Here’s an item from the “Credit Where It’s Due” department.
Ireland seems to be the hotbed for phony Catholic prophets. Every few years, it seems, another kook mystic either comes from there or goes there from here to set up shop. For a while Christina Gallagher was attracting followers with her supposed messages from the beyond, then American-born Kathryn Ann Clarke (“Anne, a lay apostle”), and now it’s the anonymous gal styling herself “Maria Divine Mercy”. With a name like that, obviously she didn’t get the humility memo from Pope Francis.
Her writings are full of angry, apocalyptic talk, and even after the failure of her date-specific prediction of a worldwide “warning” to souls, there are still Catholics here and there sucked into her stories of impending doom and disaster, war and warnings, false popes and fake prophecies. From what I see, these are angry people who would like God to knock heads and kick butts, and they are quite willing to spread the gospel of anger provided by this would-be seer. She tells us that the Church isn’t going to approve her messages, but that we should believe her anyway, because God’ll get you if you don’t; and (in her apparently heretical dispensationalist teaching) she indicates that the Church will no longer have a real Pope, so who’s gonna say no to her?
Well, that’s not how Catholic life works.
Professor Mark Miravalle has helpfully applied the Church’s criteria for evaluating mystical claims to her case, and gives the results of his analysis in an on-line article.
Why is this a case of “credit where it’s due”? Because I’m usually pretty skeptical about Miravalle’s writings; after all, he’s taken far too favorable positions about various cases of dubious mysticism: Medjugorje, Kathryn Ann Clarke, and the Amsterdam case. But when he’s right, he deserves our thanks.
What’s the Pope up to?
David Brooks, with whom I seldom agree, suggests a pastoral strategy for the Church: following the example of St. Augustine, the model is to open the doors and get people in, rather than consciously aiming at a subculture position:
The problem with the Donatists, Augustine argued, is that they are too static. They try to seal off an ark to ride out the storm, but they end up sealing themselves in. They cut themselves off from new circumstances and growth.
Augustine, as his magisterial biographer Peter Brown puts it, “was deeply preoccupied by the idea of the basic unity of the human race.” He reacted against any effort to divide people between those within the church and those permanently outside.
He wanted the church to go on offense and swallow the world. This would involve swallowing impurities as well as purities. It would mean putting to use those who are imperfect. This was the price to be paid if you wanted an active church coexisting with sinners, disciplining and rebuking them.
Perhaps this is why Cdl. Bergoglio (now Pope Francis) has been advocating a generous approach to baptism for years:
Some priests In Buenos Aires are taking steps to facilitate the celebration of new baptisms and encourage them in every way. What is driving them?
JORGE MARIO BERGOGLIO: The Conference of Latin American Bishops held in 2007 in Aparecida reminded us to proclaim the Gospel by going out to find people, not sitting in the Curia or the presbytery waiting for people to come to us. . .
Evangelii nuntiandi itself repeated that “if the Son came, it was precisely to reveal, by His words and His life, the ordinary paths of salvation”. It’s the ordinary that one can achieve in missionary fashion. And baptism is paradigmatic in that. I think the parish priests of Buenos Aires are acting in that spirit. . . .
In your opinion, are the cases where baptism is denied to children because the parents are not in a canonically regular marital situation justified in some way?
BERGOGLIO: To us here that would be like closing the doors of the Church. The child has no responsibility for the marital state of its parents. And then, the baptism of children often becomes a new beginning for parents. Usually there is a little catechesis before baptism, about an hour, then a mystagogic catechesis during liturgy. Then, the priests and laity go to visit these families to continue with their post-baptismal pastoral. And it often happens that parents, who were not married in church, maybe ask to come before the altar to celebrate the sacrament of marriage.
It all brings to mind the words of Pope John Paul II, who urged the world to “open wide the doors” to Christ. But now perhaps Francis’ strategy is for the Church to open the doors and disregard the obstacles that would otherwise keep prodigal sons and daughters on the outside. It involves some risk.
(Hat tip: Thanks to Gordon Zaft for sending me the Brooks piece.)
Good-bye, good-bye, ch-ch
I suppose this is a sign of positive reform for the liturgy in the Catholic Diocese of Portsmouth, England. They’re bidding farewell to some of the 70’s throwbacks in the diocesan offices and as a result, OCP composer Paul Inwood has lost his influential job impeding liturgical improvement.
Damian Thompson writes:
Blessed silence in the diocese
Amid all the misery and confusion surrounding the Cardinal Keith O’Brien scandal, it’s nice to be able to report some good news from the Catholic Church.
The Diocese of Portsmouth was until recently controlled by “progressive” lay people from the hippy generation. Their Chavez figure is one Paul Inwood, “Director of Liturgy” and composer of grimly trendy “folk antiphons”. For years his music has been inescapable – but a new bishop, Mgr Philip Egan, has changed all that. The splendid Bishop Egan is making Inwood’s job redundant, along with those of lots of other Lefty busybodies.
There have been banshee wails of anguish from Inwood Towers, says my spy. “Though, to be fair,” he adds, “they may just be singing one of his hymns.”
As Fr. Z. noted in 2007 and as Mr. Joseph Shaw, director of the Latin Mass Society, noted in 2012, Mr. Inwood, despite holding a diocesan job as “Director of Liturgy”, has had a habit of writing recklessly deceptive propaganda about Pope Benedict XVI’s broadened permission for the old form of Mass.
But most balefully and with a broader influence, Mr. Inwood has been the composer of junk music such as “Alleluia Ch-Ch” (MP3):
Congratulations to Bp. Egan on his work in Portsmouth!
Free speech, part III: Critical website on Vassula Ryden case returns at new address: pseudomystica.info
Here’s a little good news for readers who are concerned about the case of non-Catholic false mystic Vassula Ryden. You may recall that Mrs. Ryden won a small victory in 2012 by shutting down the leading web site with critical information about her writings.
Her campaign of harassment by means of lawsuits got the site owner to close the web site.
But in an example of the Streisand Effect, the suit brought lots of attention to Mrs. Ryden and her dirty method of dealing with sincere religious critique: among Orthodox Christians here and among sect-watchers here, and particularly here on the world’s leading English-language Catholic news site. And there’s information here in Spanish; and here in French and here in German.
And various people took action to make sure that the informative material on that web site would not disappear. For instance, Catholic Culture picked up this analysis of the case by a prominent Dominican theologian, Fr. François Dermine, O.P.
Now the theologian himself has stepped up by putting the whole website back on line, at the new domain pseudomystica.info. He’s the president of an Italian organization studying religious sects, and they’re willing and able to defend their freedom of speech from legal harassment by sect leaders.
Mille grazie, Padre Dermine!
Pope Benedict enters contemplative life
I wonder what effect the Pope’s departure into a quasi-monastic life will have on the world of vocations: i.e., on the aspirations of Catholics seeking the Lord in consecrated life. By making prayer and seeking the face of God the center of day-to-day life, he is giving a profound witness. By disappearing from the stage of the world, he is declaring the primacy of the spiritual. He is reminding us of the precious value of the contemplative life, the life of prayer, and in particular of the sacred liturgy in which man turns to God and finds him.
Dare we hope that his example will inspire many to follow?