This Time Father McHugh Has Gone Too Far: Part 2

This Time Fr. McHugh Has Gone Too Far

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
October 26, 1972

PART II

When the head of the Family Life Division of the USCC decides to repudiate the chief Catholic doctrine relating to family life, namely the indissolubility of marriage, he needs a plausible gimmick. It would never do simply to come out and say, “Marriages are dissolvable.’’ One must come up with some ingenious way of saying, “I pledge allegiance to the Catholic doctrine,” while emptying the doctrine of all vitality. The trick, if you will, is to promote the Faith into Heaven, so that here below more comfortable ideas may prevail. And the exact method of performing this trick may be learned by reading the October 7th issue of America, in which Msgr. McHugh signed a committee document called “The Church and Second Marriages.”

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This Time Father McHugh Has Gone Too Far: Part 1

This Time

Fr. McHugh Has Gone Too Far

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
October 19, 1972

I

Msgr. James T. McHugh’s years as head of the Family Life Division of the USCC have been years of unparalleled opportunity for prophetic witness. These have been the years when the Church was left standing totally alone on contraception, almost alone on abortion, alone on the indissolubility of marriage, alone even on the nature of marriage. Yet, incredibly, American Catholics are less certain about these teachings now than they were ten years ago, less certain both in their own minds and in their grasp of what the Church herself teaches. Somehow, the heroic stand which the Church has made for truth and human love has not been communicated to vast numbers of the laity. How has this been possible? In greatest measure, of course, the fault lies with an anti-Catholic press, and with apostate Diocesan bureaucracies. But it would be hard to deny a share of the blame to one man.

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Decrees Give Layman More Status In Church

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
SEPTEMBER 28, 1972

Like a lot of things Rome does, the two decrees released last week on the reform of “minor orders” (henceforth to be called “ministries”) made nobody very happy, at least in America. The so-called liberals were furious over the exclusion of women, while the conservatives were angered by yet another series of “changes.” Some were genuinely terrified that the Church might be depriving herself of exorcists, and one knows with moral certainty that somewhere, probably in California, a nut-group is already proclaiming that suppression of the sub-diaconate means extinction of the priesthood.

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National Congress on the Word of God: A Two-Edged Sword

National Congress On The Word Of God: A Two-Edged Sword

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

The Wanderer
September 21, 1972

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When Rome was informed that a national effort would be made in Washington this September to produce a renewal in preaching, Cardinal Villot dispatched a letter to Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle expressing the Holy Father’s delight at the idea and his blessing upon the enterprise. One sentence in that letter sums up the advice Rome wanted to give to the American sponsors and participants: “In short, preaching must proceed,” Villot said, “from deep conviction, serious learning, and loving compassion.”

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Send This Man To School

W. H. MARSHNER

Triumph
Vol. VII No. 5
May 1972

The USCC Department of Education is “helping” the American bishops to produce a pastoral letter on Catholic education, the provisional text of which I recently had occasion to see. It characterizes the rival, public education, as a “system which does not systematically embrace faith-inspired values. Such a school system,” the pastoral continues, “may seek ‘neutrality’ with regard to religious and moral values; but neutrality is impossible, since all education involves values, and morality is deeply imbedded in all formal education.”

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