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Post by hibernicus on Feb 26, 2009 10:53:09 GMT
I propose to start a new thread listing examples I come across of ignorant misstatements of Catholic doctrine by commentators. As we have been giving Bishop Richard Williamson the treatment he deserves for some time, I propose to start off with another example of the false pastors whom St Jude aptly describes as "clouds without water, driven by the wind", but in this case on the "liberal" side - namely Bishop Pat Buckley of the Oratory, Larne. (When I met him some years ago he explained that he had adopted the name Oratory in honour of St. Philip Neri, who I am sure would have immediately forwarded him to the Roman Inquisition.) I refer to him as bishop because he has unfortunately obtained valid though illicit episcopal orders, having had himself consecrated twice over, once by Michael COx and again by a wandering bishop, I think an "Old Catholic". On today's IRISH TIMES letter-page we find him citing Cardinal Newman's LETTER TO THE DUKE OF NORFOLK in defence of his denunciations of "the reactionary and unenlightened papacy of Benedict XVI". He quotes Newman's statement that if religion is brought into after-dinner toasts he would drink to conscience first and the Pope afterwards, and declares that Newman's statement "Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ" has been carved on his (Buckley's) gravestone. He also refers to Newman's interment with his friend Fr. Ambrose St. John as a veiled suggestion that Newman approved of those unnatural acts of which Bishop Buckley has made himself such a conspicuous practitioner and apologist. Alas, it appears that Bishop Buckley has not actually read the LETTER TO THE DUKE OF NORFOLK, but only the isolated quotations which are used by such as he to support their errors. If he had read the whole text, he would discover that Newman specifically repudiates the idea that conscience consists in doing whatever one sees fit without reference to external authority. This view of conscience, which Bishop Buckley adopts as his own, Newman declared in his address on his elevation to the Cardinalate to be the "liberal principle in religion" which he had struggled against his whole life. Newman states specifically that he means by conscience a conscience guided by the teachings and doctrines of the Church, and that his limitation on the authority of the pope simply means that the Pope should not be obeyed if he commands an act which by the standards of that whole magisterium is immoral, and need not be obeyed if he commands an act which lies outside the legitimate scope of his authority as defined by that magisterium. Newman was replying to William Ewart Gladstone, the Anglican statesman, who had claimed that the papacy had condemned liberty of conscience as such. In his reply to Newman Gladstone said that he did not believe the declaration of papal infallibility was directed against the doctrine that freedom of conscience justified unbridled license, for he did not believe anyone had ever advanced such a doctrine. (In reply, Newman pointed out that John Stuart Mill had done so in ON LIBERTY and accurately predicted -as we know from experience - the evils which would follow if Mill's theories gained general acceptance.) Gladstone of course was an honest man and did not foresee Bishop Pat Buckley. So Bishop Buckley is not entitled to cite Newman on his gravestone. I suggest that he should chisel it off and replace it with 1 Jude 16-19 16These are murmurers, complainers, walking after their own lusts; and their mouth speaketh great swelling words, having men's persons in admiration because of advantage. 17But, beloved, remember ye the words which were spoken before of the apostles of our Lord Jesus Christ; 18How that they told you there should be mockers in the last time, who should walk after their own ungodly lusts. 19These be they who separate themselves, sensual, having not the Spirit. Bishop Buckley should meditate on the whole chapter, and repent in time.
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 26, 2009 15:56:20 GMT
First of all, I am glad Hibernicus brought Bishop Buckley up. Independently of this I had occasion to say on another thread that I regard Father Robert Drinan SJ, Democratic Representative for Massachusetts 1970-1980 as worse than Bishop Williamson. Bishop Buckley, being such an obscure figure is less dangerous, but he is dangerous none-the-less and Hibernicus is correct in saying his episcopal orders are, unfortunately, valid.
