Curious. . .

Over in Rome a conservative Archbishop Vigano got in trouble for not supporting Francis, the most congenial of all the popes, and has been excommunicated for being unsupportive and treasonous. Curiously, those charges do not equally apply to those who have flaunted Rome on its teaching of the sacred character of life, the traditional family, birth control, and the role of women without suffering any recrimination.  I guess you have to be traditional in order to be noticed and conservative to be a threat.  We should not be surprised at this.  It happens all the time in a host of Christian denominations.

The Episcopal Church could not bring itself to excommunicate someone who denied cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith (like John Shelby Spong) but it easily brought down a local bishop in Albany who refused to accede to the whole woke agenda there.  The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is powerless to silence their teachers who substitute their sexual views for religious truth but they will not allow anyone to disagree with those views and remain in their communion.  The Methodist Church is splitting up because they have grown tired of losing to the conservatives in their votes to amend their church's faith to accord with all the alphabet soup characters of desire and identity but refused to take any action for someone who denies the essential truths of the Biblical faith.  I could repeat the same thing and substitute other denominations with the same outcome.  Even in Missouri, we have rules about how far conservatives can go but seem to wink and nod our way out of condemning those in our midst who have moved left in their thinking and believing. Curiously, all seem agreed that the bigger threat is the conservative one and a little bit of woke won't kill you.

I get it.  Conservatives are the party that rains on every parade while liberals will gladly cooperate with any form of liberalism or progressivism.  The funny thing is that what conservatives cannot get churches to do in support of the Biblical faith, the liberals and progressives can find a way to weaken it.  It is like we are all agreed that the greater threat comes from the right rather than the left, from those who believe the creed as opposed to those who merely say it, and from those expect a hermeneutic of continuity when it comes to what we believe, teach, and confess.  Curious, indeed!

There is little that I know about Archbishop Vigano except that he was once a spokesman for the pope with respect to the US but began to change when the mess over the Vatican sex scandals was erupting.  He complained that this pope did nothing to rein in his favorite princes and still they have not been held fully accountable (or excommunicated).  But apparently Francis has had enough from this guy and has taken the criticisms personally, judged them to be a threat, and acted to remove him.  Oddly enough, some of the most famous of the sex scandal figures from Rome have yet to be even threatened with the punishment meted out on Vigano with due haste.  I could not tell you if Vigano is a good guy or bad guy or reformed bag guy in all of this but what I can tell you is that Rome's biggest problems do not come from the right but from the left and the fruits of this left leaning bureaucracy so quick to tamp down opposition.  Rome and nearly every other Christian group has this to ponder.  Err on the left and you may incur a few smart aleck remarks but err on the right and you will be in the cross hairs of your church -- no matter which that might be.  Until we fix this, we will always be drifting toward the abyss of faithlessness more than we are careening into the pit of theological or liturgical rigor.  And that might explain a few thing.