And you can take it as read that it is now on the official “banned” list, together with all the heretical opinions therein.
As I commented earlier on this blog, since Fr Peter Dresser is a priest of the Diocese of Bathurst, his bishop, Patrick Dougherty, is the one who is responsible for any disciplinary measures. It seems to me that he has done this admirably in the following statement:
Media Release – 10th November 2008
An unpublished book written by Father Peter Dresser, Parish Priest of Coonamble in the Diocese of Bathurst, has been receiving a certain distribution and publicity.
With regard to the Divinity of Jesus, the Virginity of Mary and the Resurrection of Jesus, Father Dresser has re-affirmed to me, and intends to endorse by a public statement, his adherence to these and to all the teaching of the Catholic Church. In the book, however, such foundational truths of our Christian Catholic Faith were not affirmed: readers could rightly conclude that some were denied and that the views expressed about them were heretical.
The watering down or emptying out of Christian teaching is not the path towards rendering Catholic doctrine more deeply known by people of faith or acceptable to sceptical people.
Whatever Father Dresser’s stated good intentions and motives, stances taken in this book with regard to Jesus Christ and Mary are not acceptable: they are alien to Christian authenticity and to the fulfillment of the teaching mission of priests.
+ Patrick Dougherty
Bishop of Bathurst
The important things to note are:
1) “With regard to the Divinity of Jesus, the Virginity of Mary and the Resurrection of Jesus”, Fr Peter has “re-affirmed” to his Bishop, “and intends to endorse by a public statement his adherence to these [doctrines] and to all the teaching of the Catholic Church”.
Is this “public statement” the one issued yesterday? In which case, it is fair to say that one could hope more specific recantation of the specific errors in his published writing and radio interview.
2) “Whatever Father Dresser’s stated good intentions and motives”, the “stances taken in [his] book with regard to Jesus Christ and Mary are not acceptable: they are alien to Christian authenticity and to the fulfillment of the teaching mission of priests.”
Spot on, your Lordship. By publishing this book, Fr Dresser has specifically abused his priestly “teaching mission”.
3) “Readers could rightly conclude that [in this book] some [foundational truths of our Christian Catholic Faith] were denied and that the views expressed about them were heretical.”
That seems a fair judgement. Although I don’t know what the “could” means. “Would” would be more to the point.
4) And finally: “The watering down or emptying out of Christian teaching is not the path towards rendering Catholic doctrine more deeply known by people of faith or acceptable to sceptical people.”
Which is just what Pope Benedict said in his General Audience last Wednesday. Hint to theologians: Your task is to explicate and clarify the doctrines and dogmas of the Faith, not to “go beyond doctrine and dogma” (vis a vis the Starship Enterprise) to some point of your own fantasy.
Yes, Coyne would render uncertainty his idol.
Making uncertainty into an idol, and then worshipping this most convenient and Californian of deities, which smiles inanely on every peccadillo and favourite moral failing, is to erect for oneself a god not worth doing anything for.
It is a true deus otiosus: a lazy, indifferent god who cares as little for one as one would for it.
The trouble at base with Coyne’s thesis is that it would produce at worst Spong’s complete evisceration of Christianity, which is a sort of secularism that worships itself, and at best inculcate the sort of boring, banal, mediocre, suburban, lowest-common-denominator petit bourgeois laziness and cult of niceness and inane jokes and smiles that afflicts Australian parishes. Such is death warmed up, and makes anyone with a mind and will wish to run out and vomit, after the example of Our Lord’s devastating critique of the smug Laodiceans (Apoc. iii, 14-22) – “you are lukewarm… and I’ll spew you out of my mouth”.
Why is it that philistines rule in Aussie parishes? Why is it all so boring? If this is a taste of Coyne’s medicine for the Church, let alone if he wants WATAC pseudo-liturgies or the sort of childish cringeworthy coloured-candle-and-coloured-material navel-gazing sessions that ‘progressive’ types think the acme of worship, God help us!
Such attempts are the nadir of twenty centuries of Christian adoration.
Louise,
I have never proposed that “marriage” is the panacea for sexual abuse. I think one of the problems (as to why the Church has become so irrelevant in the minds of so many) is that our priests live an artificial life. For all the talk of “poverty” (diocesan priests do not in fact take a vow of poverty, that only applies to order priests and religious) being a priest is really a very “comfortable life” with “ordination-to-grave security” (provided you toe-the-party-line and do not question “the system/the culture/etc”). Priests might think that seeing their nieces and nephews for Sunday or Christmas lunch gives them some insight into family life. It is a very different matter to being a mother, or a father, with three, four or six teenagers screaming at one another and YOU are responsible for their welfare 24/7 for somewhere between 18 and 25 years. I honestly don’t listen much anymore to parents “on the way through”. A lot of the people in the circles I mix in have raised children through to adulthood. They followed all the “neat” instructions coming from Rome. The reality is that it takes about 25 years to work out what the shortcomings in all those “neat little rules” were. Our kids have taught us a lot.
Listen to a lot of those voices of both men and women on Catholica — now in their 60s, 60s and 80s who have “really seen life”. They are no longer deluded by the fantasies. Our priests, unfortunately, never experience any of that. Their shirts are basically ironed and put away for them. They don’t have to worry inordinately about where the next meal is coming from, how they can afford to pay for the kid’s schools books, or the next excursion, or ensure their kids have the iPod, or other “latest piece of technology” that all their friends, or consumer society is telling them “they’ve gotta have”. You can’t experience that unless you have the respinsibility 24/7 relentlessly for 18-25 years — and, if anything the time is extending as kids are leaving home a lot later these days than they did in the past.
In short the “issue” is not sexual relations, the issue isn’t even male-female relationships — the “issue” that sets priests apart from where “most people are at” is this very practical and humungously mundane stuff of how does a person intelligently, compassionately and lovingly guide one’s own offspring through to intelligent, balanced and wholistic adult personhood? The “hard bit” is not with “little kids” — the battle only begins in late adolescence for many. You can rail against Baby=Boomers for all you like. Many of these people who have become sceptical are in fact from the generations that preceded us “baby boomers”. We “baby boomers” are their children.
A further “problem” is that going with this culture of “clericalism” they (the priests and the ones who are supposed to be our spiritual guides) honestly have been schooled, or inculturated, to believe they “have all the answers” or “Rome has all the answers”. A lot of them are almost totally incapable of even “listening” to what parents and the members of their flock are saying. They literally have no concept whatsoever that “God might be speaking through the members of their flock”. The “culture” that they bought into on “joining up”, and which has been carefully cultivated at every point along the way, is that “wisdom” comes exclusively “downward from Rome” — we’re not going to learn anything from “listening to ‘the people’ who are perceived to be ‘below’ them”. The people are not perceived to be the source of any wisdom whatsoever. Their role is to “pray up, pay up, shut up and listen to us! We, and the institution, is the ONLY source of wisdom that matters. Most people have become jack of that. They have ceased turning up on Sundays — or any of the sacraments much.
The older parent and grandparent generations, through the “lived experience” of, principally, actually raising their own families — and their kids not swallowing the old myths — they have “learned the hard way” that the fairy tales down work anymore.
