Catholic Light – Page 10 – (but not lite!)

“I cannot; I must not; I will not!”

At the religious freedom rally in San Francisco on Friday, Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S., spoke as follows:

In every age Christians have been challenged to stand up for what they believe. I would like to share with you the story of a little-known Saint. His name is Gaspar del Bufalo. It was 1810. He was only 24 years old, and had been ordained a priest just a short time. But now he was under arrest. Napoleon had conquered Rome and had imprisoned the pope. His intention was to close the churches and to force all the priests to swear allegiance to him.
So there Gaspar stood in front of the prefect. The prefect was a kind old gentleman, who did everything to minimize the event, downplaying it and reducing everything to a mere formality. It was just a harmless bureaucratic exercise.
The important thing was that Gaspar be put at ease, that he should not realize the seriousness of the choice to which he was being called. After all, many priests had already acquiesced and signed the oath of allegiance.
But Gaspar was not listening to the prefect, he was thinking of the blood which Napoleon had already caused to be shed. He was thinking of the imprisonment of the Holy Father, and he was thinking of the violation of liberty and the suppression of independence for the church.
So his response to the prefect was clear and decisive:
I cannot, I must not, I will not!
Just 200 years later, It is a different country and it is a different government. This time it is an American President. He has taken it upon himself to determine what is and is not religious. He has taken it upon himself to determine how I should live my faith in this time and in this place. Should I acquiesce to his demands?
I cannot, I must not, I will not!
The world health organization classifies oral contraceptives as a class one carcinogen right up there with tobacco. And the government wants me to provide this free with healthcare.
I cannot, I must not, I will not!
Women who use oral contraceptives for four years prior to their first full-term pregnancy have a 52% increased risk of developing breast cancer. And the government calls this health care and wants me to provide this for free, well…
I cannot, I must not, I will not!
Oral contraceptives do horrific damage to a woman’s body, and should we call this health-care? Abortion destroys human life and is it reasonable or intelligent for us to call that healthcare?
I cannot, I must not, I will not!
The president proposed a compromise that would allow insurance companies to pay for the contraceptives rather than the church institution. My question, what if I belong to a church institution that is self-insured? I would then be required to pay for this.
I cannot, I must not, I will not!
What if I’m a Catholic business person who is required by my government to provide insurance that violates my conscience?
I cannot, I must not, I will not!
What will it be next and who will it be next? The New Mexico Court of Appeals has ruled that it is illegal for a photography business owned by Christians to refuse to photograph a same-sex wedding ceremony even though New Mexico law does not permit same-sex marriage. What will they say next? Will they say that it is illegal for me to refuse to do a same-sex marriage. Would we as Catholics allow the state to change one of our sacraments.
I cannot, I must not, I will not!
Saint Gaspar del Bufalo spent four years in prison for his profession of faith. We must pray too, that we have the strength to be firm in our faith.
We are not imposing our values on anyone. The government has dictated that employees at Catholic institutions are provided with free contraception, and that is the imposition on our faith and on our conscience. The government doesn’t want so much to advance the cause of women’s health, but rather, they seek to demonize a faith group that has the “audacity of hope,” that they might live their faith free from government interference and intrusion.
I know it is just a mere formality, just a harmless bureaucratic exercise. I know that the important thing is that we should not realize the seriousness of the choice to which we are being called. After all everybody else is doing it. But let me be perfectly clear:
I cannot, I must not, I will not!

Letter to a friend who left

A friend of mine — let’s call him “B.” — a musician and long-time Catholic who recently joined another church, got a letter from his pastor saying that he wouldn’t be able to perform at services in his old parish any more. The pastor had no problem with non-Catholics performing music at the parish, but for someone who left the Church to visit and perform liturgical music in our services would create “confusion” for the faithful.
The pastor was going a little bit lightly when he chose his words. The precise word, I think, is “scandal”: it means leading people into error or sin. He doesn’t want the faithful to think that the Church regards it with indifference when people leave the Church and join another body with different doctrines, a body with which we cannot share the sacraments, a body with its own system of authority apart from the Church’s unity.
B. posted the letter on the internet and many of his friends commented to sympathize and to grouse about how the priest could not possibly be a good man if he wrote such a letter.
I didn’t want to answer right there and get his friends all angry, but I did write him a private note.

