Interviewed Rebecca Bratten Weiss on Connecting the Dots today

Interviewed Rebecca Bratten Weiss on Connecting the Dots today September 19, 2017

Since, as Dave Armstrong notes, the character assassins and inquisitors at Lifesite News did not have the integrity to so much as talk to Rebecca before pasting together the sub-8th grade hatchet job they did on her, I thought I’d give her a chance to speak on my podcast.  She acquitted herself well:

As you’ll hear, Rebecca is thoroughly prolife. Indeed, that’s her trouble: she uphold the Church’s whole teaching on life from conception to natural death and she dissents from no point of Church teaching. That’s a threat to those who do, in fact, dissent from the Church’s teaching and guidance when it gets in the way of right wing culture war priorities. And so she fell afoul of a rag that now number Pope Francis, Bishop Robert Barron, and Brandon Vogt of all people as its enemies. Not a bad list to be on.

We also discussed her disgraceful and unjust firing by Franciscan University, which I think is hurting them more than her. This too had nothing to do with heterodoxy from the faith and everything to do with confusing aesthetics with orthodoxy.

The National Catholic Reporter covers it as well.

This poisonous atmosphere of purges having nothing to do with dissent from the Faith and everything to do with perfectly legitimate variations on political, cultural, and aesthetic judgments is harming the witness of the Faith enormously. I heard today from a woman who children are increasingly alienated from the Church because they have made the mistake of thinking Franciscan’s and Lifesite’s actions are what “Real Catholics” stand for. I tried to remind her that hostility to the Pope and obeisance to Donald Trump are not articles of the Creed and that teaching a Lit course on Nabokov or a taste for Game of Thrones is not defined by the Church as heresy, much less apostasy. And using the tongue to say “This persecution of a faithful daughter of the Church is bullshit” is a far less serious issue than using it to bear false witness against Rebecca Bratten Weiss an abortion supporter and an enemy of the Faith while hiding behind gooey piety to do it.

By the way, check out Convivium, the journal she edits. And, of course, you can read Rebecca’s blog right here at Patheos.


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