I know a priest who when the then Fr Buckley told him he had episcopal ambition, replied he knew where he could get an episcopal consecration for ten pence, but it wasn't worth it. On another occasion I overheard a conversation on a train between two middle-aged women where one ( a mutton-dressed-as-lamb type) revealed herself to be a divorcee and that after her parish priest told her she could remarry in church, sought the services of Bishop Buckley who did a 'lovely ceremony'. I'm sure he did, but 'Nemo dat quid non habet' to quote the legal maxim, and as the priest I referred to told me, 'Buckley would marry a cow to a horse if the price was right'. That may or may not be the case, but he has a niche market in second marriages and same sex weddings. Reminds one of the objectives of the Liberal Catholic Church - to provide the consolation of the Catholic sacraments to those who do not believe in the Catholic faith.
Buckley's treatment of Newman's letter to the Duke of Norfolk is an example of that. But I don't know if anyone has read Buckley's self-apologia 'Thorn in the Side' (the title gives a clue to the man's egomania - he is not that important). I glanced at it and found it utterly prurient. For example, one of his quotations is 'I burned my ecclesiastical bra a long time ago'. He seems to be confusing his metaphors here - to use 'boat' or 'bridge' suggests a situation of no going back, which is the sense he seems to mean to convey, but bra burning is merely a form of protest adopted by feminists which was never meant to be final. The misuse of this image is merely to give a vulgar connotation to his statement - but then maybe it is appropriate as bra burning was supposed to shock. I don't want to go into other aspects of the book I recall because they are much worse than that.
My view of Buckley - that he is an extremely childish and self-centred individual, but I don't mean this to absolve him. A lot of people out there are more than happy to be led by the message he spouts.
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 26, 2009 16:45:35 GMT
Childish is I think the right word - he had a letter in the IRISH TIMES a few weeks ago in which he said he didn't join the Church of Ireland because it had canon law and he wanted a church which would burn its canons and act purely on the basis of love - in other words he's an antinomian who sees love and law as necessarily opposed. Oddly enough my impression from personal contact is that there is something childlike about him (he seems to regurgitate liberal boilerplate slogans such as how bad the curia are without seeming to know much about them), and I think he has or had some good qualities - he was a chaplain at the maze prison during the 1980s and administered the sacraments to the last hunger-striker to die, who had been an atheist. I read THORN IN THE SIDE a long time ago and have forgotten most of it, but I do remember one passage where he remarked that most of the curates he worked with thought themselves too grand to do the cleaning and left it for the housekeeper - that unfortunately sounds plausible. His present state reminds me of the passae in one of the Father Brown stories where Father Brown tells the thief Flambeau that now is the moment at which he may repent or go deeper into crime and that if he chooses to go deeper, while the woods may look free now and he could escape into them like a monkey, one day he will be an old grey monkey, sitting alone in the trees, facing death with an empty heart. Pat Buckley needs our prayers, and if he ever reads this he should know we criticise him because we pity him.
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myk
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Post by myk on Feb 26, 2009 18:21:16 GMT
Reminds one of the objectives of the Liberal Catholic Church - to provide the consolation of the Catholic sacraments to those who do not believe in the Catholic faith. what is the Liberal Catholic Church?