Stick around long enough and watch the families still trying all the conservative stuff of heavy discipline, homeschooling and what not. My experience is “down the other end” you end up with one of two outcomes: screwed up and extremely rebellious adult children or you see adult children who have completely had the spirit ripped completely out of them and they are equally screwed up adults in the opposite direction. The ones that end up “balanced” and “well-rounded” tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
The world hungers today for spiritual guides who can “really teach” and who do know what they are talking about. They hunger for a Church that can communicate again — and communicate some very practical stuff.
Cheers, Brian
Keep it up, Joshua. I’m enjoying the entertainment immensely. It’s wonderful listening to all this “ancient wisdom” you are so exclusively privvy to.
Cheers, Brian
Learn to spell – privy not privvy.
I don’t like being mocked either.
You should easily recognize what I’m repeating as not at all original but what I can but try and say in defence of the Faith.
And you still owe me an apology for your rude insinuation.
My apologies. It was Christine not Louise who made the remark about joining the Church in 1997.
Not sure if it will earn me any more bona fides, Brian, but Christine grew up with one Catholic and one Lutheran parent and got to see both communions in detail before her conversion.
I had plenty of exposure to the Catholic way of life through my Catholic father (in Europe, by the way) and through my marriage into a Catholic family. I attended Mass often with my Catholic in-laws before I formally converted.
I’m not a novice.
As a Lutheran my great heritage was the Sacred Scriptures and their place of primacy in the Church, which David also acknowledges. I do not view the Pope as divine (the way you carry on one would think the Holy Father speaks infallibly every twenty minutes). My Lord Jesus Christ is the One who defines my faith. But I do acknowledge the place of the Petrine ministry in the life of the Church and am grateful for the role of the papacy.
As for God speaking through Creation, which is very, very dear to me (having lived on three continents, including Australia before I was even 12 years old has given me a lot of exposure to Creation), Holy Writ tells us that Creation, too, is in bondage to sin and needs redemption, a little matter that has been forgotten and has led to a great deal of pantheism across the Christian spectrum.
If people don’t turn up for the Sacraments, more fool them – though the hopelessly uninspiring poor level of preaching and celebration thereof may have something to do with it.
Yes, I do hope the aCatholic types die off quick and leave us in peace.
Thanks, Christine, and my apologies again for the confusion I created. I appreciated hearing a little of your story.
The blather about priests is certainly in some ways true – being a parent is no joke, and some priests do fix up for themselves a cushy lazy life – but a priest should really lead a hard life of self-sacrifice, very different from that of a family man or what have you, but one that should be as full of work and effort, else your criticism is exactly on target.
There are two types of priests: those who work and those who don’t.
No one likes a priest who works so little he’s a scandal to his hard-working congregation.
Now, my quibble is with the inherent assumption that putting in the hard yards with one’s family somehow privileges one, whereas, O scandal to modern man, it is the constant teaching down the ages that the celibate life is a higher state in and of itself (tho’ a lazy priest certainly isn’t living up to it and is probably worse off spiritually than his hardworking parishioners).
Here we have Americanism: downplaying the supernatural, exalting the natural. Marriage is good, very good; but dedication of oneself totally to God for the sake of the Kingdom is better. If one’s dedication to God then falters and pans out as a comfortable bachelor’s life sans wife but blessed with TV, whisky, car and easygoing leisure, then it is a contradiction and a scandal, of course.
I compare and contrast these sorts of lazy priests – liberals, all of them – with the very hardworking, prayerful, sacrificing, priests I know who are conservative and traditional. They are the ones I look up to; I wish I were not so lazy as I am, and could work as hard and pray as hard as they.
In my experience, every supposedly nice friendly liberal priest has turned out to be boring or mean or domineering or otherwise less than ideal; while all the supposedly scary rigid priests I was warned of turned out to be friendly, humorous, decent, hardworking priests who moreover love God and strive for holiness.
This led to me to pursue the path of fidelity to Catholicism, rather than continue in my own life to water down the faith to nothing and live badly.
Liberals in my experience are bitter and unpleasant and lazy; their opposites, the ones faithful to Catholic Faith, are happy and kind and good, and have endured much from the former category.
By their fruits ye shall know them.
And where in all this is the universal call to holiness?
We must at all costs avoid the temptation to conform what we believe to what we would like to believe, else we shall be ensnared in the toils of the world, the flesh and the devil; we must be truly countercultural by reading the signs of the times, not to give in to the culture of death around us, but to see that the only answer is in Jesus Christ and His Church, and to conform our beliefs to the truth that she received from Him and still, if we be not hardhearted, seeks to pass on to us.
Fr Dresser’s confused backflip is a case in point: it appears he was taking on various rehashes of German Protestant Biblical critiques that denied the truth of several fundamental Christian beliefs, but has – one must wonder how sincerely, though in charity we think the best – now come back to a more orthodox belief based upon Divine Revelation.
David, what say you round all this up and bring it to an end? I suggest humbly that over sixty posts should be enough, particularly as Mr Coyne has his own nest elsewhere and can post as he likes there without let or hindrance.
I have acted on my beliefs? (A good bit of the above happened during what is night over here, and following a popular custom I slept through it.)
The beliefs I acted upon in leaving the Catholic Church were not those I hold now. They were the beliefs taught to me by the Catholic Church, now nowhere upheld by any faction claiming to be in accord with the reforms of Vatican II.
I see no such position on the part of Mr Coyne, CA or its American counterparts, and would therefore expect no such action.
The final nail in the coffin was not the carryings-on of that crowd, but reading the texts of the novus ordo itself, in Latin, something more violently opposed to Catholic teaching and the teaching in action known as liturgy than anything mustered by CA types or your dreaded Baby Boomers (itself the product not of them but their parents’ generation, one of the last of whom now sits upon the papal throne).
At least they present a clear and consistent understanding of the Catholic faith vis a vis the lived perception of life, and how that understanding takes its place in the ongoing history of such understandings.
They do not engage in all sorts of mental gymanstics, trying to trade on the credibility of one such understanding, the preconciliar church, to establish their new postconciliar church, in fact, what am I saying, deny that the new is REALLY new or the change is REALLY a change at all. Most certainly they do not engage in the utter mendaciousness to invent out of thin air against all history and precedent a rite which is one rite in two forms, one allowed as a museum piece after forty years of kicking the ass of anyone who did not kiss theirs to celebrate it, on condition that their new rite be acknowledged as the ordinary form of the same rite it trashes.
Not to mention such abominations as the Joint Declaration, where we all agree except where we don’t which doesn’t meant that we don’t. God bless me sideways, it would be easier to just say Joseph Smith really had the plates from the angel and the Urim and Thummim to translate them than to follow this shadow and fantasy, out of the truth into shadow and fantasy indeed.
As to clerical life, how indeed shall a man manage the family of God if he cannot manage his own family is not solved by not allowing the man a family at all, thereby managing nothing!
Hell yes wrap it up — all opposition not being addressed in substantive terms but, there being a priori no possible basis for opposition, passed off as the fruit of bitterness, hatred, laziness, age or whatever.
PE,
I’ve read the Novus Ordo texts in Latin too, and can’t honestly see the abominations you contend to be present there. Could you give some examples?
