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| Bishop Bonny, following the official Installment Ceremony of two Parish Assistants. Not a single priest was ordained for Antwerp in 2012, 2013, or 2014 |
As we have mentioned before, the 'progressive' bishop of Antwerp, H.E. Johan Bonny, has published an open letter in several languages on his expectations for the coming Synod of Bishops. Bonny thinks that with the Encyclical Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI derailed the Church from the collegial, progressive course set by the Council, but he seems to hope that now the time has come to set things back on course. In his letter he uses many of the clichés of those who dissented from Humanae Vitae to argue for a new approach to the matter of 'divorced and remarried.'
The new bishop of Passau in Germany, H.E. Stefan Oster, has posted a response to Bonny on the social networking site Facebook. Here is a brief excerpt:
It does no good to keep on collecting all and only those verses of the Gospel that might help a Church suffering from a loss of faith to bend and twist her Lord Jesus until he is so nice that he doesn't threaten those situations that the Scriptures continue to call sin. Yes, of course Jesus loves sinners, but He and His Father hate sin! And it does no good to eliminate or ignore those passages in which Jesus challenges us to assent to Him decisively, or those in which He appears as our Judge. Yes, Jesus loves us the way we are [...], but He does not want us to remain the way we are. [...] We too often forget that the revelation of the merciful Jesus did not simply abolish the law, but rather revealed that the giver of the law loves us with a love as deep as the abyss. And it is because He loves us that He challenges us with the at times rigorous demands of the law, so that we can learn to answer His love; just as a good father, precisely because he loves his children, sometimes has to be strict with them. [...] God wants to save us, all of us! But salvation is not automatic, and the constant witness of scripture is that we cannot be saved without conversion. As far as I can see, Bishop Bonny doesn't even mention conversion anymore. (Translation: Sacerdos Romanus)