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Feb 27, 2009 10:04:42 GMT
what is the Liberal Catholic Church? In 1870 a group of Catholics took a principled stand against the Decree of Papal Infallibility at the First Vatican Council which they said was an innovation. They were excommunicated and had bishops and priests consecrated by an older schismatic group based in Holland which split from the Church in the 1720s (much to the shame of the Dutch Jesuits at the time who believed no bishops were necessary). These became Jansenist over time. A further group joined them in the 1890s when Polish immigrants in America had problems with the established Church in the US which was dominated by the Irish: this became the Polish National Catholic Church in America. Together these form the Utrecht Union of Churches which is made up of something like 20 dioceses in several countries and they go by the collective name of 'Old Catholics'. For a group that started out very conservative, they are hardly recognisable now. But the point is that there were many splits and schisms among the Old Catholics. One point of controversy was the practice of Old Catholic bishops ordaining priests and bishops for the High Anglican and High Lutheran Churches. There was a policy among the Anglicans to quitely introduce the Old Catholic succession into Anglicanism until all their orders were valid. The trouble with this was the decision of Anglicans, Lutherans and Old Catholics to ordain women, which caused the Polish Catholics (by far the biggest number) to break with the Utrecht Union. Anyway, back to the point, in one of the squabbles among Old Catholics, some bright spark was ordained a bishop for the 'Liberal Catholic Church' which was set up in California in the early 1900s, with a mission of, as I said, 'providing the consolation of the Catholic Sacraments to those who do not believe the Catholic Faith' (any takers? Hemingway? Hazel?). I discussed the 'Order of Marian Apostolates' under 'Weird New Movements' and I got the distinct whiff of the Old Catholic movement of one kind or another about their posturing. Though the Old Catholics have been present in England for years, this is the first time I saw it in Ireland and I have to take my hat off to Bishop Willie Walsh for taking swift action against them. Of course, an interesting question is why people in the US who support the National Catholic Reporter or as an American friend of mine calls it, the National Catholic Distorter don't gravitate towards a group like the Liberal Catholic Church. I think it demonstrates how absurd it actually is. Now, the Cox/Buckley movement, the transition of Michael Cox from being the most identifiable representative of 'Pope Gregory XVII' in Ireland to being the consecrator of Pat Buckley and the ordainer of Sinéad O'Connor is to me a speeded up version of what happened in the Old Catholic movement since 1870. Now, I hope principally that I have answered Myk's question which is very specific in regard to the Liberal Catholic Church, but I hope also that the lengthy contextualisation gives some 'between the lines' messages in regard of my attitude towards a more recent split in Church history. But for this thread back to Pat Buckley, with or without Michael Cox, Mother Frances Meagh and Sinéad 'Mother Bernadette' O'Connor.
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myk
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Post by myk on Feb 27, 2009 15:05:35 GMT
what is the Liberal Catholic Church? In 1870 a group of Catholics took a principled stand against the Decree of Papal Infallibility at the First Vatican Council which they said was an innovation. They were excommunicated and had bishops and priests consecrated by an older schismatic group based in Holland which split from the Church in the 1720s (much to the shame of the Dutch Jesuits at the time who believed no bishops were necessary). These became Jansenist over time. A further group joined them in the 1890s when Polish immigrants in America had problems with the established Church in the US which was dominated by the Irish: this became the Polish National Catholic Church in America. Together these form the Utrecht Union of Churches which is made up of something like 20 dioceses in several countries and they go by the collective name of 'Old Catholics'. For a group that started out very conservative, they are hardly recognisable now. But the point is that there were many splits and schisms among the Old Catholics. One point of controversy was the practice of Old Catholic bishops ordaining priests and bishops for the High Anglican and High Lutheran Churches. There was a policy among the Anglicans to quitely introduce the Old Catholic succession into Anglicanism until all their orders were valid. The trouble with this was the decision of Anglicans, Lutherans and Old Catholics to ordain women, which caused the Polish Catholics (by far the biggest number) to break with the Utrecht Union. Anyway, back to the point, in one of the squabbles among Old Catholics, some bright spark was ordained a bishop for the 'Liberal Catholic Church' which was set up