Tragically, Catholics are used to Catholic politicians who pick and choose the issues they adhere to in Church teaching. The most notorious case is that of America’s current president, who uses all the powers of government to promote the LGBTQ agenda and a North Korean-style abortion policy until birth, all the while claiming to be a Holy Communion-receiving “devout Catholic.”
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, D.C., recently characterized the president as “very sincere in his faith.” However, he also labeled him as a “cafeteria Catholic” who “picks and chooses” only those parts of Catholicism that suit his political agenda.
While the cardinal is correct about the horrific selectivity of these bad Catholic politicians, he should broaden his analysis. The massive growth of cafeteria Catholic politicians is due entirely to having cafeteria cardinals and bishops shepherding Christ’s flock.
These politicians “pick and choose” with impunity because they know nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever happen to them in this life, the only one that matters to them. These public leaders can look back at the record with confidence and see that this immunity has lasted decades. Be it abortion up to birth or designating Transgender Visibility Day to be on Easter Sunday, there is absolutely nothing that will land them in trouble. No possible outrage to God and His Law will ever get them excommunicated by today’s cafeteria cardinals and bishops. Everything is allowed. Nothing is forbidden.
These bad Catholic politicians understand that their impunity is because cafeteria cardinals and bishops themselves also pick and choose what parts of the Faith they decide to defend in an entirely predictable manner.
Indeed, bishops are responsible for the integrity and practice of the Faith in the areas under their jurisdiction. The bishop is responsible before God for the souls entrusted to his care.
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Because the salvation of souls is at stake, the bishop has no right to pick and choose which tenets of the Faith and which parts of Catholic morality can be left undefended, which of the Ten Commandments can be ignored and which public blasphemies and moral scandals will remain undenounced and unpunished.
This selective defense of the Faith results in a distorted view of Church teaching. The Church has always stood out by presenting the Truth and confronting the errors of the time fearlessly, even if this means suffering persecution.
A good example of this courageous attitude is the Church’s condemnation of Nazism despite the pressure from “cafeteria” officials of the time to do the contrary. Pius XI enlisted the support of all the clergy in proclaiming the Truth in his German-language encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (1937), targeting Hitler’s Nazi regime then in power. He said: “The first, the most natural gift of love of the priest to his milieu is the service of the truth, and indeed of the whole truth, the unmasking and refutation of error, no matter in what form, in what disguise, in what make-up it may present itself in. To renounce this would not only be a betrayal of God and your holy vocation; it would also be a sin against the welfare of your people and nation.”
Jesus’s Great Commission to spread the Gospel directs the Church to teach a revealed doctrine that constitutes an indivisible whole. Preaching Truth must include condemning error. It requires disciplining with censure and excommunication those who pertinaciously deny Church teaching and wound the spiritual common good.
Accepting or tolerating that the Church’s teachings be partially ignored, silenced or suppressed for the sake of political expediency is a total betrayal of a bishop’s mission.
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Thus, cafeteria Catholics are the natural fruit of cafeteria cardinals and bishops who teach most eloquently through their actions and omissions over time that the Church is a big cafeteria where everyone (even cardinals and bishops) can pick and choose whatever they want to believe in. This attitude propagates that distorted vision of the Faith that had led to today’s massive decadence and apostasy.
However, this is a strange cafeteria. It breaks all the rules. Cafeterias normally offer a wide variety of healthy foods that cater to the customers’ tastes. No harmful selections are allowed.
For the leftist Catholic, this cafeteria features the same fare of shallow spirituality, social justice socialism, liberation theology rhetoric, divers heresies and Father James Martinesque LGBTQ-favoring offerings wrapped in a veneer of Catholic trappings.
This is not a cafeteria full of tantalizing options but one that dishes out toxic, doctrinal errors that lead souls away from Christ and His Law.
It is all well and good to denounce cafeteria Catholic politicians, but worse are the cafeteria cardinals and bishops who have long made their predictable picking and choosing of liberal errors possible by refusing to uphold the Truth and sanction these politicians.
This dereliction of duty has drastic and eternal consequences, including the eternal damnation of millions of souls. It’s past time to shut the cafeteria down. It never had a right to open.
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