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Angry Is as Angry Does

The political philosopher Eric Voegelin wrote that civilizations advance and decline at the same time: up in some ways, down in others. We see this truth in our own society. Never has medical treatment been so effective in prolonging life, and never have so many innocents been killed in what are termed euphemistically “women’s clinics.” Our material riches are without parallel in human history, and our moral wretchedness may be without parallel too. 

We see this duality even in the Church. In some ways things are much better in Catholic circles than they were two generations ago; in other ways they are immeasurably worse. To many of us it seems that the advances have been outweighed by the declines. If nothing else, we have learned the importance of the virtue of hope. We try to keep a stiff upper lip, but aren’t always successful. People around us seem to be going off in all directions, some to the left, some to the right, and the traditional Catholic center (as E. I. Watkin termed it in one of his books) is no longer easy to locate. We notice anger in ourselves (“why doesn’t someone fix this problem?”) and are not surprised to see anger all around us, much of it justified. 

But sometimes even righteous anger can carry us away. Righteous anger was our Lord’s servant when he cleansed the Temple, but it can be our pitiless master if we let it control us. And some of us do. The anger quotient is higher on the left than on the right, perhaps because the left realizes, at least subconsciously, that it’s kicking against the goad. (Women never will be priests, so agitation for priestesses can result only in frustration in the long run, whereas a successful push for the return of the old Latin Mass is, if unlikely at the moment, at least theoretically possible.) 

No one should be surprised, then, to find angry magazines and newspapers. The National Catholic Reporter finesses its columnists’ anger into a sustained sneer, even as it does a generally commendable (and angerless) job when reporting straight news. A few publications on the right also are noted for their anger. Among them is The Roman Catholic Observer, a monthly tabloid edited in Mount Vernon, Washington, by Ralph Solferino. 

In his inaugural issue, published in March 1995, Solferino explained that until recently he had edited an identical-looking tabloid, Catholic Family News. This he sold to Fr. Nicholas Gruner, who heads a controversial Fatima apostolate and whose bona fides as a priest have been called into question by conservative commentators. Gruner moved the paper’s operations east and, contrary to their agreement, says Solferino, overrode Solferino’s editorial decisions. Solferino quit and founded The Roman Catholic Observer

Ironically, a few months before accepting Gruner’s buy-out offer, Solferino serialized in the pages of Catholic Family News his own long “investigation” into Gruner’s credentials. He concluded that Gruner was a legitimate and honorable priest who had been slandered by his enemies. Today Solferino says Gruner owes him $20,000 for the purchase of Catholic Family News, and he isn’t sure if he’ll be paid. 

As I said, The Roman Catholic Observer tends to be angry. The tabloid strongly opposes the vernacular Mass (attributing to it much of the confusion in today’s Church), examines the issue of “the Masons in the Vatican,” and argues that The Catechism of the Catholic Church is imbued with Modernism. An especially pointed editorial in the first issue of The Roman Catholic Observer caught my attention–and for a good reason: It excoriated me and my colleague Patrick Madrid. 

The editorial criticized us for comments made in an interview published in The Wanderer on February 16. At the end of that interview I remarked that frustrated Catholics should not follow “pied pipers” who may lead them out of the Church; as ex amples I cited Vin Lewis of All Roads Ministry and Gerry Matatics of Biblical Foundations. I went on to say that Matatics in particular was leading people into error. 

Ralph Solferino would have none of it and wrote an angry editorial. I replied in an article I titled “The Dangers of Hyperbole.” At this writing I don’t know to what extent my reply will survive the editor’s blue pencil at The Roman Catholic Observer (my guess is that all of it will see print), but few of the readers of This Rockwill see it there, so it is reproduced here. 

The Dangers of Hyperbole

In Love’s Labor’s Lost, one of Shakespeare’s characters forswears the future use of hyperbole because it has led him into all sorts of untenable positions. The editor of The Roman Catholic Observer might take a cue from this play.  

In his editorial commentary in the March issue, Ralph Solferino (whom I thank for kindly allowing me this reply) allowed hyperbole to get the better of him. His commentary, entitled “The Dangers of Being Judge, Jury, and Executioner,” concerned an interview that my colleague Patrick Madrid and I granted to Paul Likoudis of The Wanderer

Mr. Solferino, at the end of his first paragraph, says that in the interview there was a “passing” critical reference made to Vin Lewis, head of All Roads Ministry, but “an overwhelming barrage of verbiage directed against [Gerry] Matatics,” head of Biblical Foundations. 

