Cardinal Designate Fernandez, the new Prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, concluded his email interview with Edward Pentin with an apologetic about his time as a parish priest and diocesan bishop.
This is what he wrote:
I was a parish priest, and I was also a diocesan bishop. Go and ask the faithful in my parish what I did when I was parish priest, and you will see: Eucharistic adoration, catechism courses, Bible courses, home missions with Our Lady and a prayer to bless the home. I had 10 prayer groups and 130 young people.
As diocesan bishop, I used to ask people about what I’d discuss in my homilies in the cathedral and in my visits to the parishes: about Christ, about prayer, about the Holy Spirit, about Mary, about sanctification. And last year I proposed to the whole archdiocese to concentrate on “growing together towards holiness.” Whatever some of your colleagues may say, that was my formula for dealing with the religious indifference of society. Like the Pope, I believe that without mysticism we will go nowhere.
My comments: If our parishes would do what Cardinal Fernandez did in his parish and diocese, what a better Church, meaning we Catholics, would be!
I certainly believe the Modern Roman Missal has all the options possible to make the Mass as traditional as possible. Read the black and do the red. If your bishop allows, have at least one ad orientem Sunday Mass and kneeling for Holy Communion as an option.
Pope Francis may well find a way for the Church to bless same sex unions. I don't know where that will lead or whatever else will collapse because of it. I think it will lead to a schism.
In the 1980's as a liberal /progressive priest, I certainly thought at the time that I needed to prepare those I ministered to about the possibility of married clergy and female clergy. As I sobered during the years, I certainly have thought too that those things would not happen, at least female clergy, married clergy is something else and we already have it in the Latin Rite by way of the back door, Anglican clergy ordained as priests.
Either way, be it the magisteriums of Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, which I prefer and felt that the Church was much better off than in the late 1960's and the 1970's, there were many Catholics, who felt their papacies were to strict and closed to new ideas.
Now we have a pope, who is doing exactly what I thought in the 1980's would happen but didn't.
I have always said, though, that no matter what, I would remain a Roman Catholic in union with the pope and the college of bishops in union with him, no matter what and I still believe that.
But in my old age, I also qualify that with this, faithful opposition from the left or the right, but respectful of the institution of the pope and the papacy is possible and a good thing.
At any rate, it isn't the end of the world until it is the end of the world. Then all things will be set straight. I want my soul in heaven to see it happen when the resurrection of our bodies occur.
When I was pastor of the Church of the Most Holy Trinity in Augusta, one of our part time parochial vicars was a married priest (former Episcopal clergyman) who was married with many children. He went through quite a discernment to leave the Anglican Communion. He had a bumper sticker on his car that say this:
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