Category: The Church

Breitbart is reporting:

The Vatican may one day field a football team that could rival the top formations in Italy’s powerful Serie A, the Holy See’s Secretary of State, Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, said Sunday.

"I do not preclude the possibility that the Vatican, in the future, could put together a football team of great value, that could play on the same level as Roma, Inter Milan and Sampdoria," all first division teams, the Cardinal said, according to the Ansa agency.

Bertone has never hidden his passion for football, and has commented on matches in the past when he was archbishop of Genoa. He has mentioned on several occasions the possibility of the Vatican fielding a team. SOURCE. CHT to the reader who e-mailed.

I like Cardinal Bertone, and I’m glad he got the Secretary of State’s job at the Vatican, but I think this is a really bad idea.

I don’t know how serious he is about it. I can easily see this just being a kind of running joke between him and the Italian press that Breitbart isn’t getting, but if he is serious about the Holy See having a football (read: soccer) team, I think that’s a really bad idea.

First of all, how will the team reflect on the Holy See, simply in terms of its performance? If it isn’t a good team then it’s going to reflect poorly. If it is a good team then it’ll reflect poorly as the Vatican is perceived as crowding its way into an arena and diminishing the standings of other teams for no good reason.

Whether it’s an good team or not, where’s the money to run it going to come from? Will the Holy See be perceived as spending money on this that would better be spent on widows and orphans?

Even if the thing’s a money-maker, it will take time and attention on the part of those running the show at the Vatican. That’s a bad thing given that they already don’t have enough time to attend to all the real pastoral needs that exist out there.

Then there’s the fractiousness that sports teams breed. It’s one thing when you have inter-team rivalries that are completely arbitrary and everyone knows it, but if you start mixing team rivalries up with matters that actually do mean something–like religion or politics–then it’s another story. I don’t think American politics would be served well by the Democrats and the Republicans each starting their own NFL team and entangling the political sphere with the sports sphere. Having an official Vatican soccer team would produce a similar entanglement that we’d be better off without. It would, on some level, ask Catholics to side with the official Vatican team–or else teach them that it’s okay to side against the Church sometimes. And then there would be Catholic players on other teams being asked to compete against the Church’s official team.

And then there’s hooliganism. If the team is successful (or even if it isn’t), can we count on the Vatican soccer hooligans to be the most polite, least offensive, least violent of hooligans? Do we want Vatican soccer hooligans in the first place?

Assuming that this isn’t just a joke, what possible reason could the Holy See have for wanting to start such a thing? I’m sure that someone could come up with some nonsense about penetrating the secular culture with the message of Christ, but you know what? That’s the job of the laity, not the Vatican. The Vatican’s job in such matters is to support and educate the laity so that they can affect the culture for Christ, not to undermine the efforts of Catholic players and fans by starting their own rival franchise. That’s the same reason the Church doesn’t start it’s own political party.

If this is to be taken seriously, it sounds to me like an impermissible form of mission creep. The Vatican’s mission has nothing to do with fielding sports teams. I don’t even like the sport and culture office they opened up a while back, and I hope that goes on the chopping block in B16’s reorganization of the curia.

There is no special reason why the Vatican should start a sports team anymore than it should open up an ice cream plant or start its own shoe resoling service or undertake any other venture not related to its mission. "Because we can" is not a good enough reason for an organization to undertake unrelated ventures in areas that it’s not expert at. What happens is that this creates inefficiencies, wastes time and money, harms those already trying to do good work in the field, and generally fails and causes embarassment.

So I hope this is just a joke.

The U.S. bishops meet twice a year, and we’re currently in the middle of their November meeting. This time they have a rather full agenda, and they’re in the process of cranking our documents.

Given how these things normally go, I was a bit surprised to discover PDFs of these documents appearing on the USCCB web site in a fashion that was actually and pleasantly timely.

