Capitol Ideas/Shepherds in the Locality
Bethell, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS SHEPHERDS IN THE LOCALITY I went to Midnight Mass at St. 1 Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco —Archbishop John Quinn celebrating. It's one of those ultra-modern structures, as...
...One respects his candor at least...
...He gives two answers, the first suggesting that we look at this too parochially...
...John Paul II and the Battle for Vatican II, having been recently published by Trinity Communications...
...Not much about religion here...
...His ostensible topic is the November, 1985, Synod of Bishops in Rome, but in practice he ranges more widely...
...The symbols of Roman Catholicism were quite inconspicuous...
...Indeed, there is no question that one of the chief accomplishments of the Council was to loosen the Church's historical dependence on Europe, and, one might say, in the nick of time...
...Well, maybe...
...According to the latest translation of St...
...111 A writer in this field whose output I strongly recommend is Richard Cowden-Guido, his book, Report from the Synod...
...I remember with awe from my several years as a novice in a religious order the intensity of their sublimation of natural 'maternal yearnings, and the energy and passion it lent to the work of the Church...
...What Will the Program Be Like: The basic services to be provided in the hospice residence are safe and healthful living accommodations, personal assistance and care, supervision and observation, food and laundry service, plus the hospice services usually provided in the home by Hospice of San Francisco: nursing, social work and volunteer support...
...T he ecclesiastical agenda of progressives within the church dovetails with the secular agenda of progressives outside it...
...Around me was a large, evidently prosperous, non-marginalized, non-refugee, middle-class congregation, sitting patiently in the vast, circular, somewhat drafty, raw-concrete-and-glass, U.N.-like cathedral...
...Perhaps this should be amended because in so many cases apostates believe not in anything but quite specifically in socialism—the "vision of a new society," as it is so often described...
...Notice that the very dissenters who seek to abolish an ecclesiastical hierarchy are eager to replace it with a secular one...
...A priest in San Francisco told me that the Theology Department of a Catholic college in the Bay area recently hired a witch as an assistant theologian...
...Decentralization is for them a "double standard"--a pretext, not a principle...
...Activities suitable to the individual's needs will be provided, including art, music, literature, meditation and spiritual services...
...If so, how can so much of the turmoil visible in the church today be traced back to changes that were authorized by (and presumably would not have occurred without) the Second Vatican Council (1962-65...
...It's one of those ultra-modern structures, as unornamented in its way as a Shaker meeting house...
...San Francisco's cathedral decidedly does not...
...Decentralization becomes the watchword—that way the bishop of Rome may equal the bishop of Seattle who may equal the lay member in his diocese...
...Unusually explicit witness to this revolt was to be found in Stanford University's Campus Report, January 21, 1987, describing a campus march led by Rev...
...a Rome-decreed shift in the jurisdictional authority of a prelate in Seattle...
...The Soviet Union is already socialist—so why quarrel with it?words, and might well have been worse without Vatican II...
...And just as the exorcist must remember never to engage the possessed one in conversation (because the devil or devils will always outwit the exorcist), so today the rebel forces inside the Catholic Church repeatedly say that they want nothing more than a chance to "dialogue" with Rome...
...Because the secular media recognize that the fate of their agenda is very much bound up with the fate of "dissenters" (or heretics as they used to be called) within the Catholic Church...
...It is true that Rome has not yet proceeded beyond the wrist-slapping stage...
...What this suggests, I believe, is an underlying loss of religious faith...
...Luke's gospel,.read from the lectern on this Christmas night, "There were shepherds in the locality...
...In its overall shape this rebellion is remarkably congruent with the ongoing secular-progressive revolt against Western civilization...
...There is a real stink of brimstone at gatherings dominated by feminist nuns, especially at their liturgies, a creepy neo-paganism with strong suggestions of sexual perversion...
...At the outset he addresses the following quandary...
...As those who have seen his "Press-watch" column in the weekly newspaper the Wanderer will know, his headlong, energetic style makes for compulsive reading, and in this book he sustains the performance for over 400 pages...
...When in earlier centuries Ecumenical Councils were convened to clarify church teaching, "with few exceptions the heresies spread even more rapidly following the Councils, only to die down,'and often enough to die out, with the passing decades and sometimes centuries...
...The revolt was coming anyway, in other THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 13...
...He added to the list, as though almost forgetting: "And cripples...
...Within the American branch, as the recent, well-publicized cases of Charles Curran and Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen suggest, we have something approaching a full-scale rebellion On our hands...
...Orthodox Roman Catholics are expected to believe that the church's Ecumenical Councils are inspired by the Holy Spirit...
...The Catholic Church is a voluntary organization, after all...
...Note the keen interest displayed by secular newspapers like the New York Times in what might well seem to their editors marginal matters: the canonical status of a theologian in a Washington, D.C...
...I mean, by Tom Bethell there are people who call themselves witches (they even have witches' conventions), and they have a disconcerting way of acting like witches...
...More than 1600 San Franciscans, many of them from the Castro area, havedied of AIDS...
...But what about the good shepherds...
...Their souls became like the empty houses into which wandering devils enter and dwell...
