In this morning’s column , R.R. Reno describes a former pastor who has now parted ways with orthodox Church teaching:
Half-a-dozen years before he administered to me the grace of full communion he came to serve as the pastor of St. John’s, the church on the Creighton University campus, where I then taught. This Jesuit-run parish serves progressive Catholics alienated from the contemporary Church. It’s a place that fiddles with the liturgy to make it more “inclusive,” affirms gay couples, and takes a generally liberal line on social and political questions (with the exception of abortion).
Reno laments Thelen’s decision, so typical of a generation of Jesuits who have failed to provide pastoral guidance to their flocks:
When I think back to my students at Creighton, I can see that their experience of the Church—and to a great extent mine—also involves worries about betrayal, though of a different kind. A profoundly hostile secular culture wars against our efforts to achieve even a modest loyalty to the apostolic tradition, and, sadly, in the war we see the Church as a sometimes-unreliable ally.
Read Reno’s On the Square here .
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