Since When Is Abandoning The Faith Pastoral?

What the…What?

Archbishop Nichols, the same bishop who so recently decried as un-Catholic bloggers who complain, says that allowing your children to not be raised Catholic is the ‘pastoral’ thing to do. Well, guess what? I have some complaining to do.

LONDON (CNS) — Church leaders have told the British government that members of the royal family who marry Catholics under recently passed legislation will not be obliged to bring up their children in the Catholic faith.

Lord Wallace of Tankerness, speaking on behalf of the government, said he had been assured personally by Msgr. Marcus Stock, general secretary of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales, that the canonical requirement of Catholics to raise their children in the faith was not always binding.

“I have the specific consent of Msgr. Stock to say that he was speaking on behalf of Archbishop (Vincent) Nichols (of Westminster) as president of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales and can inform the House that the view taken by the Catholic Church in England and Wales is that, in the instance of mixed marriages, the approach of the Catholic Church is pastoral,” he said.

What?

If it is permissible to allow your children to be brought up in another faith, the faith is dead in England and Wales. This is absolutely absurd and profoundly un-Catholic.

2225 Through the grace of the sacrament of marriage, parents receive the responsibility and privilege of evangelizing their children.
Parents should initiate their children at an early age into the
mysteries of the faith of which they are the “first heralds” for their
children. They should associate them from their tenderest years with the
life of the Church.³⁴ A wholesome family life can foster
interior dispositions that are a genuine preparation for a living faith
and remain a support for it throughout one’s life.

2226 Education in the faith
by the parents should begin in the child’s earliest years. This already
happens when family members help one another to grow in faith by the
witness of a Christian life in keeping with the Gospel. Family
catechesis precedes, accompanies, and enriches other forms of
instruction in the faith. Parents have the mission of teaching their
children to pray and to discover their vocation as children of God.³⁵
The parish is the Eucharistic community and the heart of the liturgical
life of Christian families; it is a privileged place for the catechesis
of children and parents.

Aiding and abetting apostasy is now considered pastoral?

Who needs shepherds who feed the littlest lambs to the wolves?