However, the USCCB has a tendency to only put up documents for a short time and then yank them (try finding a version of the the U.S. edition of the GIRM on their web site these days; it used to be there, but t’ain’t now).

I’ll have some commentary about some of these, but for now, get ’em while you can.

BISHOPS’ PRESIDENT’S STATEMENT ON IRAQ

MARRIED LOVE AND THE GIFT OF LIFE

MINISTRY TO PERSON WITH A HOMOSEXUAL INCLINATION

PREPARING TO RECEIVE HOLY COMMUNION

A reader writes:

I certainly agree generally that there is this difference…but this raises a question:

In the observation on the difference in the Roman vs American approach to law–where does that leave those who are engaged in liturgical abuses etc?

Can it not be said then that well…Rome does not REALLY mean for the rubics etc to be so fully followed….etc???  Does that not just undo everything?

I assume this would not be the case…enlighten us.

Indeed, it is not the case, but this is one of those situations where enlightenment comes only with difficulty.

While Rome-written law is more prone to unwritten exceptions and legamorons than America-written law is, we both have them, and you just have to have a feel for them based on your knowledge of the culture in question.

Thus in America laws against speeding usually function as legamorons but laws against homicide do not.
The government isn’t nearly as serious about enforcing the speed limit as it is laws against murder. Americans know this instinctively because they have the experience of living in their culture and noticing the difference in seriousness with which the two cases are treated by the government. Unsolved murders give rise to extensive police investigations. Unsolved violations of the speed limit do not.

Roman law, being produced by a high-context culture, has more unstated exceptions and legamorons than our laws, but this does not make Roman law meaningless any more than the unstated exceptions and legamorons in American law make it meaningless.

The real question is how to know when Roman law contains an unstated exception or legamoron.

That’s something that the folks in the Vatican–who are actually immersed in the culture that wrote the law–tend to pick up by experience. It’s part of the context they bring to the interpretation and application of the law–the same way Americans observing their own culture figure out that murder laws are intended more seriously than speed limit laws.

For those who don’t work at the Vatican, courses in canon or liturgical law at seminaries and universities are meant to impart that context–or as much of it as possible–to students so that they begin to acquire the context, too.

If you haven’t had those courses but work extensively with canon and liturgical law, you can begin to absorb it that way as well.

That’s the category I’m in. I’ve worked enough with canon and liturgical law over the years–talking to canon lawyers and liturgists, reading books on the topics, reading documents that Rome issues dealing with them–that I’ve absorbed enough of the context to have something of a "feel" for where some of the exceptions and legamorons are.

Sometimes documents that Rome issues point to these directly. For example, Redemptionis Sacramentum has a three-fold classification of liturgical abuses as graviora delicta ("more grave delicts"), "grave matters" and "other abuses." What they put in what category tells you what they are going to be the most strict about.

Similarly, there was a letter by the CDW a while back in which it was pointed out that while the laws regarding posture at Mass are intended to provide "to ensure within broad limits a certain uniformity of posture" but not to "regulate posture rigidly in such a way that those who wish to kneel or sit would no longer be free." That kind of response screams legamoron or unstated exception.

And so the posture laws at Mass admit more flexibility than those regarding the graviora delicta, such as throwing away the consecrated species.

After you have enough experience watching Rome apply its law in concrete cases, you start getting a feel for what they’re really concerned about and where they’re only gesturing in a general way at what they want to happen.

The posture of the laity at Mass laws are gesture laws. They really don’t care if everyone else is standing and you choose to sit or kneel. As long as the laity are in the pews and not being disruptive, they aren’t going to get worked up about what posture you’re in.

That’s why you may hear me say on the radio that Rome really won’t mind if a family or group of people at Mass holds hands voluntarily–even though that posture is not mandated in the liturgical books–but it will be more concerned if people are being forced to hold hands against their will. That’s interfering with others–it’s disruptive and gets people upset, and they don’t want the laity acting disruptively.

