Beware the Anglo-Catholics

in Anglicans 1 Comment Tags: ,

Andrew Sullivan links to a feline blog by Chris Dierkes. Dierkes studied for the Jesuits before becoming an Anglican. Commenting on Benedict’s overture to Anglicans, Dierkes has this to say:

And, if personal experience and lifelong immersion in a sub-culture is any form of persuasive evidence, I can tell you that conservative Anglo-Catholicism–at the clerical level–is totally dominated by gay men.  Mostly repressed.  What used to be called when I was in seminary, the pink mafia.

Anglo-Catholics do have that bad reputation; but I doubt that things are much worse than in the Catholic clergy. The Anglicans just do things more colorfully. One Anglican foundation is especially amusing:

A slightly less bizarre foundation was the “Anglican Congregation of the

Primitive Observance of the Holy Rule of St. Benedict.” This was founded in 1896by a former medical student, Benjamin (Aelred) Carlyle, who had been fascinated by the monastic life since the age of fifteen, when he had founded a secret religious brotherhood at his public school. His choice of the religious name of Aelred, after a twelfth-century Cistercian abbot of Rievaulx who had written treatises on “spiritual friendships,” was a deliberate one, for a biography of St. Aelred by Newman’s companion, J. O. Dalgairns, had revealed to him “a monastic world in which natural and spiritual relations could be fused” (Anson,

Building up the Waste Places, p. 134).

Aelred Carlyle was a man of dynamic personality, hypnotic eyes, and extraordinary imagination. In 1906 his community made its permanent home on Caldey Island, off the coast of south Wales (outside Anglican diocesan jurisdiction), where, largely on borrowed money, he built a splendidly furnished monastery in a fanciful style of architecture. The life of this enclosed Benedictine community centred upon an ornate chapel where the thirty or so tonsured and cowled monks sang the monastic offices and celebrated Mass in Latin according to the Roman rite. As there was nothing like it anywhere else in the Church of England the island abbey inevitably became a resort for ecclesiastical sightseers, and many young men were drawn to join the community out of personal affection for Carlyle.

The self-styled Lord Abbot of Caldey introduced practices into the life of his monastery which many outsiders, accustomed to the austere atmosphere of the existing Anglican men’s communities, found disconcerting. “Stories Toto Told Me” by “Baron Corvo” (Frederick Rolfe), which had originally appeared in The Yellow Book, were often read aloud to the assembled monks at recreation time, and during the summer months they regularly went sea-bathing in the nude. Nor did Carlyle make any secret of his liking for charming young men. Spiritual

friendships were “not discouraged,” recalled his biographer, himself a former

member of the Caldey community:

… and their expression sometimes took a form which would not be found In any normal monastery to-day. . . . Embraces, ceremonial and non-ceremonial, were regarded as symbolical of fraternal charity, so our variant of the Roman rite permitted a real hug and kisses on the cheek between the giver and the recipient of the Pax Domini at the conventual Mass. (Anson, Abbot Extraordinary, pp. 125-126)

(From UnEnglish and Unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality by David Hilliard)

The current Cistercian community at Caldey is not continuous with the Anglican foundation; from Carlyle they have inherited only the building, not, I trust, the eccentricities.

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The Dayspring from on High

in guilt, repentance, Southwest No Comments Tags: , ,

I am happy to report that Father Fessio acted on my advice and has republished Daypring, a novel by Harry Sylvester about the encounter of a secular Easterner with the Penitentes of New Mexico. 

In December 2007 I commented on the original edition. 

Every time I visit the Southwest something extraordinary happens – I try not to expect it and set myself up for a disappointment, but  I always feel why the Southwest, especially New Mexico, has exerted such an influence on artists of all kinds. 

The starkness of the landscape and the Indian and Hispanic cultures are more alien to an Easterner than the cities of Europe are. It is impossible amid this landscape and these cultures to hide from the facts of life and love and death, of sorrow and blood, and for the hope for a mysterious world beyond death into which we shall all enter. It is a land of tears, but also a land of a beauty that pierces the soul. 

It is so different from the suburban culture of niceness into which Christians have fallen, the Hallmark card religiosity that has replaced a true encounter with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. 

But only a world that acknowledges the possibility of damnation can also see the Dayspring from on high dawn upon it.