The beliefs I acted upon in leaving the Catholic Church were not those I hold now.
Well, I won’t presume to argue with you over what you’ve done in your life, PE! I just thought that whenever you have come to a conclusion (eg “the Catholic Church is not what it says it is,” or “Christianity is not the real deal I’ll become Jew”) you have acted and followed wherever the line of your reasoning took you. At least, that’s the impression I’m under. Obviously, you know better than I in this matter.
At any rate, a person ought to act in accordance with the conclusions they reach.
Good onya, Brian. I love how your kids have “taught you a lot” but you won’t listen to me because my kids are not grown up! Good grief! What kind Universe do you live in?
Talk about marginalising people and ostracising them yada yada; nobody does that better than liberals.
And what have your children taught you, Brian? That sex before marriage and the obvious increase in abortions, which must go along with that, are just ducky? Or perhaps that the benefits of no-fault divorce are the best thing since sliced bread? Or that best way to worship God is by not going to Mass on Sunday? What?
And where do you draw the line, exactly for minimal belief in the Catholic Church? Should a priest who openly teaches there is no God at all still be permitted to live on the parishioner’s Church donations?
It’s hard to get a lookin on such long series of posts, but I just have to say … well, I don’t have to … that I just don’t get you PE. I like that in a person!
I’ve contributed to a couple of DBs for quite a few years now but I still feel like a neophyte in terms of how they fit into the complex world of human communication.
This kind of forum relies heavily on the whims and fancies of the ‘blogmeister’ — kinda obvious really — and results in people responding positively or negatively to those pearls.
We are, even more than on a DB I’d suggest, disembodied opinions.
We can ‘let it rip’ confident in the knowledge that our salvos are directed at another disembodied opinion.
I’d be interested in other’s perspectives, but hey, this is not my playground!
Stick around long enough and watch the families still trying all the conservative stuff of heavy discipline, homeschooling and what not.
I’m not watching it, Brian, I’m doing it. Apparently you think I think if I do all these things I’ll guarantee that my kids will turn out as little Louise clones. Where do you get these ideas? Because I am a woman, I am a realist (according to the beloved Chesterton). I know perfectly well that no matter how I bring up my kids, they will end up making their own choices. It *may* happen, however, that those choices are not dissimilar to mine after all. Your hubris beggars belief. I choose to raise my kids in accordance with what I think is best for them, not to churn out little sausages in a factory. It would sadden me to see them take up the Secularist heresy, but given that it’s the predominant world view in our society and grants licence to commit one’s favourite mortal sins, it would hardly be *surprising* if they did so. And if they did so, it would not prove the New Morality right, just more attractive.
The blather about priests is certainly in some ways true – being a parent is no joke, and some priests do fix up for themselves a cushy lazy life
This has always been true and is largely irrelevant. Certainly such priests are more of a hindrance than a help in spreading The Gospel, but the questions are simply whether or not:
1. God exists
2. Jesus is both God and Man (and which Fr Dresser seems to think is not the case)
3. The Catholic Church is the Church that Jesus founded.
*If* all these are true, then lazy or bad priests are irrelevant. And *if* they are true then Fr Dresser needs a boot up the bum for leading his flock astray and sent to the nearest Centrelink.
Hell yes wrap it up — all opposition not being addressed in substantive terms but, there being a priori no possible basis for opposition, passed off as the fruit of bitterness, hatred, laziness, age or whatever.
Not a lot of *substantive* opposition, from what I can see.
Particularly addressed to David, but also to anyone else who has lasted the distance through this enlightening exchange of vastly different viewpoints…
I’ve been re-reading the thread. There are many points that one could pick up on but I’d particularly like to pick up on this small part of your argument, David, where you respond to the question I posed. Here it is again in full before I respond. (Please note I have also posted this on Catholica as a discussion starter over there. The version on Catholica {LINK] has much more highlighting than I’m able to provide here.
Brian: In the alternative: where is your “proof” that David’s version — which I presume fairly well equates to Benedict’s version — guarantees “salvation” (or however you define the end objective of our religious/spiritual quest)?
Schütz: There is of course no “proof”, Brian. But consider something with which I am sure you will agree. “Salvation” – in any religious or spiritual meaning of the term – cannot be divorced from “truth”. Jesus promised that when we “know the truth” “the truth will set you free”. That is sound. Even modern psychology, which would probably share with you a skepticism about my “problem” (a pathological need for certainty) would agree that “salvation” only comes through true knowledge of yourself and of your situation in life. Spiritual masters have always taught us to know “the true self” in order to find salvation.
So, the Truth will lead to Salvation, no?
The next question is, who can I reliably rely upon to lead me to truth? Myself? That’s the modern answer. As a Christian, however, we would unanimously say “Christ”, for he is, as he said, “The Way, the Truth, and the Life”.
The final question which must be answered then is: How does Christ speak to me? Where can I be assured that I can hear the authentic voice of Christ?
For me the answer is a no-brainer: in the Catholic Church, where Christ’s teaching has been preserved in the Scripture and Tradition of the Church as reliably interpreted by those he authorised to be his apostles and their successors.
Your alternative is some sort of appeal to democracy.
Nope. I don’t buy it.
RESPONSE:
Yes, I agree with your first paragraph. Truth is essentially what leads to Salvation. Truth — to see as God sees —is ultimately what Salvation is. Compared to God, we’re like the classical “elephant in a dark cave”. Our perspective is forever limited by our humanness, and by the bounds (the four dimensions (x, y, z and t) of temporal Creation. It is part of the human condition that we are constantly seeking to break out of our prison and “see as God sees in an unbounded/unconstrained way”.
I also agree with you that the next logical question to pose “who can I reliably rely upon to lead me to truth?”
I then part company with you when you start to provide your answer to that question.
No, the answer is not “myself” — either in the sense of addressing that to Brian Coyne, nor in the sense of addressing it to any individual. And I would submit, that also includes the pope at least in the sense that the papacy has abrogated to itself, or had abrogated to it by a minority, a sense of infallibility and certitude that was never given or commissioned to it even by Jesus Christ himself.
I do believe we only discern “truth” in community — or “in communion”. None of us can discern “truth” alone.. We might be able to discern small parts of “truth” as self-contained individuals but in order to access “ultimate truth”, “Divine truth” or “absolute truth” we can only do so collectively. In other words: we need a church — or some kind of structure which marshalls the “collective quest for truth”. Proceeding logically from that, we also require some “person in authority” who both symbolises the structure and who coordinates the work of that structure and who, importantly and either as an individual or more likely as a chairperson of something like a “college of bishops”, serves an overseeing role to ensure this organisation does not stray from its core objective.
I suspect you would disagree with this David but I would ask you to reflect on it. I think a large part of the reason why so many have “brought down the shutters and stopped listening” or “walked” is for the simple reason that they have this sense — whether they can articulate it or not is a different question (people often have a sense, or intuition, of something is wrong long before they can articulate what is wrong) … they have this sense that we have somehow strayed from the original founding vision of Jesus Christ and the very early Church. The “new” vision which has replaced the old is one where the “truth” is seemingly “revealed” down this “royal telephone” conduit through the Pope alone — he’s “the One”, the “exclusive One”, who interprets Scripture, who interprets history, who interprets “the wisdom of the ages”, who interprets “Divine wisdom” and he then articulates it to “the plebs, God’s people or “the faithful”. THE PEOPLE are not listening to that model anymore. The problem is the model is wrong.
