“The Inclusive Community”

One of the points of concern mentioned in Cardinal Maida’s letter below is this:

Most distressing however, is the fact that Dr. Padovano continues to celebrate Mass publicly at “The Inclusive Community” as “Pastor” in Nutley, NJ, although he was laicized in 1974 and married soon afterwards.

In case you’ve never heard of it before — I hadn’t — “The Inclusive Community” is a congregation of the United Church of Christ, whose directory lists Dr. Padovano as a pastor.

In 1986, an ordained UCC pastor, a woman whom I had taught at Ramapo College of New Jersey, invited me to share with her the co-pastorate of First Congregational Church in Passaic, New Jersey. A year-long dialogue had led the Protestant community there to invite a Catholic priest to lead them, together with the Protestant pastor. The Community would re-name itself The Inclusive Community and it would invite Catholics and Protestants to join it as Catholics and Protestants. The Catholic priest would be evaluated by a search committee, the Church Council and, finally, by the Congregation. If the candidate was approved by these three bodies, he would be appointed by the Congregation as the Catholic Pastor of The Inclusive Community. This process was completed after a vote of the Congregation on November 2, 1986.

So not only does he celebrate Mass unlawfully, he appears to have formally assumed a pastorate in a Protestant denomination, which would be an act of schism, an offense that incurs automatic (latae sententiae) excommunication. (Correct me, Pete, if I’m going too far.) That the professor continues to describe himself as Catholic and ministers to Catholic members of The Inclusive Community probably doesn’t diminish the seriousness of that.
This Community meets in the chapel of a regular UCC congregation in Nutley, New Jersey — and surely there couldn’t be a more fitting place name. Dr. Padovano himself, on the Catholic Light evaluation scale, ranks as a solid 8, earning the rating Nutrageous.