Friends, let's consider this comment and the positive response it received on this thread:
A concern is that the dioceses that ban or restrict LC and RC are seldom bastions of orthodoxy. Saint Paul-Minneapolis and Miami come to mind. Will this not play into the LC/RC claim that they are persecuted for their orthodoxy?
The Archbishop of Miami made it clear in his terse letter that the Legion had broken established rules. It broke rules -- which cannot be justified by orthodoxy. An ordinary has authority over his diocese by right of an unbroken line of succession from the apostles. Yes, there are liberal bishops, flakey bishops, inattentive bishops and down-right bad ones, but that doesn't justify deception by the Legion.
The same thing happened in Minneapolis-Saint Paul. The archbishop left town, and came back unexpectedly to find the Legion rifling through files and accessing information to which it had no right. The archbishop went from being a supporter (who assisted at LC ordinations) to an enemy in the flash of the eye. That meant that the Legion did like-wise: undermining the archbishop's support among the faithful by pointing out the access that Dignity had to the archdiocese. Yes, they did. Yes, sometimes it's difficult to keep the darker elements out of the Church (to which they cling for legitimacy and a perverse pleasure of corrupting).
BUT: What is the difference between the tactics of Dignity and the tactics of the Legion??
The Archbishop Flynn called the Legion out for creating a "parallel church," and from then on, the Legion waged a constant whisper campaign with the intention of undermining his authority. I don't give a fig about "orthodoxy" if it's touted through a methodology that carries the same amount of fidelity and duplicity of irreverent homosexuals. We cannot play this game.
People saw the light when Archbishop O'Brien (with good "orthodox" credentials) noted that it wasn't the theology but the methodology. We maintain that charge -- and cannot fall into the slippery crevice of promoting orthodoxy through devious methods.
I am reading the horrific account of the North American martyrs, whereby the lives of heroic Jesuits were made even more awful by the neglect of the ordinary back home: Cardinal Richelieu. That Machiavellian old fox back in France was, ahem, distracted, and thereby the men were denied the safety they needed to further their mission. And so they furthered their mission through greater hardship, brutal tortures, savage treatment and exposure to the elements. NEVER once did they bad mouth the Cardinal or betray the integrity of their Jesuit formation by deceit or stretching the rules.
That the Legion mentions their mission in the same breath as such Jesuits is blasphemy. We will not become distracted by "orthodoxy" or the purported lack of integrity of various bishops. That's cheap, duplicitous, distracting and unworthy of real Catholics.
