News
Featured Image
Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas.

TYLER, Texas, September 20, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) — A clear, recurring theme has emerged in the recent social media warnings of a U.S. Catholic bishop: “Wake up.”

In three consecutive tweets over the course of 18 hours, Bishop Joseph Strickland of Tyler, Texas urged his fellow bishops, all Catholics, and all believers to “wake up” to the perils threatening the Church, inside and out.

Tweet 1: “Wake up” to the disregard for life in the womb

When someone tweeted, “An expert in adult stem cell research told a San Francisco court Wednesday that fetal hearts used in research are harvested from living babies” and asked, “Where is the outrage…are we pagans?,” Bishop Strickland responded Thursday afternoon:

“These abominations which desecrate life must be eliminated from our society.  So many lament the senseless violence and disregard for the lives of children and vulnerable people & rightly so but we must wake up to the disregard for life in the womb as the seed of this violence.”

Tweet 2: “WAKE UP” to courts insisting that Catholic hospitals must provide hysterectomies to transgenders

Before the crack of dawn this morning, Bishop Strickland posted on Twitter an article about the legal quagmire a Catholic hospital in California now faces after declining to remove the healthy reproductive organs from a woman who seeks to “identify” as a man.

“If Catholic hospitals can be required to remove healthy organs, why can’t they also be compelled to perform an abortion or assist in suicide, if a law is written declaring such refusals to be unlawful ‘discrimination’?” asked Wesley J. Smith in his National Review commentary.

“Catholic medicine is on the social justice gibbet,” Smith continued. “Hospitals, nursing homes, and other institutions may soon be forced to choose between ceasing being ‘Catholic’ — or closing/selling hospitals to maintain religious integrity.”

Strickland sees this move by the California courts as a grave threat not only to Catholic institutions, but as a strike at the underpinnings of civil society.

“Not only Catholics but all believers need to WAKE UP….this cuts at the very roots of civilization,” said the Tyler, Texas bishop in a tweet.

Tweet 3: To his fellow bishops regarding another homosexual priest scandal:  “Wake up indeed”

Two hours later, Strickland delivered the same message, “Wake up indeed.” This time, his remark was directed at bishops who had failed to take aggressive action regarding the scandalous actions of a priest who “sat on a Catholic tribunal for over 20 years despite leaving the priesthood, entering a ‘gay marriage,’ rejecting Catholicism in favor of Episcopalianism, and publicly opposing the Church’s teaching on marriage.” 

According to George Neumayr, the investigative journalist who reported the story at The Spectator, the former priest of the Diocese of Scranton, Pennsylvania, who until this week was employed by the Wilmington, Delaware diocese, said he remains “unlaicized.”

LifeSiteNews reached out to Bishop Stirckland’s office for additional comment, but he was unavailable.