Nevo wrote:I think this statement is perfectly appropriate. One can find similar statements from LDS Church leaders. One can be charitable and liberal-minded without rushing headlong into relativism.
I'm
not seeing much of it. But maybe it's because I frequent Mormon message boards too much.
The other thing is, excommunication in Catholicism is
extremely rare, and only in cases where priests (not lay members) openly defy the Pope, for example in some cases of priests advocating "Liberation Theology". Even former priest
Paul Collins, who defied Papal authority, was not excommunicated, though he willingly resigned from the priesthood "to save his religious superiors from being 'caught in the middle.' "
Vatican Two was an attempt to bring the Church into line with contemporary thinking:
The spirit of Vatican II is invoked for a great variety of ideas and attitudes. Bishop John Tong Hon of Hong Kong used it with regard merely to an openness to dialogue with others, saying: "We are guided by the spirit of Vatican II: only dialogue and negotiation can solve conflicts." Michael Novak described it instead as a spirit that "sometimes soared far beyond the actual, hard-won documents and decisions of Vatican II. ... It was as though the world (or at least the history of the Church) were now to be divided into only two periods, pre-Vatican II and post-Vatican II. Everything 'pre' was then pretty much dismissed, so far as its authority mattered. For the most extreme, to be a Catholic now meant to believe more or less anything one wished to believe, or at least in the sense in which one personally interpreted it. One could be a Catholic 'in spirit'. One could take Catholic to mean the 'culture' in which one was born, rather than to mean a creed making objective and rigorous demands. One could imagine Rome as a distant and irrelevant anachronism, embarrassment, even adversary. Rome as 'them'." This view of the Second Vatican Council was condemned by the Church's hierarchy, and the works of theologians espousing such a view (such as Hans Küng) have often been censured.
Nevertheless that is how it was interpreted by the people, and I was one who lived through this transition, when the Mass was changed from Latin to English (that's how out of touch they were).
Further reading:
Hans Kung.
So when is Mormonism going to "get real" and allow more leeway to its members instead of instigating witch hunts for members and scholars who do not accept Book of Mormon historicity?