I’m not sure how to put this next point, but one of the reasons for this is that Rome doesn’t expect that much from the laity. It wants them to be at Mass and watch and listen and hopefully sing and pray and not be disruptive. It doesn’t expect them to have an intimate familiarity with liturgical law and its punctillious observance.

This grows out of a mindset which is in some way a hold over from the Middle Ages, when the laity were almost uniformly uneducated peasants, and you can’t ask too much of them. From an ecclesiastical perspective, we laity are in a sense just in from slopping the pigs, and while it is praiseworthy if a few pigsloppers take enough interest in the Mass to learn the details of liturgical law, this is the exception and not the rule–and always has been.

So as long as the laity are in the pews and relatively calm and not shouting or brandishing pitchforks, Rome doesn’t so much mind if they’re not all in the same posture.

But not all laws connected with the laity display that level of flexibility. For example, the laws against lay folks preaching the homily are meant seriously. Letting lay folks preach homilies starts to blur the line between the priests and the pigsloppers, and that is a Bad Thing.

You can tell that they really mean those laws because of how frequently they reiterate them.

And so, over time, one can develop a sense of what laws are strict ones and what laws aren’t, but it takes work and careful attention.

Which raises Ed Peters’ point about whether for a global organization a high-context approach to the law is the best way to go. Given that the vast majority of Catholics–and even bishops–do not and cannot share all of the context that suffuses the Vatican itself, it could make what Rome wants a lot more obvious if they were more clear and explicit in the way they write law.

John Allen has a very good piece on the culture gap between America and Rome and how it affects relations within the Church. The article sums up a lot of the differences that you find out if you spend serious time studying Rome and how it operates and is well worth reading.

Allen initially explains the cultural difference like this:

It would be flip to say that “Americans are from Mars, Romans from
Venus,” but there’s more than a smidgen of truth to the perception of
being on different planets.

As an illustration, he compares the American and Roman attitudes toward time:

To take just one small but telling example, consider the difference between American and Roman views of time. In the United States, we have a “microwave” culture. If we perceive a need, we want that need satisfied immediately. If there is a problem, we want a plan to resolve it by the close of business. If you don’t have such a plan, it’s either because you’re lazy or you’re in denial, and either way it’s unacceptable. Our motto tends to be that of Homer Simpson who, when told that it would take 30 seconds for a fried meal, responded: “But I want it now!”

Rome, on the other hand, is a culture notoriously accustomed to thinking in the long term. Its motto tends to be, “Talk to me on Wednesday, and I’ll get back to you in 200 years.” Rome is in that sense a “crock-pot” culture. The idea is that the food simmers for a much longer period of time, but if you get the ingredients right, it will be much more satisfying.

Although Allen doesn’t use the terms I’m about to, America (like England and Germany) has what some anthropologists have called a "low context" culture, while Italy (like the Middle East) has what is called a "high context" culture.

The difference has to do with how much background knowledge you are expected to have in order to function successfully in the culture. Low context cultures don’t require you to know that much of the local cultural lore in order to function successfully. That’s why, in America, if you can speak English and obey a few basic laws which are easy to look up, you can get along well. You don’t have to know all of the unwritten laws and lore and customs and tribal alliances that you would have to in a high context culture.

High context cultures, by contrast, assume that the individual does know the local lore. Among other things, this allows high context cultures to communicate in a way that is less explicit, more allusive. This is one reason that the Bible is as mysterious as it is: It was written in a high context culture that assumed the reader already knew the background to the documents, so it doesn’t waste time explaining that background. If you don’t have that background, the resulting document can seem obscure and mysterious.

(That background, or at least the theoogically salient bits, are preserved in the form of Sacred Tradition, which is why Sacred Tradition is needed to correctly understand Sacred Scripture. It’s the missing background material you need to make sense of Scripture. It’s also notable that sola scriptura arose in a low context culture of Germany, which assumes you don’t need extensive background information to understand a document.)

