Update on Mahony's Messenger at USC
The Daily Trojan reports ...
"Both the archdiocese and the university have received a report about a serious violation of ministerial ethics and essential professional boundaries involving inappropriate physical conduct by our campus minister, Father Bill Messenger," Jenny Schwartzkopf, religious director of the Catholic Student Association, said in a press release on May 1.
Go to my PREVIOUS POST about Father Bill Messenger.
"Both the archdiocese and the university have received a report about a serious violation of ministerial ethics and essential professional boundaries involving inappropriate physical conduct by our campus minister, Father Bill Messenger," Jenny Schwartzkopf, religious director of the Catholic Student Association, said in a press release on May 1.
Go to my PREVIOUS POST about Father Bill Messenger.
posted by Quintero at 11:41 PM
4 Comments:
QUOTE: 'Bill boasts perhaps the most diverse and unique collection of Mass vestments including an original USC Trojan print. We invite you to come join our Trojan priest and family.'
Bill, who 'didn't choose celibacy, he chose the priesthood', is a big fan of Trojans. I'll just bet he is.
Then there's this little matter, but who the devil cares about the GIRM anyway, right?
QUOTE: '306. The beauty of a vestment should derive from its material and design rather than from lavish ornamentation. Representations on vestments should consist only of symbols, images, or pictures portraying the sacred. Anything out of keeping with the sacred is to be avoided.'
Well, I know in certain areas of the South, college football is called a 'religion', but USC?
Yeesh. What a clown.
Really? A clown? Probably because he challenges rules that are questionable.
Do you know Bill, I do for 12 years. He is a dear friend and a wonderful man. He was a priest that made you think, and asked questions. It not the vestments that make the priest it is the person. Just as a building and a cross does not make a church, but the people.
I was a student at USC a few years ago during Fr. Bill's tenure as chaplain. I finally stopped going to the USC chapel, and to local St. Vincent's Parish instead. I'd had enough of the inner turmoil I was experiencing from hearing lengthy homilies full of abstruse theological qualifications that did nothing but confuse students about the serious issues facing them at a vulnerable age - qualifications that I knew to be wrong. Approaching Fr. Bill about it, as politely as I did so, got me nowhere, I regret to say.
I will be praying for Fr. Bill. The situation he is in is an awful one for him and for all the Church. I hope the charges are not true (I should note that I have a difficult time imagining him being sexually interested in any student, much less a male one). But what is true is that many of Fr. Bill's Catholic "teachings" - as can be publicly seen on his website and as could be heard in his homilies just about any day - are at best misleading and at worst are outright heresy.
Cardinal Mahony, please give us a holy, saintly chaplain to guide us!!! Misconduct or not, we need a different kind of chaplain.
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