Augustine and defaulting shepherds – Catholic World Report

For two weeks every year, the Church ponders St. Augustine’s lengthy sermon On Pastors in the Liturgy of the Hours. It cannot make easy reading for those charged with the cura animarum, the “care of souls.”

Take, for example, this sharp warning from Augustine:

 You have already been told about the wicked things shepherds desire. Let us now consider what they neglect. You have failed to strengthen what was weak, to heal what was sick and to bind up what was injured, that is, what was broken. You did not call back the straying sheep, nor seek out the lost. What was strong you have destroyed. Yes, you have cut it down and killed it. The sheep is weak, and so, incautious and unprepared, it may give in to temptations.

The negligent shepherd fails to say to the believer: My son, come to the service of God, stand fast in fear and in righteousness, and prepare your soul for temptation. A shepherd who does say this strengthens the one who is weak and makes him strong…

But what sort of shepherds are they who for fear of giving offense not only fail to prepare the sheep for the temptations that threaten, but even promise them worldly happiness?

What, then, might the 5th-century Bishop of Hippo say of two 21st-century bishops, Cardinal Stephen Chow, SJ, of Hong Kong and Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago?

While the Church was reading On Pastors, Cardinal Chow spoke in Parramatta, Australia, where he insisted that there was no religious persecution in Hong Kong: “Beijing wants to keep religious freedom intact in Hong Kong, because Hong Kong is important for China.” The Beijing regime, the cardinal insisted, takes the Catholic Church seriously and tries to understand it.

How does that attempt at understanding extend, one wonders, to understanding Hong Kong’s Jimmy Lai, whose Catholic faith in human dignity and freedom has kept him in solitary confinement for over 1,600 days while being prosecuted on absurd charges of threatening “national security”?

Unlike his predecessor, Cardinal Joseph Zen, SDB, Cardinal Chow has done virtually nothing to support Catholicism’s most famous 21st-century political prisoner or to reach out to Jimmy Lai’s family.

Wouldn’t Augustine think that negligent in a shepherd?

Moreover, how does that alleged attempt to “understand” the Catholic Church involve the Chinese regime replacing sacred images in Chinese churches with placards extolling “Xi Jinping Thought”? How does understanding Catholicism square with compelling priests in Hong Kong to travel to Beijing for indoctrination in the “Sinicization” of religion, which means the complete subordination of Catholic truth to Chinese communist ideology?

While Cardinal Chow was misrepresenting the reality of the Catholic situation in Hong Kong and China, his brother cardinal, Blase Cupich of Chicago, was defending his decision to bestow a “lifetime achievement” award on Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois–a tribute that would certainly give St. Augustine pause, and precisely because doing so involves a gross pastoral failure to lead a member of the Church away from temptation.

Throughout his political career, Dick Durbin has been a promoter of the spurious “right” to abortion; he currently enjoys a 100% NARAL Pro-Choice America rating. Durbin has also been a champion of so-called “same-sex marriage.”

In both cases, Cardinal Cupich’s noble predecessor, the late Cardinal Francis George, OMI, tried to persuade the senator of the error of his ways: not only because settled Catholic doctrine teaches that the willful taking of an innocent human life is an abomination and that “marriage” between members of the same sex is an absurdity, but because the moral truths we can know by reason–the moral truths that should guide legislators in a pluralistic republic–tell us exactly the same thing.

Durbin, evidently valuing the woke orthodoxies of the Democratic Party over truths taught by faith and reason, obstinately refused to change his mind, and ever since has persisted in defending (indeed promoting) the indefensible. Because of that obstinacy on the abortion license, Senator Durbin was justly banned from receiving holy communion in the Diocese of Springfield, where he is domiciled, by a courageous shepherd, Bishop Thomas Paprocki.

For the Archdiocese of Chicago to honor such a man for his “lifetime achievement” is preposterous. If Cardinal Cupich does not realize that, perhaps Senator Durbin might have the decency to decline the award on the grounds that his acceptance of it would further fracture the unity of the Catholic Church in Illinois.

Cardinals Chow and Cupich deserve prayers as well as criticism, prayers that they come to take On Pastors seriously. For they may meet Augustine at the Great Assize, and when he asks them what they thought they were doing, “keeping the dialogue open” may not be a satisfactory answer.