One of the ways in which high and low context cultures differs is in how they write law: Low context cultures spell everything out in detail in law since they aren’t relying on people to use their knowledge of the unwritten law in interpreting the text. They write law rigorously and, as a result, they expect it to be rigorously obeyed.

High context cultures, by contrast, use law to gesture at what they want to happen, but they admit a thousand unwritten exceptions. Consequently, the laws of high context cultures abound in legamorons.

Allen describes the situation like this:

For Anglo-Saxons, law is a lowest common denominator of civil behavior, and hence we assume that laws are meant to be obeyed. If we find that people aren’t obeying a given law, it’s a problem, and we either crack down or change the law. In Mediterranean cultures, on the other hand, law is more an expression of an ideal, and there’s tremendous room for subjectivity in interpretation and application in a concrete set of circumstances. Anyone who’s ever driven the streets of an Italian city knows what I’m talking about. The bar tends to be set high, with the implicit understanding that most people, most of the time, will far short to varying degrees.

This is a constant source of misunderstanding when the Vatican issues a draconian-sounding decree, which immediately elicits howls of protest from the United States about it being unrealistic or inhumane. Vatican officials are routinely exasperated by the reaction, since they fully expect that pastors and bishops will exercise good judgment about how it ought to applied in individual cases. Most recently, we saw this dynamic with the document from the Congregation for Catholic Education on the admission of homosexuals as seminary candidates. No one in Rome, including the authors of the document themselves, believes that it means absolutely no candidate with a same-sex orientation should ever be admitted to Holy Orders. They saw it as a call to careful discernment, not a blanket ban. (Admittedly, American Catholics can to some extent be forgiven the protest. As the old joke goes, we often have the worst of both worlds – Roman law applied by Anglo-Saxon bishops!)

Ultimately, Allen concludes that America and Rome–despite their culture gap–need each other, and he’s right.

GET THE STORY.

Ed Peters has often pointed out that worthwhile initiatives in the Church are frequently started by lay people and only later taken up by the clergy.

Here’s another example of that principle.

L’OSSERVATORE ROMANO, THE SEMI-OFFICIAL VATICAN NEWSPAPER.

EXCERPT:

Cardinal Bertone said "that it is due to some lay faithful, animated by a strong missionary motivation," that the newspaper "was able to take its first steps and begin its activity with courage, presenting the genuine face of the Church and the ideals of liberty that she proposes and incarnates."

The cardinal said the "succession of historical events shows that, in the past as in the present, to spread the Gospel message in all realms of society, to promote and defend the ideals of authentic liberty, truth, justice and charity, the Church needs the action, creativity and charism of the laity."

And given L’Osservatore Romano’s venerable age of 145, the lay initiative that started it was long before Vatican II and in an age in which Catholics even more than today reflexively allowed clerics to undertake religious initiatives.

They have a lot of conferences over in Rome about . . . well, all kinds of stuff. Shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings. Everything from soup to nuts.

I’m not always sure how necessary or valuable some of these conferences are, but here’s one I can really get behind:

The fifth international congress of military ordinates is focusing on the theme "Soldiers at the Service of Peace."

The president of the congress, being held in the Vatican from Oct. 23-27, is Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, prefect of the Congregation for Bishops.

He is being assisted by Father Giulio Cerchietti, head of the congregation’s central office for the pastoral coordination of military ordinariates.

As they saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes (a slight exaggeration, but not much of one), and soldiers definitely need pastoral care.

I’m also glad–among much of the reflexive peace-at-any-costs language that we encounter in some ecclesiastical circles–a recognition of the Catechism’s reality-based statement that

Those who are sworn to serve their country in the armed forces are servants of
the security and freedom of nations. If they carry out their duty honorably,
they truly contribute to the common good of the nation and the maintenance of
peace (CCC 2310).

Amen.

GET THE STORY.

