"Celebrating the Papal Visit. Your spiritual companion" sounds a promising title. I'm keen to promote anything good that comes my way as a parish priest so this was one piece of mail I put aside to read over coffee. Inside the four page leaflet produced by the Redemptorists, there is an article about how it is not easy to be a Catholic, accompanied by a related "Hot topic" piece. Laurence England has kindly typed them out so you can read both articles over at The Bones.
The first article includes a disturbing account of Lucy Russell's response to a question about Catholic sex education which implies that her school gave no distinctively Catholic teaching at all. The sidebar article talks about the ordination of women, encouraging people to decide what they think about it. At the foot of the article is a link to the Catholic Women's Ordination website. How either of these pieces is supposed to help Catholics to prepare spiritually for the Papal Visit is beyond me. It might have been helpful to point out that the teaching of the Church that she has no power to ordain women to the priesthood is to be held definitively as part of the deposit of faith.
In its campaign for the ordination of women, CWO asserts the additional heresy that Our Lord did not ordain anyone to the priesthood. Answering the objection many pose to their position, namely that Jesus didn't ordain women, the CWO resources page says "He didn't ordain men either! This came later in the Church's history." It is worth noting that the teaching of the Council of Trent that Jesus did in fact ordain priests, and that it was heresy to say the contrary, was referenced by Vatican II (Presbyterorum Ordinis n.2) when it spoke of the institution of the priesthood by Christ. Although I expect many members of CWO are also part of the Stand Up for Vatican II campaign, I doubt that this little detail from the letter of Vatican II will bother them unduly.
Since the leaflet which promotes the CWO website is produced by the Redemptorists (and is accompanied with another leaflet offering free copies of the Tablet) it may be apposite to quote the preface that their founder St Alphonsus wrote to his book "The history of heresies and their refutation"
Heresy has been called a cancer: "It spreads like a cancer" (2 Tim 2.17); for as a cancer infects the whole body, so heresy infects the whole soul, the mind, the heart, the intellect, and the will. It is also called a plague, for it not only infects the person contaminated with it, but those who associate with him, and the fact is, that the spread of this plague in the world has injured the Church more than idolatry, and this good mother has suffered more from her own children than from her enemies.Reuters reports that CWO has spent £15,000 on placing advertisements on the side of buses asking Pope Benedict to ordain women. The bus adverts shown here, asking Pope Benedict to do other things that he can't do, are from Acts of the Apostasy blog (see: CRONES Across The Pond) There is also a comment about the fifteen grand:
That's a lot of money wasted on demanding the impossible. Not to mention I'm fairly certain Pope Benedict won't have his mind suddenly swayed by a whiny complaint displayed on the side of the bus.The Mulier Fortis drills down into the links with Catholic Voices for Reform, Catholics for a Changing Church etc.
8 comments:
The Redemptorists here in Ireland preach a lot about women to be 'included' in the Church. ie, women priest. Professor Haring is their idol. In an article in National Catholic Reporter, July 17, 1998 by Charles E. Curran, the following was said by Curran -
"In 1968, he publicly disagreed with the encyclical Humanae Vitae, which condemned artificial contraception, I will never forget my own exhilaration when Haring readily agreed to sign the statement of dissent from Humanae Vitae that we had proposed here in the United States the day after the encyclical was issued.
His reaction to Pope John Paul IFs 1993 encyclical Veritatis Splendor was especially strong. "Let us ask our pope: Are you sure your confidence in your supreme human, professional and religious competence in matters of moral theology and particularly sexual ethics is truly justified? ... We should let the pope know that we are wounded by the many signs of his rooted distrust and discouraged by the manifold structures of distrust which he has allowed to be established."
If only they knew the grace that flows from obedience. Even if you disagree, by holy obedience the heart is moulded into a disciples heart. The Redemptorists are becoming a law unto themselves, led by the ego, not by the Spirit.
Quite right, Father. These people should, in the finest Catholic tradition, be burnt at the stake.
Well no, I wouldn't say that. But a Note from the Bishops' Doctrinal Commission explaining Catholic teaching and making it clear that that these errors are contrary to Catholic doctrine would be good.
(Except that we don't have a doctrinal commission...)
With regard to the poster on the London Buses, I believe that Peter Thatchell and his gang are putting up a specifically anti Papal poster on 40 Buses, those that run round the Westminster Cathedral ~Area !
I have many times had occasion to be truly saddened by the decisions of and views expressed by Redemptorists in Ireland, notwithstanding the obvious faith, sincerity, and good will demonstrated by many individual members of that order.