While it is true that the interview, which ran to 100 column inches, had only a passing reference to Mr. Lewis, who was referred to and named in only one sentence, it was an exercise in hyperbole for Mr. Solferino to describe the longer comments about Mr. Matatics as “an overwhelming barrage.” Those comments ran to only three column inches. Since when is three percent of the total “overwhelming”? 

The editorial commentary, at 175 column inches, is nearly twice the length of the interview in The Wanderer, and, despite Mr. Solferino’s generous offer to give me as much space as I desire, I do not want to impose on him or his readers by engaging in a line-count derby, the winner to be decided not by a weighing of arguments, but by a yardstick. 

I would like to comment on some of his comments in the order he made them. I cannot hope to undo all the effects of his hyperbolic language, but I may be able to suggest to the readers that things are not quite as he limned them. 

He writes, “In reading the Wanderer article, the first question that comes to mind is, why do they [who? Keating and Madrid? Likoudis and The Wanderer staff?] feel it relevant to quote a previous article from Fidelity magazine attacking Mr. Matatics as a source of factual and accurate information, given that Fidelity magazine is widely recognized as being biased against Traditional Catholicism, and especially against the SSPX [the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre’s Society of St. Pius X]?” 

First, neither Mr. Madrid nor I quoted from Fidelity at all. Paul Li-koudis, in his introduction to the interview, noted that an earlier issue of The Wanderer cited a Fidelity article in which half a page had been devoted to Mr. Matatics. Mr. Likoudis did not “quote” from that article, but from The Wanderer‘s own response to it. 

Second, and more importantly, is the “propriety” of quoting from Fidelity. Even if we say that Fidelity is not sympathetic to Traditionalists, does that mean it necessarily can’t report accurately on them? In reality, the half page devoted to Gerry Matatics in the December 1994 Fidelity, so far as my colleagues at Catholic Answers and I have been able to determine, was factually accurate. What is wrong, then, with quoting from such a report? 

Let’s move on. Mr. Solferino asks, “Where has The Wanderer obtained the information that would suggest that Mr. Matatics is a member of SSPX, or that he is a sedevacantist [one who thinks the papal throne is vacant], as their article implies?” But The Wanderer–that is, Mr. Likoudis, in his introduction to the interview–made no such claims. Neither has anyone else. 

But there is a connection of sorts between Mr. Matatics and the SSPX and sedevacantism. He regularly attends SSPX Masses and two years ago was announced as a future columnist for The Angelus, the SSPX magazine. (He declined the appointment after several of his friends advised him against it.) Neither of these makes him a member of the SSPX, but certainly they indicate his close connection with it. 

As for the question of sedevacantism, when he spoke at Mount St. Michael, a sedevacantist stronghold [located in Spokane, Washington], on January 28, Mr. Matatics was asked, “Is there a current pope?” His answer: “I honestly can’t say.” While this cannot be interpreted as signaling his acceptance of sedevacantism, neither can it be interpreted as a ringing endorsement of the validity of the present papacy. It is the answer of someone who, at least, is unsure whether John Paul II is a pope, and, given the venue, it tended to reinforce the opinions of the sedevacantists in the audience. 

Mr. Solferino, a page later, complains that “for The Wanderer to state that it is conducting a substantial examination again begs the question . .. when the main defendant, namely Gerry Matatics, is not invited to plead his case.” This casts the interview in a false light. 

It was, after all, an interview of Patrick Madrid and Karl Keating, not of Gerry Matatics, who was mentioned at the tail end and only in a few sentences spoken by me. The only other mention of him was in the introduction, which, of course, was written after the interview was transcribed from tape. If there was a “main defendant,” it probably was the SSPX, not Mr. Matatics. Again, hyperbole getting in the way of the facts. 

Then come several sentences in which Mr. Solferino condemns Mr. Matatics–not directly, but by implication. Let me explain. 

The editor says, “Given that both Mr. Keating and Mr. Madrid frequently work the circuit in giving talks within the Conciliar Church, suggests that they, like the parishes they visit, are Modernist and politically correct in their presentations. The reason for our thinking this is that if they were not toeing the Modernist party line, they wouldn’t be able to get within 50 miles of any parish, as no bishop or priest would consider for one second of having a ‘Traditionalist Catholic’ speak in any of their parishes.” A few sentences later he continues the same thought: “If anyone should believe that perhaps we are making an unfair assumption with regard to Mr. Keating and Mr. Madrid, we can only base our opinion on the fact that both these men travel from parish to parish giving talks all over the country, seemingly unhindered.” 