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A Real Horror Story

in abortion 1 Comment Tags: ,

Although the Nazis did harvest the gold from Holocaust victims’ teeth, I believe the stories of lampshades made from human skin were Allied propaganda (not that such exaggerations were necessary – reality was bad enough). 

However the Nazi “waste not, want not” philosophy is being applied to aborted children: 

Aborted Fetal Material Used in Anti-Wrinkle Creams

 Children of God for Life announced today that Neocutis, a bio-pharmaceutical company focused on dermatology and skin care is using aborted fetal cell lines to produce several of their anti-aging skin creams.

“It is absolutely deplorable that Neocutis would resort to exploiting the remains of a deliberately slaughtered baby for nothing other than pure vanity and financial gain,” stated Executive Director Debi Vinnedge. “There is simply no moral justification for this.”

For years Children of God for Life has been a watchdog on pharmaceutical companies using aborted fetal cell lines in medical products and they have received thousands of inquiries from the public on the use of aborted fetal material in cosmetics. 

Until now, this was the first time they have encountered any company bold enough to put the information right on their own website and product literature.  A quick investigation into the science behind the products revealed the shameless data.

Neocutis’ key ingredient known as “Processed Skin Proteins” was developed at the University of Luasanne from the skin tissue of a 14-week gestation electively-aborted male baby donated by the University Hospital in Switzerland.  Subsequently, a working cell bank was established, containing several billion cultured skin cells to produce the human growth factor needed to restore aging skin. The list of products using the cell line include: Bio-Gel, Journee, Bio-Serum, Prevedem, Bio Restorative Skin Cream and Lumiere.  But Vinnedge is calling for a full boycott of all Neocutis products, regardless of their source.

“There is absolutely no reason to use aborted babies for such selfish motives,” Vinnedge said. “It is anti-life, anti-woman and counter-productive as Neocutis is about to find out!”

 

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Benedict and the Anglican Use

in Anglicans, Celibacy, Vatican 3 Comments Tags: ,

The Pope’s decision to allow the setting up of an ordinariate for Anglicans who wish to become Catholic is a generous experiment. It would not be a separate “church” like the Eastern Churches, which are self-governing churches of apostolic origin in communion with Rome. As far as I kow, no pope has ever claimed the ability to establish a “church” is this sense. 

The structure that the pope is contemplating is more like that of the military ordinariate. The bishop is appointed by the pope, and has spiritual authority over military personnel and their families. The ordinariate has its own priests and seminarians and manages its own affairs. 

The difference with the Anglicans’ is that they would have their own liturgical books, approved by Rome, and many of the clergy will initially be married. It is unclear (and perhaps Rome has not decided) whether married men will continue to be ordained for this ordinariate. 

There are already formerly-Anglican priests who converted and now function as Catholic priests. And of course Eastern Catholic churches have a married clergy, and have begun ordaining married men not just in their home territories but also in North America. If a married Catholic in the Western Church feels he has a vocation to the priesthood, all he has to do is transfer to an Eastern Church, enculturate in  that church, and ask that Church to test his call for a vocation. I have not noticed any mass movement in that direction. 

I doubt that the new Anglican ordinariate will have any significant effect in North America. I devoutly wish that there were such an Anglican-use church in the places I live. The standard of music in Catholic churches ranges from the mediocre to the truly abominable, and the translations grate on the ear of anyone who has studied English literature.

The long-term significance of the move is that it may provide a model for reintegrating Protestant Churches within the Catholic Church. It may also be a test as to whether it is worthwhile modifying the discipline of clerical celibacy in the West. From my limited contacts in higher ecclesiastical circles (my name is poison to most bishops) I sense that there is a willingness even among the most orthodox to reconsider the discipline of clerical celibacy. 

But a married clergy is hardly a panacea to the problems of sexual abuse and shortage of clergy, and brings with it a whole raft of problems. I have spoken to wives of ministers, and I have seen the toll that their husband’s ministry takes on them and their children.  

However, whatever happens, Benedict’s gesture is generous, and I hope it bears much fruit.

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Trick Me Once Shame on You, Trick Me Twice…

in law enforcement No Comments Tags:

Roman Polanski promised and crossed his heart and hoped to die that he would not leave Switzerland if he were let out of jail. He would wait patiently to see whether he would be extradited to the U.S. where he would be put in prison in uncomfortable circumstances. He would under no circumstances consider crossing the border into France which does not extradite its citizens. Polanski is a French citizen. 

