SSPX Excommuniations Lifted, But Bishop Williamson is Still Not Honest

On Saturday, January 24, 2009, Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops, deo gratias.

And the press was chock full of Bishop Williamson's holocaust denial.

This is such a great example of how the press simply does not understand - not Catholicism, not anything.

What Bishop Williamson thinks about the holocaust has absolutely nothing to do with his position in the Church, and his ability to offer the sacraments. It is stupid, ill-informed, foolish, and does not do honor to his office of Bishop. But it has nothing to do with the Pope's lifting of the excommunications.

In effect, the Pope is saying that as the old liturgy was never "abrogated," that is to say, it was never forbidden and never replaced, these priests continuing to offer it, and to insist upon it being offered, was not "wrong," and was certainly not an excommunicable offense.

He is not suggesting that everything any of them ever said is right, is not sinful, is not worthy of reproach, and doesn't make him look like a fool. He is simply saying they have done nothing worthy of excommunication.

A murderer is not necessarily excommunicated.

Bishop Williamson is a liar. Lying is not an excommunicable offense.

Would that the press would understand this, and concentrate on why the excommunications were lifted, and treat the holocaust story as a separate issue. 

The Priestly Tradition

Reading an entry in What Does the Prayer Really Say blog. It's about lay people administering blessings, and whether it is appropriate for them to do so, particularly during the distribution of Holy Communion.

Of course, in my traditional Mass, there is no question of this - only the priests distribute Communion.

The comments following the post were most interesting. While most people were opposed to the idea of lay people imitating priests and giving blessings, Father Z went a step further and reminded us that Communion was probably not the place to be giving blessings, though it has become common for small children to be blessed if they come up with their parents. (In my church, Father will bless little ones who come to the altar rail with mom and dad.)

One wag wrote, "TJM, so when a layman asks a blessing of God, He plugs his ears and yells “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU”? Just checking."

Of course, it's a good point. Surely God doesn't ignore anyone who asks a blessing on anyone else.

But that's not really the point. The point is the degradation of the office of the priest.

Like it or not, Catholicism is a priestly religion. Priests act as intercessors to God. In the case of Catholicism, they act "in persona Christi," (I think I've spelled that right!). That is, "in the person of Christ" for the rest of the people. They offer the sacrifice of the Mass, in the name of the people assembled. We come out of a tradition that consecrated certain people (priests) to the service of God. We have tabernacles - literal dwelling places for the Lord - in our Churches. We have sacraments, which only priests are qualified to administer except in the most grave and extraordinary circumstances (imminent death, for example). And even then, a lay person cannot absolve sin.

I'm not exactly sure why there is a desire on the part of modern Catholics to get rid of the priesthood.

Maybe "priest" smacks of "ancient and therefore unenlightened." Certainly among many of the "educated," priests are always villains. I had a conversation with a man the other night, and he was castigating the Catholic priesthood for its horrible predatory ways. I tried the best I could to defend not the actions of the sinning priests, but the priesthood in general. But in essence, he was really suggesting that people become priests to gain an unnatural power over the rest of us, and this "abuse of children" is just symptomatic of that.

How could I explain the gratefulness I feel when I watch the priests in our Church hear Confessions for an hour, then celebrate Mass, deliver a 40-minute, well-thought-out sermon (I can tell you as an actor, this requires a tremendous amount of energy!), then teach a Catechism class, then travel and hour to another mission church to go to it all again. And this is just Sunday. They have given up all the comforts of home, wife, children, in order to help save my soul. They have dedicated themselves to the service of God, and to my welfare. They are special. They can do special things that the rest of us cannot do by virtue of this dedication. It is, in my view, small compensation for all they have given up - but then, I'm not a priest. For these men, I am sure, to be able to hold the Blessed Sacrament in their hands, to be able to "make" it so, is more than enough for all that they have to sacrifice. It is their calling in life.

Why have the Catholic faithful become so self-centered, so self-important, that we can't live with this?