If you look at the index of sources cited in the Catechism of the Catholic Church you’ll see that it’s divided into several categories. The most important of these are quotations from papal documents (largely recent pontificates) and ecumenical council documents (largely Vatican II) and the writings of the Church Fathers. In addition, the writings of various saints are also cited.

Between those four sources–popes, councils, Church Fathers, and saints, you have almost all of the sources quoted in the Catechism accounted for.

But there are a few others.

For example, there are Origen, Tertullian, and Newman. John Henry Newman, that is.

Now Origen and Tertullian were almost-Church Fathers. They lived in the era of the Church Fathers and they would have been counted among their number except . . .

. . . except that Origen got a bad rep for entertaining some screwy notions, like the pre-existence of the soul (not the same as reincarnation) and the idea of apocatastasis (for those playing along at home, that’s the idea that every spirit–including demons–will eventually be saved; so there ain’t no hell, only purgatory). This got a buncha folks shouting anathema at him after his death, so no Church Father status for him! As worthy as he otherwise would have been of it.

. . . and except that Tertullian actually left the Church (!) and went to a schismatic group known as the Montanists and he didn’t get reconciled by the time he died. So no Church Father status for him, either.

And thus neither of ’em are saints, which–despite the estimable value of their writings–prevents them from being named doctors of the Church, the way such doctorates are handed out these days (it’s a saints-only club).

Yet the writings of Origen and Tertullian are so valuable that–in spite of the fact that they are non-saints, non-fathers, and non-doctors, they still get quoted in the Catechism.

That gives them something in common with Cardinal John Henry Newman (and yes, I know that folks would want to put Cardinal in front of his last name, but this is my blog. So there.). His writings are of such value that they are also quoted in the Catechism, and he’s a non-saint, non-father, non-doctor, too.

But that may not stay the case for long.

Newman will never be a Church Father because he didn’t live in the right era (pre-A.D. 750), but he may end up as a saint (assuming he made it to heaven) and, after that, he may get named a doctor of the Church. (I’d name him in a hot second if he were a saint and I were pope.)

Just recently, Newman’s cause to another step toward canonization. A small step, to be sure, but a step is a step (by definition). What happened was this: The diocesan phase of the investigation of a miracle attributed to his intercession is about to close and the results will be forwarded to Rome.

If Rome decides that the event was a miracle then the Ven. John Henry Newman could get beatified and find himself Bl. John Henry Newman. If another miracle happens, he could wake up one morning and find himself St. John Henry Newman.

And if that happens, his doctorization is almost a shoe-in.

Why?

Because Newman made a massive contribution to Catholic theology through his articulation of the concept of doctrinal development.

This is a concept that has been and will continue to be of enormous importance to Catholic theology (as well as the subject of periodic abuse by folks who want to present doctrinal mutation as doctrinal development, thus departing from the authentic version of the concept articulated by Newman).

The idea of doctrinal development in some form is something that Catholics have been aware of for centuries. It’s always been clear to theologians and historians that the writers in former ages of the Church did not articulate the Christian faith in precisely the same way as in later ones and that different questions have been dealt with in different ages, with various subjects coming into sharper focus as false articulations of these topics got identified and discarded.

But Newman helped articulate the matter in a new way that would better enable the Church to do theology in a way that would meet changing historical conditions without denying the substance of the faith that was handed down to it. He illustrated how the essentials of the faith remained the same in every age even if the articulation and exposition of these changed over time. Thus, for example, we needn’t expect the Church of the 21st century to look and sound exactly like that of the 4th, nor need we expect the Church of the 34th century to look and sound exactly like the one of today. Yet they could still be the same Church, preaching the same faith.

Newman’s articulation of this was unique in his day, and it has helped the Church greatly through the theological crises of the 20th century, which is why he gets to get quoted in the Catechism even though he’s not a pope, not a council, not a father, and not even a saint.

