What To Look For In A Dissenter

Father Jospeh Fessio, S.J. offered his litmus test as a quick and helpful way to identify dissenters. "You can ask any priest or bishop about three items in the Catechism and if they wholeheartedly support and defend those paragraphs, it's very unlikely they dissent from Church teaching on anything else."

Father Fessio outlined his criteria as follows:

• No one shall be given a position of authority in the Church, including admission to sacred orders, religious vows, appointment as a superior, or director of formations, who does not willingly accept and publicly defend the following three items from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

• Number 1577: "Only a baptised man (vir) can validly receive sacred orders. For this reason the ordination of women is impossible."

• Number 2357: "Basing itself on Sacred Scripture, which presents homosexual acts as acts of grave depravity, the Church has always declared that homosexual acts are intrinsically disordered and under no circumstances can they be approved."

• Number 2366: "The Church teaches that each and every marriage act be ordered per se to procreation of human life."

• "No one shall remain in authority in the Church who does not promptly employ all the means at his disposal to ensure that those under his authority accept and defend these propositions."

Fr Fessio continued: "The only way an apostolic visitation will succeed is if there is accountability and a means to determine who is for the Catechism, and who is against it. How are we going overcome this crisis of truth if we continue to allow people who do not accept the Church's teachings on these central issues to continue to represent the Church?"

Meanwhile: "More and more, Roman Catholics are becoming indistinguishable from other Americans, with growing support for abortion, divorce, euthanasia and other societal ills. Even worse, a veil of ignorance has fallen over Catholic America, obscuring Catholic lay people's understanding of their faith and calling into question their responsibility to serve as witnesses to Christ in the midst of human society." 

Link (here) to AD200 article from 2002 entitled, Father Fessio: Real US crisis is "Spiritual Abuse"