On April 6th, at the age of 93, Father Hans Kung went to meet his God, along with the Christ he didn’t seem to believe was God – he’s in for a surprise on that one, along with a few others.  Kung was a contemporary, and sometime friend and colleague, of Father Josef Ratzinger (who turned 94 on April 16th). Kung was a controversial figure, ordained in the 1950’s, and soon adopting the progressive, reforming stance that was so influential at the Council. As Father Raymond de Souza points out, young Father Ratzinger – both he and Kung were in their thirties during those heady Conciliar years, oh, to be young was very bliss! – was also a reformer, but one who stayed within the Church’s Tradition. Kung, on the other hand, drifted, dissenting on just about every issue of Catholic doctrine, from the divine consubstantiality of the Son (see above), to reserving priestly ordination to men, to just about every tenet of sexual ethics. He had his licence to teach theology revoked by the authority of Pope John Paul II in 1978, just after his election, for Kung’s denial, of all things, of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Still, Father Kung – for he was and is a priest forever – still taught, wrote, and spoke right up to the eve of his eternal judgement. I hope he sought the mercy of the God whose truth he so distorted, but perhaps, just maybe, became clearer in those last moments, and, like Dysmas, sought the mercy of that same God, whose only limit is our own refusal to receive it.

And while on dissenters, Erin O’Toole, erstwhile leader of the ‘Conservative’ Party of Canada, has announced he will vote against the ban on sex-selective abortion – the practice of murdering an unborn child just because he, or most often she, is of the wrong ‘sex’, or, as people incorrectly put it nowadays, ‘gender’. Certain, ahem, cultures see babies of the fairer sex as a burden, and not a blessing. O’Toole is maintaining this death sentence because, in his own words, he is ‘pro-choice’.

To return to the same Pope Saint John Paul II makes clear in his 1995 encyclical Evangelium Vitae, on the sanctity of human life:

The legal toleration of abortion or of euthanasia can in no way claim to be based on respect for the conscience of others, precisely because society has the right and the duty to protect itself against the abuses which can occur in the name of conscience and under the pretext of freedom. (E.V., 71)

As the Holy Father continues:

In the case of an intrinsically unjust law, such as a law permitting abortion or euthanasia, it is therefore never licit to obey it, or to “take part in a propaganda campaign in favour of such a law, or vote for it“. (72) Even more, there is an obligation, and a grave one at that, to oppose such laws (73).

So the ‘Conservative’ party continues its decline into desuetude and irrelevance, as Liberal-lite. O’Toole is a tool, a disgrace to that noble Irish lineage, and to the name he shares with a great saint, Lawrence O’Toole –   the former bishop of Dublin in the 12 century, after whom a church is named in the town in which I live.

And we will have more to say on the Great Dissenter, Trudeau, as he and his ‘Liberals’ (what’s with all these false titles) continue to ram evil laws down our gullets. His vacant, insouciant grin is taking on a rather sinister quality of late.

Three dissenters, who have done and are doing much damage to Christ’s Church, along with the society which depends on the Church’s truth and doctrine (whether said society is aware of this or not). When will our bishops, who are steering Christ’s Church, the ‘pillar and bulwark of truth’, act more forcefully, as befits good shepherds, to bring these Catholics to toe the line at least of basic orthodoxy, orthopraxy, or just common, moral sense? Well, Kung has had his opportunity, but the other two still have time to ‘see the truth’, before they meet the Christ they so misunderstand, and misconstrue. They should take to heart the warning of Pope John Paul towards the end of his encyclical, that the rejection of human life, in whatever form that rejection takes, is really a rejection of Christ.

We can only pray, with the same Christ, that they know not what they do.  For Christ’s warning that those who refuse to know and confess Him and His truth, He Himself will deny. And after that, there is no more time, nor opportunity, for mercy.

 

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