A Call To Action - what ARE they talking about?

I see that ACTA have made a response to Bishop Michaels Campbell's statement about them. As usual with dissent, the response is arrogant - "We're not going away" and deliberately vague. I notice it doesn't really answer any of the points made by Bishop Campbell and uses all the language of fuzzy doublespeak - admitting nothing and leaving open everything.  If dialogue is all that ACTA wants then what is the action their name implies? What is the purpose of the "dialogue? What are they talking about doing? The truth is that the dialogue is always about moving away from the teaching of the Church. 

Borrowing the political imagery of not being open to "dialogue" makes the deliberate suggestion of being closed and unreasonable. Bishop Michael is not being closed and unreasonable, he's just doing his job of being a bishop.  They compare themselves with the group of priests who recently signed the letter about the Synod. The difference is that those priests were simply putting their names to the existing teaching of the Church - ACTA's calls are for movement away from the existing teaching of the Church.

Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith makes this point with great clarity when he pinpoints their duplicity - that they proclaim to be "outwardly Catholic and hold what is in fact irreconcilable with Catholicism."  

Here is the great difference, I think, between those who hold to orthodoxy and those who don't. 

We all on occasion do, think and say things that are irreconcilable with Catholicism - we are fallen sinners in need of redemption.  

Some appear to think that our fallen nature should be "harmonised" with the Gospels and the teaching of the Church, with the challenge of the Gospel the primary target for change, modification, reduction evisceration. The end result being that the Church will look no different from the fallen world around it. Why should it, if we have no need of redemption. Lobbying to change the Church's Magisterial teaching, should not be seen as legitimate politics but rather, but rather, they go to undermining the whole purpose of the Church and of Faith itself.

To present as outwardly Catholic and deliberately hold what is irreconcilable with Catholicism is disingenuous, to say the least. I think Our Lord had one or two things to say about those who held themselves up as one thing but really had another agenda. Pope Francis is right about that sort of Christian.

Bishop Michael's words on his blog are very clear and direct. They strike me as the words of a father. The words of ACTA strike me as the words of politicians - and obfuscating ones at that.