Dear B.,
I imagine that getting the letter from Fr. K is a bit of a sting, and I’m sorry about that.
There is a real pain of separation involved when people move from one Christian communion to another. I’ve experienced it too, on coming from Evangelical groups into the Catholic Church years ago. For you, being barred from the choir loft at St. Helen’s is just one piece of that experience.
I hope you know how grateful I am for you and your musical service at the parish, and for all the good that you’re doing now.
Yet I also respect Fr. K for acting as a pastor. Perhaps he’s acting out of a sense of duty, trying in his way to call you back to unity, according to the Church’s faith. Or at least he doesn’t want the parish’s music ministry to contradict the Church’s striving for unity. To separate from one Christian communion and adhere to another is a serious matter: this is something on which Catholics, Anglicans, and Orthodox all agree.
Ecclesial communion is something that Vatican II wrote about: how we believe together, share the sacraments, and live under one authority in the Church. So Fr. K is acting on a long-established principle, not a narrow parochial point of view.
I don’t know if this makes it more comprehensible. But I’m running on, and telling you things you probably know already. God bless.
With sincere regards,
–RC

Free speech, part II

Some months ago the non-Catholic false mystic Vassula Ryden sued Swiss resident Maria Laura Pio, in a court in Belgium, demanding to take down Mrs. Pio’s web site of critical articles, infovassula.ch. The choice of Belgium as a venue was puzzling, since both Pio and Ryden are residents of Switzerland. Maybe some foolish lawyer in Belgium is a follower of Mrs. Ryden and volunteered to do the dirty work at no charge, thinking that he’s serving God by persecuting Mrs. Pio.
When the case came to a hearing, the court in Belgium promptly dismissed it on procedural grounds, so that went nowhere.
Well, Mrs. Ryden has found another foolish lawyer to do her dirty work, and this time she may get her way. A lawyer in Cardiff, Wales, has threatened to sue Mrs. Pio, claiming that the domain name of her web site infringes on Mrs. Ryden’s trademarks. Mrs. Pio has decided not to spend any more time defending herself from such vexatious litigation and has announced (here’s a copy) that she’s closing the site this month.
A commenter on the previous blog post observes:

Vassula and TLIG are at it again and this time may have potentially shut down the one-stop site for truth about the cult – http://www.infovassula.ch/tliglawsuit2.htm

The threats are spurious – and I’ve done some more research on the people behind this. The solicitor who is threatening to sue for legal fees and loss of TLIG(TM) earnings, Anthony Jeremy, is a specialist in CANON law and a fully paid up member of the cult, having posted at length, coincidentally, about the Congregation’s ban on the use of church premises and being mentioned by someone else in a ‘testimony’.

Vassula(TM) is a registered trademark, as is TLIG(TM), which is curious. The attack has no basis, clearly Pio’s site is not trading as TLIG, is not selling a bogus product, in fact is not selling anything and doesn’t even carry advertising! It clearly falls under ‘fair use’, otherwise it would be impossible to ever mention Vassula(TM) or TLIG(TM). Also note that nowhere on the TLIG(TM) site does it mention that these are registered trademarks and only refers to copyright on the message content. I wonder why?

Also note that TLIG(TM) is not mentioned in full, no corporate address or full details of the company. TLIG(TM) seems not registered in the UK as a trading entity. Looking at the Foundation, we find that this is registered in Switzerland. It has one office and one employee. The president, Jan Kooger Howard, has currently 19 separate companies running from front offices around Geneva – none has more than 6 registered employees – his main interest seems to be an oil brokerage for Nigerian oil, Sahara Energy Services. And no, that does not appear to be a trademark!

The trademarks are owned by the VP, another Swiss big businessman, Jacques Gay, one of the Freres Gay and the owner of a few watch clasp patents.

I’ll take your word as to the lawyer’s identity, since I don’t know it for myself. His claims seem spurious to me too: Mrs. Pio isn’t engaged in trade, so it seems strange to claim that she’s violating a trademark. And the claim that Vassula’s followers can’t tell a critical website from a supportive one is really an insult to them.
How a lawyer can make such implausible assertions without turning purple from embarrassment is beyond me, but some people have a natural skill for it.
[Update (August 2012): clarified the description of the Belgian court’s action.]