For God So Loved the World

Trying to be God-centered in this world is very difficult; I also find that some people talk about it, but don't really mean it - it is almost like a badge they like to wear without having earned it. One of the things that C. S. Lewis stresses is the sternness of Christianity, the manliness of it - it is not a religion for wimps, even though modern man has made it seem that way, including much of the Catholic Church. I am lucky enough to attend the old Mass, but even at the new mass I find it all about how wonderful we are and how much God loves us - but loves us in a gooey, sweetie-pie way. And I think... wait a second! This is a God who humbled himself by assuming our form, and then dying a horrible, humiliating death, because we were so wretched in our behavior, and doomed otherwise. If a dad ran into a burning house and pulled out his child and died of horrible burns himself, we would not think, awww, how sweet! We would think, what a brave and loving father! What a wonderful man! (The new mass doesn't even refer to it being a "sacrifice" but stresses the "meal" aspect of it, as if this were not a great and terrible thing we were witnessing, but just having a Happy Meal!)

For that reason, I loved Lewis' Narnia books - Aslan (the Christ figure) was strong, and noble, a true teacher. He loved his friends, and they loved him desperately, but it was always with respect and the knowledge that he could destroy them in a moment...

And he demands them to be strong and bold, not wishy-washy and soft. I just finished reading Goodbye, Good Men, about the crisis in vocations in the Church, and while the thought is not new (to me, or to many), it was re-inforced in reading it: the Church has been feminized out of all proportion.

The Faith as I knew it as a child was not a Faith for the faint of heart. It required discipline, self-sacrifice, self-awareness, difficult challenges (you really were expected to be celibate until marriage, for example, or for life if you chose a religious life), and plenty of time devoted to God, services, prayer, and practicing your religion. (Today, for example, our sermon was an hour - an hour - long! I mentioned to someone recently how long our sermons are - usually 30-40 minutes, and he said, "I wouldn't like that." Awww.) Fasting, abstaining, penance, financial deprivation, personal sacrifice - these things were expected of a Catholic.

Now, it's all about me, how I feel, my "community," sharing a meal of love and brotherhood, standing rather than kneeling (it is both uncomfortable and beneath my "dignity" to kneel - come on, guys, this is GOD we're talking about!), my personal fulfillment (I'm a woman and I want to be a priest, and I don't care what Jesus did, or about 2000 years of tradition... I want to be a priest, so I can wear vestments and stand up on the altar, rather than be "second best!").

I remember reading The Nun's Story when I was a child. It was one of my favorite books, because I wanted to be a nun, and it described in great detail what the life of a sister was all about. I read this book probably 40 times, all told.

In one particular episode, Sister Luke (our heroine), who is a very good medical student (she is studying to be a nurse), is asked to fail her examinations. She is asked to do this because another sister has become jealous of her skill and intelligence. The Mother Superior feels that Sister Luke's act of self-mortification will be good both for Sister Luke's pride, and for the other sister's spiritual crisis.

Sister Luke feels that this is a waste, and that she is more valuable to the Church if she passes her exams and goes to the missions as a nurse. She compromises by doing less well than she is capable of doing so that the other nun outscores her, but not so badly that she fails.

I struggled with that request. Could I have so humiliated myself? I doubt it. But the old Church, and God, would not hesitate to ask us for these kinds of sacrifices. We were expected to "man up" and do it.

Today, in our long, long sermon, Father said, we should be joyful when God sends us trouble. He sends it to us for our good - he is the author of troubles. We should say thank you, and see these as opportunities to grow, and to have something we can offer God to demonstrate our friendship and willingness to bow to his will.

How many times have I said in recent months, "I submit to your will, just show me what it is." And perhaps He is showing me what it is, I just don't like what I see... so I keep waiting for it to be something else. Something not so painful for me.

Yes, God is about love - and there is a tender quality to God's love. But it is also very much the love of a father - and while mothers nurture and love unconditionally, father's love was, at least in the old view of things, based upon conditions. Dad expected us to perform: he set standards, and we tried to live up to them.