Thanks be to God the Redemptorists on the Orkneys are now fully and unequiocally within the Church! Hopefully, they are a sign of good things to come. We should all pray for the intercession of St. Alphonsus for the restoration of orthodoxy to the order at large.
The frustrating thing about all these heresies spreading is to think what force of good all these obviously energetic (one would wish a little less so!) people could do if they were fighting on the side of truth and the genuine charity which can never be divorced from truth.
I'm very new to the Church, but I have to ask these few questions/comments. Please excuse my ignorance.
1. Has any action (targeted catechesis, explicit condemnation, excommunication, etc) been taken against the members of Catholic Women's Ordination by Church authorities and if not, why not?
2. Why don't these 'heretics' just leave the Church voluntarily? I knew a High Anglican female priest who at least recognised and accepted that the Catholic Church would never ordain women. The problem with these people who want to 'reform' the Church is that they pick and choose doctrine at will, much like the Protestants have an erroneous tendency to do. They believe that the Catholic Church is the only true Church of God as founded by Jesus Christ (otherwise why wouldn't they leave immediately?) and yet they ignore the clearly different - although equal - roles intended for men and women, as is evident throughout the Old and New Testaments (and not just in the writings of the liberals' bogeyman St Paul but also in the Gospels).
3. Why do such people insist that 'modernising' (i.e. by ordaining women, encouraging homosexuality, etc) the Church is the only way for it to survive and grow? It seems that the weaker and more diluted the CofE becomes in terms of doctrine, the smaller its congregations become. In contrast, the Evangelical Christians (heretical in a liturgical and sacramental way) seem to be having the most success by far in Britain at least, and they possess the most extreme examples of what liberals would call 'right-wing' beliefs. The doctrinal discipline exerted over the Evangelicals by their ministers ironically exceeds that seen in the honestly hierarchical Catholic Church and, in my opinion, is deeply unattractive in terms of content, simply for the huge errors that Evangelical Christianity has as its 'deposit of faith'. However, their discipline is to be admired, since it is their strict discipline - in addition to the rather bizarre imitations of rock concerts that they worship through - that seems to be winning people over in much greater numbers than the liturgically and sacerdotally traditional churches.
My take on this whole issue is that the Church hasn't done enough to emphasise the fact that all the members of the Church have equally valuable but fundamentally different roles to play, be they lay or ordained, male or female, rich or poor, European or Asian, etc. People don't campaign for an integration of the male and female football leagues because they recognise it as self-evident that the two sexes cannot compete at the same level. The problem with the priesthood is that it seems to have lost what could be called its masculine image and is no longer seen as something that only men can do, exacerbated by the ordination of women by the Protestants which makes it seem that women are already actively 'as good as' their male equivalents in other denominations. The existence of female altar servers in the Catholic Church probably hasn't helped this trend, even though I don't personally have a problem with this particular modern custom.
There are two things that need to be done in my opinion:
1. Something needs to be done to restore to the priesthood its masculinity, a characteristic that was once so evident in the resolute monks of the Early Middle Ages, the heroic missionaries of the Franciscans, Dominicans and Jesuits, not to mention of course the band of hard-working men who first followed the call of Our Lord, Himself a manual labourer.
2. Women need to be reminded of their own special and distinct roles within the Church that cannot be fulfilled by men. This should be coupled with a reassertion of the unique role to be played by the laity, reminding them that they are equal to deacons, priests and bishops already and do not need to be ordained in order to live and serve as full Christians.
To Fr Tim. Kev asks an interesting question about why the Church does not condemn the organisations promoting heresies. You might like to deal with this...perhaps in you Catholic Herald articles. I put a few points on my own blog in partial reply as I find the topic interesting myself.
I realise this is a bit of a post resurrection, but I came across my post here and realised that I may have made it sound as if the Redemptorist order at large apart from one group and scattered invididuals were all heterodox, or that all decisions and at least perceived views that I may have been saddened by qualify as heresy (I say perceived because there is in my mind also now some uncertainty as to how definitively I know said views). I cannot remember how aware I was of this at the time, but in reading my words now, I see that they may certainly imply that. So for the sake of both justice and charity, I should point out that I don't have the basis for saying that the order as an order is not sound and do not wish to do that. The problem might well rather be with groups and individuals in the order making some odd decisions. Apologies to the Redemptorist order and good Redemptorists everywhere!
Post a Comment