Promoting Bishop Spong. (News in Brief).

Saskatoon -- As the Prairie Messenger Saskatchewan's Catholic Weekly noted on April 2, retired Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, N.J., has never been a man to shy away from controversy. Opening a conference on "gays" and lesbians in Saskatoon, Spong charged that Christian churches foster patriarchy, sexism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homophobia.

His own research, Spong said, has convinced him that people do not choose to be either homosexual or heterosexual: "People don't choose, they awaken."

Spong used Biblical passages to support his accusations. His talk was entitled "The Christ who breaks the boundaries of prejudice."

Comment:

The Prairie Messenger reporter, Terry Craig, depicted this renegade Anglican bishop as a heroic opponent of homophobia. He did not question Spong's untenable claim that God makes some people homosexuals and others heterosexuals. As we pointed out in a Jan/Feb 2003 "Letters to the editor" response ("Editor replies," pp. 4 and 5), no scientist has found a genetic basis for homosexuality.

Similarly, Spong was allowed to get away with the claim that the Bible forbids opposition to homosexuals, whereas St. Paul, among others, denounced their acts as an abomination.

Why do Catholic papers (it was also reprinted in the Catholic Register), give publicity to a notorious opponent of Christian teaching, making it seem that Holy Scripture is full of bigotry when it condemns homosexual acts? One has to assume that it is part of the homosexual drive for acceptance.

From Saskatoon, Spong travelled to Toronto to hold forth on his new book A New Christianity for a New World before a packed audience, including an Anglican bishop. In case you wondered, the new Christianity referred to is not the re-evangelization which Pope John Paul calls for, but a new and different Christianity, a Christianity without the Virgin Birth, or the Atonement, or the physical bodily Resurrection of Jesus, or miracles, or Divine Providence.

You can read about all this in a page-long article sympathetic to Spong by Ted Schmidt, editor of Toronto's Catholic New Times, ("John Shelby Spong: midwife to birth a new faith," May 4). According to Schmidt, Spong "is articulating the obvious. The old formulae have little purchasing power in a postmodern world." Scripture as literal is dead. This, Schmidt tells us, is where Spong begins and if truth be known, it is where most Catholic theologians not only begin, but have been for more than 30 years."

One may presume then that none of these "Catholic theologians" are still in union with the Papacy. This actually ends their career as "Catholic" theologians. It would help if Ted Schmidt told us who these "theologians" are and why they should continue in Catholic institutions, if that's where they are.

The New Times (certainly not Catholic any longer) carries another article, "Bush cripples AIDS initiative with global 'gag rule."' It is by the excommunicated Frances Kissling, president of "Catholics for a free choice." Free choice, here, refers to the claimed right to commit abortions. Kissling is enraged that U.S. President George W. Bush allots $15 billion to fight AIDS but then wants to exclude the contraceptive practices of past programs.

Finally, another article, this one by Robert Blair Kaiser of Vatican II notoriety, attacks the Pope's encyclical The Church and the Eucharist. Why is the New Times called Catholic?