Yes, as I said, we NEED a church and, yes again, we NEED a pope (or some “head of church”. That’s the part of the model which is correct. Where it has run off the rails is in the next step of logicial thinking. The “truth” is not communicated exclusively by God down through the Pope. It is communicated through “all of the people”. Yes, there is a problem with that, in that the message that “comes out he other end” is confused, and confusing. The role of Church and Pope though is essentially, and primarily, one of “making sense of that confusion”. Then articulating our “collective sense” of what “truth” is. Then “archiving” or, in the words of Jesus Christ, “remembering” the accumulated wisdom and divine insights down through the ages.
Is that the model we have today? I think not. God is NOT perceived as “speaking through all of the people”. The model we have at the moment is that it is NOT the people — the body of Christ — that is perceived as “the repository of truth”, but the Pope which is perceived alone (or virtually alone if you include his close advisors), as “the repository and interpreter of truth”. Most people don’t buy it anymore. They have stopped listening. They see even popes as “fallible individuals”. The real revelation coming from the sexual abuse scandals is precisely that. Priesthood is no guarantee against fallibility and human weakness. The woeful responses of bishops and the popes themselves shows that the “problem” goes “right up the hierarchical tree”.
Go read Robert Tilley’s most interesting book, “Benedict XVI and the Search for Truth”. To me its great value is that it doesn’t “prove” what Robert Tilley set out to prove. It illustrates perfectly how we have “run off the rails”. It is unfair to our pontiffs as much as it is unfair to “the people” to saddle one man as being “the royal conduit of truth from God”. God is the ultimate repository of “truth”. God doesn’t speak to humankind through the exclusive channel of a Joshua Smith, a Henry VIII, a Thomas More, any more than he does through a Karol Wojtyla, a Josef Ratzinger, a Roncolli or a Eugenio Pacelli. God speaks through “ALL men and women” and we ALL screw up the message. We do need a mechanism through which we collectively discern, articulate and remember what God is saying. The moment though we elevate that temporal mechanism and start giving it Divine status we have entered into the realm of Idolatry.
Yes, we do need to accord a sense of respect to our institution — the mechanism through we we discern, articulate and remember — and, it is common sense, to accord respect to the leaders of that institution. That respect though has to be earned on merit. It is not accorded simply because someone sticks a funny hat on someone’s head. ALL tempora
l leaders today have to “earn respect”. It is not accorded simply because one is made a king, a president or a pope. One does have to lead. One has to provide intelligent leadership. A leader has to earn the respect of their people through the wisdom of their intelligence — and the sense that even “the plebs” or “the great unwashed” develop that “this person is leading us in the correct direction towards truth”.
I honestly think this is the sort of model of “church” and “papacy” that the Holy Spirit was leading our Church to through the momentous developments of the Second Vatican Council. Here you had God “speaking” through the entire assembly of bishops. Ever since Vatican II we have had a small gaggle of men trying desperately to ensure that “the collective of all the bishops” is never given the floor again in that way. Benedict might constantly say that all he does is “in the spirit of Vatican II”. It is Orwell-speak though. Judge the man by his actions, not his words. At every point he is endeavouring to turn back the thinking and “spirit” of Vatican II. So was his predecessor. For forty-one years now we have had a “small gaggle of men at the top” seeking to undo Vatican II and take us back to a “royal telephone model” of Divine communications. The people at large can see through it. They have “bugged off out the door” and are no longer even pretending to listen. There is but a small and dwindling gaggle of old hens hoping against hope that they can restore the old model: the picture of God speaking exclusively to a Pope and the Pope then singularly interprets and articulates what “Truth” is — what God is saying — to The People.
I’ll look forward to your defence of this model. Why does it provide us with a greater assurance that we have “accessed truth” rather than the more distributed model of responsibility which, I would argue, is much closer to the model of Church given to us by the likes of Peter, Paul, James, Barnabas, Phobe, Chloe and all the early disciples?
Dicit ei Pilatus: Quid est veritas? Et cum hoc dixisset, iterum exivit ad Iudaeos, et dicit eis: Ego nullam invenio in eo causam.
Or as Bishop Sheen used to say, Pilate asked, What is truth — then crucified it.
Bye now, and God love you.
David, what say you round all this up and bring it to an end?
Why, just when it is getting intersting?
Dicit ei Pilatus: Quid est veritas?
Thank you , PE, that was precisely my point when I said (somewhere way up in the stratosphere on this comment string but recently resurrected in the last comment by Brian):
“The next question is, who can I reliably rely upon to lead me to truth? Myself? That’s the modern answer. As a Christian, however, we would unanimously say “Christ”, for he is, as he said, “The Way, the Truth, and the Life”.
Oddly enough, in his lengthy reply above, Brian addresses the first half of this statement (that I as an individual cannot be a reliable guide to truth), but completely ignores the paramount statement that follows: that for any Christian Jesus Christ alone is the reliable guide to truth.
But Brian goes direct from the individual as ultimate guide to truth to the community as ultimate guide to truth, all along the way slinging off at the Pope. In other words, he completely ignores (deliberately? or simply out of habit?) the place of Jesus Christ in our Faith.
Actually, Brian, you do this all the time. I am beginning to wonder what your problem with Jesus is.
You are like Pilate, asking “What is Truth” and then turning around to consult the “community” outside when Truth is standing right in front of your nose.
David,
Give us a break. Throughout my response I continually emphasized that “God is the ultimate source of truth”. It was said, or implied, in almost every paragraph. Yes, granted I did not use the name of Jesus, but elsewhere in this string — and continually through all that I write — I emphasize that Jesus is “the Way” to thinking and acting like God.
The trouble is, and even your “model” of Church/authority, acknowledges this, we need to interpret Jesus and the Scriptures through which Jesus speaks to us. We need a mechanism to do that so that we don’t go off into “strange or indiosyncratic interpretations” a la Joseph Smith Jr (founder of the Mormons), Charles Taze Russell (Founder of the JWs), Brian Coyne or David Schütz. You believe the existing mechanism of the Pope, in communion with the bishops, provides us with that mechanism and protection. I dispute that. The evidence is that increasing numbers of Catholics dispute that. They have stopped listening — stopped participating. (On Catholica, Cliff Baxter has drawn attention to a news report from the US of the almost stratospheric disobedience of ordinary Catholics to the directives of their bishops in the recent election. [LINK] We have begun deifying our institution, deifying our popes and bishops turning them into little different to Joseph Smith Juniors. I argue we need to stop doing that. It is not the model Jesus gave us.
David, honestly mate, you are attempting to engage in a distraction with what you wrote. I do acknowledge God as the ultimate source of truth and I acknowledge Jesus as the “Way” provided to us to access that truth. I also acknowledge that we require a mechanism, a Church, and a head of that Church, who coodinates the collective effort to authoritatively discern, articulate and remember what God is saying to us through Jesus, through Scriptures and through “Tradition” (the accumulation of “Divine Wisdom” discerned by our forebears).