in California in the early 1900s, with a mission of, as I said, 'providing the consolation of the Catholic Sacraments to those who do not believe the Catholic Faith' (any takers? Hemingway? Hazel?). I discussed the 'Order of Marian Apostolates' under 'Weird New Movements' and I got the distinct whiff of the Old Catholic movement of one kind or another about their posturing. Though the Old Catholics have been present in England for years, this is the first time I saw it in Ireland and I have to take my hat off to Bishop Willie Walsh for taking swift action against them. Of course, an interesting question is why people in the US who support the National Catholic Reporter or as an American friend of mine calls it, the National Catholic Distorter don't gravitate towards a group like the Liberal Catholic Church. I think it demonstrates how absurd it actually is. Now, the Cox/Buckley movement, the transition of Michael Cox from being the most identifiable representative of 'Pope Gregory XVII' in Ireland to being the consecrator of Pat Buckley and the ordainer of Sinéad O'Connor is to me a speeded up version of what happened in the Old Catholic movement since 1870. Now, I hope principally that I have answered Myk's question which is very specific in regard to the Liberal Catholic Church, but I hope also that the lengthy contextualisation gives some 'between the lines' messages in regard of my attitude towards a more recent split in Church history. But for this thread back to Pat Buckley, with or without Michael Cox, Mother Frances Meagh and Sinéad 'Mother Bernadette' O'Connor. thanks for the info
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Post by hibernicus on Feb 27, 2009 18:42:24 GMT
There may be more than one Liberal Catholic Church. The best-known one was founded by an individual called Leadbetter, who started out as a High Anglican Ritualist, got bishops' orders from an Old Catholic, and later wound up as a theosophist (associated with Madame Blavatsky). He had periodic difficulties caused by his habit of being very liberal with the altar-boys. His LCC still exists and combines very elaborate liturgies with belief in reincarnation etc. This transition is not perhaps as surprising as it may seem; there has always been a strain of Anglican Ritualists who take their love of ritual and pride in being a select group of initiates into dabbling with the occult. CS Lewis's pal Charles Williams was a mild example of this, though I do not think he went very far off bounds - some have gone a lot further. There has been a similar fringe among French Catholics, Rene Guenon would be an example though his conversion to Sufi Islam is actually fairly respectable by comparison to some of the things such people get up to. The ultra-traditionalist and sedevacantist fringe also tend to attract occultists; I have heard claims that some such people have received orders from bishops in the Thuc succession for their own purposes. BTW the "Anglican" policy of obtaining orders from Old Catholic and Orthodox bishops was not an official policy of the whole but only related to a section of the High Church Anglo-Catholics. The Broad Church and Evangelical sections would not care whether Rome saw their orders as valid, and some would actively have preferred them to be invalid because they didn't believe in the Catholic doctrine of the priesthood. (When the Dublin diocesan synod of the Church of Ireland met after the appearance of APOSTOLICAE CURAE to pass a resolution condemning Leo XIII's statement, one ultra-evangelical cleric actually tried to move as an amendment that they heartily agreed with the Pope's statement but was peremptorily silenced by Archbishop Plunket.)
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Post by Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha on Mar 3, 2009 13:06:56 GMT
I believe there are a number of LCCs, but I had the Leadbetter foundation in mind.
Occultism is also a feature of certain aspects of Russian Orthodoxy. I am not in the least surprised that some traditional Catholics would indulge in it, though I should be scandalised at the thought.
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Post by hibernicus on Mar 23, 2009 17:22:57 GMT
When catching up on the IRISH TIMES a few days ago I notice that on Wednesday Bishop Buckley gave as an example of the abuse of infallibility that a woman of his acquaintance, having had an abortion "in good faith and with a clear conscience" when she told her parish priest what she had done was thrown out of the parochial house and informed that she had excommunicated herself. He regards this as deplorable. Here he seems to take the view that anything done "in good faith and with a clear conscience" cannot be wrong - in other words, he defines good and evil in wholly subjective terms. Let's try applying this elsewhere. Mohammed Bouyeri acted in good faith and with a clear conscience when he shot Theo Van Gogh and then slit his throat for insulting the Koran, so does Bishop Buckley think Bouyeri did nothing wrong? If he does think it was wrong, he can hardly then judge an act by the conscience of the perpetrator alone.
