Toronto Cardinal Collins Risks Charge of Hypocrisy

Image from Socon.ca

Published today to SignOfContradiction.Blogspot.ca

On Sunday past, at the 75th Ordination Anniversary Celebration for Monsignor Vincent Foy, Cardinal Collins presided over Mass in the Extraordinary Form and delivered the homily. According to this blogger, Cardinal Collins

…spoke of the fortitude and perseverance we need to have as Catholics in our current culture and to fight the temptation to leave and reject her solemn teachings. He praised Msgr. Foy’s fidelity and persistence in preaching the truth of Humanae Vitae.  ++Collins noted that it was our duty to challenge and evangelize our culture, to get out and spread the good news of the Gospel of Jesus and the Gospel of Life.”

This is rich indeed considering the Cardinal rarely mentions the word “contraception”, or the phrase “Humanae Vitae” in his day to day oversight as Bishop of the Archdiocese of Toronto. If you doubt that statement please go to the Archdiocesan website and do a word search. You’ll find two or three search results from 2008 and 2009 pertaining to a community talk at St. Michael’s college on the medical consequences of contraception and a parish seminar on the “Contraception Deception”. Then go to the Archdiocesan blog and do the same.  With over 660,000 page views you’ll find basically one article on Humanae Vitae out of over 550 blog postings and that was not an article with a prominent Toronto Catholic’s name attached. It was a reprint from an article in the Irish Independent.

Cardinal Collins, like every other Canadian Bishop as far as I can see, has done nothing significant to promote the teaching of Humanae Vitae on an Archdiocesan-wide level. Have any of the Bishops instructed their priests to require Confession for this evil behaviour? The Cardinal has failed to teach and to warn his flock of the sinfulness of the practice of contraception and its contribution to the culture of death in Canada. He recently held a campaign to get people back to Confession yet took no steps whatever to ensure that Catholics had an opportunity to cleanse their souls of the pervasive and intrinsically evil practice of contraception. Is this the work of a worthy Bishop?

Apparently, in light of his comments in his homily at Msgr. Foy's ordination celebration, Cardinal Collins knows full well the scope of the problem in Canada about contraception yet refuses to address it in any concrete fashion in his own See. Rightly, he praised Msgr. Foy for his doggedness over orthodoxy for five decades or more yet he takes no steps himself to imitate that godly determination in his own powerful sphere of influence. What a sham! Unless of course we see a drastic and immediate turnabout in the Cardinal’s approach on this issue.

Isn't this hypocrisy? Isn't it very much like what Jesus described regarding the leaders of his day whose fathers killed the prophets but who pretended that they themselves would never have participated in such persecution?

Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites; that build the sepulchres of the prophets, and adorn the monuments of the just, And say: If we had been in the days of our Fathers, we would not have been partakers with them in the blood of the prophets. Wherefore you are witnesses against yourselves, that you are the sons of them that killed the prophets. Fill ye up then the measure of your fathers. You serpents, generation of vipers, how will you flee from the judgment of hell? Matthew 23:29-33

And isn't there similar application for what Jesus said about those same leaders earlier in that same chapter who expect the faithful to live devout Catholic lives yet won't lift a finger to help them in crucial ways?

All things therefore whatsoever they shall say to you, observe and do: but according to their works do ye not; for they say, and do not. For they bind heavy and insupportable burdens, and lay them on men's shoulders; but with a finger of their own they will not move them. Matthew 23: 3-4

Why isn't Cardinal Collins doing his part to support Msgr. Foy in his valiant fight to reverse the culture of death in Toronto? Why isn’t he making Humanae Vitae an issue in his diocese? And very conveniently, the Cardinal did not mention Ground Zero for the collapse of morals in Canada, the infamous Winnipeg Statement. This brazen attack in 1968 on the Pope and the Magisterium by the Canadian Bishops has led to an actual false church of sorts in Canada, and a dangerous pseudo-catholicism which is sending countless souls into hell…

To say nothing of spawning a culture of death responsible for over 3.5 million children killed by abortion in Canada.

Cardinal Collins and his fellow Bishops need to come clean. These men need to stop their dissimulations, repent and do their job as Apostles of Christ, or RESIGN. After such outrageous behaviour in this life as Successors of the Apostles, do these men imagine they'll get into heaven with a wink and a nod from God? Either God has played a cruel joke on all of us or these men are gravely compromised in their callings.

Who knows, maybe what they’re counting on is a very long time in purgatory first?