Bishop De Angelis Pastoral Letter

You Really Don't Get it Corcoran

Bishop De Angelis wrote a beautiful, thoughtful pastoral letter here to try and smooth the waters after all the tension that has been going on at St. Michael's Parish in Cobourg. Life Site News has a good report of it here, including some interviewing of Jim Corcoran.

Meanwhile, Barb Hall has turned the Ontario HRC from an integrated sausage machining machine into the auto industry model, and we can only hope that it fails like the North American industry has done recently, with no disrespect to that industry. Here's what I mean. Barb has separated the Legal Support Centre which pays all the bills for you and helps you file your claim from the Human Rights Commission, which investigates the claim, and processes the offending parties, and from the Human Rights Tribunal which then slams the door shut on the poor sucker to seal the deal.

So, the only change is that the once integrated sausage making machine is now a dis-integrated sausage making machine, where the left hand doesn't necessarily co-ordinate with the middle hand, which then doesn't necessarily co-ordinate with the right hand.

Here's just a couple of lines from the OHRC web site about the Legal Support Centre:

The Human Rights Legal Support Centre offers legal services to individuals throughout Ontario, who believe they have experienced discrimination. The Centre can be contacted at 416-314-6266 or 1-866-625-5179.

The Legal Support Centre cannot assist employers, landlords, service providers or business operators who have questions about how the Human Rights Code applies to them.

Maybe you'd like to call them up and give them some free advice back. They won't take your call unless you believe you have experienced discrimination, and believe me you are gonna experience discrimination before they are done with you.

So, Corcoran got his advice to proceed from the Legal Support Centre, and unable to think for himself, he took it. Why not, it was free, and worth every penny he paid. About as good as the free advice he gets from Ed Cachia, probably.

So, his response to the wonderful pastoral letter that His Bishop wrote: "The bishop may be subjecting himself to the possibility of a lawsuit."

Corcoran is so busy listening to his own voice that he can't hear anyone else's.

My prayer for Jim Corcoran is that one day he will awaken to the realisation that it is not all about him, and maybe somebody will send him a copy of Max Lucado's book "It's Not About Me".

Here's just one little excerpt:

What would happen if we accepted our place as Son reflectors.

Such a shift comes stubbornly, however. We've been demanding our way and stamping our feet since infancy. Aren't we all born with a default drive set on selfishness? I want a spouse who makes me happy, co-workers who always ask my opinion. I want weather that suits me and traffic that helps me and a government that serves me. It is all about me.

Jim Corcoran's life and the lives of the other members and now former members of St. Michael's Parish are too valuable to throw away on such nonsense, which is the crux of the Pastoral Letter from Bishop De Angelis.

Jim Corcoran is now treading on ground where he is prepared to risk the eternal salvation of himself and of fellow and former co-parishioners by his prideful actions. When he meets Jesus at that final moment, how will he answer for his treatment of his brothers and sisters, because Jesus will not ask him how they treated him, but how he treated them? He'll ask them about their treatment of him. That's for them to make account of themselves.

Barbara Hall will not be standing beside him then, nor his advisers from the Legal Support Centre. But, Bishop De Angelis will have prayed for him as his pastoral leader. It will not be enough though without a change of his heart.