Where I disagree with you is the level of authority that is accorded to the mechanism. Is it a “substitute for Christ” or is “the Body of Christ — the entire Assembly” the substitute for, and channel from, Jesus Christ (and ultimately from the Trinitarian Godhead)?
Now, rather than bending my arguments, can we get back and hear your defence of your model? Why does it provide us with a greater assurance that we have “accessed truth” rather than the more distributed model of responsibility which, I would argue, is much closer to the model of Church given to us by the likes of Peter, Paul, James, Barnabas, Phoebe, Chloe and all the early disciples?
people often have a sense, or intuition, of something is wrong long before they can articulate what is wrong) … they have this sense that we have somehow strayed from the original founding vision of Jesus Christ and the very early Church.
Because Jesus was quite okay with fornication, divorce, and sodomy, for example. As were the Apostles.
Let’s look at the actual issues people currently disagree with the Church on and I think we’ll find that as Joshua said, it all goes back to an unwillingness to listen to the Church on various moral issues, particularly sexual ones.
When a person disagrees with the Church about these kinds of issues, which the Church says must be believed by Catholics, then they have a vested interest in believing that the Church has somehow lost its way.
Brian, I’d suggest you don’t understand David’s model of the Church, because you’ve described his “model” in a way that I don’t recognise as the orthodox “model.”
Why does it provide us with a greater assurance that we have “accessed truth” rather than the more distributed model of responsibility which, I would argue, is much closer to the model of Church given to us by the likes of Peter, Paul, James, Barnabas, Phoebe, Chloe and all the early disciples?
Why did St Paul argue with St Peter about circumcision?
David, is this the largest number of comments on your blog?
Yes, I think so, Lou.
Brian, Brian, Brian, Brian…
I tried to bring Jesus back into this conversation, because in the end it comes down to loving him and wanting to do his will. Maybe I’m still just an old evangelical, but I love the Church because I love Jesus. I want to think with the Church because I want to think with Jesus.
Dear brother, I think you would have an entirely different perspective on the Church if you had (gasp, horror, yes, I am really about to say it) a personal relationship with Jesus. That is, if you regarded yourself as first and foremost a disciple of Jesus, and if you had a living devotion to him, and if you were willing to place yourself under his Lordship.
That would help bring you out of yourself a little too, Brian. Far to much of the incurvatus in se for your health.
David, David, David, David,
Schütz Dear brother, I think you would have an entirely different perspective on the Church if you had (gasp, horror, yes, I am really about to say it) a personal relationship with Jesus. That is, if you regarded yourself as first and foremost a disciple of Jesus, and if you had a living devotion to him, and if you were willing to place yourself under his Lordship.
That would help bring you out of yourself a little too, Brian. Far to much of the incurvatus in se for your health.
To loosely borrow the words of yourself from up near the top of this string…
Thank you for diagnosing “my problem”, David. My spiritual director has been trying to figure that one out for years without success.
Now ………………… can we get back and hear your defence of your model? Why does it provide us with a greater assurance that we have “accessed truth” rather than the more distributed model of responsibility which, I would argue, is much closer to the model of Church given to us by the likes of Peter, Paul, James, Barnabas, Phoebe, Chloe and all the early disciples? What assurance or guarantee can you give us that His Holiness always gets it right? Is that something that we everywhere and always just have to accept as “a matter of faith”? What of the situation, as there have been in the past, when one has corrupt popes, or simply misguided popes?
Still looking forward to your answer (without getting sidetracked into discussions of my shortcomings),
What assurance can you provide that your model of Catholicism ultimately leads “to truth — to salvation”? What assurance, or arguments can you advance, that it will turn around the unprecedented exit out of the pews the Western world has experienced over the last century?
Perhaps I could advance a question on the other side also: what arguments can you advance that the version of “truth” the alternative model leads to is inferior to the “truth” your model leads to?
Cheers,
Brian
Brian, you really don’t get it, do you? I don’t find my assurance in a “model” of Catholicism, but in Jesus.
Jesus leads me to Truth. He led me to the Catholic Church so that I can keep on walking with him. Simple as that.
Sorry to disappoint you, but we can wank on about “models” all we like. I’m not dealing with a model here, but with my Lord and Saviour.
“Wank on” indeed – I’m still waiting (till Hell freezes over?) for this Coyne creature to be a Christian and apologize for his rude insinuation toward me.
I must say it is proven by all evidence that “Scratch a liberal, find a fascist” and that such persons tend to rabbit on about being loving and nice, but then turn out to be the rudest and most merciless if ever one crosses them.
This is the best ever! Post-conciliar Catholicism is ON THE AIR! Welcome to 1968!
OK, done dancing, now from the wheelchair. Unlike myself, David and Louise and Joshua and other “documents of Vatican II” types, as I like to call them in contrast to the “spirit of Vatican II types, these guys don’t leave because, unlike myself, they see no reason to leave, and if anything, it is they who precisely are more faithful to the Catholic Church as instituted by Christ as distinct from you who seek to impose later understandings as normative — so if anyone should leave on the basis of not believing the Catholic faith, it is you, not they.
Since I do not have a horse in this race, neither side of you representing authentic Catholicism, here’s a message from the outside, both as one who is outside by current belief, and as one who walked away, populations about whom you both express concern.
Can you not see that neither of your positions result from a lack of love for the Church or for Jesus? And that therefore, to attempt to prevail by a demonstration of the other side’s lack thereof is doomed to fail?
Can you not see that neither of your positions result from a lack of love for the Church or for Jesus? And that therefore, to attempt to prevail by a demonstration of the other side’s lack thereof is doomed to fail?
What a spoil-sport you are PE!
Brilliant, just the same.
For a moment, I had forgotten you were above us all, PE. Thanks for clearing that up.
You think we’re arguing about Vatican II, but we’re not. We’re arguing about whether the teaching authority of the Church is with Peter and the bishops or whether it’s in some other, vague, undetermined place, conveniently obscure for anyone who wishes to go against the traditional morality of the Church since its birth.
We are arguing about our ecclesiology, not whether or not there is a Church at all. You understand it differently from all the rest of us, PE, and obviously Brian sees it differently from the remainder of us.
It seems that we should – if we are to continue with the conversation – come to an agreement that there is a Church (we do all agree on that, yes?) and then work from there to see where we diverge.
I strongly suspect, in the end, that our view will be the more rational, but go ahead and prove me wrong. Doing so without personal insults etc, I’m sure, would be preferable.
And Brian, you were very rude to Joshua and ought to apologise.
I’m sure we can assume that at least we all love Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Can we also assume that we all believe in the Trinity and that Jesus established a Church with teaching authority?
Well, my point, Louise, is I don’t know if we can. You see, even in those two sentences you are talking about different things – one is the “affective” faith, and the other the “intellectual” faith.
What I am suggesting is that besides intellectual assent to orthodox teaching, we need the committed discipleship of the heart that arises from deep personal love of Jesus Christ.
If you start at that point, you end up in a very different position.
How many Catholics have gone to the Penties and there declared that they have come to know Jesus in a way that they never did in the Catholic Church?
What I pray for is literally an evangelical revival in the Catholic Church in which cradle Catholics wake up and see what a great treasure they are sitting on in their patrimony of the Faith.