A Swiss court, remembering that another court had heard a similar promise, said, no deal. 

Or as Le Monde puts it more elegantly: 

Le tribunal pénal fédéral de Bellinzone a rejeté, mardi 20 octobre, la demande de mise en liberté provisoire du cinéaste franco-polonais Roman Polanski, détenu en Suisse depuis plus de trois semaines sur mandat américain, en raison des risques “élevés” de fuite.

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Bishop Lahey and Sacrilege

in Canada, clergy sex abuse scandal, law enforcement, Psychology, repentance, Responsibility, sexual abuse 1 Comment Tags: , ,

Nightmares are a hazard of those who investigate child abuse, and one of the most potent sources of the nightmares is the explicit sacrilege that is sometimes, perhaps often, involved in the abuse. Some abusive priests have dressed boys as Jesus and then assaulted them.

 

Bishop Lahey not only had child porn on his computer (bad enough) but, the Chronicle Herald reports,

Court papers state that the image of the “young, naked male” showed him wearing only “a set of black rosary and a set of white rosary beads around his neck.” The boy appears to be nine to 12 years old, court papers say.

A number of other images of young boys were found on the bishop’s laptop, the documents say, and videos show “young males engaged in sexual acts.”

One image allegedly depicts a young naked male who appears to be “hurt, as there are red welts and marks on his stomach and chest area.”

“He looks sad in this image,” the documents say.

It is bad enough that anyone should find pleasure in such images, but a bishop, a successor of the apostles!

Lahey was widely respected, even by sexual abuse victims. The failure of abusers to give evidence of their evil tendencies in other areas of lives is also deeply disturbing. If we see a person doing many good things, we assume that he is a good person – perhaps not without faults, but not concealing abominable evil either. But that assumption is wrong. That realization is also the stuff of nightmares.

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Father Absence and Failure in School

in education, Masculinity, Responsibility, Women in Church 4 Comments Tags: , ,

Patrick Welsh, who teaches in the Washington D.C, school system, has diagnosed the problem of poor academic achievement among black students: Making the Grade Isn’t about Race. It’s About Parents.

“Why don’t you guys study like the kids from Africa?”

In a moment of exasperation last spring, I asked that question to a virtually all-black class of 12th-graders who had done horribly on a test I had just given. A kid who seldom came to class — and was constantly distracting other students when he did — shot back: “It’s because they have fathers who kick their butts and make them study.”

Another student angrily challenged me: “You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us.” When I did, not one hand went up.

Educators are worried that black children are doing poorly in school because of unspecified “racism” or low expectations. Welsh demurs: 

But focusing on a “racial achievement gap” is too simple; it’s a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom. 

Fathers have to be present in a home for children to succeed in life; the absence of a father makes it very difficult for a child to succeed. A child growing up in a middle-class community in which almost all children have fathers at home will benefit from this environment, even if he lacks a father. But when whole neighborhoods do not have a father in any home, working, disciplining, guiding, the result is inevitable: academic failure, violence, and out-of-wedlock pregnancy. 

But what can a government do about this? Some policies hurt the family, but churches are really the only way that men can be taught their responsibilities to be responsible fathers and not simply biological males. 

And of course men, especially young men, especially black young men, stay away from church, which they regard as a feminine environment: for women and little children, not for men. 

But all the churches, at least the main-line churches, including the Catholic Church, worry about is how to make more space for women in church – when women are already the vast majority of the congregations.

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Trying to Put the Genie Back in the Bottle

in Liturgy, Rome, Vatican 7 Comments Tags: , ,

Bishop R. Nickless of Sioux City has written a letter to his diocese: Ecclesia Semper Reformanda.

 

In it he denounces the false method of interpreting the Second Vatican Council: 

On the one hand, there is an interpretation that I would call “a hermeneutic of discontinuity and rupture,” it has frequently availed itself of the sympathies of the mass media, and also one trend of modern theology. 

The hermeneutic of discontinuity risks ending in a split between the pre-conciliar Church and the post-conciliar Church. It asserts that the texts of the Council as such do not yet express the true spirit of the Council. 