He was the one who, no matter how many times we fell off our bike, would pick us up, set us back up on the seat, and say, "Try again."

And most of the time, we did. And sooner or later, we learned to ride the bike.

Not New But Relevant

I am reading a series of essays by James Hitchcock, about the Church in the 70s and 80s. For all that they were reactions to Vatican II (which took place during the 60s), they might have been written yesterday.

One essay about abortion, "Abortion and the Moral Revolution," is particularly interesting.

Hitchcock observes, " THe new orthodoxy (the new popular opinion) fits closely with the reality of class conflict, already discussed, in that this orthodoxy is essentially located in what has often been called the "new class" - those persons who regard themselves as enlightened and emancipated in their opinions and who are maximally receptive of new ideas. In essence these people believe that moral belief, although necessary to society, is also dangerous because of the passions it arouses. Publicly they espouse the idea of relativism and equal toleration of all opinions, in order to dampen possible outbreaks of moral passions of which they disapprove. In practice, however, they concede to themselves the sole right o have moral passions, the sole right to mount moral crusades. Moral passion is treated as a dangerous substance which must in effect be licensed."

As anyone who has ever expressed a non-PC opinion derived from a moral conviction knows, the writer is right on target here. This is particularly the case with abortion. But the writer goes on to discuss anti-abortion feelings and the political scene. This really struck home for me:

"Since the late 1960s there has been talk of a "conscience constituency": in American politics, meaning an element among voters which shuns traditional party loyalties and traditional considerations of economic self-interest in favor of political behavior based on the perceived moral importance of particular issues. These are issues - war, racism, poverty, ecology, the "Third World" - which ordinary politics either takes little interest in or seeks to avoid, precisely because they are emotional and divisive.

"The intense hatred which many "new politics" people have for the antiabortion movement stems form their feeling that the kind of people who are opposed to abortion, especially if they are demonstrably religious, have no right engaging in moral crusades. Such crusading is permissible only if directed toward subjects which have been certified as genuine issues of conscience. Conceiving themselves as authentic keepers of the public conscience, such people are rendered angry and frightened at the prospect of others - the wrong kind of people - claiming the authority of conscience for their own concerns.

"Those "single-issue" voters who have allowed their political loyalties to be guided solely by considerations involving, say, war or the Equal Rights Amendment, are commonly admired, within the "conscience constituency," for their purity, even if their single-mindedness is sometimes thought a bit short-sighted. Those who cast their ballots solely on the question of abortion, however, are accused of being dangerous fanatics and threats to the democratic system, the remedy for such a threat being a renewed sense of party loyalty, in which antiabortion voters would not hold politicians accountable for betraying them."

In this most recent election, I was pretty up-front about my inability to support Obama first and foremost because of his position on abortion. I had one very telling discussion with a man who, when questioned, agreed that late-term abortion was tantamount to murder. He agreed that if Obama supported it, he would have a problem with that. Even though Obama supported it verbally, and even though he promised to rescind the ban of partial-birth abortions as soon as he attained office, this man insisted that because Obama did not cast an actual vote (he politically voted "present" rather than go on record), he could not find Obama guilty of supporting murder.

Moreover, this man, and others, insisted that I was being dumb, irresponsible, and, as the article mentions, short-sighted by voting a single issue: abortion.

My answer? A respect for human life - a belief that human life is somehow more valuable than anything else on earth, and that it should always be protected - is central to all our other understanding of life, politics, culture, art - simply put, a valuing of human life is central to everything we do, are, stand for, and are likely to become. This is not to say that issues of war and ecology are not important - they are. But, particularly in the case of war, they are important for one reason: they are harmful to human life.

We might argue that our responsibility to manage the ecology transcends human life, and so it does. Still, absent human life, many of the most powerful destructive forces in the universe and on this planet - fires, volcanoes, tidal waves, comets, novas, and so on - would continue to kill, to change ecologies, and to punish innocent animal life, without our expert help.

