Consider The Following Words

"I said: 'Today, it is we Catholics who are destroying our Catholic Church. We need only look at the number of abortions among Catholics, look at the homosexuals, and ourselves.' (That's when I pointed at my chest - through that action I wanted to say, we the priests) and I continued saying: We are destroying our Church ourselves. And that's when I said that those were the words expressed by Pope John Paul II. At that point, in the St-Léolin church only, I added: 'We can add to that the practice of watching gay parades, we are encouraging this evil' ... What would you think of someone who seeing what was happening on (Sept.) 11, 2001, the crumbling of the towers, had begun clapping? We must not encourage evil, whatever form it takes."

Apparently, this is the sort of talk that gets a priest barred from saying Mass. In Canada, at least. This was from a homily given by 85-year old priest Fr. Donat Gionet of the Diocese of Bathurst. As a response, Bishop Valéry Vienneau appears to have prohibited him from offering Mass. The rationale is pretty astounding:

Rev. Wesley Wade, vicar general of the Diocese of Bathurst, said Gionet's teachings don't meet the diocese's goal of following Christ's example of loving unconditionally.

"We have to respect people on their own journey," Wade said.

"The first message of Christ was to reveal to us a loving father and a merciful father and that we are all called to be his children and that we are all loved unconditionally by Him."

While the Church gets criticized as a judgmental institution, Wade said the reality is "it's full of compassion."

I suppose Christ's warnings about Gehenna and all that other badness associated with sin has been forgotten. He didn't seem to respect the Pharisees all that much when He called them a brood of vipers. Is the above what passes for love these days? What loving father stands idly by while His children sow the seeds of their own destruction without reprimand? That's why He gave us the Church. To warn us about the consequences of our actions so that we don't wind up damned to eternal torment. I'm sure God will be perfectly ok with our having waved the souls of our acquaintances on by during their journey to hell as long as we were respectful about it.