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No, Gentle Reader, this has nothing to do with Republicans. Or politics. Or America. This has to do with dissent in the Catholic Church.

They take their title from the popular refrain, “There’s an elephant in the living room,” meaning, “We’re talking about everything except the huge, evident problem which lies before us.

It is curious they call themselves the Elephants; by doing so, they say that they are the problem. Perhaps they consider themselves the problem because of the issues they raise, with argumentation which is cleverly rhetorical but full of many errors. What are these issues?

They themselves document their own issues on their own web site (see http://www.elephantsinthelivingroom.com/documents.html). Other issues can be discerned from the literature they occasionally publicize, such as letters which are mailed out with mass-mailing methods. You will find in these documents either attacks on the following points or literature to undermine the Church's teachings on these points by sowing doubts. (Let's remember that sowing doubts was the method the Serpent used with Eve.) They question, and even doubt or reject, content of Catholic Magisterial teaching such as these:

· Moral condemnation of homosexual acts, and all Catholic sexual moral teaching in general

· Anything that remotely reminds them of tradition of the Catholic Church, by obsessing about "change, change, change." (One thing doesn't change for them: that everything must change... isn't that curious)

· ... oh, and I learned by personal experience that they are brutally opposed to the use of bullet points

Here is a superb web site to obtain from God his mercy and his grace to bring an end to this (the Elephants) and other abominations, by no other means than penance and prayer. Click and sign up, I did!

(Logo copied from home page)

http://www.trumpetsofjericho.org/

The Gentle Reader may be astonished, even find it hard to believe that anyone, much less priests, could hold these positions. Allow me to cite a part of Fr. Sipe's talk, a talk published on the aforementioned web page, regarding the sexual perversions recently popularized in the press at large:

This is coming! You can’t stop this. Certainly, the Church is trying to do things, but they’re trying to plug holes. The core of this problem is a sexual problem, and it is the sexual teaching of the Church. The sexual teaching of the Church is that every sexual thought, desire and action outside marriage is mortally sinful; and every sexual act within marriage not open to conception is also mortally sinful. And there is no paucity of manner. This is not reasonable! This is pre-Copernican! People do not live this way!

The effects of this movement, popular among clergy and even some laity in the Archdiocese of Detroit, are these: empty Catholic schools, many ruined families, contraception introduced into the intimacy of marriage, growing Catholic divorce, the strangling of vocations to nearly the point of extinction (priestly and religious), a resentment towards the pro-life movement, countless souls who have abandoned the Catholic faith, a psychologized catechesis where nothing is actually taught, widespread theological modernism (“the heresy of hersies” Pius X, Pascendi, n. 39), to name a few.

It seems odd that the only people reprimanded these days are the ones who still respect the authority of the various bishops and Ordinary - the ones who do not respect the bishops are free to do as they please; and this is a mystery which I do not pretend to understand. In fact, I'm beginning to think that it is intrinsically unintelligible. But the logical proof of that will have to wait for another day. Oh, that's another thing the Elephants hate: the serious use of logic.