The Sisters of Mercy have offered their support for the excommunicate, Father Roy Bourgeois, recently dismissed from Maryknoll. “We have known and worked with Father Roy as an advocate for justice in both church and society, nationally and globally,” their statement said.
Father Bourgeois was declared excommunicated latae sententiae on November 24, 2008, for not recanting his public statements in support of women’s ordination. What brings attention to his case now is his dismissal, on October 4 of this year, from the The Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America (commonly known as Maryknoll). That dismissal was not made public until November 19.
One day, pray God soon, the faithful of the Catholic Church will have a wake up call not unlike that the post-exilic Jews were mercifully given when they returned to Palestine. The priest and scribe, Esdras, read the law in their hearing, causing them to weep for the transgressions that led to the Babylonian captivity, for their idolatry, and their taking strange wives from the pagan nations.
The people wept when they heard the words of the Law they had violated. They did fruitful penance later and repented of their transgressions.
Here is the Catholic Encyclopedia on this event:
Esdras brought the Book of the Law. On the first day of the seventh month (Tishri), a great meeting was held “in the street that was before the watergate”, for the purpose of reading the Law. Standing on a platform, Esdras read the book aloud “from the morning until midday”. At hearing the words of the Law, which they had so much transgressed, the congregation broke forth into lamentations unsuited to the holiness of the day; Nehemias therefore adjourned the assembly. The reading was resumed on the next day by Esdras, and they found in the Law the directions concerning the feast of the Tabernacles. Thereupon steps were at once taken for the due celebration of this feast, which was to last seven days, from the fifteenth to the twenty-second day of Tishri. Esdras continued the public reading of the Law every day of the feast; and two days after its close a strict fast was held, and “they stood, and confessed their sins, and the iniquities of their fathers” (Nehemiah 9:2).
The “progressive” Catholics, like those of the National Catholic Reporter, do not know the New Law of the Gospel as taught by God’s infallible Church. When they realize the full breadth of their heresies, infidelities, betrayals, treason, perversions, and corruptions of little ones, they will weep, as did the those guilty of analogous infidelities in the Old Testament. So we hope.