It is crucial that we all grasp that the hermeneutic or interpretation of discontinuity or rupture, which many think is the settled and even official position, is not the true meaning of the Council. This interpretation sees the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Church almost as two different churches. It sees the Second Vatican Council as a radical break with the past. There can be no split, however, between the Church and her faith before and after the Council. We must stop speaking of the “Pre-Vatican II” and “Post-Vatican II” Church, and stop seeing various characteristics of the Church as “pre” and “post” Vatican II. Instead, we must evaluate them according to their intrinsic value and pastoral effectiveness in this day and age. 

Nickless calls for the return to traditional practices: 

We must renew our reverence, love, adoration and devotion to the Most Blessed Sacrament, within and outside of Mass. A renewal of Eucharistic Spirituality necessarily entails an ongoing implementation of the Second Vatican Council’s reform of the liturgy as authoritatively taught by the Church’s Magisterium, the promotion of Eucharistic Adoration outside of Mass, regular reception of the Sacrament of Reconciliation and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Eucharist and our Mother. 

He goes on to talk about defending the family, encouraging vocations etc.

 

All this is well and good, but the fact is that many of the bishops who were at the Vatican Council as a body presided over and indeed sometimes mandated the destruction of the customs and attitudes that Nickless wants to restore. Were those bishops wrong and Nickless right? Perhaps – I think so, but how is the laity to judge that one crop of bishops largely erred and the current crop is getting it right?

 

When I was an undergraduate at Providence College, I had a course in the Liturgy taught by a peritus, a Dominican priest, who had helped write the constitution on the liturgy. He fully accepted what Nickless called the hermeneutic of discontinuity. The liturgy of the post-Vatican II Church was supposed to be something in all externals completely different from the pre-Vatican II Church. But it is hard to distinguish mere externals from the essence, just as it is hard to distinguish the body from the soul.

 

In any case, it is always harder to build up good habits and customs than to destroy them. I am happy that some (not all) of the clergy have given up a mean-spirited persecution of the members of the laity who are attached to traditions of the Church, but it is going to be hard, probably impossible to restore practices that have disappeared, like widespread Eucharistic adoration and frequent confession.

 

Nickless denounces the “false spirit” of the Council: 

The so-called “spirit” of the Council has no authoritative interpretation. It is a ghost or demon that must be exorcised if we are to proceed with the Lord’s work. 

But this genie is out of the bottle and it will take more than a letter from a bishop to put it back in.

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The Kindness of Strangers on the Way

in Uncategorized No Comments Tags:

Deo volente, I will do the Camino de Santiago, or at least as much of it as an aging body will take, in the fall of 2010. 

In preparation I have been reading accounts of other pelegrinos, some likely, like Father Kevin Codd , the rector of the American seminary at Louvain (To the Field of  Stars: A Pilgrim’s Journey to Santiago de Compostela), some understandable, likes Robert Ward, an unbeliever but a travel writer (All the Good Pilgrims), and some highly unlikely, like HaPe Kerkeling, a gay German comedian (I’m Off Then: Losing and Finding Myself on the Camino de Santiago). 

What impresses all walkers on the Camino are the simple acts of kindness that they encounter from fellow pilgrims and from locals: the strangers who will tend to their bleeding blisters, the opticians who will rush to replace broken glasses, the women by the wayside who offer fruit and water and ask only for a prayer when the pilgrim reaches Santiago. And then there are the coincidences that impress even the unbelievers.  And there are also the fakes, the con artists, the doubters, the seekers, the New Agers, the wanderers, the vagrants. It is very like the Middle Ages. 

As the Latin poem on the Refugio at Roncesvalles said:  

The door is open to all, to sick and healthy, not only to Catholics but also to pagans, Jews, heretics, and vagabonds. 

And it will, I hope, be open to me.

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The New Pharisees

in clergy sex abuse scandal, clericalism 1 Comment

A comment below raises the excellent question as to how the abusers can live with themselves.  How can they lead outward lives of piety and inwardly be sacrilegious criminals. 

Their spiritual ancestors the Pharisees had a similar ability to impress men by outward shows of piety but inwardly were full of rapine and evil: they were whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones. 

Jesus had little doctrinal disagreement with the Pharisees: unlike the Sadducees, the Pharisees believed in the existence of angels and the resurrection of the dead. But they observed the minutiae of the Law, while forgetting justice and mercy and love.

