The Theological Liberals Have No Right

[cappie]

Cardinal George Pell the Archbishop of Sydney Australia has come in for some critism recently by some of his priests the following was in the Sydney Morning Herald thought some might be interested in Fr Ephraem's article about theological liberalism.

The theological liberals have no right to take the moral high ground
August 26, 2004

Cardinal George Pell's opponents should at least have the fortitude to argue against his ideas, writes Ephraem Chifley.

Theological discussion in the Catholic Church in Australia has become intellectually sterile and profoundly boring. The broadside by Father John Crothers against Cardinal George Pell on this page earlier this week was a case in point. It would have brightened our morning to have read someone with the wit and directness of an Auberon Waugh who said of another archbishop: "He's an awful little man and I wish he'd hurry up and die."

Instead, we heard a string of complaints without much substance: that Pell has made inappropriate public statements, such as that on the divorce tax proposal, has made conservative appointments in the parish of Redfern and has set up a second Catholic University in Sydney. There were also complaints that the Congregation for the Faith had determined that gluten-free hosts "are invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist".

My objection is not that liberals such as Crothers should disagree with the archbishop - for me Pell's republican barracking was pretty embarrassing - but that they don't have the fortitude to argue against the Cardinal's ideas.

Hand-wringing about gluten-free wafers, (which was in fact a binding Roman ruling which has nothing to do with Pell) is a red herring. Similarly the decoration of the seminary chapel, clergy appointments to sensitive parishes and support for Notre Dame University are all issues of mundane administration. Even Pell's intervention on divorce was really a question of political prudence.

Crothers brought them up because he implies ideas don't matter any more, management is all that's left. Pell, he says, is at liberty to indulge his ultra-conservative opinions. He wrote, "Being conservative or liberal is neither right nor wrong, it's just the way we are" - as Jerry Seinfeld might have said. Why then should it matter whether "neo-conservatives" are appointed to Redfern or the seminary chapel tizzied up?

What matters is that the church isn't a bowling club or a hamburger franchise. It has something to say about God and mankind that it believes comes from Jesus Christ.

The language of managerialism, described by Don Watson in his book Death Sentence - with cant terms like "models of church" or "leadership style" - obscures this basic theological issue.

The question is whether or not the church has a divine origin with a set of structures and teachings that are unchangeable. Pell holds to that view with intelligence and tenacity. For him the church is far more than an institution - it represents God to the world.

His opponents emphasise the human and cultural elements of Catholicism, often to the exclusion of what others see as integral aspects of belief and practice. If religion is a mostly human invention then it can be radically re-interpreted: scripture, creeds, the moral law, worship, priesthood, even the very notion of God himself. Often all that remains are the liberal super-dogmas of tolerance and inclusivity - the only doctrines that Jesus taught according to their rewrite of scripture.

The history of the past 40 years of the Catholic Church in Australia has yet to be written. But the view that theological liberals have had some sort of monopoly on the high moral ground of inclusivity and tolerance will not cut much ice with future historians.

There are too many well-documented instances of systematic abuse of human rights when liberals have had their hands on the levers of power: seminarians being forbidden by seminary authorities from saying the rosary or thrown out because they disliked sensitivity sessions involving middle-aged nuns and massage oil.

Then there are those progressive priests who "renovated" churches by demolishing well-loved marble monuments and removing icons and statues in scenes reminiscent of Cromwell's purges during the Reformation. There is a famous photograph of the then dean of one Catholic cathedral actually at the controls of a bulldozer doing a Lazlo Toth on the High Altar.

What about those who have refused communion to worshippers choosing to kneel to receive Holy Communion or, worse, bishops calling in the police to evict them as happened in Quebec? Even this may be reckoned a question of management, but it throws into relief complaints by liberal clergy about being "on the outer" and inflexible styles of church leadership. While superficially irenic, the churchspeak employed by Pell's opponents conceals a specific theological agenda that historically has not tolerated any opposition or difference of opinion.

The unstated objection to Pell is that he is a bishop who promotes and defends the Catholic faith that they have sought radically to re-interpret if not to reject. Theological liberalism is a sterile project that will be seen in a century's time as the regrettable aberration of a few troubled decades.

I just wish it would hurry up and die.

Ephraem Chifley is a Dominican friar resident at St James Priory in Glebe.

[MorphRC]

Isnt Pell very traditionalist?? Not in the Ultra way, but very blunt, straight forward, no bull.

[MorphRC]

traditional*

sry

[Theoketos]

That is what I hear...

When I went on a pilgrimage through the land Oz, it was at the time when the Old Cardinal retired, and the new one took over. There was a big to-do about homosexual communion, and how the even the new Cardinal was still "too conservative", and probably would not let them receive.

I was really happy to hear that he is orthodox, and I said many rosaries for him.

BTW, the Cathedral is awesome in Sydney.

[MorphRC]

Yeah thats what I heard, and saw on the news.

[XIX]

A bit off the topic, but I really believe that the terms 'liberal' and 'conservative' have been changed in a sense. Example: Some people who are considered ultra-traditionalists are probably consideed by most to be conservative because they criticize the Pope for ecumenism, etc.

Now to me it seem like attacking Rome like that is a very [i]liberal[/i] thing to do. Am I wrong?

[Sinner]

[quote]Theological liberalism is a sterile project that will be seen in a century's time as the regrettable aberration of a few troubled decades.

I just wish it would hurry up and die.[/quote]


:toilet:

Now that is amusing Father! Godspeed to him.......

[cappie]

From the Australian Newspaper

Christopher Pearson: Wafers, waffles and whines

August 28, 2004
GEORGE Pell was once again making headlines last week. A priest in his Sydney diocese, John Crothers, published a highly critical essay in the e-magazine Online Catholics. It was headed "It's time to take a stand" and accused Pell of being "exclusive and inflexible" and ignoring "the rights and needs of faithful Catholics".

