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PASTOR GENERAL'S REPORT, JANUARY 13, 1984
PAGE 11
--A growing, and increasingly militant, homosexual network within
the Church has influence, among other·places, in seminaries and
religious orders.
--There has been an almost total collapse of discipline in�
seminaries, along with the purveyance of dissenting theology as
if it were orthodoxy. Probably a large majority of Catholic col
leges and universities have become effectively secular, while
their residual Catholicism is closer to that of Hans Kung than to
that of John Paul II. [Kung is the ultra liberal Swiss theolo
gian censured by the Vatican in 1979.] •..
One dimension of the malaise is the turn toward political leftism
that has characterized much of American Catholicism over the past
decade.
Prominent religious orders like the Jesuits and the
Maryknolls are openly sympathetic to "liberation" movements in
Latin America.
Those agencies of the United States Catholic
Conference that are officially concerned with "peace and justice"
act like extensions of the left wing of the Democratic Party••••
The bishops' highly publicized pastoral letter on war and peace,
adopted last May, reflected this leftward trend. Although in
some ways the document, if read strictly, can be called moderate,
it postulates, for example, a "tradition" of pacifism in the
Church that is not really a tradition, and then gives it equal
weight with the historically dominant "just war" tradition. [The
bishops are now preparing another leftist letter, this one
critical of capitalism ] •••.
Three fairly broad dissenting constituencies [are prevalent] -
priests restive under the discipline of celibacy, women (mainly
nuns) who want to become priests and laymen who reject the tra
ditional teachings about divorce and contraception. Everything
that now happens in the Church is filtered through those glass
es.... No amount of concession wi_ll satisfy the dissenters,
because they aim at nothing less than total revolution within the
Church.
Hopefully more on this important trend next week.
--Gene H. Hogberg, News Bureau