Warning! Says the Bishops. Beware Catholic Faithful.

I was reading the blogs that I frequent and I came across this by Dr. John Bergsma on his shared blog The  Sacred Page.  I was not aware things like this were taken care of at a more local level.  

The USCCB's Committee on Doctrine wrote a document last week warning the faithful of the book, The Sexual Person: Towards a Renewed Catholic Anthropology by Todd Salzman and Michael Lawler.  It finds its empitome in this blurb: 

"Its interpersonal and experiential approach points to a thorough revision of Church teaching on birth control, reproductive technology, premarital sex, and homosexuality." — Edward C. Vacek, SJ, professor, Department of Moral Theology, Weston Jesuit School of Theology (my own emphasis added)

 The bishop's document (found here) is coherent, clear, and straightforward about the inadequacies and outright problems with the work.  First and foremost, it oversimplifies and (possibly) unintentionally desacralizes Sacred Scripture treating it with as much or less reverence than a publication of poems written by and for four year olds.  Each moral statement in Scripture is sociohistorically conditioned, so conditioned as to have no relevance in the 21st Century.  They don't even bother to do the work of deconstruction to take down the arguments they go the easy route of absolute relativism.  However, "The Church has never doubted, however, that with proper study and analysis it is possible not only to come to an understanding of the meaning that the scriptural writer intended but also, through an understanding of the human words, to come to an understanding of what God intended to convey to us by means of the human writers.  History is not an impassable barrier for communication of God's truth through Scripture." (7 of bishop's document)


The document goes on to speak about Salzman and Lawler's lack of grasping the natural law.  Their conclusions are dissident, disrespectful, and moral relativistic.  Be warned this book is not representative of Catholic sexual ethics.  Do not be mislead by their use of Catholic language including the Theology of the Body-esque title of the book.