San Diego Catholics Set to Protest Bishop McElroy

by David Nussman  •  ChurchMilitant.com  •  August 30, 2018

Protest on Sept. 28 outside diocese’s pastoral center against liberal prelate

SAN DIEGO (ChurchMilitant.com) – A group of faithful Catholics is organizing a protest against Bp. Robert McElroy of San Diego.

The protest is scheduled for Friday, Sept. 28 at 11 a.m. outside the diocesan pastoral center. Organizers are referring to it as “Silence Stops Now,” the same name as the rally that will take place outside the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops’ annual meeting in Baltimore in November.

Church Militant contacted the organizers of the protest in San Diego.

“We wanted to hold it on St. Michael the Archangel’s feast day [Sept. 29],” the organizers said. “But it fell on a Saturday and no one at the diocese would be there. So we decided to hold the protest on the eve of the feast day. And St. Michael is a very appropriate saint for us in this endeavor.”

The organizers encouraged other faithful Catholics in the area to join the protest.

“Please get involved,” they said. “No sitting on the sidelines. Holy Mother Church needs you.”

They also said, “We are about 200 members and growing, and we need help.”

They went on to quote Ven. Abp. Fulton Sheen:

Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops, like bishops, and your religious act like religious.

A flyer for the protest lists a series of demands from Bp. McElroy. Some of these demands are copied over from Church Militant’s “Send a Letter to Your Bishop.”

One of the demands exhorts Bp. McElroy to desist from leftwing talking points, demanding of Bp. McElroy, “That you stop your leftist propaganda in favor of illegal immigration, open borders, climate change, and your love affair with Islam, and that you no longer allow Iman Taha Hassane and other Muslims to use our diocesan properties to undermine our Catholic Faith by proselytizing for Islam.”

The flyer also demands that Bp. McElroy stop persecuting faithful priests, and start teaching the hard truths of the one true Faith. It insists that Bp. McElroy should “preach and teach Jesus, the Ten Commandments, the Four Last Things and all other perennial Catholic doctrine.”

“What about the salvation of souls?” the flyer asks Bp. McElroy rhetorically.

Bishop McElroy has a reputation for being a liberal and supporting the LGBT agenda. In September 2017, Bp. McElroy wrote an op-ed for America magazine in which he defended pro-gay Jesuit celebrity priest Fr. James Martin. McElroy’s op-ed belittled faithful Catholics who oppose the LGBT agenda, accusing them of “homophobia” and characterizing their opposition to Fr. Martin as a “cancer of vilification.”

At one place in the article, the San Diego bishop downplayed the importance of the virtue of chastity, saying, “[C]hastity is not the central virtue in the Christian moral life.”

 

https://www.churchmilitant.com/news/article/san-diego-catholics-protest-bp.-mcelroy