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D r a g n e t
THE ANTI-ANGELICA
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So you say that, as a progressive Catholic, you want an alternative to Mother Angelica? Try "Godtalk," a half-hour public access television show now broadcast on five stations in the Washington, D.C. area. (Anyone can air a show, for free, on a public access station—and the quality of programming shows it. Such stations are watched mainly by insomniacs.)
The host of "Godtalk" is Bridget Mary Meehan, a Irish-born member of the Sisters for Christian Community. Never heard of the order? Not surprising. It isn’t an order at all, at least not one set up with approval of Church authorities. It is a group of feminists who like to advertise themselves as nuns. They report only to themselves.
As regular guests "Godtalk" features several priests—Fr. William Callahan, Fr. James Burch, and Fr. Ken Knapp. Just as Meehan does not clearly identify her own (canonically irregular) status, so she fails to identify theirs. Callahan is a former Jesuit, who was instructed to leave the order when he refused to give up his proselytizing for women’s ordination. He is not incardinated and thus cannot function as a priest. Burch, who is married, isn’t even a Catholic priest. He’s a member of the Old Catholic Church, a schismatic sect that broke off from Rome after the 1870 definition of papal infallibility. Knapp left the Catholic priesthood to marry and thus cannot function canonically as a priest.
As for Meehan, she calls herself a "mainstream Catholic." She attends a parish church occasionally, when her elderly parents need a ride, but her "real liturgies" are outside any parish. She meets with a small community of former priests and feminist women, all of whom preside at "women Eucharists" and all of whom recite the words of consecration. They decline to use the word "Father" when referring to God. It isn’t clear whether they join together in praying the "Our Parent."
Meehan’s purpose in hosting the program is to focus on the "hot button" issues, which she says are the ones "too hot for churches to handle." That is an odd description, since the issues are precisely the ones that have been "handled" to death over the last two decades: divorce, annulment, remarriage, homosexuality, women in the Bible, inclusive language in the liturgy, women’s ordination, contraception. The difference, she says, is that she and her guests handle them in a "scientific" rather than a "fundamentalistic" way.
In her most discouraging line, Meehan told a reporter, "I love Catholicism. We’re not walking away."
Archbishop Francis George of Chicago plans to recruit foreign priests for stints in his parishes. Over the last decade or two Chicago has ordained, on average, fewer priests than some dioceses a tenth of its size. George plans an overhaul of seminary training, but the fruits from a reform are many years off. Young men will be hesitant to seek priestly training in the archdiocese until they see that its track record has improved dramatically. What to do in the meantime? George says parishes should welcome foreign priests, just as once American parishes once welcomed priests from Ireland, Italy, and France.
Fr. Richard McBrien, writing a few months ago in theNational Catholic Reporter, thinks this is a bad plan. He worries that such "imported priests" won’t be able to understand our culture and thus won’t be able to minister effectively. Mightn’t they be coming for base reasons, such as better salaries and higher living standards? Aren’t they needed in their own countries? Aren’t a lot of them going to be from such benighted places as Poland and Nigeria?
McBrien’s is a disturbing argument, writes Fr. Cosmas K. OkeChukwu-Nwosuh in an op-ed piece in the Reporter. Fr. OkeChukwu-Nwosuh happens to be from Nigeria, and he’s now a doctoral student at Catholic University of America. He notes that "priests are drawn to the United States, as elsewhere, not by money but by the call to serve." Eloquently citing Edmund Campion (executed by the English Reformers), Maryknoller James Walsh (imprisoned in China), and Jesuit Walter Cizek (held in Soviet gulags), he notes that historically some people have insisted on misinterpreting priests’ motives.
Fr. OkeChukwu-Nwosuh quotes McBrien and characterizes his sentiments as "isolationist and anti-immigrant." He says that McBrien’s "objection is not really to the idea of ‘imported priests,’ but to the kind of priest—likely a person of color, from a Third World culture. . . . His objection is a thinly-disguised form of xenophobia."
Zing! Here we have Richard McBrien, icon of progressive Catholics, being called (though not in so many words) a racist by a black priest from Africa. That priest goes on to say, "The bottom line to all the questions and hackles being raised in Chicago is: ‘Can the poor of the Third World preach to us?’ It is a question that echoes another that was asked some two thousand years ago: ‘From Nazareth? Can anything good come out of that place?’ ‘Missionaries from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the United States? Come on! You’ve got to be kidding!"