Here is the irony: The parishes Mr. Madrid and I speak in are often the same parishes Mr. Matatics speaks in. We will arrive at a parish where he had spoken some months before, or we learn that he has spoken at a parish we visited the year prior. If our speaking at those parishes makes us “Modernists,” then Mr. Matatics is also a “Modernist.” But does any reader of The Roman Catholic Observer believe such a thing? I doubt it. 

Mr. Solferino has engaged in hyperbole again, and it has led him to a quandary. This is what happens when one works on the basis of surmise (“suggests that they . . .”) instead of fact and when one argues through the flinging of labels (“Modernist”) rather than through syllogisms. 

Sandwiched between the two quotations above is a representative instance of overblown rhetoric, the kind that undercuts one’s argument: “Certainly [pastors of the parishes Keating and Madrid speak in] don’t mind inviting Lutherans and other Protestants to their parishes, and they don’t even mind if they read the Gospel and give the Sermon during their Masses.” 

Mr. Madrid and I have spoken in hundreds of parishes over the last seven years, and, so far as we are aware, in not a single one of those parishes has a Protestant been invited to “read the Gospel and give the Sermon.” So far as we know, in those parishes even lay Catholics haven’t been invited to “read the Gospel and give the Sermon.” 

Where does Mr. Solferino come up with such “facts”? I am tempted to ask him, if his characterization of the parishes we (and Gerry Matatics!) speaks in is correct, that he name only five such parishes out of the hundreds we have spoken at. I am tempted to ask that, but I don’t wish to rub it in. 

Then we come to a more substantive charge, which Mr. Solferino puts this way: “The reason for the underbrush as he [Keating] calls it, and the existing confusion among Catholics, is due simply to the fact that Catholic apologists, teachers, and professors are teaching an ambiguous, watered-down, and Modernist kind of Protestantized Catholicism.” 

Partly right, but partly wrong. The confusion among Catholics has not been caused by apologists (among whom Mr. Solferino apparently includes Mr. Madrid and me), as is evidenced by the fact that the confusion long predated our apologetics work. The confusion even long predated Vatican II. For several generations Catholics have been operating as though there were an eighth sacrament, Holy Osmosis. They have thought that it would be enough for the family to attend Mass on Sunday and for the kids to attend parochial school or CCD, and the faith would be passed from one generation to the next by a kind of trickle-down theory. 

The knowledge and faith of Catholic laymen already were weak when Vatican II convened, and the wider cultural problems of the 1960s (which were evident twenty and thirty years earlier) capitalized on the laity’s poor formation. Granted, the decay has been accelerated by confused priests, unfaithful religious, and timid bishops, but the decay has been fought by wise priests (such as Fr. John Hardon and Msgr. William Smith), faithful religious (Mother Teresa and Mother Angelica), and courageous bishops (Cardinal Ratzinger and Peoria’s John Myers). 

And the decay has been fought by apologists such as Prof. Scott Hahn and those associated with Catholic Answers. True, the good guys haven’t won yet, but it is unseemly to suggest that all Catholic “apologists, teachers, and professors are teaching an ambiguous, watered-down, and Modernist kind of Protestantized Catholicism.” Mr. Solferino then implies that my colleagues and I, and other apologists and evangelists we associate with, fail to teach the “hard sayings” of our Lord. He lists “dogmas pertaining to salvation, divorce, homosexuality, abortion, contraception, etc., etc. Whom, may we ask of Mr. Keating, is teaching about such things in the ‘true’ Church Mr. Keating refers to, in the clear-cut unambiguous language of yesteryear?” 

The answer: Mr. Madrid and I are, as are Scott Hahn, Prof. Janet Smith, and dozens of others engaged in apologetics. The magazine I edit, This Rock, recently carried a cover story explaining and supporting the Church’s stance on homosexuality. (The story was written by a former “gay-rights” activist who is now a chaste Catholic.) In April I gave a seminar near Dallas and devoted considerable time to the issues of divorce and contraception. Many individuals and organizations, as Mr. Solferino well knows, promote the Church’s teaching on abortion. 

So where’s the problem? I suspect it’s in the remaining topic in his list, salvation. The people I refer to do not teach the Feeneyite misinterpretation of the dogma of “no salvation outside the Church.” We teach, instead, the magisterium’s interpretation. But Gerry Matatics and Vin Lewis subscribe to the Feeneyite position. In this they are doct rinally incorrect. Another note of irony: The Society of St. Pius X also rejects the Feeneyite position, so one hardly can claim that all self-styled Traditionalists adhere to the rigorist view. 

