Fr. Fessio sounds like he's doing a variation of the Curse of Vatican II routine without having the guts to go the whole distance into sedevacantism. Well, that's not fair--nobody can accuse the present Pope, or even Paul VI, of moral liberalism.  Then again, the stories I've always heard are that Paul VI was ready to spring for presumed evils like artificial birth control but was talked out of it, and so Humanae Vitae started a backlash that was the beginning of what some Catholics--I assume Fr. Fessio is one of them--view as the great downward journey of the Church toward moral turpitude, lavender seminaries, altar girls, defections to the Lutherans and Episcopalians, and the movements that won't go away...such as calls to ordain what C. S. Lewis (an Anglican some people regard as an "honorary" Roman Catholic) insisted on calling "priestesses." And yes, the devilish movement toward unmarried people who "live in sin" having the temerity to approach the altar to receive Communion; married couples avoiding the consequences of sexual activity, i.e., basically fornicating, and then also having the chutzpah to go up for Communion without going to
Confession first; and priests marching down Christopher Street in the Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.

Fr. Fessio's talk about spousal and child abuse as the partial result of this so-called morally lax climate is his own version of a Potemkin Village, and even there it is so full of holes you could drive a Hummer through it. It's not a Potemkin Village, it's a moral Theresienstadt, and I don't have to take that analogy any further, do I? I've heard stories of priests back in the Godly Old Days telling bruised, abused wives to stand by their men--drunken slobs who used those women as punching bags and seminal receptacles--because that was the Cross that God had given them to bear as inheritors of the Blessed Mother who also suffered. Yeah, but we have no record that Joseph ever beat up his wife. So even this sick dead-end is a subterfuge and basically a lie.  And at the beginning and end of the day, here's another priest...more literate than many, yes...who is  hung up on the Church's sexual obsessions.  When are you people in the turned-around collars going to stop the spiteful moral superiority act because some people can do something you're not allowed to?

I wonder what Fr. Fessio would have thought of Fr. Mychal Judge.  The latter was an openly recovering alcoholic who'd been sober for 23 years when he died last year down at the Trade Center, and he was (gasp) gay. I don't know if he was "active" or just leaned that way and observed his vows of celibacy: that's between him and God.  I DO know that among gay men I  knew in the City, Mike Judge was their one loving and nonjudgmental connection to a Church that many grew up in and that--with the exception of Fr. Judge, OFM--treated them they way you'd treat a box of ammonia-stinking cat litter. I wonder if Revs. Fessio and Judge ever met. God, what a horrible thought. Probably, Fr. Fessio could blame Mike Judge's alcoholism on the loose morals of the Post-Vat2 Church as well.  No such animal as a "whiskey priest" ever existed before John XXIII hosted an open bar at a reception, I suppose....

Message to Fr. Fessio, which I hope to Christ above you read--aside from  this note, I'm ignoring you.  Most people I know ignore you the same way we ignore The Fabes out in Lincoln with his irrelevant excommunications that are unenforceable and have the weight of a styrofoam hammer. Speak to the converted all you want, Fr. Fessio. You're irrelevant.  You don't have any "instruments" to show me.  Even Rome has put them away.  Basically I excommunicate you.

And I'm still going to call myself Roman Catholic because it gives me an identity with a Church that has nothing to do with you.

Ken