Date Sun,
23 Nov 2003 22:27:06 -0500
From Oswald
Sobrino
Subject Article for your Faithful
Voice Website
If you
would like more material for the Faithful Voice website, please feel free to
reprint the following article on Voice of the Faithful that I published on my
Catholic Analysis website.
Oswald
Sobrino
Editor/Writer,
Catholic Analysis
www.catholicanalysis.blogspot.com
The
message of VOTF is clear:˛ the Catholic hierarchy is evil˛.
Voice of the Faithful Feverishly Proclaims That Catholic
Hierarchy is Evil
Oswald
Sobrino , Editor/Writer, Catholic Analysis 23 NOV 03
The
false prophets are active within the boundaries of the Church. Indeed, the
smoke of Satan is still, unfortunately, with us.
If
anyone had any lingering doubt about the questionable origins, beliefs, and
intentions of the Voice of the Faithful (VOTF), the statements made at a recent
tri-state gathering of the organization at Fordham University in New York City
make the anti-Catholic nature of the organization clear. The tirade by former
priest Eugene Kennedy, a well-known writer, psychologist, and former professor
at Loyola University of Chicago, can easily match the invective, contempt, and
hatred expressed over the centuries by anti-Catholics, whether during or after
the Protestant Reformation. VOTF and Kennedy take their place along extreme
fundamentalist anti-Catholics such as those at Bob Jones University or those
who publish anti-Catholic pamphlets such as Chick Publications. Extended
excerpts of Kennedy's diatribe, a diatribe laced with discernible New Age
affectations and exhibiting the influence of a life accustomed to psychobabble,
are reproduced in an article found in a Connecticut newspaper.
Here
is a partial sample of the Kennedy harangue, loudly applauded by the assembled
VOTF activists:
Abusing
the body of Christ sacramentally and the bodies of children sexually are the
responses of persons with power. The responses they make to people who trust
them and have no power. The hierarchical poison is tasted every day by persons
who seek very ordinary, but very important things -- the date and time of a
wedding, a dispensation of some sort. Perhaps, permission to hold a meeting on
church property. "Scholars taste it when officials strive to control what
they think, write or say. Ministers gag on it when ordered to guard against
homosexuals, the scapegoats of our age branded by hierarchs with the mark of
Cain. People are told to submit to their own demeaning and thereby to gratify
something unhealthy in the officials as they put you down to raise themselves
up. All of this of course for the good of the church."
"The
Voice of the Faithful," by Francis X. Fay, Jr., in The Hour Online,
Norwalk, Conn. (first accessed on 10/28/03) (emphasis added).
This
excerpt plus the rest of the excerpts from the newspaper article make the
message of VOTF clear: the Catholic hierarchy is evil. In these excerpted
remarks, there is no attempt to limit criticism to one or more particular
bishops. What we have is a wholesale condemnation of the hierarchical structure
itself, of the very concept of a church hierarchy.
By
condemning the very idea of the hierarchy, they are rejecting Christ, and have
put themselves outside the belief of the Catholic Church. Vatican II's Lumen
Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, plainly proclaims that it was
Christ himself who instituted the hierarchy:
In
order to shepherd the People of God and to increase its numbers without cease,
Christ the Lord set up in his Church a variety of offices which aim at the good
of the whole body. . . . .That divine mission, which was committed by Christ to
the apostles, is destined to last until the end of the world . . . . For that
very reason the apostles were careful to appoint successors in this
hierarchically constituted society.
Lumen
Gentium, 18, 20, trans. by Austin Flannery, O.P. (Costello Publishing
1998)(emphasis added).
Kennedy
and VOTF clearly reject the letter and spirit of Vatican II. The conclusion, in
my view, is inescapable: these activists are not Catholic in spirit, word, or
intent. They are a force for anti-Catholicism parasitically existing within the
technical boundaries of the Church. They have remained in the Church, to borrow
again from Lumen Gentium, " 'in body' not 'in heart'" (LG, 14). They
have come full circle. They are now persecuting the same hierarchical Church
for which many of their own immigrant ancestors suffered persecution.
The
assertion of Penn State professor Philip Jenkins that much anti-Catholicism
comes from within the boundaries of the Catholic Church is again being
confirmed. Jenkins anticipates my own conclusions about the Eugene Kennedy
harangue:
Many
of the most damaging attacks against the Church derived from internal sources
rather than external critics: [Maureen] Dowd, [James] Carroll, [Anna] Quindlen,
[Eugene] Kennedy, [Garry] Wills, and [Richard] Sipe would all describe
themselves as faithful Catholics. Yet their rhetoric deployes an often
ferocious range of anti-Church arguments, which are readily adopted and
amplified by the most fervent anti-Catholics. In this view, the Church is of
its nature un-American, abusive, and totalitarian; clergy are closeted
perverts.
Philip
Jenkins, The New Anti-Catholicism (Oxford Univ. Press 2003), p. 156.
The
false prophets are active within the boundaries of the Church. Indeed, the
smoke of Satan is still, unfortunately, with us.
Rosarycampaign@FaithfulVoice.com will be forwarded to Oswald
Sobrino