Dietrich von Hildebrand, whom pope Pius XII called 'The 20th century doctor of the Church', wrote in his book: "The Charitable Anathema" (A small sniipet of that chapter),
Lethargy of the Guardians
"One of the most horrifying and widespread diseases in the Church today is the lethargy of the guardians of the Faith of the Church. .... [Bishops] who make no use whatsoever of their authority when it comes to intervening against heretical theologians or priests, or against blasphemous performances of public worhip. They either close their eyes and try, ostrich style, to ignore the grievous abuses as well as appeals to their duty to intervene, or they fear to be attacked by the press or mass media and defamed as reactionary, narrow-minded, or medieval. They fear men more than God. The words of St. John Bosco apply to them: "The power of evil men lives on the cowardice of the good."
.... One is forced to think of the hireling who abandons his flocks to the wolves when one reflects the lethargy of so many bishops and superiors who, though still orthodox themselves, do not have the courage to intervene against the most flagrant heresies and abuses of all kinds in their diocese or in their oders.
But it is most especially infuriating when certain bishops, who themselves show this lethargy towards heretics, assume a rigorously authoritarian attitude towards those believers who are fighting for orthodoxy, and who are thus doing what the bishops ought to be doing! I was once allowed to read a letter written by a man in a high position in the Church, addressed to a group which had heroically taken up the cause of the true Faith, of the pure, true teaching of the Church and the Pope. This group had overcome the "cowardice of good men" of which St. John Bosco spoke, and ought thus to have been the greatest joy of the bishops. The letter said: as good Catholics, you only have to do one thing: just be obedient to all the ordinances of your bishop.
This conception of a "good" Catholic is praticularly suprising at a time in which the coming of age of the modern layman is continually being emphasized. But it is also comepletely false for this reason: what is fitting at a time when no heresies occur in the Church without being immediately condemned by Rome, become innapropriate and unconcionable at a time when uncondemned heresies wreak havoc within the Church, infecting even certain bishops, who nevertheless remain in office. Should the faithful at the time of the Arian heresy, for instance, in which the majority of the bishops were Arians, have limited themselves to being nice, and obedient to the ordinances of these bishops, instead of battling the heresy? Is it not fidelity to the true teaching of the Church to be given priority over submission to the bishop? Is it not precisely by virtue of their obedience to the revealed truths which they received from the magisterium of the Church, that the faithful offer their resistance? Are the faithful not supposed to be concerned when things which are preached from the puplit which are completely incompatible with the teaching of the Church? Or when the theologians are kept on as teachers who claim that the Church must accept pluralism in philosophy and theology, or that there is no survival of the person after death, or who deny that promiscuity is a sin, or even tolerate public displays of immorality, thereby betraying a pitiful lack of understanding for the deeply Christian virtue of Purity?
The drivel of the heretics, both priests and laymen, is tolerated; the bishops tacitly aquiesce to the poisoning of the faithful. But they want to silence the faithful believers who take up the cause of orthodoxy, the very people who should by all rights be the joy of the bishops' hearts, their consolation, a source of strength for overcoming their own lethargy. Instead, these people are regarded as disturbers of the peace. And should it happen that they get carried away in their zeal and express themselves ina tactless or exaggerated manner, they are even suspended. This clearly shows the cowardice which is hidden behind the bishops' failure to use their authority. For they have nothing to fear from the orthodox; the orthodox do not conrtol the mass media or the press; they are not the respresentatives of public opinion. And because of their submissiom to ecclesiatical authority, the fighters for orthodoxy will never be as aggressive as the so-called progressives. If they are reprimanded or disciplined, their bishop run no risk of being attacked by the liberal press and being defamed as reactionary.
This failrue of the bishops to make use of their God-given authority is perhaps, in practical consequences, the worst confusion in the Church today. For this failure not only does not arrest spiritual diseases, heresies, and the blatant as well as the insidious (and this is much worse) devastation of the vineyard of the Lord; it even gives free rein to these evils. The failure to use holy authority to protect the holy Faith leads necessarily to the disintegration of the Church."
Thankfully, we are geting a new crop of bishops who are really cracking down and leading very well. Let us keep them in our prayers!
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