There's something rotten in St. Blog's

Bill Cork picks up on an observation made by Gerard at Catholic Blog for Lovers concerning some Catholic bloggers around who appear to be miserably unhappy!

...there are Catholics who are miserably unhappy with the Church and her hierarchy. Failure after failure is pointed out, name after name is vilified. The worst is believed about any and all. They come across, in the words of Pope John XXIII, as dreary prophets of gloom. Misery!

I agree. They are what Ignatius of Antioch referred to as the "noxious weeds" who imagine there is a Catholicism without the bishop. I've been particularly disgusted with the way some people, who know not a single bishop, attack bishops I know to be good men. They speak of "arrogance." Arrogance?!

Amen. This is precisely the reason why I will not link to some blogs that are considered to be pretty popular. It's horribly draining for me to read post after post of the same bitching and moaning, complaining and blaming, deriding Bishops of our church as far as the eye can see. And the worst of it is that many times the only source they have is calumnious speculation from some secular news magazine claiming to preach the truth. If that isn't the poorest apologetics witness I have ever seen, then Catholic evangelization is in serious trouble. I'd prefer to read an edifying blog, one that celebrates the Catholic faith, and while looking realistically at the sinful nature we all share, exhorts us to turn our eyes to the Savior who has redeemed us from whom we receive the Catholic faith - that which is transmitted infallibly by Christ through the hands of the successors to Peter and the Apostles, our Bishops. They're human - they have always been human. But we can do nothing without them! It's so easy to point the finger. But I can tell you that if *I* were a Bishop, people would be calling for my head by now! So instead of berating our Bishops, support them with powerful, prayerful intercession. Pray for your Bishop daily. Do it! It is our duty.

It is fitting, then, not only to be called Christians, but to be so in reality. For it is not the being called so, but the being really so, that renders a man blessed. To those who indeed talk of the bishop, but do all things without him, will He who is the true and first Bishop, and the only High Priest by nature, declare, "Why call ye Me Lord, and do not the things which I say?" For such persons seem to me not possessed of a good conscience, but to be simply dissemblers and hypocrites.

     -Epistle of St. Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, to the Magnesians, Chapter IV (c. 100 AD)