Action Speaks Louder
No sooner did the U.S. Supreme Court render its fateful decision legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide than the U.S. bishops picked up their collective pen and issued statements in defiance of the new law.
Well, perhaps defiance is too strong a term. Rather, they registered their “disappointment” with the Court’s ruling — disappointment being the “operative word” in their reactions, according to LifeSiteNews.com, which posted a helpful compendium (July 14) of several bishops’ statements in response to Obergefell v. Hodges. A few highlights:
– Archbishop Joseph Kurtz, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), called the ruling “profoundly immoral” and “unjust,” a “tragic error that harms the common good and the most vulnerable among us, especially children.”
– Bishop Robert E. Guglielmone of Charleston, South Carolina, came on strongly, noting that “marriage is a sacrament instituted by God, not by man or by institution, and can only be between one man and one woman.” Therefore, the Supreme Court “has no authority over Holy Matrimony.”
You May Also Enjoy
If we restore not only orthodoxy but a concern for a genuinely Catholic identity, we can more effectively turn to our task of conveying the Gospel to the world.
Michael O'Brien is an accomplished Catholic novelist. His strength is fiction.
In 2010 then-Cardinal Bergoglio sent a letter to the Carmelite nuns of the Archdiocese of Buenos Aires asking them to pray that God spare their nation from the harm of same-sex marriage.