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Post by hibernicus on Apr 16, 2009 18:54:44 GMT
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 29, 2009 11:12:57 GMT
In this weeks IRISH CATHOLIC Garry O'Sullivan is holding forth on what he considers "healthy religion" and how it requires "debate". I confess that I think he is severely askew in his diagnosis, but I am not addressing his point here. Instead I want to look at a quotation which he gives us from Mark Patrick Hederman: Abbot Mark Patrick Hederman, quoting Kierkegaard, says "Christ is nothing, never forget it, Christianity. Christianity has presented Christ as an image, as a model, as a picture of perfection. This is precisely the problem. Christianity turned itself into a pursuit of perfection rather than an achievement of completeness. The Cross became an external and impossible point of unnatural oblong striving, rather than an internal even-armed crucial division of ourselves into quadripartite areas and functions of consciousness Nand unconsciousness, thinking and feeling, sensation and intuition." He [i.e. Hederman] adds: "We need a relationship with God and an understanding of Christianity that corresponds to, and connects with, the reality of what we are." END OF QUOTE Abbot Hederman's statement can be seen as pantheistic or as a perfectly orthodox critique of the Pelagian idea that we can save ourselves through our own unaided efforts. I leave it to those who know his work better to decide which it is. What does strike me, however, is that his idea of religion is utterly opposed to that of Kierkegaard - for a brief outline of Kierkegaard's career and views, see his Wikipedia entry en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kierkegaard My understanding is that (a) Kierkegaard's condemnation of official Christianity was based on the very opposite principle to that of Garry O'Sullivan and Dom Hederman. He did not hold that it was too ascetic and otherworldly but that it was too comfortable, too smugly confident that it understood all history (he was specifically attacking the Danish Lutheran State Church and its reliance on a Hegelian-based theology which offered an optimistic reading of the working out of God's purposes in history). For Kierkegaard God was totally Other and the act of faith was comparable to God's command to Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac (a command not only shocking in itself and seeming to contradict God's own previously-declared promises to Abraham); man cannot question or comprehend God's purposes but only submit. (b) Kierkegaard was the very opposite of a well-adjusted person. He spent his life as a figure of ridicule; he gave up the prospect of marriage to a woman he deeply loved and who loved him because he felt duty demanded it; it has often been suggested that he suffered from bipolar disorder. I confess that I think Kierkegaard was too much of a fideist (though I should state that my favourite novelist Walker Percy, who happened to be a devout Catholic, was deeply Kierkegaardian and I keep on meaning to explore Kierkegaard more deeply) but it is pretty clear that his views were utterly opposed to those of Dom Hederman. So why does Dom Hederman cite him as if he agreed with him? Could it be that Dom Hederman is so utterly self-absorbed in his own view of the world that he cannot see how other views are possible and reads all those writers he admires as if they agree with him, so they are emptied of their own distinctive content and become only so many mirrors in which Narcissus sees himself? I am incline to think so, for I recently read a pamphlet Dom Hederman wrote about Yeats, Harry Potter and Christianity in which , whatever his thoughts on Harry Potter and Christianity, he utterly misrepresents Yeats. I hope to say something about this some time.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 29, 2009 14:38:39 GMT
The most extraordinary thing about Dom Hederman's remarks only struck me after posting the previous entry. He speaks of the Cross as if it were a gymnastic apparatus for regular muscular development, whereas it's an instrument of death and torture. That is why the pagan Romans were so shocked at Christians' venerating it - it would be like venerating the Black and Decker drill used to kneecap someone, or the bullets dug from the corpses of victims of gangland shootings. The Cross may be venerated as an instrument of salvation made glorious by Jesus' death, but this glorification relies for its force on an underlying knowledge of its original purpose. More than ever I think the central issue between the liberal and orthodox view of Catholicism lies in this issue of whether suffering can be redemptive. The orthodox view is that however terrible it can be redeemed through God's unknown puprose and Our Lord's own sufferings. The liberal view is that suffering is always pointless and meaningless and against God's will and that the central purpose of life is to minimise it. The centrepoint of the liberal critique has a good deal of force, which is that belief in redemptive suffering can lead to the veneration of suffering for its own sake and thence to inflicting suffering on other people on the pretext that it's for their own good - but the liberal view quite simply makes nonsense of the Crucifixion and implies that God is not really God because He is powerless before it - indeed it comes very close to treating God as a projection of ourselves.
