'Catholic Omnibus': front page dissent

Action: faithful Catholics should remove this free paper from Churches wherever they see it. The front page of the current (August) issue (second paragraph) says this:

[in the Summer of the liturgical year] 'we begin to come to terms with the absence of the earthly body of Christ and get the measure of what 'This is my body' means in everyday terms. The body of Christ is discovered in the body of believers, in the other who believes and lives out a similar faith in Christ - or indeed whose articulation and mode of living is challengingly different from mine.'

But when 'This is My Body' is said in the liturgy the reference is to the Real Presence of Our Lord, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, upon the Altar and in the Tabernacle. It should also be noted that 'challengingly different' 'modes of living' is a euphemism for modes of living condemned by the Church. The nun author (pictured: notice the habit) is a well-known dissenting theologian, Gemma Simmonds CJ, who is 'chaplain' to the once Catholic Heythrop College in London, despite the fact that, under canon law, chaplains must be priests.

Can. 564 A chaplain is a priest to whom is entrusted in a stable manner the pastoral care, at least in part, of some community or particular group of the Christian faithful, which is to be exercised according to the norm of universal and particular law.

Comment: The 'Catholic Omnibus' is a quarterly 12-page tabloid produced by the National Board of Catholic Women. The NBCW is an official consultative body of the Bishops' Conference of England and Wales. It is dominated by the radical feminist and pro-abortion group 'Women Word Spirit' who seem to have been dropped from the Catholic Directory, after years of complaints from faithful Catholics. Their grip on the NBCW has not loosened, however, and last year the orthodox 'Association of Catholic Women' resigned their membership of the NBCW in protest.

Other features of the current issue: there are some photographs with captions, but no other text on the Pope and World Youth Day, the biggest story from the Universal Church this quarter. A huge amount of space is devoted to 'Green' issues, and none at all to the teaching of the Church, currently under intense attack, on the family and life issues. This is pretty surprising from a 'Catholic women's' publication. The report of the Health and Bioethics Committee of the NBCW focuses on the Government's innocuous proposals to make it easier for the dying to be cared for at home, and limits reference to the Hybrids bill to four lines. The formerly Catholic organisation 'Progressio', which campaigns for abortion and contracatpion, is promoted in a long article on p10, with a call for readers to support them at the end; the dissident pacifist group Pax Christi is given another long article (see our dossier). Most telling of all is the 'Justice and Peace' agenda which focuses on housing, poverty, and the developing world to the exclusion of the killing of the unborn and the destruction of the Catholic adoption agencies in our own country, and similar trends around the world.

Many of the writers are notorious dissidents. As we see from the first of Patricia Philip's 'Catholic Feminism' articles, here:
The Editor, Angela Perkins, was so enraged at a pro-life proposal at a NBCW meeting that she stood up to shout it down.
Her 'team' members are Verena Wright-Lovett and Freda Lambert: the first a member of the WWS and the second the author of a letter defending it in the Catholic Herald.