And why, if he made it to heaven and gets declared a saint, he’ll be on the short-list for being named a doctor of the Church. (Pius XII should also be on that list, in my opinion, and John Paul II is on it.)

Still, we gotta wait on that, so in the meantime

GET THE STORY.
READ MORE ABOUT NEWMAN.
READ NEWMAN’S ESSAY ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE.
READ MORE ABOUT THE DOCTORS OF THE CHURCH.

Incidentally, as a matter of curiosity, I first encountered the idea of doctrinal development long before I was a Catholic, when I was a new Christian listening to tapes of J. Vernon McGee’s "Thru the Bible" program. Though McGee may not have had any idea who Newman was (nor did I at the time), he clearly articulated the idea that Christian doctrine progresses through the ages as various questions are taken up–settled–and then new ones are examined.

According to the history of doctrinal development that McGee articulated, the early centuries settled the doctrine of Christ (think the first six ecumenical councils), the Reformation settled the question of justification (sola fide), and the current age–McGee speculated–was settling the question of Eschatology (Dispensationalism).

Now, my friends, may I say that although McGee was a Dispensationalist and a Fundamentalist with very little affection for the Catholic Church (meaning that he was wrong about the conclusions the process of doctrinal development was reaching), the fact that he could recognize and acknowledge the process working through Church history is a significant testimony to the explanatory power and value of the concept.

I hope McGee and Newman have become good friends in heaven.

A reader writes:

What is the difference between a ministry and an apostolate?  What does the Church teach on this? And lastly, are there restrictions on laymen, for example, who use the term ministry when in all actuality it is an apostolate.

This is a common question. People are often perplexed by the relationship between the two terms and the fact that they are often used interchangeably. And there’s a good reason for that: They are interchangeable–at least substantially so.

The term ministry (in a religious context) at its base conveys the idea of performing a spiritual service of some kind, while the term apostolate at its base conveys the idea of in some manner promoting the work of the apostles or functioning in a capacity somewhat like that of the apostles. Since the apostles performed spiritual services, the two terms basically converge.

Thus both "ministry" and "apostolate" can refer either to particular spiritual services or to organizations that are devoted to providing such services.

Because the clergy and laity have different functions, they perform ministries or apostolates in different ways, but the laity are envisioned in participating in apostolic activity. Thus Vatican II issued a Decree on the Apostolate of the Laity.

With recent dissident efforts at horizontalizing the Church and bluring the distinction between clergy and laity, there can be confusion about what apostolates are appropriate to clergy and laity. The same thing can happen regarding ministries, and the 1997 Instruction on Collaboration was notably concerned about the use of the term "ministry" in certain contexts involving lay individuals, for example (see Practical Provisions, Article 1).

Despite these difficulties, the two terms retain substantial overlap, even if they need to be carefully understood and distinguished in particular contexts.

Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo apparently consecrated four men as bishops on Sunday.

In so doing, as Ed Peters points out,

HE INCURRED THE PENALTY OF AUTOMATIC EXCOMMUNICATION RESERED TO THE HOLY SEE.

So did any of the men he ordained if they were still in communion with the Church.

MORE FROM CATHOLIC WORLD NEWS.

As tragic as that situation is, I fear that an even greater tragedy may be about to unfold.

Since the debacle following Vatican II, the Holy See has been terrified of a major schism occurring that would involve modernist dissidents. For that to take place, a number of conditions would need to exist:

1) There would need to be a large number of laity willing to go along with the schism.
2) There would need to be a large number of priests available.
3) There would need to be bishops available.
4) There would need to be infrastructure available (churches, financing, etc.)

Thus far the right combination of factors has not combined to create a major modernist schism (in the proper sense of the term). There are always lots of tiny little schisms occurring–even personal ones (i.e., individual people going into schism)–but the largest we have had since the Council was that of the traditionalist dissidents in the Lefebvrist movement. The number of traditionalist dissidents, however, pales in comparison to the number of modernist dissidents. There are far more laity, priests, and even bishops with modernist than with traditionalist tendencies.

