Reprinted from
Our Lady of the Rosary
Parish Bulletin
July AD 1985
On Catholic Unity
[The scene opens in a rarely used confessinal.]
Penitent: “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. It has been about three weeks
since my last confession. Uh ... Father? Are you there Father?”
Confessor: “Oh! Sorry! We don’t get many in confession any more. I must have
fallen off....”
Penitent: “Father, it has been three weeks since my last confession. I don’t
exactly know how to put this, but the main thing I have to confess is that I ...
Uh. ... I have found myself getting angry with priests lately ... even muttering
about them under my breath.”
Confessor: “You must be aware that the Catholic priest represents our Lord
Jesus Christ Himself. Even if a particular priest has a certain fault, you sill
must show him the respect which his high calling demands—he is another Christ.
Do you understand that?”
Penitent: “Well, yes, Father, I do. And perhaps that’s the problem. I always
did believe that the priest was just about the closest thing to Christ here on
earth. But ... Well ...Now, I don’t mean you Father, but the other priests in
this parish don’t seem to think of themselves as being like Christ.”
Confessor: “Now, what would make you say a thing like that? And especially
here in church?”
Penitent: Well, Father Bob doesn’t look like any kind of priest I have ever
seen before—Oh. I understand that priests have to relax too, but those white
tights of his—I’ve even seen him coming into church during Mass wearing them.
And, once, he even gave out Communion wearing them. The only thing that
attracted attention away from him was the lady in jeans and a T-shirt who was
also handing out Hosts. And he doesn’t even like to be called Father—‘just
call me plain Bob,’ he is always telling people.”
Confessor: “Well, now....”
Penitent: “And your other priest, Father Joe, doesn’t come across much like
another Christ either. And the outfit he wears for his children’s clown
liturgy isn’t the half of it—the things he says are worse.”
Confessor: “We do have to get used to new ways now. You know that in recent
years the Church has decided that we should be more free—more open to dialogue.
You mustn’t criticize an individual priest if his views are not exactly like
your own.”
Penitent: “Father, I am not a picky person, but sometimes I just can’t stand to
come to church anymore. I don’t want to go home swearing about the priest, or
his banjo, or his politics—I just don’t know if I can take it much longer!”
Confessor: “Now, God will give you the graces you need if you will just
cooperate with them. Perhaps you need to be more careful about which Mass you
attend. You might try coming to one of the earlier Masses—the young men don’t
like to have to rise too early. If you come to my Mass, or go over to Saint
Eustace’s for Father Black’s 7:00 AM Mass, I think you will be more
comfortable.”
Penitent: “But why must I do that Father? Isn’t there any unity in the
Church anymore? Why are things so radically different from church to church or
from priest to priest?”
Confessor: “But, indeed, there is unity. Each one of our priests is united
with the Bishop, and the Bishop, in turn, is united with the Pope in Rome. If
it were otherwise we wouldn’t even be permitted to say Mass in a Catholic
Church. You really mustn’t let externals make you think the Church is not
united.”
Penitent: “Oh, Father, it is so frustrating! At least before I moved here six
months ago, we could attend Mass at the Ramada Inn. A priest would come there
every Sunday and offer the old Latin Mass. That was real unity—it was the same
Mass I heard as a child, or growing up, or when I travelled to other places,
even to other countries. And there were never any surprises. No Father Bob
popping up out of a trunk at the beginning of Mass!”
Confessor: “Now, that’s very serious. You know that those priests who use the
old Mass are not recognized by our Bishop. Did you mention attending their Mass
in your previous confessions?”
Penitent: “Confess attending Mass? You have got to be kidding! And as for
your Bishop, if he tolerates the things I have seen around here, I don’t think I
want to be in union with him!
[Our scene fades out.]
The
Membership Card
This exchange between our hypothetical confessor and penitent is not
particularly far-fetched. It goes without saying that we did not quote from any
particular person’s actual confession, but the dialog is built up out of the
experiences of many traditional Catholics. Of particular interest is Father
Confessor’s understanding of unity in our Catholic Church.
Almost every traditional Catholic who has had a confrontation with a modernist
priest or bishop has been told by them that his opponents are in union with Rome
(no matter how crazy the things they do or say), and that he is not similarly in
union, and that he is therefore not really a Catholic. Simply writing on the
letterhead of a traditional Catholic organization often brings the condemnation
of “not acknowledging the authority of the Pope.” What the Modernists fail to
understand, or will not admit, is that there is more to being “in union with
Rome” than having escaped excommunication or not having been formally removed
from office.
