My Energy Spots

The Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops had a meeting on Nov 27 with the leadership of the Canadian Religious Conference, of whom I've written before.

From the account they list on their website, the purpose of the annual visit was "to help foster good relations between the Bishops and women and men religious in Canada." They discussed recent major events in the life of the Church, and also (quite vaguely put) "discussion on questions involving justice, peace and mission, as well as possible areas for engagement."

I have a lot of reservations about the CRC. I suspect they don't speak for many of their members and that most reputable religious communities within Canada steer clear of them. It seems that the CRC's main focus is on the dated causes of the leftists of a generation ago, and the bastard offspring of those causes today. For instance, one of their recent quarterly bulletins was entitled "Living a Politics of Communion and an Economics of Solidarity." I'm not sure what that means, but I think it has something to do with finding my energy spots and showing them to the Earth Community.

This 4-page document is interspersed with quotes from various sources. You would expect a group that is an association of the leaders of the major Orders of priests, monks and nuns across Canada to, I don't know, quote from some Catholics.

Instead, they quote from:

• Rainer Maria Rilke - an early 20th Century German poet whose mother dressed him like a girl, and who had a life-long affair with a married woman
  
• Hafiz - a 14th Century Muslim poet
  
• Dorothée Soelle - a modern, divorced German theologian who coined the term "Christofacist" to describe fundamental Christians, and whose second marriage was to a former Benedictine monk
  
• David Korten - an modern American who is advocating a transition from current social and political infrastructures towards an Earth Community
  
• Mary Grey - a modern British ecofeminist who receives positive reviews from other ecofeminists
  
• Catherine Mowry LaCugna - yet another modern feminist theologian, she is the first of the bunch who is concretely identified as Catholic, but whose concept of the Trinity strays from Church teaching. Richard McBrien has a lot of good things to say about her, which should dissuade any serious Catholic.
  
• Martin Luther King - he did a lot of commendable things, but definitely not Catholic

These are the people that the leaders of our religious communities deem worthy of forming their members and consequently us, the laity.

Someday, someday I just know that our Bishops will firmly admonish the CRC that the two core justice issues of our time are NOT "poverty and climate change."

Just not today.

O Lord, heal our Church!