Red Card: The Tablet

It has long been known that The Tablet has been a mouth piece for dissent but it's most recent editorial appears to have broken new ground in relativism [1]. Having read it, words failed me so I looked for images to express how I felt:

The Picard Facepalm: Good, but not quite enough

The Triple Facepalm: Better, but still not suitably grace

The Ultimate Facepalm: Just right

Tablet bashing is a rather easy sport if one is so inclined but it is difficult to envisage how dialogue is possible with a publication which seems to delight in furthering dissent. We are all in need of salvation and the Church was made for sinners but to suggest that it change its teaching to match the majority view in the pews is profoundly un-Catholic. Christ meets us sinners with open arms, as he met the woman caught in adultery, and he addresses us in the same way :"I do not condemn thee: go, and sin no more." [2] The writers of the Tablet seem to revel in the former but refuse to accept the latter, the true hallmark of a Christian. They dress their rhetoric up in appeals to conscience and the primacy of social justice but they refuse to accept the heaviest burden of the cross, namely interior change and the moulding of the will to that of Christ. 

Jesus encountered many who found his teachings "intolerable language" but they at least had the grace to walk away, hopefully to return less hard of heart. The Tablet however, has committed a grave act of hubris in claiming the voice of dissent as Christ's own. It is difficult to view The Tablet, a true wolf in sheep's clothing with a fleece as woolly as its theology, as accepting "all the means of salvation given to the Church together with her entire organization" united "by the bonds constituted by the profession of faith, the sacraments, ecclesiastical government, and communion". Indeed, "even though incorporated into the Church, one who does not... persevere in charity is not saved. He remains indeed in the bosom of the Church, but 'in body' not 'in heart.'"[4] Actively seeking out and promoting dissent is not the hallmark of an "International Catholic Weekly": it is time The Tablet had the grace to "walk away" and stop claiming to be a part of the Universal Church which it so clearly holds in disdain.

[1] http://www.thetablet.co.uk/editors-desk/1/823/church-s-new-faithful

[2] John 8:11

[3] John 6:60-71

[4] Catechism of the Catholic Church 837