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“GUN CONTROL” at St. Peter’s – More to the Story
When it comes to our radical Pastor’s involvement with issues on the left, it is always necessary to delve deeply into what motivates him. In yesterday’s post (For the Sheep in Exile – Bulletin 2017-12-10), we had only peeled off one layer of the onion. To be certain, the Unitarian Universalists (UU) are among the chief sponsors of the scheduled December 14, 2017 GUN CONTROL event publicized in St. Peter’s bulletin.
Let’s put the UU’s aside and go one level deeper. First, we’ll go back to For the Sheep in Exile: Bulletin 2017-06-25 when Father told us that he had just returned from attending the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests (AUSCP) assembly in Atlanta. He himself established that he was impressed and influenced by the event. Then, we go further back to the picture of our Pastor attending the 2016 AUSCP assembly in Chicago. It is here that we find another motivating factor for Father’s apparent support for GUN CONTROL.
It was in Chicago that Father may have or even likely participated in an AUSCP vote for GUN CONTROL. Following is a direct quote from the AUSCP website article AUSCP passes resolutions regarding gun control and violence, dated June 29, 2016:
Members of the Association of U.S. Catholic Priests approved (June 28) three resolutions regarding gun control and non-violence. One resolution supports the statement made by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace and Pax Christi International regarding Nonviolence and Just Peace. Another resolution calls for members of the association to “incorporate the lessening of gun violence in their personal life choices and pastoral ministry.” The third resolution supports Chicago Archbishop Blase Cupich who is urging the USCCB “to make gun control and gun violence one of the top priorities of the Church.”
So, it seems that our Pastor has decided that the UU sponsored GUN CONTROL event coincides perfectly with the AUSCP call to “incorporate the lessening of gun violence in their personal life choices and pastoral ministry.”
Our parish bulletin now promotes (in capital letters) a “GUN CONTROL” event. That would lead us to suspect that GUN CONTROL is now part of the “pastoral ministry” here at St. Peter’s.
How many souls will be saved?
Catholic Cultural Revolution: What Can Happen to a Parish in Three Years?
No, you and I can’t answer the question posed in the title of this post. Even if we were to re-read every post on this blog, we would only have a part of the story. Yet, as I was looking back to our posts in 2014, I ran across the post What Can Happen to a Parish in Four Months? We noted that on July 13th, our Pastor said:
OUR WEBSITE – I have a friend, Fred Pugarelli, who has offered to update our website and make our website more interactive. I know that in other churches that I have been assigned to, the website is crucial for informing and attracting people. In a county as settled as Rappahannock, a website might not be as important, but I still think it would be useful to be out there in the internet. One thing that I would like to put on is a link to the weekly homily. I would also like to have pictures of parish events and interviews with parishioners (an oral history). I know that the gen Xers and the Millennial generation seem to be more oriented to the internet and it would be good to try to attract them.
Here we go. In his own version of RULE 2 for Radical Pastors (Build an organization by presenting a vision of where you are going and moving toward it) he was building an expectation. – He was building an expectation that we would be informed. He was building an expectation that there would be transparency in the parish.
Oh yeah. He commissioned a Parish Pastoral Council and he put the meeting minutes on the parish Website. He elevated the Cemetery Committee to a higher level of visibility and he published their meeting minutes on the parish Website.
Almost overnight, St. Peter’s went from a parish with virtually no Internet presence to a parish that gen Xers and the Millennial generation would flock to. The vision, the expectation that we were becoming informed and attracting people had been placed in our minds. You betcha!
Then came the reality of 2017. The vision, the expectations are gone. They have died. The expectation of transparency was just crapola.
Now the parish website is just like a ghost town.
The Parish Pastoral Council has been “disappeared”. (See Catholic Cultural Revolution #3: The Parish Pastoral Council has been “Disappeared” for details.)
Upon close examination, you will find that the Cemetery Committee appears to be dead and buried. What do I mean? – The one and only set of meeting minutes for the Cemetery Committee ever posted were the minutes for – February 2, 2015. (By the way, that was a well written set of minutes.)
Oh, and what happened to the former Director of Religious Education – no word is given. His name was “disappeared” and our Pastor took his place.
Actually, there is no transparency. The sheep of St. Peter’s are in the dark – like mushrooms (and you know the rest of that ditty).
It is one thing to have had no parish Website or only a poorly run site. It is quite a different thing to have had your vision, your expectations built up to think that there would be transparency at St. Peter’s only to have those expectations dashed. Slowly we are moving into the darkness.
Char’s Commentary:
Father said. “…the website is crucial for informing and attracting people…” Yeah, and how’s that working out? How many souls have been saved???
In the last three years there never was any real transparency.
There is one exception to my last statement and it is presented in the following song:
Your lips are moving, I cannot hear
Your voice is soothing, but the words aren’t clear
You don’t sound different, I’ve learned the game
I’m looking through you, you’re not the same
Catholic Cultural Revolution #3: The Parish Pastoral Council has been “Disappeared”
I went to the St. Peter Catholic Church Website this week to find out what’s new. Every now and then I find some useful information. For example, last week I found out that Father was missing in action – again. (See Catholic Cultural Revolution #2: Where’s Father? Again!)
To really know what’s going on in the parish, I need to hire a good detective.
This week, oh my goodness, I found out that the Parish Pastoral Council (PPC) is missing in action. It is gone. There is no trace. Either the PPC and all of its members have disappeared or, even worse, they were “disappeared”.
This really calls for a good detective.
- So, you might ask, who is the PPC member for your Mass? You can’t find that on the Website anymore.
- What wonderful works of the New Evangelization are being developed by our PPC? Sorry, you can’t find that out on the Website.
- What plans for savings souls have been considered? Nope, you won’t find it.
- In fact, you just can’t find anything about the PPC anymore.
Not Really “Disappeared”: Although the minutes of past PPC meetings have been “disappeared” from the parish Website, that does not mean the Sheep in Exile no longer have access to them. (This was the first success for our newly hired detective.)
For our Pastor, in case you want a personal copy, here are the ‘disappeared’ PPC minutes:
Char’s Commentary:
Our radical Pastor has once again made a sneaky move to cover up an inconvenient truth – The PPC is not what parishioners have been led to think. Although I can’t read his mind, there is every reason to suspect that the PPC always was, and as long as Father is at St. Peter’s, always will be just another tool used in the Catholic Cultural Revolution. There is also every reason to suspect that this PPC charade is fully in accordance with RULE 2 for Radical Pastors.
RULE 2: Build an organization by presenting a vision of where you are going and moving toward it.
Saul Alinsky said that people were to have the power that their ideas and programs should come to the surface. But he also understood that the organizer had to capture the best of those ideas and present them as a vision so that people could move toward them. Alinsky wrote, “The organizer’s biggest job is to give people the feeling that they can do something”
Dear readers, RULE 2 is why Father established the PPC. As Alinsky wrote, “The organizer’s biggest job is to give people the feeling that they can do something”. It doesn’t matter if anything is accomplished or any souls are saved. Our Pastor’s vision of a good PPC is a coffee clutch that has the feeling that they can do something.
More importantly – keep no records and keep the parish in the dark. Mushrooms grow well at St. Peter’s where PPC minutes and members get “disappeared”.
That’s it folks. The PPC is charade. If it remains missing from public view, it might just become another self-licking ice cream cone and book club like the PPC at Father’s last parish, St. Charles Borromeo. Woohoo!!! (Read: Minutes – Pastoral Council Meeting – St. Charles Borromeo Church – April 21, 2014)
“Oh, just one more thing” … Meet my new detective!
The Sheep of Kephas 