CDF publishes document on apparitions 34 years after its first issuance

Thanks to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, which has just published its 1978 document of guidance for bishops discerning private revelations.
Yes, you read that right. It’s 2012, and we’re talking about the publication of a 1978 document. If anything proves the old quip “Roma eterna, sed civitas Vaticana sempiterna” (“Rome is eternal, but Vatican City is almost eternal”), it’s this.
The document, usually known as Normae Congregationis from the first words of its title, was issued in 1978 and sent to bishops. It contains principles and general procedures for bishops on how to judge a claimed private revelation. It was issued with the intimidating marking sub secreto, a warning that it was not to be published: not because it contained anything startling, but probably because it hadn’t undergone the full review process a public document would receive.
But “information wants to be free”, as the saying goes, and from 1994 to 2010 various writers, from Japan to France, and from Canada to Italy, have published it in Latin and in vernacular versions. It appeared in at least one canon-law dissertation, and I even contributed to its spread a little by publishing an English translation made with two colleagues (and yes, the leader of the project did have permission from his bishop). Most recently, the vaticanist Andrea Tornielli got a copy by simply asking the CDF for it, and his copy had no instructions about keeping it secret, so he published the Latin text and an Italian translation in February 2012.
Cdl. Levada writes in a preface that the document had in effect passed into the public sphere, so CDF chose to make its release official, here in Latin and with five vernacular translations, including the English version, Norms regarding the manner of proceeding in the discernment of presumed apparitions or revelations. Cdl. Levada’s preface also discusses the issue of private revelations in general and mentions how the topic came up in the bishops’ Synod on the Word of God, and expresses his hope that the document will be helpful to pastors and experts needing to deal with this pastoral issue.

“The Church is not ours but His”

In these days after the Solemnity of the Ascension, it’s proper to reflect on the Church that our Lord left behind.
In the 1985 interview book “The Ratzinger Report“, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI) said this to interviewer Vittorio Messori:

…the Church is not ours but his. Hence the ‘reform’, the ‘renewals’… cannot exhaust themselves in a zealous activity on our part to erect new, sophisticated structures…. Saints, in fact, reformed the Church in depth, not by working up plans for new structures, but by reforming themselves. What the Church needs in order to respond to the needs of man in every age is holiness, not management.

The Cardinal was speaking about ecclesiologies — theories of what the Church is — that had lost their balance in the 1960s and 1970s. Some Catholics, he said, had in practice adopted a concept of the Church that was like the American “free church” concept. This refers to the pattern we see as far back in America as the Pilgrims: a fellowship of believers who spurned the idea of an institutional Catholic Church founded by the will of Christ, and also spurned the state-churches that arose from the Protestant Reformation, which those Pilgrims also considered oppressive. They founded their own communities to follow their spiritual lives according to their convictions.
To think of the Church as a creation of ours makes it a human construct, subject to democratic processes and group dynamics, and dependent on our human skills of management.
This is different from how we Catholics believe. We think of the Church as the communio sanctorum, a phrase with multiple meanings.
The Church is the fellowship of the saints, in which “saints” refers to all the baptized, the people made holy (“saints”) by the grace of Christ given in baptism. This fellowship extends not only throughout the world but also through time, and includes those who have died in fellowship with Christ, and who are still one community with us even as they await their glorification which will be full at the end of the world.
And the Church even includes the Holy One himself, Christ the Lord risen and glorious who has ascended to the Father and is present body and soul before Him. The Church is the Body of Christ, present in Heaven through Him, and present in the world and in history through His people.
Because Christ is the Head of the Church, He makes the Church into the communio sanctorum in its other meaning: the sharing of holy things. It is the sharing of the sacraments — Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Confession, Ordination, Marriage, Anointing — the holy things through which Christ uses material goods, words, and gestures to confer grace and spiritual life on us. To be fully in the Church is to share the sacraments, the greatest of which is the Eucharist which contains the living Jesus Christ himself, given to us hidden under the forms of bread and wine.