California Catholic Daily, Wednesday, March 12, 2008 A.D. Is it our “metaphors” that need changing? Cardinal Mahony honors 20 years of dissent with gala dinner Fr. Liam Lawton sang “Danny Boy” (movingly, it was said) [what?] in her honor. There were readings from works by Maya Angelou, David Whyte, and John O’Donohue [but in 2000 years of Christian history no saint or Christian was appropriate or found good enough to read?]. Paying tribute were Cardinal Roger Mahony, Msgr. Lloyd Torgerson of St. Monica’s parish in Santa Monica, and Megan McKenna, a self-described “writer, theologian, storyteller [heresyteller?], missionary.” All these and about 500 more were gathered Feb. 29 for a Religious Education Congress [why pay for a syncretic event, what happened to evangelizing the Word made flesh?] event, a dinner to honor Religious Sister of Charity Edith Prendergast, director of the Office of Religious Education for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles since 1987. As director, Sister Edith has overseen the archdiocese’s annual Religious Education Congress [was this her idea or Cardinal Mahony's?] , a gathering of religious educators and others from California and across the U.S. that has become notorious over the years for its presenters who dissent from Church teachings [besides protesting has anyone approached the Vatican concerning this?]. "It has been an extraordinary experience to be associated with you in our local Church," Cardinal Roger Mahony told Sister Edith [I'm sure she feels likewise], according to the March 7 Tidings, the archdiocesan newspaper. Noting Prendergast’s “candor, civility, competence, courage [why is it 'courageous' to dissent from teaching?] and, most importantly, compassion,” Mahony said, “I cannot be more grateful to our almighty God for the gift of Sister Edith Prendergast." Prendergast showed some theological candor in September 2002, at a talk sponsored by her office with Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The speaker was Michael Morwood, an Australian theologian whose book, Tomorrow's Catholic: Understanding God and Jesus in a New Millennium, Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne, Australia in 1998 said contained serious doctrinal errors. When Morewood refused to retract the errors, Pell banned him from speaking publicly on the incarnation, the redemption, and the Trinity. Despite this, and Morewood’s subsequent resignation from the priesthood, Prendergast’s office offered those who attended his talk a "certificate of attendance," to go towards earning a "catechist certificate." [and Cardinal Mahony did nothing?; or am I asking for too much here?] After Morwood’s talk, Sister Edith said he had "raised our sights and shaken us up." She said that, during Morwood’s talk, she was thinking “that the time for us involved in religious education is to rethink our story and traditions [like abandoning Christianity altogether]. So often I think that we are counting on images and metaphors. We have to ask the question: are they relevant to our time? Do they speak to anyone?" [relativism loud and clear] Among the "metaphors" that might not "speak to anyone," Sister Edith mentioned "the metaphors of the incarnation, of the Trinity, redemption -- some of the things that Michael assessed for us tonight. And each of those metaphors, in a way, you might say, is a poetic device, giving an insight into who God is, but also, who God is not. When you say God is Mother, or God is Father, God is not mother or father, either [are you proposing transgender?]. We have to look at the need to change our metaphors and also the need to re-address them throughout the ages. I ask people, how do we teach, today, the Trinity? How do we teach incarnation? Is it what we were taught twenty or thirty years ago? I don't know. And I think that is one of the areas that Michael is willing to push us to take a look at today and that's in the context of the fact that our cosmos has changed, our social and scientific development of our age."