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More worrying noises from the insurrectionary party in the American Church
I remain convinced of the utter necessity of reforming many branches of the Catholic Church, especially the American, Brazilian, German and Dutch ones, to clear them of the so-called Liberals. People who don't like the kind of thing that the Catholic Church has been for 1900 years have, these days, a supermarket's worth of alternative products to buy, including some which claim Apostolic Succession and allow them the fun, should they wish to, of taking part in beautifully conducted traditional rituals, rich with vestments and incense. There is no need for people who never believed any of the major Church dogmas to stay in a body whose views they oppose. The trouble is that, for forty years now, they have stayed and tried to subvert it from the inside. It was an absurd enterprise anyway, but it has succeeded just as much as it ever could - sowing scandal among the faithful, encouraging the Church's enemies, leading to sin and to schism.
However, I am more and more worried by the spirit that seems to be unleashing itself in North America now that the "liberals" are, at long last, on the defensive. Just the other day a Canadian Bishop openly said that the State ought to suppress homosexual activity. This is wrong on a number of levels. First, it is irresponsible talk in the strict meaning of the word. The Bishop has made a demand that he knows will never be granted, not even seriously considered. Both major Canadian political parties are sympathetic to homosexuality, and the current Prime Minister is about to steamroller a gay-marriage law through Parliament, ordering every party member to vote in favour, whatever his or her views. In other words, the Bishop has preened himself in public, made a show of his politico-religious purity, by making a claim that belongs in Dreamland. I call it irresponsible, apart from the hatred it will draw against the Church and the harm it will do to political relationships, because it makes extreme demands in the full knowledge that they will not be granted, and that therefore he will never be called upon to take responsibility for their results.
Second and worse, it is the rise of a spirit we had hoped dead for ever: the use of State power to enforce morality. Now let us be clear about what I mean here. I believe morality to be one and indivisible. I believe that the man who initiates a boy into homosexual sex and the man who robs a bank are equally guilty before God. But there is a difference. God has His own ways to deal with corrupt souls, and He is not concerned with public order or the national budget. His role is not to make our life easy in this world. The State's, however, is. The State has no business teaching morality, as such: its business is simply to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens. The State must try to stop bank robbers, or punish them if they succeed, because it has to protect the property of its citizens. The State is not responsible for the state of their souls before God, however; it is not infrequently observed that the souls of those who are responsible for its running are often in no better condition than those of the inmates of their jails. The State may, prudentially, want to restrict homosexual activity in certain areas; keep a wary eye, for instance, at the interaction of practicing homosexuals with children; and try to act in such a way that homosexuality is not actually favoured. This, I think, is as much as any Catholic ought to ask of it. But to demand that the State should repress homosexual activity is both tyrannical and impolitic. It is to ask a group of sinners, many of them hardened and impenitent, to single out a group of their fellow sinners for punishment, because of the specific sin they practice. I think that to describe this procedure is enough to show how contemptible it is. God help any one of us who takes the State to be an appropriate judge of morality.
That is bad enough. But there is worse. The Canuck Bishop's irresponsible outburst is not an individual freak: it seems to me increasingly typical of what certain sides of the Church feel themselves legitimated to say and think in this period of anti-"liberal" insurrection. I just read the latest issue of the leading insurrectionary group's online magazine, Roman Catholic Faithful, and at least a couple of items simply made my hair stand on end. The first was the statement that one of the leading writers, having to suffer the horrors of the notorious diocese of Springfield, Illinois (which is rotten from top to bottom and has achieved almost legend-like status as everything that a Catholic diocese should not be), said that, if there had been a community of Lefebvrite (hard-right) schismatics in his neighbourhood, he and his family would have joined them. This is simply horrifying. In Church terms, it is like thinking that you can use cancer to cure AIDS. The very notion that one can go to a schismatic Church like the so-called "Society of St.Pius X" when one is displeased with one's bishop shows a lightness of heart and mind, an incapacity to distinguish between what is eternal and what is local, and what is worse a willingness to put oneself above the Church, that is simply alien to anything that should be called Catholic. There, I don't like the local Bishop, so I'll leave the Church. That'll larn'em! And in the same issue, the same writer implicitly criticizes a formerly Catholic family that went over to the Mormons after a Catholic priest drugged and abused their six-year-old son; one would have thought that he should either understand their position, or else not be so proud of his own.
Even worse, RCF not only act as though leaving the Church for the Lefebvrite schismatics were a negligible or even praiseworthy matter: they actively retail Lefebvrite propaganda lies and urban legends. At the very end of their magazine, after dozens of pages dedicated to the well-deserved exposure of Roger Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles, possibly the worst and most ruthless of the "liberal" infiltrators still ensconced in positions of authority and power - at the very end, they suddenly put in a short and paranoid article hinting that Popes John XXIII and Paul VI had had, before their election, "Communist sympathies" and thick FBI files; and that the Conclave had originally nominated the notorious Cardinal Siri, only to be stopped in its track by that bugbear of modern American reactionaries - France. (All those people ought to remember that France was once America's strongest ally in Europe, and that it was America that broke that friendship.) All this is trash. Paul VI especially was a brave and much-abused man who paid dearly for opposing as much as he could the spreading spirit of "liberalism" in the Church, and who fought more than one battle (Humanae Vitae, the fights against divorce and abortion, etc.) in the full knowledge that he would, on the political level, lose them; simply because it was more important to lay down a firm marker for the Church's position than to actually win a political confrontation. This was a courageous decision that I wonder whether any of the posturing Lefebvrites of this world would have taken.
