Rapid Response for TUESDAY, February 11, 2020

This is in reply regarding the article entitled:
"New Year's Resolutions For Concerned Catholics: A Few Suggestions", by George Weigel (in the January 16, 2020 publication of Catholic New York).
If there was ever an example of "bringing a knife to a gunfight", this is it.

The predicted trials for the Church are accurate but incomplete.
The proposed responses are laudable but totally inadequate.
God's Church will survive all of this - as it survived the heresies of the early Church and the egregious sins of many Popes in the Middle Ages, the excesses of the Inquisition, its more recent suffocation of Pope John XXlll' "Aggiornamento" aborning, and the Clergy sex scandals.
But it will be a truncated vestige of its past and proper self - and a failure to its Laity and Clergy.

I am certainly not a theologian. I am just a life-long faithful and thinking Catholic. I am open to being corrected and convinced by appropriate and knowledgeable authority. I certainly do not want to spread scandal.
But this I believe at this time as necessary for the Church to restore its necessary authority and guidance for its many disaffected present and former followers.
There is nothing wrong and morally prohibited regarding:
1) Married Priesthood...and Women as Priests;
2) Recognizing Homosexuality as a biologic fact for some, from conception;
3) The "Unitive Function of Sex" as a disastrous misreading of God's plan
for man and woman in marriage;
4) Non-Abortive Contraception as a legitimate decision between a committed married couple who are open to bearing and raising offspring;
5) Abortion as Always wrong, except when absolutely necessary to save the Life of the mother;
6) Denying all pro-abortion "Catholics" access to Holy Communion;
7) Allowing divorced Catholics who took that action thoughtfully and necessarily a path to full return to the Church.

Complete and open discussion of these issues and opportunities, with full participation by the Laity - the Body of the Church - would go very far to restoring Catholics' interest and participation in a now - vestigial  Church which is in the middle of an actual although denied schism...and whose Authority is either seriously questioned - or worse, ignored.

In all of this, I pray for guidance from God: for myself and for the Magisterium.

GS