I do not wish to argue the question of salvation in these pages. My analysis will appear in a future issue of This Rock. But I do wish to leave the readers with the intriguing note that several of the most “Traditionalist” popes of the last two centuries (their opponents called them “reactionary”)–Pius IX, Pius XI, and Pius XII–rejected the interpretation that eventually became identified with Fr. Leonard Feeney’s name. 

Let’s move on. Mr. Solferino claims that “in many churches the matter for unleavened bread has been substituted by cookies, regular bread, crackers, and the like.” I would like to see hard statistics about this. I have taken Communion in many of the churches I have spoken at, and not once did I have cause to suspect in-valid matter. (One of my talks in Dallas focused on the question of differentiating valid from invalid matter.) None of my colleagues has reported such a problem either. 

I’m not saying that such abuses haven’t occurred, but I suspect most reports of them are no more reliable than the “urban legends” we so often hear about (such as the one about the woman who dried her wet cat in the microwave–a story endlessly repeated, but never once verified). What Mr. Solferino should have said is that such abuses have been known to occur, but apparently rarely. (They also occurred in the Middle Ages, which is why the Church had to develop regulations about what constituted valid matter for the bread and wine.) 

Again, I don’t want to belabor this point–it was more a less a throw-away line by Mr. Solferino–but I do want to note that hyperbole leads to error and, worse, injustice. If we go around saying that “in many churches” invalid matter is used, readers will understand that to mean “in most churches” or “in almost all churches,” and by allowing readers to entertain such ideas we do a disservice to them and to the priests they come to despise. 

Let me wrap this up before I overstay my welcome. Near the end of his commentary Mr. Solferino says that “most of the responses given by Mr. Keating and Mr. Madrid in the supposed ‘examination’ [by Paul Likoudis] are mostly incorrect and biased, insofar as both these men make statements as if actually knowing the minds of Mr. Matatics and Mr. Lewis.” 

First of all, Mr. Madrid didn’t refer to either Mr. Matatics or Mr. Lew-is. It was only in my answers that their names appear. Second, in fact we do know the minds of Mr. Matatics and Mr. Lewis, at least to a fair extent, because they have stated their positions either in writing, in lectures, in tapes, or in telephone calls with us. 

In one of my answers I say that Mr. Matatics “is now telling people that it would be a sin for him to attend the new Mass.” This statement is entirely accurate. I know, because he said it to me and my colleagues on the telephone, and I asked him to repeat himself so I could take it down correctly. His exact words: “I cannot attend the new Mass because for me it would be a sin.” He believes it would be a sin because he believes the Novus Ordo is invalid, even when said by a rightly-intentioned priest who follows the missal to the letter. 

In an upcoming and very lengthy article in This Rock I will set out what Mr. Matatics thinks about this issue and other issues, using his own words, taken from his talks and his writings, and using the testimony of several dozen people who have had contact with him over the last few years. There will be little need for me to draw any conclusions for the readers. The facts will speak for themselves. 

This is not something I look forward to doing; it is something I prayed would pass me by. After all, I thought so highly of Gerry Matatics’s talents (and I still think highly of them) that I hired him in 1990, and he worked for me for several months. But events in the four years since he left Catholic Answers have reached a crescendo, and it is no longer possible to keep silent. The problems extend far beyond the few doctrinal points Mr. Solferino and I have discussed, but anything more that I and others have to say will have to wait for the article. 

Mr. Solferino concludes his commentary by saying that Mr. Madrid and I–and presumably others like us–are “Modernist vigilantes out for the innocent blood of Traditional Catholics.” Wrong. Many of us consider ourselves traditional in the best sense of the word. But we are in no way schismatic, nor do we subscribe to any doctrines not supported by the magisterium, and we will not pretend that there are “no enemies to the right.” 

We recognize that some Catholics, in the name of Tradition, have adopted the Protestant principle of private interpretation. This always leads to error and rancor, never to truth and inner peace. It also leads to the undercutting of Tradition by some of those who claim to be its defenders. 

As we discuss these matters over the coming months, I hope their importance will dissuade us from substituting prejudice for reason or hyperbole for finely-tuned arguments. Let’s not become partisans of this person or that; we do not want to find ourselves reduced to saying “I belong to Paul” or “I belong to Apollos” or “I belong to Cephas.” The only proper answer is “I belong to Christ.”

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