What might seem to be the most obvious evidence of being “in union with Rome” is
having a place on the “organization chart,” or, so to speak, being a “card
carrying member.” This is the kind of union which our Father Confessor and his
associates have, and which is generally enjoyed by the Modernist clergy.
To
be accurate, we must digress and indicate that we are considering two distinct
groups of men. The “Father Confessors” are basically good priests, trying to
maintain their orthodox faith, but not wishing to cause a great deal of trouble
with their more “progressive” bishops. Often they are, themselves, disturbed
about the things going on around them, but they don’t want to disturb the status
quo (which includes their pensions). “Father Confessor” offers the new Mass as
reverently as is possible, prays the Office, even preaches a good dose of real
spirituality, but tries to stay out of trouble. But sharing the “organization
chart” with “Father Confessor,” and carrying the same “membership card” is our
newer type of priest, “Father Radical.” Father R. may simply want to admit the
remarried divorced and the perverts to Holy Communion. He may be a
middle‑of‑the‑roader, denying the efficacy of the Sacraments and the Real
Presence. Or he may be more “with it,” denying altogether the divinity of our
Lord Jesus Christ. Yet, even though he fits into one of these categories, he
still gets to carry the prized membership card identifying him as a Roman
Catholic priest.
Loyal Catholics—those who believe and practice the Faith as they learned it
years ago—may evaluate these facts and decide that the Pope is himself a
Modernist. “After all,” they may conclude, “how else could the infallible
successor of Saint Peter keep all of these heretics on the payroll?” Some
unfortunates have followed this line of thinking and become convinced that the
Pope is not really the Pope!
If
we assume for the moment that the Pope is the Pope, and that he is orthodox in
his beliefs, we still have the burden of explaining why he has done nothing
about “Father Radical.” Why is it that “clown priests” are recognized as Roman
Catholics in good standing, while traditional priests are lucky to escape
censure for offering the unequivocal Mass at the Ramada Inn? Perhaps the Holy
Father is attempting to avoid another rupture in the Church like the Protestant
“Reformation.” Five hundred years ago the Popes excommunicated the heresiarchs
of the “reformed” churches, but lost half of the Catholic world. A
conscientious Pope is unlikely to do the same thing. For good or for bad we
have seen that the Holy See will continue to recognize priests and bishops as
Catholics unless they are blatant in defying His Holiness. While we certainly
can understand the concern of the Holy Father, we also feel it reasonable to
question the value of the Roman Catholic “membership card.” It has ceased to
have any value as a testimonial of one who holds and practices the true Catholic
Faith.
Catholic unity does not begin and end with organizational structures. As
Christians we are bound to consider two far more important notions: “What is it
that we believe?” and “How is it that we behave ourselves?”
Christian Belief
It
has long been recognized that there is an intellectual basis which determines
whether an individual is a Catholic or not. The Church has always held that in
order to be saved one must accept the freely given gift of Faith. “He that
believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be
condemned” (Mark 16:16). Indeed, we often refer to the organization Itself
as “The Catholic Faith.” What is this “Faith,” if it is not belief in the
things revealed by God in Sacred Scripture and Tradition? If a person refuses
to accept the divinely revealed truth—in whole or in part—he simply cannot be a
Catholic. It is not required that all Catholics be theologians; experts in each
and every item of revelation—what is requires is a humble acceptance of these
truths as they are defined by the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the
Church.
In
recent years, whenever an article of the Faith has come up for public
discussion, the Modernist have been quick to trot out their “Catholic
theologians” to explain that the Church has no particular “fixed opinion” about
the belief in question. The newspapers and the networks tend to cooperate with
extensive coverage. While there may well be room for variation among
theologians on some topics, there simply cannot be diversity once the
Magisterium has defined a particular matter. A person who cannot accept such
ideas as the divinity of Christ, the immorality of abortion, or the Real
Presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, simply cannot be a Catholic—he
cannot because the unity of belief is fundamental to the Catholic Faith.
Modernists would have us believe that divinely revealed truth is subject to
change—that God is evolving, and that what is true for us today may not be true
in the future. They tend to separate the events of Faith from those of History,
as though, for instance, the Resurrection might be real in the faith of a
particular generation, while being unreal in history. At the fringe of the
Modernist movement we find those who not only attribute the imperfection of
change to God, but who go so far as to claim that man is evolving into God! Of
course, as Catholics, we know that God is unchanging, and that we are His
creatures, not His creators. We know too that such foolish thinking is
usually the result of sinful pride, or perhaps lust.
