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D r a g n e t
Coming and Going
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This Rock
Volume 9, Number 10
 October 1998 
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The Church of England has lost another cleric to the Catholic Church—and an important cleric at that. Francis Brown has closed down Ecclesia, a group that tried to stem the inroads of liberalism within the established church, and this month he is leaving as vicar of St. Stephen’s, Hull, where he has been since 1980.
For several years Brown has led efforts to oppose the ordination of women in the Church of England. "This Anglican parish has no part in the apostasy of priestesses," he once said. Now he’s not having any part in the greater apostasy of the Church of England as a whole. He says it is "no longer a fit home for anyone in orthodox Christianity. It is spiritually, morally, and intellectually bankrupt." Its sacraments are "empty and invalid," and only the Catholic Church speaks for authentic Christianity, he says. "I now realize that the proper course for faithful Anglicans is not to go on attempting to revive the corpse of the Church of England but to place themselves in communion with the Holy See."
Cristina Reese disagrees. She represents Women and the Church, a pro-women’s ordination movement. "There is a growing sense that there might be, in his and my lifetimes, women priests in the Roman Catholic Church as well. If he is looking for a sanctuary from ordained women, I am not sure how long he will be safe in the Catholic Church." The proper answer: forever, since there never will be priestesses in the Catholic Church. It appears that only time will be able to demonstrate this to Reese, but Francis Brown already has come to understand it.
Welcome Francis Brown, good-bye John Wijngaards, a Catholic theologian and, for forty years, a member of the London-based Mill Hill Missionaries. He has left the priesthood, giving the standard complaint about celibacy, contraceptives, and women priests. "The teaching authority has lost its credibility even among loyal pastors, who often struggle to limit the damage inflicted by offering their faithful a more sensitive pastoral guidance than Rome does." Translation: We permit sins that Rome condemns, such as fornication, contracepting, and homosexual acts.
Wijngaards, born in Holland and ordained at Mill Hill in 1959, accuses bishops of shirking their duty by not challenging Rome publicly. "Theologians and theological institutes," he adds, "fail by not standing up for what they believe to be the truth. Religious superiors and seminary professors fail their students by leading them into an establishment that will inhibit their autonomy and responsibility." In resigning, he said, "I want to stand on the side of those men and women who are so casually and unjustly dismissed by the Vatican. It is only by distancing myself now from the institutional Church that I can extract myself from the guilt of taking part in the conspiracy of silence."
Give Wijngaards partial credit. He has the courtesy to remove himself, more or less, from the Church. Most dissidents don’t show that much integrity. But don’t give Wijngaards too much credit. After all, his removal is only partial. He will remain as director of a Catholic charity called Housetop, which publishes books and videos on Christianity in the modern age, and thus will continue to draw a salary from the Church.
Kevin Orlin Johnson, whose article about apparitions appears in this issue, notes that some apparitions go belly up, forcing the seers to modify their routines.
"Many cult leaders switch from religious to political promises, as Mary Ann Van Hoof did," reports Johnson. "She drew tens of thousands to her failing Wisconsin farm in 1949 by claiming visions of the Virgin Mary, but official rebukes from Church officials, plus the generally unsophisticated tenor of her proclamations, soon cooled their fervor. Van Hoof, a former spiritualist, quickly dropped religious pronouncements altogether and seized on the prevailing Red Scare to recruit new members. Until her death in 1984 it was all Commie plots hatched by a Council of Elders, mind control through fluoridation, and global nuclear conflict that would destroy everything outside a thirty-mile radius of Necedah, where a spaceship would come to take them to a paradise inside the hollow Earth."
It may be that Van Hoof took too literally Pellucidar and other writings of Edgar Rice Burroughs, several of whose novels dealt with the notion of a hollow planet inhabited by strange creatures and peoples. However that may be, Johnson notes that "survivalists still migrate to the ‘safe zone’ and dig in, stockpiling arms and food for the predicted nuclear Armageddon that never shows up on time." What started out as a scam apparition was transformed into cultic nonsense. Nearly half a century after Van Hoof came up with her scheme, some people think there is something to be said for its veracity.
A regional Call to Action conference was held in Belmont, California, the first weekend August. It was more of the same. There were three hundred in attendance, "most of them elderly," reports a seminarian who investigated the event.
In her speech, Diana Hayes, who teaches at Georgetown University, said that lay people don’t need any mandate from the Church to "do ministry." All they need is the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Jesus established no hierarchy, she insisted. He left behind not an institutional church but stories, parables, and sayings.