As painful as the Lefebvrist schism has been, the potential for a major schism on the part of modernists is thus far more frightening to Rome.

Thus far it hasn’t happened, and my guess is that one of the major reasons is the non-fulfillment of condition 4 above. I think a lot of individuals don’t want to face the financial and logistical hardship of trying to set up a major modernist dissident church. They’re too comfortable where they are and are content to serve out their time spreading dissent in their already secure positions of influence. Why should a modernist priest leave the financially secure and respectable position and brave the rigors of an insecure startup venture?

If you want to know part of the reason that the Holy See has been so soft on individuals with this tendency, the desire to avoid a schism is a big part of it. If the people in question are made too uncomfortable then they might decide that pulling up stakes would be worth it, so Rome has cut them substantial slack (far more than in the old days) in hope that the problem can be solved on a generational basis by cooking the frog of dissent slowly, gently reigning them in in a step-wise manner and waiting for the current group to pass from the scene.

Thus we’ve had incremental improvements, like the release of the Catechism of the Catholic Church to promote authentic Catholic teaching (instead of doing something like the anti-modernist measures popes took in the early 20th century) or revising the GIRM and insisting on new, better translations of the liturgy (instead of just jumping back to the old order of Mass).

But the situation may not last, and what Milingo just did may have made it much, much worse.

At least two of the conditions needed for a major modernist schism are now concretely fulfilled. There are thousands of former priests who have left the priesthood to get "married" (in fact, they are not married due to the impediment of holy orders, but they have discounted this fact), and by apparently elevating some of these men to the episcopate, there are now bishops who are not just sympathetic to this movement but who are part of it and who are not tied to the existing episcopal structure in the Catholic Church. (I.e., they are not occupying positions that Rome appointed them to and which they have reasons to want to retain.)

These men could turn around and start ordaining their own priests–and I assume that this was the purpose of elevating them to the episcopate since they could already perform all the other sacraments–and they could draw upon the pool of modernist ex-priests and, one way or the other, have a large number of clergy for their movement in fairly short order.

The question would then turn to consideration of condition 1: How many laity would be willing to go along with them?

There certainly are a large number of laity who have modernist inclinations, though a lot of these are non-churchgoers. (When you hear reports that frighteningly high numbers of Catholics hold heterodox views, those numbers generally do not distinguish between cultural Catholics and those who actively practice their faith. Regular churchgoers, while they have suffered under decades of heterodox preaching and religious education, are still far more orthodox than the non-churchgoers are.) Non-churchgoers aren’t likely to start going to the local breakaway church just because it has a married priest saying Mass. A few will, but most are too comfortable where they are in bed or watching their TV sets (or both) on Sunday morning.

The number who would go, however, is not inconsiderable. It would still be a smallish minority of Catholics, but enough to produce a larger schism than the SSPX and similar groups have.

If the schismatic bishops can get the infrastructure they need.

Right now the only people who would go to their services are the hardcore dissidents, and while there are plenty of them, in order to have a major schism you really need parishes all over the place. "Location! Location! Location!" as they say. The schism would be able to attract far more of the faithful to it if there were dissident parishes all over the place that looked at least somewhat like Catholic churches and held themselves out as such.

It thus seems to me that the major barrier is thus still the financial/logistical one, but the potential for a larger-than-Lefebvre schism of a modernist dissident type exists, and what Archbishop Milingo has just done has made the situation an order of magnitude worse.

As you might guess, I think that this is a situation that clearly calls for prayer.

