differently. And he goes right ahead and tells his reader what he [i]ought[/i] to be doing.
Years ago, a popular slogan among young radicals was “question authority”. Now that they have become the authority, do they want others saying that about them now? Maybe they should revise the slogan: “question authority — unless you mean [i]us[/i].