Jesse Gutierrez-Cervantes, a former monk who now works as a "communications specialist," urged listeners to "avoid heterosexism, which assumes that everyone is heterosexual or ought to be." He displayed an altar that included images of the face of Christ, Our Lady of Guadalupe, a Native American statue, a jester, a crystal, and a pink triangle on a black button.
To the extent personal sin was mentioned, it was assigned only to the rich. Fr. Bill O’Donnell, of the Diocese of Oakland, said that "Bill Gates is an evil man" and "capitalism is the root of all evil." Declan Dean, who gave the homily at the concluding liturgy, described an imaginary Jesus who pleaded with members of San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club to "liquidate their assets" and give the money to the Campaign for Human Development.
At that liturgy two women recited the words of consecration, and the litany of saints included "good Pope John XXIII," Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, and Cesar Chavez. At the sign of peace the people were instructed to turn to one another and say, "You are the body of Christ."
These Call to Action conferences reaffirm that the organization’s members are in no real sense Catholic any longer, and they reaffirm that Call to Action will disappear in a few years, no matter what. The actuarial tables will take care of that, as the grayed-haired average participant must realize. Heterodoxy is the wave of the past, folks. Orthodoxy is the wave of the future. Learn to live with it.
"Christ speaks through me when he puts me into a trance," explains Erika Bertschinger, who goes by the name "Uriella." "Then I speak his words without knowledge of what he is saying. I am his mouthpiece." According to her, the Lord is telling us that it’s just about closing time. For credibility’s sake, he told Uriella in advance about the stock crash (not that a few hundred financial analysts hadn’t predicted it too, but who’s counting?), and now Uriella says that a world war will break out before the end of the year. She should know, apparently, since he supposedly is the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary. Uriella, 69, came to that realization in 1973, when she fell off a horse and onto her head.
The end of the world was supposed to have begun on August 8 with a general economic collapse (which seems to have been delayed, inexplicably). Then will come a Russian invasion of Western Europe, even though Russian armed forces are in worse shape than they have been in since, oh, 1917. Nutty, you say? Well, not nutty enough to dissuade two hundred people from joining Uriella’s cult, wich is called Fiat Lux, which just happens to own half a dozen luxury houses in the picturesque Lindau Valley.
Reprinted herewith, without permission of the writer (who no doubt would prefer to remain anonymous but can be identified as a Jesuit now retired from teaching) is a review of a book you may have a hard time finding locally: God: Triune or Quatern—A New Look, by Ignaz von Stupp, S.J. (Donnerundblitzen: Schickelgruber Press, 1997), translated by Phoebe Schmalz, R.S.C.J. Here is the reviewer’s note:
"Von Stupp, Professor of Philo-Anthro-Theology at the University of Zauerkraut, although basically Husserlian in his methodological approach to philo-anthro-theological questions, makes a decidedly Hegelian turn of ideology in this new work—a must for anyone in the field. His basic thrust and problematic, which he carefully nuances with Troeltschian intersubjective objectivity, is that, while Trent and Nicaea, along with Chalcedon (although here he parts company with his mentor, Thor Bjornson) maintained an ongoing dialogue among the hypostases in the Trinity, there is room for exploring the very real possibility of a quarternity of subsistences (á la neo-Feuerbachianism) commingling in the Johannine sense. Thus, in his I-Id-Sich-Thou approach, von Stupp takes a bold but needed step forward in what has become a rather jaded approach to the whole Quaternian problematic. While rather lengthy (5,023 pages), this book puts the whole Anglo-Ortho-Holydunker ecumenical dialogue in a brand new perspective. I can fault the author only on one point—and many would disagree—that I can’t understand anything he is trying to say."
Our thanks to Fr. Francis King, S.J., for discovering this review in an obscure theological journal.
Mike Gendron, leader of an anti-Catholic ministry called Proclaiming the Gospel, distributed a slick little brochure called "Are You Being Deceived?" The brochure itself is an exercise in deception—and a clever one. The text begins engagingly: "If I were to insult you, you’d feel the sting immediately. If I were to embarrass you, you’d be the first to know. But if I were to deceive you . . . you might never know it!" The thing to watch out for, he says, is those who deceive you about religion, because their deceptions may deprive you of salvation.