In addition to Phariseeism and hypocrisy, the abusers suffer from some deep desire to control and use others. That is why they keep records of their crimes, records which expose them to prosecution and conviction. 

They control others by putting on a very convincing façade of good works, as well as by abusing victims. At the heart of the abuser is a desire for control, for power. As the Catholic priesthood has often been presented as an instrument of power (whether spiritual, political, or psychological) it attracts such people.

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Anti-Semitism without Jews

in Anti-Semitism, Uncategorized 1 Comment Tags: , , ,

Anti-Semitism has the ability to flourish in the absence of Jews. Reality had never troubled anti-Semites. I remember reading about the world system of a primitive tribe in Central America. Their mental map placed themselves (naturally) at the center, then neighboring tribes, then Spaniards, then Americans and in the outermost fringes and darkness witches and Jews (Not that they had ever met a Jew).

Another primitive tribe in Honduras shows the same tendencies.

Manual Zelaya, an alley of Hugo Chavez  of Venezuela, was ousted. Some call it a coup. He returned to Honduras and took refuge in the Brazilian embassy. One of his supporters is talk show host David Romero, who broadcast:

There are times when I ask myself if Hitler was or was not correct in finishing with that race with the famous Holocaust. If there is a people who do damage in this country, they are Jewish, they are Israelis.

Zelaya himself is on to the subtle ways of the Jewish conspiracy:

In phone calls to the media, Zelaya has charged that Israeli mercenaries had attacked the embassy with high-frequency radio waves and toxic gases.

Perhaps the Jews are broadcasting messages that are being picked up by the fillings in Mr. Zelaya’s teeth.

There are only a hundred Jewish families in all of Honduras, and no one else has noticed the   presence of Israeli commandos in that country.

Mr. Romero is now all tears and claims that he was misunderstood and that he is part Jewish himself.

PS. Obama is supporting Zelaya.

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Equal Opportunity Nuttiness

in Anti-Semitism, clergy sex abuse scandal 1 Comment Tags: ,

In Honduras it is not just leftists (I will post that when my computer lets me) who like to blame the Jews for everything. After American papers starting in 2002 printed stories about sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga realized who was behind these attacks (guess):

     “It certainly makes me think that in a moment in which all the attention of the mass media was focused on the Middle East, all the many injustices done against the Palestinian people, the print media and the TV in the United States became obsessed with sexual scandals that happened 40 years ago, 30 years ago,” Rodriguez said. 

     “Why? I think it’s also for these motives: What is the church that has received Arafat the most times, and has most often confirmed the necessity of the creation of a Palestinian state? What is the church that does not accept that Jerusalem should be the indivisible capital of the State of Israel, but that it should be the capital of the three great monotheistic religions?” (see John Allen, The Word from Rome).

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The Fault Is Not in the Structures but in Ourselves

in clergy sex abuse scandal, clericalism, Moral Theology 3 Comments Tags:

The fully justified anger about Bishop Lahey should not blind us to the failings in other forms of Christianity. There have been crimes and cover-ups in other denominations. 

Abuse in independent churches is almost impossible to track. Even denominations like the Southern Baptists have a polity that makes it impossible to screen out abusers. 

When hierarchical churches have cases of abuse, people look wistfully at independent congregationalist churches; when independent churches have cases of abuse, people look to episcopal churches in which someone outside the immediate church has responsibility and authority. 

The failure is not in governing structures but in human nature, in its lust and cowardice. 

The failure in the Catholic Church is however made worse by a form of clericalism. 

In the Middle Ages, as Tom Doyle has shown, Catholics were very open about denouncing the crimes of clerics. After the Reformation, Catholics drew the wagons in a circle and became reluctant to admit problems that Protestants could use as ammunition against the Catholic Church. 

The hierarchy had a fear of massive defections to Protestantism, and adopted a strategy of convincing the laity that the sacraments were the best way to salvation, and that the clergy were the members of the Church most intimate with the sacraments and who also controlled access to the sacraments. 

By controlling access to the sacraments clerics also controlled access to salvation, and therefore cleric could control laity – for their own good, of course. A legalism grew up the church, and the hierarchical church became an enforcer of law rather than a guide to growing in virtue.

 

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