Fr. Eric Hodgens - Proof That That the Dissident Catholic Gang Is Totally Out of Touch

Cardinal Pell does an excellent job of answering Fr. Hodgens delusional rantings. & I do mean delusional.

In the article he wrote he blasted the current trend toward religious orthodoxy in the Church, including the “favoured new movements,” and “World Youth Days” that he said, reassert the “old model which is not working”. Then he goes on to blame the “drought of priests” and the “loss of the younger generation” on a shift towards conservatism in the Vatican.

Like I said, delusional. Let's start with the lack of vocations. The only places that is true are in the dioceses & religious orders that have abandoned orthodoxy. Those orders that are faithful to the authentic Magesterium have seen plenty of vocations. Some orders are experiencing huge growth. The same is true of those dioceses with Bishops that are upholding the authentic teaching of the Church.

& where are these vocations coming from? Not from my generation which is the generation that was driven away by, as Cardinal Pell points out, the 60s -70s dissident gang Fr. Hodgens belongs to. It is coming from the younger generation that is returning to the Catholic Church as a result of those new movements & World Youth Days.

Then there is this line of Fr. Hodgens that leaves me shaking my head in disbelief that he could even say this. He dexcribed the actions of those standing up for orthodoxy as being guilty of “displacement of the main game of spreading a message of life, hope, compassion and forgiveness by overstressing moral issues.” I have to start by saying I find his use for the term "main game" as downright blasphemous. The Church's message & mission is NOT a game, it is deadly serious. & it has eternal consequences.

& the moral issues he is upset about are a huge part of the message of life, hope, compassion & forgiveness. It is Fr. Hodgens message that sin is not sin is what is contrary to the true message. He is the one that is denying people true freedom, true life, true forgiveness & true hope by teaching that you can do what is evil with no consequences. In saying contraception, homosexual unions, premarital sex, cohabitation & the like are OK he is leading people into the prison of slavery that those sins are. He is denying people who are in sin the access to the forgiveness they need. & he is shutting them off from eternal life & aiding them to stay on the path to hell.

What Hodgens is doing is projecting the damage his gang did onto those who are restoring the Church. He is clearly in denial because to admit the truth is to admit he is wrong. & his pride won't allow him to do that.

Cardinal Pell rips flawed rant of “swinging ‘60s”- era priest against moral teachings

MELBOURNE, April 13, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A retired Australian priest has publicly blasted the Catholic teaching on sexuality, female ordination and clerical celibacy, and what he called the Church’s “salacious preoccupation with sexual mores”.

Fr. Eric Hodgens, a Melbourne priest ordained in 1960 who served for seven years as the diocese’s Director of Pastoral Formation for Priests, wrote in the April edition of The Swag, the quarterly magazine of the National Council of Priests of Australia that “a large section” of the priesthood is “at odds” with the Church’s “displacement of the main game of spreading a message of life, hope, compassion and forgiveness by overstressing moral issues.”

In response, in the same edition of The Swag, however, the cardinal archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, has pointed out that it is precisely the generation of the swinging ‘60s, and the ascendancy of their liberal agenda that has damaged the Church and repelled the young.

Hodgens’s “solutions were put into practice after the Council,” Pell wrote, “to some degree in Australia, but especially in Belgium, Holland and French-speaking Canada. They emptied the Churches there.”

Particularly odious to Fr. Hodgens was the late Pope John Paul II, who he said was possessed of a “monumental” “lust for power”. He blasted the current trend toward religious orthodoxy in the Church, including the “favoured new movements,” and “World Youth Days” that he said, reassert the “old model which is not working”. He blamed the “drought of priests” and the “loss of the younger generation” on a shift towards conservatism in the Vatican.

In response, Pell remarked dryly that for a pope who was “an abuser of power, out of touch in scripture, limited in theology [and] a bad listener,” “It is a surprise that anyone came to his funeral.”

Hodgens attacked as out of date Catholic teaching on contraception, in vitro fertilisation, divorce, and homosexuality, saying that the Church has “foreclosed” on these and needs to “revisit”. He complained also of the new, more literal translation of the original Latin-language liturgical texts, calling them “defective” and the translation process “non-consultative and politically motivated”.

But Pell pointed out that it is the “mainstream orthodox” trends that have attracted the younger generations who are flocking to the new orthodox religious orders and seminaries, and that the well-worn “liberal” agenda has lost its cache.

“The now aged liberal wing of the Church, which dominated discussion after the Council and often the bishops and the emerging Church bureaucracies, has no following among young practising Catholics, priests or religious.”

In a Western world dominated by secularist media, “liberalism has no young Catholic progeny,” Pell said.

Hodgens is a well known leftist dissenter in the Australian Church and has publicly opposed Catholic teaching on moral issues for years. In 2006, he was a cosignator on a letter by twenty-four self-described “leading liberal Catholics” to the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. The letter complained bitterly of Cardinal Pell’s “static notion of truth” and said he is “teaching inaccurate and misleading doctrine” that “overemphasises the obligation to follow the church absolutely”.

In 2005, Hodgens wrote on an internet forum, “Most priests are no longer committed to the old taboos on sexuality. Most do not believe that couples living together are doing something very wrong. Most are happy to have homosexual couples living lives of commitment. They find the Roman heavy insistence on these issues obsessive and wonder why.”