Heretical "Catholic" group spends £15,000 on anti-Papal posturing and is promoted in Redemptorist Papal visit leaflet


"Celebrating the Papal Visit. Your spiritual companion" sounds a promising title. I'm keen to promote anything good that comes my way as a parish priest so this was one piece of mail I put aside to read over coffee. Inside the four page leaflet produced by the Redemptorists, there is an article about how it is not easy to be a Catholic, accompanied by a related "Hot topic" piece. Laurence England has kindly typed them out so you can read both articles over at The Bones.

The first article includes a disturbing account of Lucy Russell's response to a question about Catholic sex education which implies that her school gave no distinctively Catholic teaching at all. The sidebar article talks about the ordination of women, encouraging people to decide what they think about it. At the foot of the article is a link to the Catholic Women's Ordination website. How either of these pieces is supposed to help Catholics to prepare spiritually for the Papal Visit is beyond me. It might have been helpful to point out that the teaching of the Church that she has no power to ordain women to the priesthood is to be held definitively as part of the deposit of faith.

In its campaign for the ordination of women, CWO asserts the additional heresy that Our Lord did not ordain anyone to the priesthood. Answering the objection many pose to their position, namely that Jesus didn't ordain women, the CWO resources page says "He didn't ordain men either! This came later in the Church's history." It is worth noting that the teaching of the Council of Trent that Jesus did in fact ordain priests, and that it was heresy to say the contrary, was referenced by Vatican II (Presbyterorum Ordinis n.2) when it spoke of the institution of the priesthood by Christ. Although I expect many members of CWO are also part of the Stand Up for Vatican II campaign, I doubt that this little detail from the letter of Vatican II will bother them unduly.

Since the leaflet which promotes the CWO website is produced by the Redemptorists (and is accompanied with another leaflet offering free copies of the Tablet) it may be apposite to quote the preface that their founder St Alphonsus wrote to his book "The history of heresies and their refutation"
Heresy has been called a cancer: "It spreads like a cancer" (2 Tim 2.17); for as a cancer infects the whole body, so heresy infects the whole soul, the mind, the heart, the intellect, and the will. It is also called a plague, for it not only infects the person contaminated with it, but those who associate with him, and the fact is, that the spread of this plague in the world has injured the Church more than idolatry, and this good mother has suffered more from her own children than from her enemies.
Reuters reports that CWO has spent £15,000 on placing advertisements on the side of buses asking Pope Benedict to ordain women. The bus adverts shown here, asking Pope Benedict to do other things that he can't do, are from Acts of the Apostasy blog (see: CRONES Across The Pond) There is also a comment about the fifteen grand:
That's a lot of money wasted on demanding the impossible. Not to mention I'm fairly certain Pope Benedict won't have his mind suddenly swayed by a whiny complaint displayed on the side of the bus.
The Mulier Fortis drills down into the links with Catholic Voices for Reform, Catholics for a Changing Church etc.

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