Category: Controversies

Not John Kerry. No. This has something to do with Catholicism. I went to a local parish yesterday for daily Mass and the Extraordinary Minister of the Eucharist looked at me like I had nine heads when he saw that I was receiving our Lord on the tongue. I wasn’t kneeling to receive or anything – I just didn’t want to get Jesus on my unconsecrated hands. Is that too pious these days?

The Revealer‘s Jeff Sharlet complains that the WaPo put its Deal Hudson resignation story on page A-6 instead of some place more prominent:

Why is the resignation of the Bush’s chief Catholic advisor — a position of much greater power than the governorship of New Jersey — getting so little attention?

Already, I find it hard to take that seriously. Mr. Sharlet thinks having a conference call once a week with an assistant of Karl Rove makes you more powerful than the governor of a state of 8.6 million people. I’ll be nice and say “Bunk.”

The Woodstock for religious orders was held in Fort Worth last weekend. Dom has his usual insightful insights which are linked above. I urge you to read his commentary on this story in the Dallas Morning News – “Among faithful, mum isn’t the word.”

The irony of the title is plain. Faithful who? The unfaithfully faithful? The religious who openly defy the bugaboo of modernity, the Vatican?

“Security in our church has come to be identified with the controlling power of the clergy to the detriment of the people in the pews,” said the Rev. Michael Crosby, a priest from Milwaukee. “We are perishing numerically because we have not been public enough in our protest of patriarchy.”

The security Fr. Crosby mentions was of the false kind. Some Bishops thought they could sweep the problems of sexual abuse under the proverbial rug. We know what the result is. Fr. Crosby speaks, though, as one who would give more power to the laity. But power to do what? Elect a pastor? Force a priest out they don’t like? There are many who like to make the Church into a democracy and they would make the immutable truths of faith and morals as flighty as the age.

Fr. Crosby’s subsequent statement about the cause of the lack of vocations is incorrect. He says they haven’t been public enough in their protest of the patriarchy. I say many orders are dying on the vine because they have rejected their patrimony, traditions, and the patriarchy of the Church. The orders that embrace them are flourishing, such as the Nashville Dominicans and the CFR’s. The Legionaries of Christ and Opus Dei are other examples of groups that are truly faithful to the Church and thriving. I was considering entering the Legionaries, actually, but my hair is parted on the wrong side and I’m no good at soccer. But never you mind that – what I’m saying is Fr. Crosby and his confreres don’t see the writing on the wall.

Take the traditional habit, for example. It’s a symbol, it’s not just a garment. A symbol always leads one to the substantial meaning it symbolizes. That’s why it’s called a symbol. Religious habits are made in the form of a cross. The religious who wears a habit is truly taking up the Cross, putting it on, making the Cross central to their interior and exterior life.

The Claretian martyrs of Barbastro would disagree with the “progressive” religious of today. The Spanish Marxists killed some fifty Claretian seminarians in 1936 because they were faithful Catholics in formation for the priesthood and because they wore the cassock. Their lives would be spared, they were told, if they took off the cassock. The Claretians, truly faithful to the substance behind the symbol, refused and went to their death.

Link via Drudge.

The Anti-Chomsky Reader edited by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.