Nasty aspects

Below is an extract from the right wing blog Rorate Caeli.

Is the Catholic Church as nasty and dysfunctional as would seem to suggest from this material?

The palpable hatred within sections of the church tells its own story. And that phenomenon/aspect seems to be in the ascendancy right across the organisation.

Poor Pope Francis.

"Marx's comments "belong in the village pub": Cardinal Josef Cordes' letter to Tagespost publicly rebuking German Bishops' Chairman

Poverty and Humility: Cardinal Marx some years ago in Fulda enjoying 
one of his great pleasures: Church Tax-funded luxury cigars

The German-language Catholic news website Kath.net provided a few days ago an authorized summary of the letter sent by Cardinal Cordes to Tagespost on Cardinal Marx's most recent controversial statements, in effect declaring the independence of the German Church. Translation by reader "K":

Vatican City. Authorised summary of a letter to the editor of the “Tagespost” from March 7, 2015, in which Paul Josef Cardinal Cordes, former president of the papal work COR UNUM, publicly refutes some statements made by Reinhard Cardinal Marx and Bishop Franz-Josef Bode of Osnabrück at the plenary meeting of the German bishops in Hildesheim. 

At the last plenary meeting of the German bishops, statements of their president were made public which were neither officially published nor denied by the conference’s secretariat. Since words of the most prominent representative of German Catholics give directions and [since these statements] furthermore caused a stir in the media, it makes sense to publicly contradict some of the positions expressed, also in order to limit the confusion they have caused in several places. 

In these statements, the president [Marx] noted that in the universal Church ‘certain expectations’ are directed towards Germany. This is astonishing. A poll of the ‘Bertelsmann foundation’ showed that only 16.2 percent of the West-German Catholics believe in almighty God as a person they can encounter, all other Catholics equate ‘God’ with a faceless providence, anonymous fate, or a primordial power – or they simply deny His existence. Therefore we have little reason to boast against churches in other countries about our faith. 

Moreover, it is not only astonishing that the German Church supposedly enjoys such great respect within Catholicism. More irritating still are the theological blurs and statements, in which the President of the Bishops’ Conference plainly declared that “We are no local branches of Rome. Each Conference is responsible for the pastoral care in its cultural environment and, as it most proper task, has to proclaim the Gospel in its own way.” As a social ethicist Cardinal Marx may know much about the dependency of branches of large corporations. In an ecclesiastical context, such statements should rather be rather left to the village pub.