From the other side of the continent, right here at the Catholic Answers offices, there came another letter to the Reporter. It was written by Fr. Ray Ryland, who wrote:
"Fr. Richard McBrien’s contemptuous reference to African missionaries in this country as ‘imported goods’ deserves the beating it received in Fr. OkeChukwu-Nwosuh’s charitable response. It has been my privilege to become acquainted with half a dozen or so African priests serving temporarily in this country while doing graduate study at various universities. If they are at all typical of the missionaries Archbishop George is inviting, I can readily understand why Fr. McBrien finds them distasteful.
The reason is that all the priests I have known were loyal, enthusiastic, faithful Catholics. They neither have nor want any part in Fr. McBrien’s shrinking world of dissent. The ‘culture’ Fr. McBrien alleges they can understand is his culture of cafeteria Catholicism. God forbid they should ever ‘understand’ it in terms of sharing it.
Last May three of our interns, Jason Evert, Joseph Nixon, and Peter Hofmann, attended an anti-Catholic conference given at the local Lighthouse Baptist Church. The sponsor was Arthur Maricle, the associate pastor and director of the Answers from the World Bible class. The featured speakers were Bart Brewer, one-time priest and long-time director of Mission to Catholics International, and Richard Bennett, another former priest. In our July/August issue Jason wrote an account of his, Joseph’s, and Peter’s attempts to correct the misinformation given out at the conference. The article was called "Mission to Mission to Catholics."
Now Maricle has come out with a response to Jason and a defense of the "former Roman Catholic priests who were gloriously saved and, subsequently, left the false religion they had once represented and promoted." Maricle says that "an antagonistic Roman priest [unidentified] who know Bartholomew Brewer sent him a copy of the article, and Bart, in turn, sent me a copy." He goes through Jason’s article paragraph by paragraph, bolstering his own authority by belittling our interns’: "The young men . . . have no more than a thimbleful of biblical expertise or practical experience in their religion as compared to two brilliant, born-again, former priests. . . . We tried hard to be gracious, but if we hadn’t laughted under our breaths at this sincere but ludicrous attempt to ‘prove’ from the Bible that Mary is the queen of heaven, we would have cried. . . . This is so incredibly typical of those who are religious but biblically ignorant. . . . What ignoramuses! What cowards! What fools!" And other polite comments.
We regret to inform Mr. Maricle that, after finishing graduate work in August, Jason will be joining the staff of Catholic Answers as a full-time apologist. No doubt he will find cause to pay another visit to Lighthouse Baptist Church.
Among the items given out during the conference was Maricle’s explanation of the Inquisition, subtitled "A Study in Absolute Catholic Power." He says that, "while controversy rages around the number of victims that can be claimed by the Inquisition, conservative estimates easily place the count in the millions. This does not include the equally vast numbers of human beings slaughtered in the various wars and other conflicts instigated over the centuries by Vatican political intrigues. Nor does it take into account the Holocaust wrought upon the Jews by the Nazis, led by Roman Catholics who used their own religious history to justify their modern excesses."
Set aside the bit about "the equally vast numbers" killed in Vatican-instigated wars. Ignore the charge that the Nazi government was run at the direction of Catholics (none of whom Maricle bothers to name). Consider only the idea that "conservative estimates" place the number executed under the Inquisition "in the millions." Well, that’s not as extreme a number as we’ve seen in some places. The now-almost-forgotten Jimmy Swaggart claimed that the Church took as many as sixty million lives during the "Dark Ages." Other anti-Catholics have ratcheted up Inquisition’s total to as many as ninety-five million—a neat trick, since the entire population of those countries in which the Inquisition operated never approached that figure until recent times.
Maricle doesn’t say where he got his "conservative estimate," but there are reputable scholars who put the total executions at a tiny fraction of what Maricle would like to think they were. Edward Peters, in his book Inquisition, says that the total may be as little as three thousand—about one-thousandth of what Maricle insists on. French scholar Fernand Hayward also notes that the totals were tiny, at least in comparison with the figures bandied about by anti-Catholics.
