Why should this appointment be controversial? So three years ago that priest thought sin contributed to the damage caused by Katrina. Others, both non-Catholic and Catholic, have expressed similar thoughts. Since there is no way to prove that was not so, he is entitled to his opinion, isn't he?

gjkeywl wrote:

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Others, both non-Catholic and Catholic, have expressed similar thoughts. Since there is no way to prove that was not so, he is entitled to his opinion, isn't he?

And you are welcome to think the earth is flat but it might be a problem if you wanted to be an astronomer.
And just because Pat Robertson and some other Protestant loons think that God punished the USA by 9/11 or Katrina doesn't mean that the church should overlook similar bizzare thoughts

A flat earth has nothing to do with it. I don't think this priest would deny the physical causes of hurricanes as understood by science. If you took a poll of priests and bishops about whether God destroyed Sodom and Gomorah because of the immorality of its inhabitants, I think you would find many who thought He did, though perhaps expressing it in different terms. Likewise did God spare Nineveh because of their repentance? Was the long history of Israel falling on hard times due to their not keeping the commandments interpreted properly by the prophets, or should their bizzare thoughts have been condemned rather than enshrined in Scripture? If the priest had said "God allowed nature to take its course, rather than intervening to stop it, or ameliorating its effects, because of the lack of faith demonstrated by the lives of those affected," would that also seem bizzare to you?

gjkeywl wrote:

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If the priest had said "God allowed nature to take its course, rather than intervening to stop it, or ameliorating its effects, because of the lack of faith demonstrated by the lives of those affected," would that also seem bizzare to you?

Very bizzare

That's interesting. Do you think that God has any influence on human affairs at all? If so, might that influence be conditional to any human behavior? In other words are prayers, sacrifices, or efforts to do God's will, of any value in affecting anything that occurs on earth?

gjkeywl wrote:
God's will on earth is accomplished through the actions of human beings.

That is partially true, but I believe God's will on earth was also being carried out before human beings existed, so there is more to it than that.

Go back to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. If you recall the problem of God punishing the innocent among the guilty was raised by Abraham. God assured Abraham that he would not destroy the two cities if He found even ten innocent men.

A significan point is that Abraham stopped his pleading a ten, and not one. So nine innocent men might be destroyed along with the guilty and thus some "collateral damage" was seen as tolerable. Also probably not all in the city were equally guilty and so there was no proportional earthly human justice in this event. This shows that the consequences of sin can bring earthly suffering to all regardless of the spectrum of guilt. Everyone therfore has a personal interest in reducing the sins of others as well as themselves. I don't interpret Sodom as an example of Divine intervention, but as an example of lack of it. The sinful lifestyle of most of its inhabitants precluded respect for the divine messengers who might have told them to leave.

Flash forward several millenium to Katrina and New Orleans. If one used the tale of Sodom and Gomorrah as a prooftext of the destruction of New Orleans by divine intervention then you would have to agree that only the poor, the elderly and the sick were guilty of crimes against God. The rich and powerful, the movers and shakers and those who maintained the character of New Orleans were the innocent ones as they were largly spared at the expense of those who had no power.

Why would I "have to agree" with such an illogical statement that is in the form of a classical fallacy. If A is not equal to B and A is negative, that does not tell you anything about the sign of B. Jesus points out the silliness of such thinking in his comments on the people killed by the tower of Siloe (Lk 13:4,5), but points out that continuing to sin will bring a calamity upon all the rest who were not killed. The point is we should not try to assess anyone's culpability by who is, or is not killed by some event, but that the occurence of the event itself should be seen as an indicator of some evil that may have been avoided. That is, in fact, what we do after such things happen. In the case of Katrina all the blame got conveniently pushed to Bush by some, but I seriously doubt that the root causes all sprang from the White House. There was a lot of obvious negligence at the local level (public and private), and what the root causes of that were only God knows, but if some priest thinks it has something to do with immorality that doesn't sound so outlandish to me.

This is a very very sick accusation against God. Instead of the Vatican promoting this priest he should have been sent of to a monastary for reflection

I don't see any accusation against God, but against human immorality (which is his job). Vice wouldn't be identified as vice if it did not have bad consequences and both Old and New Testaments point out that at least some of the large scale temporal consequences of sin can be avoided by repentance. No one will repent if they think they are not doing anything wrong, or that it will have no real major effect on everyone. The priest risked, and got, ridiculed for telling people what they did not want to hear, and now you want him penalized too.