“Be Not a Troublemaker”

We picked up the September 28, 2003, issue of Our Sunday Visitor and saw this headline on the cover, “How CUF Became the Bishops’ Friend.” We turned to the story on page 8 and read the big pull quote from the story, “We have been vilified for 20 to 30 years, but bishops are now discovering that CUF is their friend.” The quote is from Leon Suprenant, President of CUF (Catholics United for the Faith). Given that two-thirds of our bishops covered up for pedophile priests, thus enabling them to continue their predations (according to a three-month study by The Dallas Morning News), why would CUF want to be their friend? At the very least, CUF’s sense of timing is terrible.

The Visitor’s entirely favorable story tells us that CUF has been trying to “improve its image” and that its “methods have changed.” CUF now works for “unity” in the Church, trying to break down the divisions between dissenting and orthodox Catholics. It’s as if St. Paul said, “Do not expose the unfruitful works of darkness,” when in fact he said, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them” (Eph. 5:11).

CUF has in effect become an adjunct of Cardinal Bernardin’s Common Ground Initiative — again showing bad timing, for that Initiative is now moribund. (In an article on “The Grammar of Dissent” in CUF’s periodical Lay Witness [Nov.-Dec. 2003], Suprenant calls for “dialogue” with dissenters, saying that faithful Catholics should “understand the worldview of dissident Catholics and strive to find common ground.” He even says that orthodox Catholics should “purify” themselves of “any vestiges of homophobia, preconciliarism,…and other sins….” We didn’t know that homophobia and preconciliarism were sins.)

The Visitor story quotes Suprenant as saying that years ago CUF members did not act “appropriately” and got tagged as “troublemakers.”

Be not a troublemaker: That seems to be CUF’s slogan today. Well, how nice for those Catholics, lay and clerical, involved in the unfruitful works of darkness.