Leaving the Church
I found this article on NCR to be rather ironic. The article is your typical NCR dissident fair and checklist of everything from women's ordination, divorce and remarriage, etc. The article is entitled Leaving New Orleans and the Catholic church.
After my long struggle to recognize the new spiritual self growing within, after leaving the church for a faith tradition I find more open and welcoming, and after confirming that I have chosen a path that is good and right for me, I have adopted as my favorite expression of assurance Psalm 46:10: “Be still, and know that I am God.”
Now even for NCR it is difficult to understand this article appearing. Would you see in the National Review "Why I am no longer a conservative" or the new Republic "Why I am no longer a liberal." Or do they just allow an ode to leaving the Church since in many ways they have also done so?
There are several ways for the church to penalize or expel Catholics who lobby for change. The most extreme, of course, is excommunication, which rejects a person as Catholic unless or until that person formally admits and atones for the transgression. Persons are excommunicated not for sins of morality but for transgressions against faith -- heresy.
Excommunication does not reject a person as Catholic. Excommunication is a canonical penalty and the person is to be denied access to the sacrament and from performing certain duties. It is a remedy to remind them and to bring them back into full communion with the Church. The ironic part was her writing from New Orleans is that Archbishop Joseph F. Rummel excommunicated several people relating to segregation which would be a sin of morality not heresy. Do you think the same people who worry about making Communion political would have denounced this act?
The article was written by Deborah Halter a longtime contributor to NCR. Please send some prayers her way.
The editor of NCR Tom Roberts writes Deborah Halter is a bright, engaging, devoted Catholic woman called to ordained ministry
Yes the magisterium of NCR has spoken. All bow and precede to burn copies of Ordination Sacerdotalis. Let us all go on pilgrimages to Kansas City so that we might see the Vatican of America. To try to catch of glimpse of Tom Roberts when he gives his Wednesday Audiences.
Known as 
Many years ago, I read NCR faithfully. Paid out money we didn't have so I could get a subscription. And the more I read about the doings in the Church, as seen through the eyes of NCR, the more I thought, "Who on earth would VOLUNTARILY belong to an outfit as wicked as this?" It took me 25 years--and much life-experience--to figure out that the picture of the Catholic Church painted in NCR was a Satanic caricature.
Blessedly, self-absorbed "spiritual" types like the dimwit who wrote this article have either left the Church for more congenial communities or are dying out fast--with no replacements on the horizon.
It's hardly surprising. After all, what normal person could get excited about annulments-on-demand? That sort of topic is just not in the same league as, say, eternal salvation.
Well, on the bright side, at least she is leaving the Church before "ordination," rather than becoming a "Roman Catholic Womanpriest."
"I have chosen a path that is good and right for me, I have adopted as my favorite expression of assurance Psalm 46:10: 'be still, and know that I am God.'"
SHE has CHOSEN the path that is good and right for HER? Does anyone else get the idea that when she recites Psalm 46:10 she thinks she's in "dialogue" with herself?
Does anyone else get the idea that when she recites Psalm 46:10 she thinks she's in "dialogue" with herself?
Yep, and form the editor's desk article, I suspect she isn't the only one. Oddly enough, you read into it and you see the core heresy that underlies their belief system when the editor talks of the sacraments as "symbols" as a Liberal Protestant would speak of it. That is, as something that points to something they don't truly believe in that isn't what it signifies.
Oddly enough, these types of folks that don't see the action of the One True God in the sacraments have no problem seeing power in crystals and other New Age stuff.
Like lemmings running towards the cliffs.
Or is it Dodos?
Is anyone actively countering the fallacies this 'Catholic' rag puts forward? It's not nice to allow them to continue to mislead people.
How can one feel called to something that the One True Church says doesn't exist and still feel that your call is valid? Obedience has to play a part at some point or you are fooling yourself.
Is anyone actively countering the fallacies this 'Catholic' rag puts forward? It's not nice to allow them to continue to mislead people.
EVERY True Catholic publication is countering these fallacies! The fact of the matter is NCR's core readership and subscription base - I have heard this from other sources - is institutional. That is right, libraries.
Most public libraries and universities (and more than a few liberal Catholic ones!) will not subscribe to L'Osservatore Romano - even though it is the newspaper of a soverign state! - but WILL subscribe to THIS crap. Why? Because it is seen as an "objective independent source."
But magazines that the laity actually subscribe to - found in the homes of Catholics attending Mass weekly are decidedly more orthodox. If you tend to care for the church as little as the staff at NCR, why spend money on a subscription to that rag?
National Catholic Register, New Oxford Review, Crisis, Culture Wars, This Rock, Envoy, The Latin Mass Magazine, and a number of others as well as a whole host of orthodox diocesan papers are subrscibed to by thousands of private homes... People like you and I who care about the Catholic Church and want to read about it and the world from a Catholic perspective.
While these Catholic publications generally enjoy very little institutional subscription, NCR, does. Without it, they still thrive... without the libraries subscribing, I wonder if NCR would last too much longer.