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Post by Michael O'Donovan on Jun 29, 2009 22:19:53 GMT
I read Hederman's Kissing the Dark and found it vacuous. Without meaning to be uncharitable, I think the good Abbot is a little bit pleased with himself.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 30, 2009 14:41:56 GMT
Here's another example of crossed wires similar to Dom Hederman's invocation of Kierkegaard. The feminist theologian Mary Condren had a piece in the IRISH TIMES recently, in which, while making some legitimate points about the Church's mishandling of institutional abuse (she has a moving account of how her father wrote to John Charles McQuaid expressing concern about orphans' living conditions and got a characteristically abrupt brush-off) she denounces the very concepts of asceticism and redemptive suffering as abusive:- Here is the full article www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/opinion/2009/0612/1224248683859.htmlHere is the crucial passage:- The Ryan report describes vividly the beating and humiliation of children. But, as you well know, many religious congregations used the discipline, small whips, every week on their own naked flesh, more often in Lent, and often under the orders of their superiors. Others actively practised public humiliation (for oversleeping they came down to the refectory with blankets over their heads), or for other minor offences. What effect do you think such practices had on their self-esteem? Then, at the end of the piece, Condron writes as follows:- Simone Weil, the great Jewish mystic, once wrote of a view of redemption alternative to that of redemptive violence: “Suffering and pain are like false currency until they reach the one who refuses to hand it on.” What she does not realise is that Weil meant that "refusal to hand it on" involves VOLUNTARILY UNDERTAKING TO SUFFER IT YOURSELF. As Weil's Wikipedia entry shows, she was a lifelong practitioner of the most extreme forms of asceticism and eventually starved herself to death as a gesture of solidarity with those enduring food shortages in occupied France: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil I confess that I have problems with Weil as well as Kierkegaard, though she was certainly a profound thinker. Her contempt for the body was so extreme that she has been plausibly described as Manichean or Gnostic; probably for related reasons, she was so hostile to Judaism that she has been called a Marcionite. (Condren describes her as Jewish but she was so only by descent; she considered herself Christian though she refused baptism until shortly before her death, if not altogether, for arcane theological reasons which had a whiff of spiritual pride about them.) For Condren to invoke Weil in this context raises serious questions about whether she can read at all. Why is she invoking such a thinker in support of views so utterly opposed to Weil's own? Can't she argue her case on its own merits? Here is an interview in which Condren sets out her own dubious views: www.tallgirlshorts.net/marymary/marycondren.htmlShe sees this passage on the suppression of Marian devotions after Vatican II as an example of male power distrusting female devotion. Catholic traditionalists will see it in a different light, but it's worth noting this from such a person as Condren: And you know an example of that was, when I was a child in our local parish, which was Mount Argus run by the Passionists, every single May, four Sundays in a row, we had the May Procession. And we would dress up in these little white dresses and throw roses and sing all the Mary songs. And people came from all over Dublin and even abroad, outside Dublin, to these May Processions. And then when the Vatican Council came into vogue, they cut the May Processions. They decided that Mary was getting far too much attention altogether, to the detriment of Jesus. And the women were furious. They said, you know, they were not consulted. This was their festival. This was their procession. This was their time. And it took about ten years before they brought it back. One procession a year they would allow. But already the damage had been done and the tradition that was so sensual, involving music and smell and image, all those sensual parts of spirituality which Mary had embodied had been removed from the Catholic Church, in a very similar way that they were removed during the Reformations.
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Post by hibernicus on Jun 30, 2009 14:42:23 GMT
I have to be away from the board now for several days.
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