But as to all the rest - I still maintain that if we truly respect human life above all, most of the depredations we so fear and loathe - murder, greed, theft, torture, war, and so on - would, if not disappear, be minimalized, without the need for political intervention.

Chicken? Or Egg?

It occurred to me a while ago that perhaps the reason there are so many Christ-like stories in world mythology is that we were designed to "recognize" that story - because it is the truth.

At Mass on Sunday another thought struck me - perhaps the odd fact that we must eat to survive is linked to our spiritual need to consume the body and blood of Christ. Why weren't we created to manufacture our food from the sunlight, air, and perhaps minerals from the soil the way plants do? Why this necessity to keep consuming plant and animal life? Many think it odd that Christians, Catholics in particular, "eat" their Savior. But maybe it's just all of a piece.

Interestingly, in Mere Christianity, which I am reading now (slowly - there is so much to think about!), C. S. Lewis points out that God did, indeed, choose to create us as creatures who must eat to survive, and must have sex to procreate. He might have made many other choices, but these are the ones He chose. That is simply the way it is.

So I can't help wondering if we (perhaps I should say, social and other scientists) persist in looking at things backwards: we don't discount the Christ story because it has been told in other cultures, but in fact we recognize the thread of human truth in it; we don't discount the Christian notion of Holy Communion as bizarre and superstitious but rather we see the perfect symmetry of our need to consume to live - both spiritually and physically. What other method might God have chosen in order to demonstrate to us our need for Him as the sustenance of our spiritual lives?

Icons

I had a new friend, and I went to meet his family.

The family were Catholic. So, nominally at the time, was I. Their house was full of icons: a cross on the wall, a statue of the Blessed Mother, an Infant of Prague stood in one bedroom.

Inwardly, I scoffed.

I had been trained to do this, but didn't realize it at the time. I was smart, educated, worldly. I read books, studied philosophy. This kind of thing - this "iconolotry" - was for peasants. Clearly, these people had a peasant strain in them.

Boy, was I wrong. Certainly not for the first time, and surely not for the last.

Of course, you have to be willing to submit yourself - without assurance, science, or proof positive - to a belief that there is something more to our existence than live, scramble for food, procreate (maybe), die, and disappear forever. But having once submitted, it isn't over. The submission, the surrender, is continual. It must be done again, and again. It's like love. Real love, of course, not "falling" in love. It must be done again and again, in the face of doubt, despair, anger, pain and sorrow. And while it's never quite as difficult as the first time (the submission), it never gets easy.

Icons, a particularly Catholic thing, are nothing more than signposts. They are like little arrows scratched on trees in the woods, assuring you that you're on the right path back home.

I recall one night driving from Geneva to Dijon. The road was rural, the night was dark, and we had no idea of where we really were. We drove along in the dark, hoping we were headed in the right direction. With welcome relief, we finally came upon a road sign with the welcoming arrow and kilometre measure. I can't tell you what a happy sight that simple sign looming in the headlights was.

Touching a rosary in your pocket, seeing a statue on your bedside table, or a little cross on the wall as you leave your house in the morning is the same sort of sensation. It's just a reminder that you're on a path headed somewhere, and that you haven't lost your way. It's a chance to refocus, to set your mind again on God, make that little act of surrender. Just for one more day.

Sinful Vote?

During the announcements at Sunday's Mass, our priest stood on the pulpit and explained to us that if we had voted for Obama in the recent election, we should go to Confession before we tried to receive Communion - he was unequivocal about the fact that by voting for a man who outspokenly defended and endorsed abortion (at any and all stages) we were committing a mortal sin. I was surprised, but I can only say that I am profoundly grateful that some of our priests and even some of the American bishops have found the courage to be forthright about our obligations as Catholics.

I just don't understand how anybody, Catholic or not, can think that unless we respect human life - at whatever stage - anything else matters.