At any rate, the presence of open, unashamed Lefebvrite material and moods among RCF is more than worrying; it is positively scary. The Lefebvrites, let us never forget, are the unrepentant heirs of the French proto-fascist movement Action Francaise, and have supported such champions of Catholic righteousness as Pinochet. With their kind of orthodoxy I, for one, want nothing to do. So, as long as such people as RCF are actually fighting the good fight against such boss-bishops as Mahoney and his likes, I am on their side; but if this admiration for fanatical right-wing schismatics is more than a temporary aberration brought forth by exasperation, then I for one will be found against them root and branch.
However, I am more and more worried by the spirit that seems to be unleashing itself in North America now that the "liberals" are, at long last, on the defensive. Just the other day a Canadian Bishop openly said that the State ought to suppress homosexual activity. This is wrong on a number of levels. First, it is irresponsible talk in the strict meaning of the word. The Bishop has made a demand that he knows will never be granted, not even seriously considered. Both major Canadian political parties are sympathetic to homosexuality, and the current Prime Minister is about to steamroller a gay-marriage law through Parliament, ordering every party member to vote in favour, whatever his or her views. In other words, the Bishop has preened himself in public, made a show of his politico-religious purity, by making a claim that belongs in Dreamland. I call it irresponsible, apart from the hatred it will draw against the Church and the harm it will do to political relationships, because it makes extreme demands in the full knowledge that they will not be granted, and that therefore he will never be called upon to take responsibility for their results.
Second and worse, it is the rise of a spirit we had hoped dead for ever: the use of State power to enforce morality. Now let us be clear about what I mean here. I believe morality to be one and indivisible. I believe that the man who initiates a boy into homosexual sex and the man who robs a bank are equally guilty before God. But there is a difference. God has His own ways to deal with corrupt souls, and He is not concerned with public order or the national budget. His role is not to make our life easy in this world. The State's, however, is. The State has no business teaching morality, as such: its business is simply to protect the life, liberty and property of its citizens. The State must try to stop bank robbers, or punish them if they succeed, because it has to protect the property of its citizens. The State is not responsible for the state of their souls before God, however; it is not infrequently observed that the souls of those who are responsible for its running are often in no better condition than those of the inmates of their jails. The State may, prudentially, want to restrict homosexual activity in certain areas; keep a wary eye, for instance, at the interaction of practicing homosexuals with children; and try to act in such a way that homosexuality is not actually favoured. This, I think, is as much as any Catholic ought to ask of it. But to demand that the State should repress homosexual activity is both tyrannical and impolitic. It is to ask a group of sinners, many of them hardened and impenitent, to single out a group of their fellow sinners for punishment, because of the specific sin they practice. I think that to describe this procedure is enough to show how contemptible it is. God help any one of us who takes the State to be an appropriate judge of morality.
That is bad enough. But there is worse. The Canuck Bishop's irresponsible outburst is not an individual freak: it seems to me increasingly typical of what certain sides of the Church feel themselves legitimated to say and think in this period of anti-"liberal" insurrection. I just read the latest issue of the leading insurrectionary group's online magazine, Roman Catholic Faithful, and at least a couple of items simply made my hair stand on end. The first was the statement that one of the leading writers, having to suffer the horrors of the notorious diocese of Springfield, Illinois (which is rotten from top to bottom and has achieved almost legend-like status as everything that a Catholic diocese should not be), said that, if there had been a community of Lefebvrite (hard-right) schismatics in his neighbourhood, he and his family would have joined them. This is simply horrifying. In Church terms, it is like thinking that you can use cancer to cure AIDS. The very notion that one can go to a schismatic Church like the so-called "Society of St.Pius X" when one is displeased with one's bishop shows a lightness of heart and mind, an incapacity to distinguish between what is eternal and what is local, and what is worse a willingness to put oneself above the Church, that is simply alien to anything that should be called Catholic. There, I don't like the local Bishop, so I'll leave the Church. That'll larn'em! And in the same issue, the same writer implicitly criticizes a formerly Catholic family that went over to the Mormons after a Catholic priest drugged and abused their six-year-old son; one would have thought that he should either understand their position, or else not be so proud of his own.
Even worse, RCF not only act as though leaving the Church for the Lefebvrite schismatics were a negligible or even praiseworthy matter: they actively retail Lefebvrite propaganda lies and urban legends. At the very end of their magazine, after dozens of pages dedicated to the well-deserved exposure of Roger Cardinal Mahoney of Los Angeles, possibly the worst and most ruthless of the "liberal" infiltrators still ensconced in positions of authority and power - at the very end, they suddenly put in a short and paranoid article hinting that Popes John XXIII and Paul VI had had, before their election, "Communist sympathies" and thick FBI files; and that the Conclave had originally nominated the notorious Cardinal Siri, only to be stopped in its track by that bugbear of modern American reactionaries - France. (All those people ought to remember that France was once America's strongest ally in Europe, and that it was America that broke that friendship.) All this is trash. Paul VI especially was a brave and much-abused man who paid dearly for opposing as much as he could the spreading spirit of "liberalism" in the Church, and who fought more than one battle (Humanae Vitae, the fights against divorce and abortion, etc.) in the full knowledge that he would, on the political level, lose them; simply because it was more important to lay down a firm marker for the Church's position than to actually win a political confrontation. This was a courageous decision that I wonder whether any of the posturing Lefebvrites of this world would have taken.
At any rate, the presence of open, unashamed Lefebvrite material and moods among RCF is more than worrying; it is positively scary. The Lefebvrites, let us never forget, are the unrepentant heirs of the French proto-fascist movement Action Francaise, and have supported such champions of Catholic righteousness as Pinochet. With their kind of orthodoxy I, for one, want nothing to do. So, as long as such people as RCF are actually fighting the good fight against such boss-bishops as Mahoney and his likes, I am on their side; but if this admiration for fanatical right-wing schismatics is more than a temporary aberration brought forth by exasperation, then I for one will be found against them root and branch.
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Brilliant.
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