It is certainly beginning to happen – and it seems to be being driven by converts to the Church. I could just name Sherry Weddell of Called and Gifted for one example (see her blog at http://blog.siena.org/index.html). Although a big help along this line was given by JPII and his enthusiastic promotion of the New Evagelisation (which, I think, was invented by Paul VI).
Well, Louise, if you think my suggestion that none of the positions stated in this combox result from a lack of love for Christ or his Church and that therefore trying to demonstrate same on the part of those of not-your postition is doomed to fail is simply arrogance, perhaps you can leave my diagnosed arrogance to me, God, and such spiritual directors as I may have, and address the matter at hand.
As to my position now, nowhere, any place at any time, did I say there is no Church at all. What I say is there is indeed a Church, and that the Catholic Church is neither it nor that in which its fulness subsists. Not the same thing.
As to Brian’s position, nowhere, at any place at any time, do I read him saying there is no Church at all, nor that there is not a teaching authority with the Pope and the Catholic bishops. In fact he lays out quite clearly that there is, and how that works out, both as originally constituted by Christ and to which Vatican II began to recall the Church. You don’t agree with that view of how it works out, or that that was the original constitution by Christ, or that Vatican II began a recall to it. Not the same thing.
Starting from the bottom and responding to the comments directed to me since my last post…
Past Elder: As to Brian’s position, nowhere, at any place at any time, do I read him saying there is no Church at all, nor that there is not a teaching authority with the Pope and the Catholic bishops. In fact he lays out quite clearly that there is, and how that works out, both as originally constituted by Christ and to which Vatican II began to recall the Church. You don’t agree with that view of how it works out, or that that was the original constitution by Christ, or that Vatican II began a recall to it. Not the same thing.
Thank you for that. And also for your insight that all positions in this string do genuinely come out of a “love of Christ” as their foundation. I accept that and acknowledge that. Certainly that is the foundational position of not only my beliefs but my life. I noticed in the paper yesterday that average weekly earning have now reached $1,147 per week. It is now over nine years since I could even dream of earning that much a week. I work on less than the stipend paid to a priest and I work far longer hours each week than any priest or bishop. After my treatment by two individuals who are supposed to represent Christ to us “in persona Christi” I learned that if I wanted “truth” it was high time that I forgot about the security of an institution-guaranteed income and superannuation. My commitment is not a wank. I did seek the financial support of the institution on a number of occasions but people who ask the sort of questions I ask are not given preferment these days. We are “shown the door”. That hurts but that is also life. I think it is in small part symptomatic of why so many get really cheesed off and piss off out the door.
I would also like to acknowledge though that I appreciate that David, and all the other contributors to this conversation also operate from the fundamental premise or foundation of a love for Jesus Christ. That said, it is plainly evident that all of us have wildly different understandings of what our love for Jesus calls us to. We might all “love Jesus” but we can end up with an opposing set of beliefs as to what style of Church Jesus called for us to believe in. The debate here is NOT essentially about our “love for Jesus”. It is a discussion about what sort of Church Jesus calls for that can express his love, and his Word, in the world.
Louise: And Brian, you were very rude to Joshua and ought to apologise.
I disagree. My words were fairly mild (and I think an accurate reflection of what Joshua is engaged in). He was the one who spelled out in graphic detail the original meaning of those words in a sexual context. I did not use those lurid words. I think Joshua is “playing with himself” intellectually and emotionally. I continue to believe that. I also respect the man’s evident sincerity and commitment to his beliefs. He also evidently disagrees with my beliefs and commitment and he does not hold back in expressing that.
Also, in the post above the one I have just quoted from I agree with this point you make, Louise: “We are arguing about our ecclesiology, not whether or not there is a Church at all.”
Past Elder: Can you not see that neither of your positions result from a lack of love for the Church or for Jesus? And that therefore, to attempt to prevail by a demonstration of the other side’s lack thereof is doomed to fail?
Again, thank you for that. I can only agree and reproduce it again here to underline the point.
Joshua: “Wank on” indeed – I’m still waiting (till Hell freezes over?) for this Coyne creature to be a Christian and apologize for his rude insinuation toward me.
I must say it is proven by all evidence that “Scratch a liberal, find a fascist” and that such persons tend to rabbit on about being loving and nice, but then turn out to be the rudest and most merciless if ever one crosses them.
Thank you, Joshua. Charming!
Schütz: Brian, you really don’t get it, do you? I don’t find my assurance in a “model” of Catholicism, but in Jesus. … Sorry to disappoint you, but we can wank on about “models” all we like. I’m not dealing with a model here, but with my Lord and Saviour.
David: I simply refer back to what Past Elder has said and which I agree with in this post. I do not doubt for a single moment the depth of your commitment to, and love of, Jesus. I don’t doubt my one either. I think we are both motivated by the same foundational belief in a person. Louise though has perhaps identified the central issue that is causing disagreement here and the fuel for this conversation: “We are arguing about our ecclesiology, not whether or not there is a Church at all.”
I would dispute strongly your last statement implying that you are not interested in models. For Christ’s sake, David, what a cop out that is. To borrow a phrase from conversations a few have been engaged in with the likes of Exy or our old friend Herman (what’s happened to him?) from the old CNDB, when you come up with responses like that having a conversation with you is reduced down to the level of “trying to nail a lump of jelly to a tree”. I don’t dispute that you operate in Christ’s name and for his sake and his love. But, pull the other leg, trying to convince me that you are “dealing with a model here”. The very name of your blog very much indicates that everything you are about is a particular model of Church. This sychophantic style you run around operating out of excpecting your readers to get down in prayer mats in some of the ecclesial leaders you quote is very much “modelling” a certain vision of Catholicism. It’s one I profoundly disagree with. Where, precisely, did Jesus set up this model you propose of this curtsying and prostrating ourselves before any authority figures and treating them as Gods and demigods as though they can think and say no wrong whatsoever? Where? And if you can answer that you will be answering the question I have repeated about three times so far and won’t do so again. David, I have no doubt at all about your great love for Jesus, nor for your immediate employer, nor for His Holiness. None whatsoever. It is blatantly obvious from everything you write. Tell us though where Jesus told us that these blokes are infallible in everything? Show us where their “vision” or “model” of Church is re-evangelising the masses. I’ve shown the statistics that pretty clearly show that there model or vision has been an unmitigated disaster that has effectively been driving “God’s faithful” out of the pews for more than a century at a rate that has been unprecedented history. Show us something — anything — that might give us even a skerrick of confidence that this fawning, sycophantic, “yes, Holy Father, no, Holy Father, three bags full, Holy Father” version, or model, of Catholicism is stemming the exit out of the pews. I don’t believe Jesus invites us into any form of sychophancy either towards Himself, towards his Father, and least of all to any of his lieutenants here in the temporal sphere. We are invited to discern, articulate and live out/act out “the will of our Father in heaven” is the expression Jesus used. In modern language it seems to me that translates to mean we are invited to discern, articulate and live out/act out “the will of God” in our lives. As that other priest who was crucified by your mate, George Pell, argues, that “God” is not up there in the sky somewhere — he’s not an “elsewhere God” — he resides “in our hearts”; in that sanctuary of conscience where we meet the Divine “face-to-face”.