Mary Ann Walsh, a Sister of Mercy for thirty-three years, doesn’t like Ann Carey’s new book, Sisters in Crisis. Carey is wrong to blame the Leadership Conference of Women Religious for much of the decline in religious orders, says Walsh in a syndicated review of the book. She pooh-poohs the idea that "feminist-driven nuns" have been ineffectual role models for potential applicants. She scoffs at the idea that the LCWR "promoted a radical agenda involving the deconstruction of community life, secularization of ministries, antagonism to male Church authority, and neglect of spiritual development." She says today’s sisters are living just as their counterparts did sixty years ago. "The book will offend many nuns, but some are treated well. Carey describes the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, an alternative group to the LCWR, as ‘women religious who espouse loyalty to the Church.’ The insinuation that other religious are disloyal is insulting."
In other news, the Sisters of Mercy, like other radicalized orders, are rapidly declining in numbers, and, in a few years, the whole discussion will have become moot through the operation of the actuarial table.
A dozen years ago Elizabeth Clare Prophet, head of the Church Universal and Triumphant, moved her operation from Malibu to a valley near Yellowstone National Park. There she and her followers constructed housing, schools, business facilities, and a massive underground bomb shelter—just in case. Residents imbibed her New Age theology, at the center of which is the old notion of "ascended masters" who speak to her in messages she calls "dictations."
Prophet, 59, says her goal is to liberate her followers from orthodoxy. "I think orthodoxy limits our personal and very private communion with God." But she doesn’t seem to want to liberate them from her orthodoxy, which includes reincarnation as a chief tenet. She calls reincarnation "the missing link in Christianity." It’s the link that will unite Christianity with Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions. "These religions are dying," she says.
Whether or not they are, hers certainly is. Former members of her church label it a cult. In 1990 hundreds of members sold their possessions and moved to her mountain valley, there, in her bomb shelter, to await the end of the world. Eventually they got tired of waiting and caused a stink. Last year half of her headquarters staff was laid off. Membership is down, but Prophet says, "I don’t count membership." Other New Age groups are circling the Church Universal and Triumphant, waiting for its imminent collapse. Prophet is said to be behind the times. She’s still talking about "ascended masters," but what people really are interested in is auras.
Not long ago, Sister Jane Burke, a School Sister of Notre Dame, spoke at a press conference organized by nine congregations of women religious in the Baltimore-Washington area and intended to raise news media awareness of their work. The urged the media not to be fooled by outward appearances, an especially apropos remark, given that she was dressed in a conservative business suit. "If you’re only looking at who we are on the outside, you don’t get the full picture," she said. What was refreshing is that she didn’t dust off the old habit for the "photo op." A little truth in advertising goes a long way, even if unintentionally.
We keep hearing about schisms and potential schisms. It's nice to know that an old schism might be ending soon. Officials of the Catholic Church and the Polish National Catholic Church have been engaged in reunification talks, and this year the PNCC leadership, at its quadrennial general synod, will vote on whether to approve full communion.
The PNCC broke off from the Catholic Church about a century ago. The schism arose not out of doctrinal disputes but out of pastoral conflicts between Catholic bishops and Polish immigrants. The PNCC is one of the Old Catholic Churches of the Union of Utrecht. Its episcopate always has been recognized by Rome as in the apostolic succession, and its seven sacraments are valid. In 1996 the Old Catholic Church in Germany started to ordain women, and the PNCC terminated communion with it. PNCC leaders say they also will terminate communion with any other Old Catholic Church that tries to ordain women.
Tired of the usual run of parish missions and retreats. Here’s a refreshing change. Fr. Daniel McCaffrey, S.T.D., travels around the country giving weekend retreats on birth control. He says that "the afternoon seminar presents the theological, medical, and practical truths underlying the Church’s teaching on the unity of live and life in marriage. The consequences of contraception and sterilization are discussed, and the remarkable new scientific methods of natural family planning are presented in detail."
Fr. Daniel McCaffrey preaches at all weekend Masses. In his homilies he draws on such documents as Humanae Vitae, The Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Evangelium Vitae. The three-hour afternoon session includes a presentation by a natural family planning instructor, active participation by a physician, and personal witnesses by couples who have used the methods discussed. A parish social and personal discussion time follow a question-and-answer period.
For further information on having Fr. McCaffrey talk to your parish, call him at (405) 720-9873, or write to him at the Office of Natural Family Planning, Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, P.O. Box 32180, Oklahoma City, OK 73123. Highly recommended.
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