Pastoral Letter from Bishop Egan.

I enjoyed reading the latest Pastoral Letter from Bishop Philip.   What impresses people when they heard Jesus speak was that 'he spoke with authority and not like their elders'.   He had a clear message to give which he then entrusted to his apostles and disciples.    If today we ask ourselves does the Church speak with the same authority and with the same clarity as he and his followers did in those early days?   We have certainly gone through bad times in the last forty years and perhaps that is why our yang people in Catholic schools show little interest.   Where they should find certainty they find doubt.   Where they should find unwavering trust in God they find confusing.   Like the story of the Tower of Babel, there is confusion in what is said and the Catholic Church is not united but split into groups, one group almost at times despising the others.     The pretended unity is a sham.   Instead of preaching the Gospel with the authority of Christ many priests find themselves in a position where  their ministry is all about pleasing  the different factions and keeping them in a 'unity'.  But i doing this they lose their authority.

Bishop Egan has decided that the diocese should study the two most important issues in the next two years: the Bible and its relationship to the Catholic Church.  It is to an easy one, in a country where a false ecumenism taught the the Bible comes first and then the Church.   In fact when we study the Early Church it soon becomes clear that the Bible owes it authority to the Church and not the authority of the Church to the Bible.    On the Eucharist will we return not to the Pre-Vatican II days but the early Church, where the apostles themselves taught that the blessed bread was the flesh of Jesus Christ.  Will we accept that init is the substantial presence of Jesus that makes the Eucharist a Sacrament, a means of grace, and that Sacramental Presence can only be understood in this way for the word sacrament does not describe a substance.    We have so much to learn.   Let us prepare in our parishes by praying for the Holy Spirit to guide our Catholic Church.    

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