What we’re dealing with here is not ultimately some “intellectual game”. Neither is it some emotional game — some wank! Nor is it some kindergarten game of “let’s all see who can be nicest for teacher today” to earn a glitter star or helephant stamp on the wrist. It’s a profound journey involving both heart and mind, the intel
lect and the emotions, into that “inner temple where we meet God face to face and profess our obedience to those arduous commitments God asks us to make in conscience” (not at the level of our feelings trying to “curry favour” with our employers, our mothers, nor even those ideas that were planted in us by our mothers as what good girls or good boys” we were called to be. Jesus, and “the Father” calls us beyond all that. Somewhere, far, far deeper.
Cheers, and have a good weekend. I will check back from time to time to see if you have finally responded to my question but essentially this will be my final contribution to this discussion for now. I have enjoyed it immensely, I have to admit. Thank you all.
Sorry about the typos in that last post. We had a thunderstorm up here in the mountains and I was trying to post it in haste before switching my modem off. (We lost our last modem about a year ago through a lightning strike that melted every modem in our little village.) The storm has now passed and I am watching a brilliant lightning display over the Cumberland Plain and the City of Sydney as I type this.
I’ve re-posted my response on Catholica where I could correct the typos and also add a bit of colour to separate out the various ideas we were discussing a bit more.
Again thanks to you all for what has been, for me at least, an enjoyable and enriching conversation. Yes, it has helped me depth what I am trying to say a little better and articulate me thoughts more clearly.
You’ll find the post at http://www.catholica.com.au/forum/forum_entry.php?id=19009.
Cheers, Brian
If Coyne thinks I am – I assume he means deluding – myself, so be it; I suppose he can hardly think otherwise without denying his own position.
I too stand by my remarks: the atrocious suffering that liberals inflict on others seems normally to go unspoken, but it does exist: certainly I would fear them if they get any sort of power at all.
At the end of the day I am glad I don’t have to deal with them – I don’t regard them as faithful Catholics, considering them as wilfully deceiving themselves and others in the way that Coyne thinks I do myself.
Good night.
I don’t believe Jesus invites us into any form of sychophancy either towards Himself, towards his Father, and least of all to any of his lieutenants here in the temporal sphere. We are invited to discern, articulate and live out/act out “the will of our Father in heaven” is the expression Jesus used. In modern language it seems to me that translates to mean we are invited to discern, articulate and live out/act out “the will of God” in our lives.
Hmmm.
I know much of the language of Scripture is highly symbolic, but —
if the angels in heaven themselves veil their faces in the presence of the Glory —
Moses prostrated himself before the Divine —
Thomas the Doubter gasped “My Lord and my God —
and at the parousia EVERY knee shall bow —
Now, I don’t want to be seen as utterly fawning and servile but I think a bit of reverence is in order. Jesus didn’t just come to “fix” this world, He came to beckon us to the next.
As that other priest who was crucified by your mate, George Pell, argues, that “God” is not up there in the sky somewhere — he’s not an “elsewhere God” — he resides “in our hearts”; in that sanctuary of conscience where we meet the Divine “face-to-face”.
As Q used to say in the movie, “Oh do come along Bond!!” Does anyone with any modicum of intelligence believe that God is “up there” ??
I don’t entirely trust my “conscience” to be the arbiter of revealed Christianity.
Here’s another poor fella about to get the Vatican smackdown:
WASHINGTON (CNS) — Despite being threatened with excommunication by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Maryknoll Father Roy Bourgeois said he would not recant his belief that women should be ordained as Catholic priests.
“There’s nothing that Rome can do to me to take away the peace, the clarity I have on this issue,” Father Bourgeois told Catholic News Service Nov. 12. “No matter what the consequences, I feel I am doing the right thing.”
Father Bourgeois sent a letter to congregation officials Nov. 7 outlining his stance on women’s ordination and how he believes church “teaching on this issue is wrong and does not stand up to scrutiny.” He said the issue is one of conscience and that he cannot recant something of which he remains firmly convinced.
The letter was made public Nov. 11 by the priest’s attorney, Bill Quigley, in New Orleans, La.
The 69-year-old priest said his letter was in response to an Oct. 21 notice from the Vatican congregation, headed by Cardinal William J. Levada, an American, that gave him 30 days to recant his belief and public statements about the ordination of women or be excommunicated.
Known widely for his 19-year campaign to close a U.S. army school at Fort Benning, Ga., that trains Latin American soldiers, Father Bourgeois attracted the attention of the leaders of his order and church officials following his participation in a reported ordination ceremony sponsored by Roman Catholic Womenpriests Aug. 9 in Lexington, Ky.
In August Father Bourgeois said he concelebrated the liturgy, delivered the homily and laid hands on longtime friend and fellow peace activist Janice Sevre-Duszynska during what traditionally would have been the ordination rite at the ceremony in a Unitarian Universalist church. He said he was invited to the ceremony by Sevre-Duszynska and decided to participate after a period of discernment.
He received a canonical warning from Maryknoll leadership during an Aug. 18 meeting with representatives of the order’s General Council in Maryknoll, N.Y. At the time, Father Bourgeois said he hoped the issue was settled because he had no intention of participating in any other such ceremony.
The Maryknoll order, through spokeswoman Betsey Guest, said Nov. 13 that a confidential notice had been received from the Vatican congregation and forwarded to Father Bourgeois. She said the order “continues to respect the confidentiality” of the communications.
“We are definitely required to abide by the decision by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,” she said. “At the same time we have an obligation to ensure the canonical rights of our members.”
She added that it would be Father Bourgeois’ decision on the next step to take once a final decision from the congregation is received.
The congregation’s letter came as a shock, said Father Bourgeois, who was ordained in 1972. “The seriousness set in,” he said. “It wasn’t complicated. They said very seriously I had 30 days and if I didn’t recant I will be excommunicated. That’s pretty serious. That’s pretty clear. No ifs, ands or buts.”
Father Bourgeois said he spent two weeks in prayer and discernment before crafting his response. He said he then drove from his home in Columbus, Ga., to Lutcher, La., 35 miles west of New Orleans, to meet with his family, including his 95-year-old father.
“To them and to me (my father) said, ‘Roy has been all over the world and God brought him back from the war in Vietnam safely. God brought him back from Bolivia and El Salvador (where he served as a Maryknoll missioner) and God is going to take care of him now. I support him 100 percent and he’s doing the right thing,'” Father Bourgeois told CNS.
“When we get the blessing from family and loved ones, it does bring some peace. At the same time, it saddens me to put them through this,” he said.
For now, Father Bourgeois will continue to prepare for the Nov. 21-23 vigil and procession to the gates of Fort Benning in Columbus, the home of the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the army school he has been trying to close for nearly two decades.
He also said he may try to arrange a meeting with congregation officials with the help of his superiors in New York and in Rome to discuss the issue.
It’s priests like him who helped drive my cradle Catholic husband out of the church (and hubby served in Viet Nam and spent his working life as a police officer, so Father B hasn’t seen anything that hubby hasn’t seen).
Utopia is not going to happen in this world.
All the best, Brian !!
