Leftist comedian Mort Sahl used to say that the only man in Hollywood he trusted was John Wayne. Although light years from Wayne politically he said that Wayne was a man of honor and his word was always good, something he could not say for the rest of Hollywood. That came to mind when PopeWatch read this from Father Z:
Marco Tosatti, an Italian journalist whom I have always liked and for whom I have even greater respect now than before, has a piece at La Stampa which bears attention. What really caught my eye was his quotation at the end from a liberal journalist who works for a Left-leaning Catholic news agency, Adista.
This quote tells you more than a thousand other editorials on the Synod:
Finally a short note: It’s not very often that I find myself in agreement with Adista, a Catholic news agency. But I could not do otherwise than appreciate this editorial by Augusto Cavadi:
“Two observations to close. Newspapers are saying that this Synod has broken the Catholic Church. False: it brought into the light an old split, perhaps as old as the Church herself. Without going too far back, decades ago now the Catholic philosopher Pietro Prini had written about a submerged schism, invisible, on the part of many (bishops, priests and theologians included) in respect to the official Magisterium. In this split, it is instinctive to find oneself in sympathy with the progressives, but, and I have to add this out of love for sincerity, not without some discomfort. Between some of the current “progressives” and the immovable “conservatives”, my esteem goes to the latter, faithful to their own line of thought even when it is inconvenient to sustain it. In just a few months the change of wind has seen many bishops and pastors, who for decades accused the “reformers” of heresy, now showing themselves to be “open” and “sensitive”. This kind of thing disgusts me. These careerist conformists are too skilled in jumping onto the banged wagon of the powers-that-be-of-the-moment to merit our trust as fellow travelers.”
Go here to read the comments. Opportunistic turncoats sometimes do well materially, but even those who find them useful rarely view them with anything but scorn.
There is a a little village outside Oxford called Hinksey. The church is St Peter’s (and the pub is the Cross Keys)
It has a list of its rectors on a board inside the church and one of them was the incumbent from 1529 (Four years before Henry VIII’s Act of Appeals that marked the breach with Rome) until 1563 (Four years after Elizabeth i’s accession) In other words, he retained his living under Henry’s Act of Supremacy and the anti-Protestant Act of Six Articles, then under the Articles and First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI, then the Reconciliation with Rome under Mary and, finally, the 1559 Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity under Elizabeth I
I dare say quite a few English parish churches could produce similar examples.