True to form, The Sydney Morning Herald reiterated those charges in a rather breathless piece on Monday morning. By lunchtime, ABC radio's Eleanor Hall announced on The World Today that there was "a split developing in the Catholic Church" over Pell's leadership. There was no comment from the cardinal's office, but the Herald reprinted Crothers' article on its opinion pages so that readers could judge for themselves.

What was all the fuss about? Crothers tells us that he had just had a painful meeting with a parishioner, Anne, who is a depressive. She also suffers from coeliac disease, a gastrointestinal condition, which means she has a very low tolerance for wheat flour. It fell to Crothers to tell her that the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had ruled that, where previously gluten-free host wafers made from maize had been tolerated, henceforth communion breads must conform to 2000 years of tradition and contain some trace of flour.

In an era where fewer than one in 10 of those who fall into the hands of the Catholic school system will attend mass regularly in adulthood, wafers with or without flour may seem like much ado about nothing. Perhaps the most obvious analogy is with the Russian synod heatedly debating a minor liturgical question while Bolshevik gangsters were taking over the state. Even so, the church has its reasons and they deserve an airing.

Since the Second Vatican Council, some parts of the church have drifted into a kind of theological modernism that is closer in spirit to Protestantism than to orthodoxy. Instead of the normal understanding of the mass as a sacrificial offering up of Christ under the forms of transubstantiated bread and wine, it sees the liturgy as a communal meal. Some priests have gone so far as to use damper, Jatz crackers, raisin toast, jam pastries and tacos, so very tasty and good for you, rather than bread, all in the name of making the mass a cosier, less formal occasion. At youth services, celebrants in Marcel Marceau make-up and dressed in clown suits have been known to consecrate buttered bread topped with hundreds-and-thousands.


The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had to curb those abuses and to remind clergy that it was not a province where individuals could please themselves but where the church laid down the law. Crothers' clear obligation was to explain to Anne the duty of obedience to lawful authority. He might also have canvassed with her the range of communicants' options, including the new ultra-low flour wafers with a gluten level of about 200 parts per million. Instead he appears to have made matters worse.

"Anne was devastated. She will no longer be able to receive communion in the normal way. She will not be able to receive communion when she is sick, nor at the communion service she attends regularly. She was extremely upset and angry."

Anne's longing to cling to familiar forms and useages is perfectly understandable. She's entitled to patient explanation and special pastoral attention. She's also entitled to be told what Crothers never mentions, no doubt because it would absolutely undermine his case. Where the sensitivity to gluten is acute, coeliacs have automatic recourse to the chalice at communion. The church holds that Christ is entirely present under either form -- the consecrated bread or wine. Access to either is traditionally regarded as the greatest imaginable privilege.

What neither Anne nor Crothers is entitled to is righteous indignation when they can't have their own way or delusions of grandeur about their place in the church's scheme of things. The Catholic Church is not and never can be a democracy. It has always been run according to its own rules, confidently patriarchal and hierarchical. The clergy and laity have rights and privileges, of course, but the church alone defines them and can suspend them. Even bishops are constrained by higher authority.

This last proposition may be at the heart of the matter. Crothers' complaint only begins to make some sense if he assumes that Pell is at liberty to pick and choose which Roman directives he publishes locally and enforces. It should be borne in mind that Sydney has long been governed by liberal authoritarians and prelates who sought peace at any price. Perhaps Crothers has never encountered a bishop who felt obliged to set an example of obedience. Certainly it would make sense of his Luther-like "Here I stand and can do no other" tone.

"I knew at that moment that something had gone seriously wrong with our church. This was the criticism Jesus constantly levelled at the Scribes and Pharisees, letting religion become an end in itself. I knew in my heart that I had to take a stand, not just about the banning of gluten-free hosts but about a growing tendency in our church to ignore the rights and needs of faithful Catholics in the name of religion. Over the past few years there has been a concerted effort by some bishops to push the Australian church further to the right. Certainly in Sydney, Cardinal George Pell makes no apology for his ultra-conservative views," Crothers wrote.

Plainly gluten-free flour has become emblematic, in Crothers' mind at least, and grown to stand for a broad ambit licence to rebel against Rome, against his bishop, against any authority other than his own and, let's not forget, against the sinister forces of ultra-conservatism. Reports on Thursday of other clergy from the Paramatta diocese threatening to use gluten-free hosts suggest the emergence of a new cause celebre. However, as Brian Lucas, the secretary of the Australian Catholic Bishops Conference, pointed out, they would be rebels without a cause. People with coeliac disease could always communicate from the chalice and reports of anyone being denied access to the sacrament were "an outrageous beat-up".

That Pell's real offence is much more likely to be his perceived conservatism doesn't mean that the red herring of gluten-free wafers will go away. Using them illicitly, with varying degrees of ostentation, may lead to displays of public insubordination that can't go indefinitely unpunished and they may become a symbol of clerical resistance. But resistance to what? Pell's allegiances aren't in any simple way to the Left or Right, let alone with any political party. Nor, sadly, are they particularly conservative, as his liturgical preferences and his endorsement of a republic made clear.

Perhaps Pell's distinctiveness, and his great offence, lies in representing what's left of mainstream Catholicism as unmistakably as John Howard represents the political mainstream. How else account for the level of rancour from the Fairfax press, the ABC and the greying Left-liberal clergy -- those embittered old men of Vatican II? The very notion of a mainstream is anathema to all of them, almost as appalling as orthodoxy itself.

[Anna]

Nothing's so loud as an angry liberal.

God Bless Bishop Pell!