Is the Amarillo Diocese “tempted to turn the page, to say that all these things happened long ago and we should look to the future. ..move forward without remembering the past” “wooden beam” that the “serious mistake” left in our “own eye?”
Friday of the Twenty-third Week in Ordinary Time
I never noticed them until I got this feeling
That it’s later than it seems”
I agree with our bishop, Patrick J. Zurek, in putting forth in his Holy Week homilies this year the Encyclical of Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti, as the standard for love and unity in our diocese. Today, let’s reflect upon paragraph #249 in that regard:
CHAPTER SEVEN
PATHS OF RENEWED ENCOUNTER
MEMORY
249. Nowadays, it is easy to be tempted to turn the page, to say that all these things happened long ago and we should look to the future. For God’s sake, no! We can never move forward without remembering the past; we do not progress without an honest and unclouded memory. We need to “keep alive the flame of collective conscience, bearing witness to succeeding generations to the horror of what happened”, because that witness “awakens and preserves the memory of the victims, so that the conscience of humanity may rise up in the face of every desire for dominance and destruction”.[234] The victims themselves – individuals, social groups or nations – need to do so, lest they succumb to the mindset that leads to justifying reprisals and every kind of violence in the name of the great evil endured. For this reason, I think not only of the need to remember the atrocities, but also all those who, amid such great inhumanity and corruption, retained their dignity and, with gestures small or large, chose the part of solidarity, forgiveness and fraternity. To remember goodness is also a healthy thing.
BOTTOM: Another dedication to a benevolent bishop from an admiring priest.
Waldow has a long history of confusing fiction as fact. He was expelled from major seminary for lying about the rector in an effort to get him ousted. I have the complete record of how he came to this diocese. He was ordained by one of my predecessors. When I was ordained I was advised by his former classmates to be careful, alleging that he is a congenital liar.
From a 2008 letter in which Bishop Matthiesen defended the “serious mistake”
This approach demands of us the decision to abandon a modus operandi of disparaging, discrediting, playing the victim or the scold in our relationships, and instead to make room for the gentle breeze that the Gospel alone can offer.
From a January, 2019 letter by Pope francis to TO THE BISHOPS OF THE UNITED STATES CONFERENCE
OF CATHOLIC BISHOPS on retreat. A retreat that Bishop Zurek missed in order to take a personal vacation.
A lie is a lie…always! And the constant and insistent claim “I have proof”
From a 2019 letter in which Bishop Zurek uses the same “modus operandi” as Bishop Matthiessen
means nothing when all is fabricated.
A Memorial in the Grotto of St. Mary’s Cathedral
“In memory of the death of innocence of the victims of clergy sexual abuse. When innocence dies…a life stops. It is essential that we never forget.”
