The following is a reflection by Fr. Alain Lorans.
After the response of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith recalling that the Church cannot bless same-sex unions (March 15, 2021), Bishop Bonny told the Dutch-language daily De Standaard on March 17: “I feel shame by proxy for my Church.”
He added: “I would like to apologize to all those for whom this response is painful and incomprehensible: the committed faithful and Catholic homosexual couples, the parents and grandparents of homosexual couples, and their children, the pastoral staff, and the counselors for same-sex couples. Their pain for the Church is mine today.”
Bishop Bonny can now feel understood and supported by his base. During a conference organized by the British weekly The Tablet, on April 28, he assured that because of this ban, nearly 700 people, most of them young, had left the parishes of his diocese at the end of March. and that nearly 2000 people had asked for the “cancellation” of their baptism in the registers of the Flemish dioceses of Belgium.
That is because he thinks he is Catholic, because, he says, this Roman prohibition “is not at all in phase with Amoris lætitia,” the exhortation of Pope Francis which authorizes communion to the divorced and remarried on a case by case basis.
He regrets that the Roman Congregation does not take into account what the human sciences say today about sexuality in civil society, while many countries have legalized marriage or civil partnership for same-sex couples.
Basically, Bishop Bonny thinks like the post-modern world. He senses and feels what this dechristianized world senses and feels. He is “in tune” with it. He imitates it. And this docile mimicry preaches a worldly, insipid gospel: “But if the salt lose its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is good for nothing any more but to be cast out, and to be trodden on by men,” (Mt 5:13).
Bishop Bonny wants to please and is afraid of displeasing. He adapts to the surrounding spirit; he adopts it. After so many supposedly pastoral overtures, what remains under this miter? The wind! The wind that turns the mills of “politically correct” words.
Thus the “great fear of right-thinking” becomes, a compromise with compromise, the great emptiness of nothing-thinking.