I also think that Rome should give serious consideration to establishing the consecration of a bishop without papal mandate as of itself a schismatic act. Thus far it has not done so. (The reason Lefebvre went into schism was that he consecrated bishops not just without a papal mandate but against papal mandate.) The way the law is written right now, one could be consecrated a bishop without papal mandate and still remain a Catholic, though one would be subject to the censure of excommunication. But having rogue bishops who are still in some sense Catholic will gravely harm the pastoral good of the faithful, and it strikes me that Rome may need to make it clear that no such bishops are in any sense Catholic so that the faithful will not be confused. To do that, Rome should consider revising or authentically interpreting the law in such a way that any unmandated episcopal consecration is itself schismatic.

Fr. Gabriele Amorth, that is.

A reader sent me a link to

THIS ARTICLE ON A RECENT INTERVIEW THAT FR. AMORTH GAVE

and I was considering whether to blog it when I noticed that the same article was linked on the Drudge Report, so just about every other person in the world will see it, and I knew I had to deal with the issue.

First, let’s deal with the material in the article itself: The headline is a claim by Fr. Amorth expressing a personal opinion of his that Hitler and Stalin were possessed.

Is that true?

Well, maybe.

They were both the leaders of massive, unimaginably inhuman movements that caused millions of deaths and untold suffering. They both were enraptured by evil, dehumanizing ideologies whose consequences were written in blood.

Is it too far to think that the devil might take a special interest in influencing such gentlemen? Of course not. To the contrary. I think it would be quite reasonable to think that the devil took a lively interest in influencing both of them and spurring them on to greater and greater evil.

Did this amount to full-blown possession, with personality displacement and all that?

I don’t know. All I can say is that it wouldn’t surprise me, but I would be hesitant to give interviews expressing the opinion that they were actually possessed unless I had pretty clear evidence of that and not just conjecture based on a knowledge of how much evil they did.

Which leads to the question: What kind of evidence does Fr. Amorth have? I don’t know. The article doesn’t say. and I don’t have access to the original interview, which was probably in Italian anyway.

Not having any indication of whether Fr. Amorth has specific evidence of possession, I then find myself asking whether Fr. Amorth is the kind of individual who would be careful that he had solid evidence before making such claims.

No. He’s not.

This is evident in the article itself from the following quotation:

“I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed.”

Huh? Really? All of the members of the Nazi Party? Without exception? They all had full-blown cases of possession with personality displacement? Even the teacher in B16’s school who helped him avoid attending Hitler Youth meetings?

The fact is that Fr. Amorth is an individual given to making sweeping statements that are not firmly grounded and that are subject to a credulous mindset that is too ready to see possession (full-blown or not).

How else can one explain his claim–in his book An Exorcist Tells His Story–to have performed thirty THOUSAND exorcisms in a nine year period? That’s nine exorcisms PER DAY for nine years–Sundays included!

If this claim is remotely accurate then the man is a walking exorcism factory.

It is simply impossible to reconcile this claim with the Church’s requirements for the performance of exorcisms, which include (among other things) diligent evaluation of the individuals to be exorcised to determine that they are not simply suffering from psychological illness.

One more recent report indicates that the number of exorcisms he has performed had risen to 50,000 as of 2001.

It is therefore very difficult to place much weight in claims made by Fr. Amorth on such matters.

Which left me scratching my head about one claim made in the article, that Pius XII attempted to have a “long-distance” exorcism performed on Adolph Hitler.

I couldn’t take Fr. Amorth’s word for this, of course, but I did some independent research, and it seems to be true. I’ll have more info on that when I can get it.

Oh, and I should mention something else about Fr. Amorth. He is often credited–as he is in the article–as “the Vatican’s chief exorcist” and (somewhat more colorfully) as “Benedict XVI’s ‘caster out of demons.'” This is not true.

There is no “chief exorcist” position at the Vatican. Fr. Amorth is a priest of the Diocese of Rome who happens to be one of a number of exorcists there. He is the most well-known and prominent of them, but this does not give him the position of “chief exorcist of the Vatican.”

MORE INFO ON FR. AMORTH FROM ED PETERS.

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MORE HERE.