January 8, 2024
Archbishop's Mass ban for ecumenical community reflects outdated hierarchical model
Well before it was nearly
irremediably compromised by the ongoing clergy sexual abuse scandal, the
Catholic hierarchical culture was engaged in a losing battle with the concept
of authority. What is it? Who has it? Why? How is it exercised? To what end?
Lionel : Authority
can now only be based upon Vatican Council II interpreted rationally and so
honestly.
_______________
What began as a troubling
problem in the last century has become an even deeper and more corrosive
challenge this century both within the church and in the church's relationship
with the wider culture.
While the questions might not
yield quickly to certainty, one response was recently demonstrated by
Archbishop Alexander Sample of Portland, Oregon, in his order that abruptly
ended a Catholic-Lutheran ecumenical venture that has been underway for nearly
40 years and that was viewed approvingly by three of his predecessors.
Lionel: His
predecessors have been interpreting Vatican Council II irrationally and so
there was the liberalism on ecumenism. Now there can only be an ecumenism of
return according to the Council interpreted with 'the red passages
not being exceptions for the blue' and the
rest of Tradition.
_______________
The archbishop, in a letter to the Spirit of Grace community, described his
perceived obligation to "guard the entire liturgical life" of the
local church. The action, he said, resulted from his discernment of "the
needs of the Catholic faithful of the archdiocese, the key principles governing
the sacred liturgy, and how best to promote Christian unity."
Lionel: There
can only be Christian unity based upon Vatican Council II interpreted with
invisible cases of LG 8,14,1,5,16,UR 3, NA 2, GS 22 etc being invisible. They
are not objective exceptions for the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus which
tells us that the Lutherans and other Christian denominations are outside the
Church, Jesus' Mystical Body.
_______________
All of that he accomplished,
according to undisputed reports from the community, without any discussions
with those affected, with no attempt to determine the community's needs, and
absent an assessment of the state of "Christian unity" at Spirit of
Grace congregation. Members describe themselves as "one community with two
traditions" who worship together but separately conduct celebrations of
the Eucharist.
Lionel: Vatican
Council II is no more liberal. There is no more a development of doctrine.
_______________________
Sample's answers to who
exercises authority, and how, are distressingly archaic. He alone is the
authority, and he exercises it by edict. It is the formula from an earlier era
when hierarchies reflected a primitive understanding of the world in which all
power and authority presumably resided at the top and most often (in the
church's case, always) in a male figure.
Lionel: Without
Vatican Council II interpreted irrationally there is no precedent in the
history of the Church to consider Lutherans, who are schismatics and heretics, as
being in union with the Catholic Church.
_________________
The late Eugene Kennedy, a
longtime church observer and prolific author, understood earlier than most that
authority had become a central issue in the modern era for both church and
society. In Authority: The Most
Misunderstood Idea in America, a book authored with his
wife, Sara Charles, a psychiatrist, the diminishment of the old hierarchical
model was hastened, they wrote, by the advent of the space and information
ages. In the first case, space flight photos dramatically depicted the Earth as
not up or down from anything but amid the vastness of our solar system, an
affront to social systems based on an Earth below and heavens above.
The information age
democratized what was once the sole province of a select few. "In the
golden age of hierarchy, information was perceived as power and was reserved to
very few at the highest levels," they wrote. "It was sacred, an
expression and source of power, reserved like the Holy of Holies, with access
for the elect alone."
In the modern era, Kennedy and
Charles wrote, "the great institutions that identify their authority with
their hierarchical structure are, in effect, raising an empty monstrance and demanding
that people accept the receptacle as if it were the sacrament."
Lionel: Objective reality has not changed there still is Heaven and Hell and people who die in mortal sin are going to Hell.
Hierarchy
and its once automatic claim to unchallenged authority is left unmoored,
drifting in search of purpose and safe harbor.
Given the tattered state of hierarchical
credibility and authority, a question emerges, the answer to which, I think,
has a significant effect on each: What is a church to do when fear no longer
works?
Fear once kept Catholics in the pews and
in line. Generations in this country raised on the transactional theology of
the Baltimore Catechism — failed and sinful humans negotiating with an
ever-wrathful God — lived lives of holy terror. They were ever mindful that the
world was loaded with potential infractions capable of sending one to eternal
damnation. Members of the clerical/hierarchical culture, promoted as different
to their core from all the rest, were the never-to-be contradicted connection
between humans and their God.
Lionel: Hell exists. Vatican Council II tells us most people are going there without Catholic faith and the baptism of water (Ad Gentes 7).
___________________
Fear
no longer works. As the recent
series on the Catholic
diaspora demonstrated, bishops closing parishes or sending in new priests to
upend ministries; or ending such activities as welcoming LGBTQ Catholics have
elicited less than obedient responses. In more than a few instances, Catholics
have walked and set up shop elsewhere, often with an ordained woman as pastor.
They still call themselves Catholic.
Lionel
: Yes they call themselves Catholic and
they still are interpreting Vatican Council II irrationally with liberal
conclusions.
____________________
Whether they are a schism in motion or the
cutting edge of a future church is to be determined. What will become of the
Spirit of Grace community beyond the initial shock and hurt is yet to be seen.
Lionel : According to Vatican Council II which is traditional, orthodox
and conservative this community is in schism with also the past Magisterium of
the Church. The past Magisterium is no more contradicted by Vatican Council II,
interpreted rationally.
_________________
-Lionel Andrades
https://www.ncronline.org/opinion/guest-voices/archbishops-mass-ban-ecumenical-community-reflects-outdated-hierarchical-model
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