I have just read Fr Tim's post on this magazine's attitude toward the terrible battle the Church is fighting in this country. Making jokes about The Tablet, such as, 'I wish there was a Catholic Journal as good as this' is no longer a laughing matter. I believe it to be in schism and think the Bishops need to do something about it! The editor needs to be put in line! If he continues to print anti-catholic articles he needs to be told either to stop scandalising the Church or to make it a Protestant Journal!
I'm sure no Orthfully Catholic readers are Tablet readers (except of course to know thine enemy) but we must have some sort of boycott campaign! Try to convince your Parish Priest to stop subscribing to it, our seminary ended its subscription last year. Do anything to stop Christ's faithful from reading the heresy within its pages!
10 comments:
As ghastly as the Tablet is I am rather shocked that a seminary has stopped its subscription.
Future priests are called to serve liberals as much as traditional Catholics.
Occassionally it has some pretty sound stuff in it.
It is as you say, important to know your enemy.
You must be in an orthodox seminary - a rarity in the UK, I guess.
God bless you and your colleagues in your studies.
With these kinds of blogs its sounds like you are against the principle of a free press. I diasgree profoundly with The Tablet on their presentation on the gay adoption question.
But on the whole The Tablet is not heretical and has a 22,000+ readership.
Its important that those who hold the orthodox line can defend that in the face of pressure from dodgy articles in The Tablet.
If you cancel a subscription it looks like running away, surely that is not the anwser??
The seminarians are, of course, free to buy their own personal copies of the Tablet. Some, in fact, do. However I personally believe that the Seminary's current position is a good one. We buy that which is beneficial to the whole community. Furthermore a magazine which, even once, compromises Catholic teaching cannot, as yet, be regarded as sound and orthodox.
The Tablet really put themselves in the mud over the recent gay adoption crisis. A Catholic magazine which attacks the teaching of the Magisterium cannot be considered safe even if they are good on other issues.
Priests are called to serve the Church and to serve others by feeding them on the nourishing doctrines of truth. The best way to serve liberals or any other person that has difficulty with the Church's teaching is by loving them. What better way is there to love a person than by teaching them the truth in all patience?
"What better way is there to love a person than by teaching them the truth in all patience?"
I would suggest getting back to the Summa. See, there is no reason to even read it. See what St Thomas does, he takes a propostion, he takes arguements against that propostion and then argues against them. Truth triumphs.
I would hope that students who will be priests in my diocese will be able to argue against error coherently rather than merely coming out with a fideist "the Church teaches that ....".
That form of arguement is hardly consistent with the appeal to reason of the Regensburg address, or Ratio et Fides. I find it terrifiying.
Know your enemy and defeat him on his own ground.
It is no secret that a large percentage of subscriptions to The Pill come from Anglican clergy. The real problem is that so many of our bishops agree with its editorial line either openly or secretly. It is symptom, not the disease.
I will still buy the Tablet, because it does have the occasional good article, but I agree with you 100% that its coverage of the Gay adoption was appaling (as I said in my Blog... shameless plug). I do think that we need to put pressure on the Tablet, and suggest that E-mailing and writing with our complaints would be more effective. We need to let them know that we expect a Catholic magazine to be... well...Catholic!
The editor is not a "he" but a "she"... not that I am drawing any inferences from that... just a matter of factual accuracy.
The Tablet...that's an Anglican paper isn't it?
I find the Tablet wakes me up in the morning. If you're feeling a little tired in the morning just give it a quick read and you'll be jumping out of bed before you finish the first paragraph. Also, i buy about 5 copies of the tablet most weeks from WS Smith's in Oxford as it means others can't buy them.
The Tablet presents a sad state of affairs. Since it changed course at the time of Vatican II it banged the same drum for many years until it became a weekly museum piece, stuck in the preoccupations of 1968. In that time the readership changed and progressively more non-Catholics came to read it than Catholics. By its stance it more or less says to the majority readership 'Stay where you are'. It is not always heterodox so much as presenting a particular style of Catholicism, now running out of steam. A major problem lies in the board and trustees, all of whom are inflexible in their liberalism. Since the appointment of Catherine Pepinster it has marginally improved. Were it to become a centrist Catholic journal once more it would lose readers and might fail. But from the Woodroffe years onwards it has catered for an educated readership and still does so. There is a need for an educated Catholic journal. This will present problems for the rank and file, the majority of whom have never looked at it anyway. For some time the best part has been the back pages: book reviews, arts and so on. But what is outstanding, unequalled in any other British Catholic publication, is the Church and the World news survey at the end which gives an unrivalled overview of national and international Church affairs. For that alone it is worth reading. For seminarians it will give an idea of what might be in the heads of the more educated members of their congregations and as these people are likely to be active members of the parish its wise to know how they think a) to counteract it intelligently b) to avoid damaging collisions on both sides.
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