One of my pet peeves surrounding the scandal and especially the blowback in the Development and Peace Scandal is that LifeSiteNews is always mentioned, but never the blogs.
Well, for the first time, I have seen professional Quebec Catholics mention John Pacheco, Steven Gonzalez and Socon or Bust.
It comes the from the blog of the ACPC-- the association of the French Candian Catholic Press. The blogpost was by François Gloutnay.
His post was about the pro-life conference that will be held in Quebec City on May 15th.
It mentions that the organizers hope that John Pacheco and Steven Gonzalez will accept their invitation.
Gloutnay says that they are run a "fundamentalist" blog who attacked Msgr Martin Veillette, the bishop of Trois-Rivières, who is said to have authorized the publication of an article in Le Devoir which criticized the Religious Right. Gloutnay calls that particular blogpost "venomous". He said that it mentioned that the bishop opposed Cardinal Ouellet's statement about abortion, and that he supported the ordination of women.
Gloutnay mentioned that they looked forward to Veillette's retirement at age 75. He quotes Steve as saying that Cardinal Ouellet will find someone solidly pro-life to replace him.
In context, this is meant to be a bad thing.
Well at least the Quebec media will begin to learn the names of the people involved in this story.
Perhaps this foray into openness will mean that we will finally have everything out in the open in Quebec and the rest of Canada.
Some people might think that Fr. Rosica calling us the "Catholic Taliban" was a bad thing. It wasn't terribly charitable, but the silver lining is that maybe we will finally have an authentic debate. I deliberately use the word debate instead of dialogue because the latter is used to suppress any kind of hostilty, opposition, argumentativeness and so forth.
And these exchanges turn out to be fake. And when it's fake it doesn't get to the heart of the matter.
So let's stop being fake, let's just have it out. It's not pretty, it may even be mean and nasty, but at least it's authentic. We get to the truth faster this way than trying to couch every statement in vague, diplomatic statements that leave themselves open to misinterpretation-- sometimes deliberately.
I note that Development and Peace supporters never attempts to prove that John and Steve and LifesiteNews are WRONG about what they say. It's just assumed they are wrong by virtue of the fact that they follow Church teaching. Or else they are assumed not to follow Church teaching, but no one produces the relevant passages of the Catechism. Which says something.
So this blogpost is a negative with a silver lining. It's time to get everything out in the open. Who's for Church teaching, and who's not.