What Coyne can’t cope with – because he wants the exact opposite done – is that Pell and the Pope and so on are acting as the Church has done in all ages: rooting out heretics. The actions of bishops in the first centuries (cf. SS Polycarp, Ignatius, Irenæus) were no different.
The confused aCatholic brigade are suffering from that Baby Boomer egomania that the rest of us have had to endure at their hands: they – like Satan – feel they have the need and therefore the right to imperiously remould the Faith in their own image.
Their fate is obvious.
And I do wish such persons would learn that “depth” as a verb is another tired example of nun-talk, while their use of “sycophancy” is quite eccentric and abnormal; but I suppose they wish to twist language, too, to serve their fell ends.
Shame!
Well God bless me. What in all free falling Judas in a wind tunnel is a sycophant anyway? This being a Roman Rite blog, supposedly, let’s get Roman. The Latin word is delator. What’s a delator? Literally, the word means denouncer. Originally it meant one who told the government that someone else owed it money, then that someone else had broken any law and deserved punishment, and often included a reward for the accuser. Hmm. The Greek word literally means to show the fig. What’s that all about? It was someone who turned informer against someone who stole figs from the sacred fig trees and exported them. Hmm.
So, we’ve got someone who reports someone else to their authorities with accusations of something that is punishable. Seems to fit pretty well here!
Delatores actually is yet another aspect of the Roman Imperial system that made its way into church structure and canon law. Not to mention, “the fig” has another meaning altogether, though in modern times the “one fingered salute” has emerged as a rival to this most ancient and venerable tradition.
Carry on, delatores!
perhaps you can leave my diagnosed arrogance to me, God, and such spiritual directors as I may have
I have now, I assure you.
and address the matter at hand.
Well, not that I am constrained to address the matters at hand which you think are important, but what makes you think I am not doing so?
While I do think that Brian’s position is objectively bad for the Church, I don’t assume he is deliberately trying to harm the Church, from his perspective. Just because I’m arguing the toss with other people who love God (I assume, because I cannot read people’s hearts) doesn’t mean I think they are acting with malice.
In short, I think they’re objectively wrong and I’m happy to argue about that.
As to my position now, nowhere, any place at any time, did I say there is no Church at all. What I say is there is indeed a Church, and that the Catholic Church is neither it nor that in which its fulness subsists. Not the same thing.
There may be a misunderstanding here. I may have expressed myself badly. I don’t think I actually did suggest that you and Brian do not think there is a Church at all, it’s just that I find it odd that people can think there’s this thing called a Church (and which handed down a tradition, eg dogmas such as the Trinity) and yet it’s pretty vague.
I disagree. My words were fairly mild (and I think an accurate reflection of what Joshua is engaged in).
Brian, we may have to remain in disagreement on that point, the expression was obvious enough in its meaning, even if not lurid.
I think Joshua is “playing with himself” intellectually and emotionally. I continue to believe that.
How interesting. I myself can never get over how irrational the liberal view of things is (both in and out of the Church).
PE said, And that therefore, to attempt to prevail by a demonstration of the other side’s lack thereof is doomed to fail?
I don’t recall trying to demonstrate this myself, although it might be possible to distinguish between love as an emotion of affection and friendship etc and that of a more objective nature, related to doing what is objectively good for the sake of the other.
I think it is quite wrong to be constantly acting against the Church’s authority (in general, the exception being where members of the Church hierarchy have acted unjustly according to God’s Law and need to be admonished).
Joshua said, “Scratch a liberal, find a fascist” and that such persons tend to rabbit on about being loving and nice, but then turn out to be the rudest and most merciless if ever one crosses them.
And I just have to say that this has been my “lived experience too.”
e.g. My PP is a good bloke, but he and I are at different ends of the Church’s “spectrum.” He and I make a bit of a joke about it, based on a homily of his once: I am at the “AD2000” position on the spectrum and he is at “The Tablet” end.
Now, unfortunately, he has been known on a number of occasions to state that ordinary pew-warmers who just want to live according to the catechism are mean and nasty. As opposed to all the lovely warm’n’fuzzy “Tablet” types. So, although I have not, to my knowledge, harmed anyone in the parish, I feel chastised regularly merely for trying to live as I think Catholics are supposed to live. I must go to Mass every Sunday if I am to give God at least the bare minimum of what He is entitled to and therefore must hear my PP berating me for my views regularly. Yet, if I never wanted to hear from the Pope, I need never know what he is saying from one year to the next. So it is for every parishioner. In reality, our PPs have more “power” in our lives than the Pope does.
Yet these same PPs bang on about wicked old “Rome” all the time!
And this, I’m afraid, is typical of liberals. Those who complain about the Church being a boys club where only the men have the power, have never met some of the women Pastoral Associates that I have, obviously. Get in *their* way and see what happens to you.
As Q used to say in the movie, “Oh do come along Bond!!” Does anyone with any modicum of intelligence believe that God is “up there” ??
Heh! Well said, Christine. The *supposed* position and beliefs of orthodox Catholics as represented by the liberal Catholics is the grossest of caricatures. This is a typical example.
I don’t entirely trust my “conscience” to be the arbiter of revealed Christianity.
Exactly, Christine. Again, well said.
The confused aCatholic brigade are suffering from that Baby Boomer egomania that the rest of us have had to endure at their hands
It’s the fact that they cannot see it that’s most annoying in my “lived experience.”
Dissent from the Pope – yeah, “speak truth to power”! Dissent from the Baby Boomers and lookout, you’re a sycophantic wanker.
they – like Satan – feel they have the need and therefore the right to imperiously remould the Faith in their own image.
Well, not just the Faith either, but the faithful. See above.
And I do wish such persons would learn that “depth” as a verb is another tired example of nun-talk
We’ll just add it to our index prohibitorum, eh Joshua? Along with “tolerance” “diversity” “respect” “vibrant”…
Delatores actually is yet another aspect of the Roman Imperial system that made its way into church structure and canon law.
I’ll try to find some examples of this in the scriptures for you shall I, PE? I think you’ll find that if this is a problem it goes way back.
For now, however, I must take myself to bed.
Good night, one and all!
Let’s indeed start a new list of words and phrases so bestially misused as to make one reach for one’s pistol (if one had such a thing – we’re Aussies, we don’t leave guns lying around for Junior to play with):
“story” (when used of the Scriptures);
“spirit of Vatican II” (O spirit, what crimes are committed in thy name!);
“journey” (that overused and self-serving image of the post-Vatican II Church as the POG – People of God – wandering in the desert, which is true enough now I think about it…);
“faith level” (an otherwise friendly nun having once been almost as rude as that Coyne – notice I never address him directly – by saying patronizingly that I was only on “faith level 4” whatever the Hell that means!).
Combox 101 — I think that People of God thing derives from chapter two of Lumen gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, with a whole later chapter, if memory serves, on the “pilgrim” Church, pilgrims by definition being on a journey. Hell, anybody remember who was the peritus to Josef Cardinal Frings — he whose shouting match 8 November 1963 with Alfredo Cardinal Ottaviani, the council’s leading voice for actual Catholicism as taught by the Church up to the 1960, pretty well sums the whole deal up?
PE,
Have you ever considered the curious parallels between yourself and Tertullian?
(He even wrote in a compressed, racy style!)