For those who believe exclusively in the importance of the “Catholic membership
card,” it is instructive to read what Saint Augustine had to say in his writing
On Baptism:
For in all points in which they think with us, they also are in
communion with us, and only are severed from us in those points in which
they dissent from us. For contact and disunion are not to be measured
by different laws in the case of material or spiritual affinities. For
as union of bodies arises from continuity of position, so in the
agreement of wills there is a kind of contact between souls. If,
therefore, a man who has severed himself from unity wishes to do
anything different from that which had been impressed on him while in
the state of unity, in this point he does sever himself, and is no
longer a part of the united whole; but wherever he desires to conduct
himself as is customary in the state of unity, in which he himself
learned and received the lessons which he seeks to follow, in these
points he remains a member, and is united to the corporate whole.
Augustine’s words
should be a valuable lesson to those who insist upon remaining members of the
local parish or diocese, no matter how deeply it may be mired in heresy, but
will do nothing to help with the preservation of the traditional Faith.
Catholic
Practice
Ideas have practical consequences in the real world. The things we believe
affect the things we do. For example, belief or dis-belief in the doctrine that
our Lord actually took for Himself a human body will have an obvious effect on
our attitudes toward our own bodies and out respect for the physical rights of
others. Belief that God Himself inhabited a human body cannot but help
influence our moral notions of things like temperance, sexuality, and the right
to life. Similarly, dis-belief would have an opposite effect.
The recent visit of Pope John Paul II to the Netherlands points up this
relationship between belief and practice. Among the demands of the radical
Dutch “Catholics” was the call for Church acceptance of “liberation” theology,
fornication, divorce, abortion, and homosexuality. To the radical Dutch these
were not simply academic concerns—the crazier ones were literally demanding the
death of the Pope! (An interesting side note: The National Catholic Register,
itself a journal of the left, described one of the Dutch spokespersons, a
Catherina Halkes as “taking seriously the ‘witchcraft’ and ‘mother goddess’
movements”!)
Of
course, none of this is really new. When Christianity was just beginning,
nearly two thousand years ago, Saint James told us:
So
faith also, if it have not works, is dead in itself. But some man will
say: Thou hast faith, and I have works: show me thy faith without works;
and I will show thee, by works, my faith. Thou believest that there is
one God. Thou dost well: the devils also believe and tremble. But wilt
thou know, O vain man, that faith without works is dead?
Not only are Faith and Good Works necessary for salvation—they really are
inseparable. Man cannot do good if he intentionally disbelieves the truth. He
cannot have a genuine belief if he acts in a way inconsistent with the faith.
Belief,
Behavior, and Church Unity
It
should be obvious to Catholics of the latter part of the twentieth century that
it is not always possible to have organizational unity, while still preserving
Catholic Belief and Practice. Sometimes we find that those who should be the
very shepherds of the flock are. themselves, the occasion of sin against Faith
and Morals.
We
must be careful to acknowledge that there is an essential difference between the
Church and Her leaders. The rather modern Jesuit, Father Karl Rahner, wrote,
quite to the point:
The
promise that the gates of hell will never prevail against the Church
does not promise her constant visible, "empirical" strength and
immunity, but promises the power which is God's alone in the weakness
and vulnerability of the men who are her members. When men feel safe and
assured because "nothing can ever really happen to the Church," then
they always find out sooner or later that indeed nothing can "happen" to
the Church, who is in God's hand, but quite a lot can happen to the men
who out of idleness or timidity do nothing and rely on this.
“Quite a lot,” it is true, can happen to those who rely completely on that
“Catholic membership card” to guarantee salvation. We can, quite literally,
lose our souls if we give up our critical faculty, and along with it our Faith
and Morals. The historically minded may wish to look up the account of Saint
Athanasius, to see that it has happened before: In defending the Faith against
the Arians, who denied the reality of the Incarnation, this saint of the fourth
century was persecuted by most of his fellow bishops, and was even condemned by
the Pope’s legates—he had his membership card cancelled, his “ticket punched,”
if anyone ever did. But we all know that it was Saint Athanasius who was proven
correct, while the bishops and papal curia had to change their position. And
all Athanasius was doing was maintaining the Traditional Catholic Faith, which
held that the Second Person of the Trinity, God Almighty, became truly man.
While we have seen that the institutional bureaucracy can sometimes be at
variance with the Catholic Faith, this state of affairs is by no means
desirable. Indeed, it is deplorable. Let us be sure that we believe and
practice the True Faith. And then, let us pray for, and call upon the Pope to
restore Catholic orthodoxy in the organization of the Church. May God give him
the grace to restore the true Mass, true Belief, and true Morality throughout
the Catholic Church.
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