...We're from the West,' but other cultures also should be studied...
...I had heard that the church was opening a hospice, and according to a brochure in the back of the church, Hospice of San Francisco "is converting the Convent of the Most Holy Redeemer Church into a residential hospice facility housing 15 people...
...There is understandable fear of a schism...
...Ultimately the rebel-lion, like Lucifer's, is against man's created (hence dependent) state...
...So what does the future hold in store...
...One can well imagine old hands on the News Desk yawning at such developments...
...The shepherds, too, were marginalized---considered outcasts at that time...
...There was conversation and even some laughter in the huge congregation, seated as though at a concert...
...Jesse Jackson in support of a new course "emphasizing the contribution of women and minorities to Western culture": "During the march, several choruses of `Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture has got to go' rang out...
...Peter is itself caught up in the storm, and listing noticeably, although far from capsized...
...A professor of philosophy at the Jesuit University of Loyola in Chicago, he crowed that "the dismantling of traditional Roman Catholic theology, by Catholics themselves, is by now a fait accompli...
...How innocuous...
...He is, therefore, "marginTom Bethell is a visiting media fellow at the Hoover Institution and The American Spectator's Washington correspondent...
...The shock of the revolution was too much for many of them to bear...
...Thus the work of undermining faith proceeds under the guileful rubric of free inquiry...
...The reality of Vatican II has produced a great flowering of the faith in what is known as the Third World, particularly, though not exclusively, in Africa...
...There are other such symbols which have acquired ideological overtones, but space does not permit...
...The rebels are normally more cautious than this...
...Those who are not familiar with Roman Catholicism in America should be advised that churches can now be divided into those that still have altar rails [unprogressive], and those that have banished them...
...Excerpts from the Archbishop's homily: Jesus was "born in exile," a "refugee...
...This struck me as demolition masquerading as translation...
...Perhaps it can be smuggled in if it's among "the individual's needs...
...in mood more reminiscent of a U.N...
...The recent bishops' 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 pastoral on the economy, for example, urges a recentralization of economic life, thereby enabling a few powerful people in Washington (a secular Curia, if you will) to tell the rest of us how we should live our lives...
...All they want is a little more "questioning...
...In her beautifully written book, The Desolate City: Revolution in the Catholic Church, just published by Harper & Row, 'Anne Roche Muggeridge touches on this subject in the following arresting passage: Before Vatican II, nuns were totally committed to the traditional eschatological world view...
...And while we're at it, let's get rid of that altar rail—a "barrier," beyond which only the (all-male) elite may tread...
...Until the mid-sixties it seemed possible that the Catholic Church might proceed in sublime disregard of this secular upheaval, but now it is clear that the Barque of St...
...This area is much frequented by homosexuals, who according to one estimate may comprise as much as 25 percent of the city's population...
...alized, and poor...
...Is this what we see when we see the marginalized, the poor, the homeless, and the powerless around us...
...What has been gained by the removal of "abiding in the fields, keeping watch over their flocks by night...
...Cowden-Guido asks...
...It is the best introduction that I know of to the contemporary revolt within the Catholic Church...
...But past revolutionary periods have been followed by surprisingly effective counter-reformations, and that is where we may be headed today...
...The high quality of recent converts at so inauspicious a moment suggests such a development...
...When the marchers paused to hear Jackson's impromptu talk, he said: 'The issue is not that we don't want Western culture...
...This also explains why so many of our clerical dissenters simultaneously preach a laying-down of American arms...
...building than a cathedral...
...So what happened...
...A few days later I went to the church of the Most Holy Re- deemer, in the Castro district of San Francisco...
...Secondly, he believes, Modernism had already built up a considerable head of steam by 1962, at which point "the Western world was preparing for a furious burst of nihilism—disguised at first, of course, as idealism...
...Nonetheless these have become national issues...
...a rebellion against Rome, but also against the very idea of objective truth...
...A harpist in a red evening dress struck a seasonal medley for openers...
...In its place has been substituted a secular faith in a transformed human nature...
...Family and friends will be encouraged to spend time with their loved ones...
...Anne Roche's husband, John, is the son of Malcolm Muggeridge, and her book, suitably tinged with the characteristic Muggeridgean pessimism, is one that he might have been proud to THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1987 11 write himself...
...Archbishop Quinn went, on...
...And so he "identifies himself with all those who are poor, marginalized, refugees—exiles...
...Down with hierarchy...
...In a brilliant image, Joe Sobran put it to me recently that the Catholic Church is in the present day "possessed...
...G. K. Chesterton said that when people stop believing in God they don't believe in nothing, they believe in anything...
...I can believe this...
...university...
...Perhaps the current regime in Rome will slap a few more wrists in a futile effort to stop the liberal movements launched by the Second Vatican Council," Anne Roche quotes Thomas Sheehan as saying...
...No one has to join it...
...Why not take them at their word...
...A few years ago I would have assumed this was hyperbole, but now I take it literally...
...Rebel clergy and theologians represent themselves today as seeking only "openness," "dialogue," "debate," and so on...
Vol. 20 • March 1987 • No. 3