"Catholics, for example, believe that the pope and the Roman Catholic Church teach exactly what Jesus and the Bible teach. [True!] But how do we know if the popes’ teachings or the dogmas of the Roman Catholic Church are true? The only way we can be 100% sure is to do what the church of Berea did in New Testament times. They examined the Scriptures to see if what the Apostle Paul taught them was true (Acts 17:11)."
Here is Gendron’s own deception. The Bereans didn’t examine Scripture to verify that Paul was telling them the truth—and he, in praising them, did not praise them for checking up on him. The Bereans weren’t adopting a position of sola scriptura. What they were doing, as a fresh reading of the passage will show, was much more limited: They were seeing if Paul, in claiming that Jesus fulfilled the ancient prophecies, was on the mark or not, but there is no indication in the passage that Paul was endorsing the "Bible only" theory.
Anyway, from that Gendron moves on to a short catalogue of Catholic "errors." Let’s look at a few:
1. "Catholics are reborn as sons of God and freed from sin through water baptism (CCC 1213)." Well, that’s what Jesus told Nicodemus: If he wanted to be saved, he needed to be born again through water and the Holy Spirit, a formulation that means baptism.
2. "Jesus is offered daily as a sacrificial victim on Catholic altars (CCC 1367)." Gendron doesn’t bother to quote the first line of that paragraph of the Catechism: "The sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice." The text goes on to quote the teachings of Trent and refers to 1 Corinthians 11:23 and Hebrews 7:24, 27. Catholics don’t believe that Christ is sacrificed anew at each Mass. We believe the one sacrifice of Calvary is re-presented at each Mass, quite a different concept. Since what occurred on Calvary really was a sacrifice (Gendron will admit this), it follows that if that act is re-presented in the Mass, then the Mass is a sacrifice. The syllogism as a whole is not hard to follow. The sticking point is whether one accepts the premise that the sacrifice of Calvary can be re-presented at all. Gendron thinks not, but he forgets the image in Revelation of our glorified Lord perpetually offering his sacrifice on Calvary to the Father. If Christ can re-present his sacrifice in heaven, for all eternity, why can he not arrange to do so on earth, through the ministry of his priests?
3. "Venial sins are not deserving of hell (CCC 1863)." Apparently Gendron thinks that they are. But Scripture disagrees with him: "All wrongdoing is sin, but there is sin which is not mortal" (2 John 5:17; RSV). "Mortal" means "deadly." What does mortal sin kill off? Not the body, since everyone is aware of people who engage in mortal sins repeatedly and without evident repentance, and yet many such people live long and, in worldly terms, prosperous lives.
No, what is killed off isn’t the body but the life of the soul—not the soul itself, which, as a spirit, can’t die, but the life of the soul, which is to say grace in the soul. So mortal sin eliminates that grace, and without that grace one can’t get to heaven. "But there is sin which is not mortal." Scripture doesn’t give a name to that other kind of sin, but we call it "venial," which means "light" or "not grave." It’s the kind of sin that doesn’t kill off the life of the soul, according to John, and that must mean that "Venial sins are not deserving of hell." So, based on Scripture alone (plus a little logic), Gendron is wrong again.
The remainder of the flyer is along the same line: an oversimplified explanation of a Catholic teaching, then a scriptural quotation that, standing in isolation, seems to undermine that teaching. It’s an old story and an old technique, now dressed up in a polished, full-color publication. "As you can see, these teachings directly oppose each other," concludes Gendron. "One is truth. One is deception." Yes, but he has been deceived about where the deception lies—and that’s the most dangerous kind of deception of all.
Kenny Griswold is a senior at Harlingen High School South in Harlingen, Texas, but he isn’t letting his relative youth keep him from publicly defending the Church. The Valley Morning Star printed an anti-Catholic article by Pastor Oluf Pyle of the La Feria Church of Christ, and Griswold composed a reasoned and effective reply that was run by the newspaper.
He explained the distinction between Tradition (upper case) and tradition (lower case) and backed up his argument with scriptural citations (2 Thess. 2:15 and 1 Cor. 11:2). He noted that Pyle fell for the Nestorian heresy in rejecting the Marian title "Mother of God" and said that, if that title were inappropriate, "the Bible would not quote Elizabeth as calling [Mary] ‘the mother of my lord’ (Luke 1:43)." And in response to Pyle’s claim that no Christians were called "Catholic" until after the Council of Nicaea (325), the high school apologist trotted out Ignatius of Antioch, who, around 110, wrote that "wheresoever the bishop shall appear, there let the people be, even as where Jesus may be, there is the Catholic Church."
Good work, Kenny!
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