Category: The Fringe

As some of you may have heard, this has been a rather rough week for the Anglican communion which is now threatening to split along continental lines over the issue of homosexuality. Here’s my thought on the subject… click

John Pacheco and Bob Sungenis are going at it for another round, this time over the topic of Religious Liberty and the Ecumenical Gatherings at Assisi. John offers a number of choice comments here, of which my favorite is the following:

If you are really interested in winning souls for Jesus Christ, you preach love, forgiveness, peace, mercy and the rest of the things the Pope preached. You do this because the world already knows all about damnation. We are damning each other to hell every day. The world needs to hear about God’s MERCY too and not just about judgement. That’s why we have a feast of Divine Mercy. We are talking about a tactical way of winning converts to the faith. The over bearing hermeneutic of damnation that you operate under is not as effective today as it once was.

This debate is fascinating for a number of reasons, one of which is the great familiarity of each principle party with the other. Throughout the years, many Catholic apologists have passed through CAI. Yet Sungenis and Pacheco were probably the two mainstays, as President and Vice-President of CAI respectively. When John made the difficult decision last Autumn to leave CAI and found Catholic-Legate.com, most of CAI-Canada followed him over. I hate to sound melodramatic, but in reading this dialogue there is a Luke Skywalker vs. Darth Vader feeling about it, in that John respects Bob as one of his mentors in the apologetics world and is now trying to rescue him from the dark side of radtradism.

Meenwhile, the Lidless-Eye Inquisition also has a number of great threads going on as usual.

Additionally, one of my favorite blogs, namely, Against the Grain from the Ratzinger Fan Club also has an excellent entry in response to various radtrad attacks that explains The Meaning of the Word Subsists.

I will post about Arlington’s ordinations today in a moment. First, a blurb about a rabble-rouser in the parking lot today who was handing out “report cards” on the Diocesan clergy after Mass. The man, someone who I’ve sung Latin with in a local schola, was handing this drek out while a woman next to him, somenoe who I also know from my parish, was standing right next to him asking people not to read it when he handed it to them. I passed them as I was leaving the parking lot and thought the man had something useful. I looked at it quickly as I heard the woman saying a short prayer to Our Lady. She then said, “Don’t read that – you don’t want that on your heart.” I have spoken with this woman many times and in my humble opinion she’s a saint. I quickly gave it to her and crushed it in her hand. Both were standing in the pouring rain.

One of my friends later told me a priest had walked into the reception with one of these sheets and was totally disgusted.

If I ever see that man again I will ask him what he was trying to prove. When I see this holy woman again at Mass I will thank her.

A few weeks ago, we noticed a fringe group starting up its own illicit Mass with a married ex-cleric at a suburban Boston Elks’ club. Now they’re moving up in the world, and finding themselves a more suitable worship space: the local Unitarian meeting hall. A few observations:

1. It’s not very nice, as a matter of inter-religious relations, for Unitarians to help a group that’s trying to start a schism in the Catholic Church. However, this is not surprising, since the UUA has in the past subsidized frauds like “Catholics for a Free Choice”.
2. The celebrant of their first Mass in the new location is someone named Ed Minderlein, whose writing for VOTF urges people to leave “the current pyramid hierarchical structure” and “move into small healthy communities” like the Reverend Ed’s fringe group where they “espouse the theology of personal freedom”.
   This is a clarifying little event that shows what kind of thinking shapes the agenda at VOTF: they’re reaching the stage of overt rebellion against the Church. They’re not far from certain fundamentalists who hand out tracts and urge Catholics to “come out from among Babylon”.

(Thanks to Jeff Miller for the link.)

I wonder if 30 people got up yesterday and said, “Hey, I think I’ll commit de facto schism over at the Elks’ Lodge.” A sympathetic article has this:

[The Rev. Ronald] Ingalls’ wife, Sheila, said she didn’t want the service to be too conventional.
“I wanted it to be special,” said Sheila Ingalls, manager of online banking at Middlesex Savings Bank in Natick.
A boom box, taking the organist’s place, played tapes with songs for everyone to sing including, “Come As You Are,” which expressed the sentiment of the congregation.