The Deacon's Bench
Commuters along I-30 in Arlington are seeing a controversial billboard that scolds bishops and urges Catholics to give up the church.
It has inspired Catholic convert, Zachary Moore to send in his defection.
I can’t be a Catholic anymore,” the Keller resident, said.
Moore, who is part of Dallas-Fort Worth Coalition of Reason says he doesn’t agree with the church leaders on contraception.
“The vast majority of Catholic women use birth control, so for bishops to take this stance shows how disconnected they are with parishioners.”
Wisconsin-based, Freedom From Religion Foundation placed the billboard as a way, the group says to send a message. It reads, “Put Women’s rights over bishop’s wrongs”. The group chose the DFW location because both the Fort Worth diocese and the Dallas diocese are suing the Obama administration over the contraceptive mandate.
Since the billboard went up, Catholic officials say they have received complaints from members of the community.
“We have taken calls mainly from women who are angry and offended,” Dallas diocese spokeswoman, Annette Gonzales Taylor, said.
UPDATE: Elizabeth Scalia over at First Things has another take on those who are urging Catholics to flee the Church:
The sons of Caesar appear today in the op-ed pages of leading newspapers, where the better classes of people—the self-proclaimed smarties who amuse themselves and their circles by calling themselves “collapsed” Catholics—are urging other smart Catholics to help “collapse” that which they believe to be teetering, to come away from stubborn, stupid old Peter, the thick-head who seems to have taken Jesus literally when he spoke of being a “sign of contradiction.”
The children of Caesar are assured of their own expertise, and overly invested in the social validation that comes from being compassionate in precisely the correct ways; they are too smart to have ever bothered learning what the Church actually teaches, why she teaches it and what possible intent lies behind those teachings besides “oppression” and “control” over people’s feelings, chromosomes, and orgasms. “Just leave,” runs their evangelistic message, because your church is clearly unwilling to surrender to the authority of the times and the latest moral trends.
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