Crusty Old Fool Alert!

Pope Ratz is turning back the clock for the faithful again. Given all we’ve endured in the last years, we should be used to crap like this … but somewhere in my cell memory [that holds recall of the burnings in Salem and the Inquisition in Spain] there is still enough resonance to patriarchal arrogance to make me jump. Pffffft! And they say that John McCain is the patron saint of lost causes!

I’m remembering a photo shopped picture of Bush sitting in the front row at John Paul’s funeral, staring pensively at the Pontiff, laid out in ornate red robes. The bubble over his head read, “Who killed Santa?”

This nation has her own Religious issues to deal with, her Bible Thumpers and Snake Handlers, to pay much attention to this — at least until Friday becomes meatless again, and the consumer index reflects same. This is a mirror within a mirror, however — as the Catholic Hierarchy declares Protestants null and void, so do our own Christocrats attack Mormons [Romney-ites] as pagan cultists.

Somewhere, the old God’s laugh.

Jude

Dismay and anger as Pope declares Protestants cannot have churches
· Text quotes ‘absence of sacramental priesthood’
· Declaration criticised as huge step backwards
John Hooper in Rome and Stephen Bates, The Guardian
Wednesday July 11, 2007

Protestant churches yesterday reacted with dismay to a new declaration approved by Pope Benedict XVI insisting they were mere “ecclesial communities” and their ministers effectively phonies with no right to give communion.

Coming just four days after the reinstatement of the Latin mass, yesterday’s document left no doubt about the Pope’s eagerness to back traditional Roman Catholic practices and attitudes, even at the expense of causing offence.

The view that Protestants cannot have churches was first set out by Pope Benedict seven years ago when, as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, he headed the Vatican “ministry” for doctrine. A commentary attached to the latest text acknowledged that his 2000 document, Dominus Iesus, had caused “no little distress”.

But it added: “It is nevertheless difficult to see how the title of ‘Church’ could possibly be attributed to [Protestant communities], given that they do not accept the theological notion of the Church in the Catholic sense and that they lack elements considered essential to the Catholic Church.”

The Pope’s old department, which issued the document, said its aim was to correct “erroneous or ambiguous” interpretations of the Second Vatican Council, which ended in 1965. Quoting a text approved by the Council, it said Protestant churches, “because of the absence of the sacramental priesthood”, had not “preserved the genuine and integral substance of the Eucharistic Mystery”.

However, other Christians saw the latest document as another retreat from the spirit of openness generated by the Council, which laid the basis for talks on Christian unity. Bishop Wolfgang Huber, head of the Protestant umbrella group Evangelical Church in Germany, said: “The hope for a change in the ecumenical situation has been pushed further away by the document published today.”

He said the new pronouncement repeated “offensive statements” in the 2000 document and was a “missed opportunity” to improve relations with Protestants. The president of the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy, pastor Domenico Maselli, called it a “huge step backwards in relations between the Roman Catholic church and other Christian communities”.

A statement from the French Protestant Federation warned that the internal document would have “external repercussions”.

The Church of England reacted more cautiously than seven years ago when Dominus Iesus was issued and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, denounced it as unacceptable. The spokesman for the current archbishop, Rowan Williams, said: “This is a serious document, teaching on important ecclesiological matters and of significance to the churches’ commitment to the full, visible unity to the one church of Jesus Christ.”

The Vatican’s statement had fewer misgivings about the Orthodox Church, which had “true sacraments” and a genuine priesthood. But their failure to acknowledge the Pope’s authority meant they suffered from a “defectus”, politely translated from Latin as “a wound”.

On Saturday, the Pope freed Catholics to ask for masses to be celebrated according to the Latin rite abolished by the Second Vatican Council. This meant the reinstatement of a Good Friday prayer describing Jews as blind to the Christian truth.

The president of the Italian rabbinical assembly, Giuseppe Laras, yesterday called it “a heavy blow”. He told the daily Corriere della Sera: “We are going back. A long way back.” ++

Is Pope Benedict turning back Catholic clock?
Reuters
Thu 12 Jul 2007

VATICAN CITY, July 12 (Reuters) - Critics say Pope Benedict, in several recent controversial moves, is turning the Roman Catholic Church’s clock back by half a century and alienating Muslims, Jews and Protestants in the process.

Supporters say that by allowing a wider use of the Latin Mass and reasserting Catholic primacy over other religions, he is trying to revitalise his 1.1 billion-member church and prepare it for an uncertain future.

“Basically, what we are in the grip of at the moment, and Benedict is one of the engineers of this, is what I would call a strong re-assertion of traditional Catholic identity,” said John Allen, author of several books on the church and the Vatican.

Some saw his decision to allow a wider use of the old-style Latin Mass as a blow to the reforms of the 1962-65 Second Vatican Council, which substituted Latin for local languages, modernised the church and encouraged inter-religious dialogue.

Catholics who thought the days of incense and dead languages were behind them were puzzled. Jews voiced concern over the possible use of prayers for their conversion in the old Mass.

Benedict also approved a document which said all other Christian denominations apart from Catholicism were wounded and not full churches of Jesus Christ, drawing the ire of a number of Protestant groups who said it would hurt dialogue.

“This is the Pope being the German professor who is going to clarify language in his classroom,” said Father Tom Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “And he thinks the world is his classroom.”

“The problem with that is that he defines what a church is and by doing so takes any discussion of what a church is off the table in dialogue (with other religions),” said Reese, a leading U.S. Jesuit author.

In the wake of the 1962-1965 Second Vatican Council, Catholic identity underwent revolutionary changes.

The Latin Mass was phased out, Gregorian chant gave way to folk guitar masses, and Jews, Muslims and other members of other Christian faiths were no longer seen as heretics to be converted or shunned.

“The basic debate after Vatican II was ’should we become more like the world, more modern, more relevant in order to meet it halfway, or is the world heading off in the wrong direction and the last thing we want to do is follow it?’” Allen said.

For most of the immediate period after Vatican II, modernisers won the day even though church attendance fell and the number of men who left the priesthood rose.

FINGERPOST

Nuns stopped wearing traditional habits, some priests took normal day jobs so they could better understand workers’ problems, and in many cases Catholic identity was thrown into the blur of the inter-religious blender.

With the election of Pope John Paul II in 1978, traditionalists began to make inroads again and Benedict’s actions this month were seen by some as a clear fingerpost for the church’s future — what some see as a hard right turn.

“His intention is not to insult people but many times that’s the way it come across,” Reese said. “He uses words the way he defines them whether people like it or not, whether it upsets gays, women, theologians, Protestants or Muslims.”

Last year Muslims protested after Benedict used a quote that associated Islam with violence. He said he was misunderstood and later expressed his esteem for Muslims but the sting remains.

George Weigel, a prominent U.S. lay Catholic theologian, author and leading conservative commentator, sees Catholic identity as a matter of life and death for the church.

“Christian communities which maintain a clear sense of their doctrinal and moral boundaries can not only survive the encounter with modernity, they can flourish within it. Whereas Christian communities which fudge their boundaries tend to wither and eventually die,” Weigel said.

Weigel believes Catholic identity and belief cannot be part of “options in a supermarket” if the church is to survive.

Some see a leaner, meaner Catholic Church in the future.

“The Vatican’s calculation is that the retrenchment we are going through now may result in a smaller church but it will be a church that is more focused, more energetic, and in the long term that will pay off,” said Allen. ++

“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007

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