Posted on 10/23/2004 4:13:17 PM PDT by skellmeyer
It all seems oddly familiar: a statement from the Vatican, a source who insists that the words of the statement should be published far and wide, and then a sudden retraction. Cast your mind back ten months and you will recall this exact chain of events, but the famous name involved was Mel Gibson’s, not Senator John Kerry.
In that instance, Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal, Reuters and the National Catholic Reporter all reported the same thing. They had been told the Holy Father had seen Gibson’s Passion and had said, "It is as it was." While Cindy Wooden of Catholic News Service (CNS) became the first journalist to report otherwise, the New York Times quickly weighed in, confirming that the words had been said. But Wooden reported the very next day with a quote from the same archbishop interviewed by the NYT, that the words had NOT been said.
(Excerpt) Read more at bridegroompress.com ...
First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Do whatever steps you want if
You have cleared them with the Pontiff.
Everybody say his own
Kyrie eleison,
Doin' the Vatican Rag.
Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional.
There the guy who's got religion'll
Tell you if your sin's original.
If it is, try playin' it safer,
Drink the wine and chew the wafer,
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate!
So get down upon your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries,
Bow your head with great respect,
And genuflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Make a cross on your abdomen,
When in Rome do like a Roman;
Ave Maria!
Gee, it's good to see ya.
Gettin' ecstatic an' sorta dramatic an'
Doin' the Vatican Rag!
Tom Lehrer, 1963
You just made my day, a$$h**1e
Well, I do own copyright, and if I wanted the whole thing posted here, I think I would have done that.
Eh? What's the problem here, mate?
Fr Cole reneged on his "definitive" answer by stating "Fr. DiNiola asked me to help out and I thought I was helping a student with an academic exercise" (paraphrase). This, in the context of "Cannon Law". Sheesh- whats with these bishops? At a time in which resolve and dogma are demanded from the church? And the implication is that a "journalist" is calling the shots? Heaven help us.
Fr. DiNoia was just publicly signalling to the listening ears of "certain circles" that he would have sat on the complaint and left it completely ignored if only he had realized what was going on. The fact that he said this publicly also indicates he's not sure how far those circles extend, or he wouldn't have advertised his "hands-off approach" in such a ham-handed public fashion.
If you needed any more proof, here it is. There is a war in the Church, and this is just one more engagement in the contest.
The interesting thing is Wooden's involvement in both the cover-ups. She has apparently become the unofficial conduit of the borderline heterodox in Rome. When they can squeeze someone hard enough, she gets first dibs on the news of the squeeze. It's an interesting thing to know, and might come in handy in future news analyses.
Usually at the end of every year, I draw up a list of the biggest Vatican stories of the year. This time I'm tempted to compile a list of the year's biggest non-stories, and this week we got a new candidate: the purported "excommunication" of American presidential candidate John Kerry.
Here's what happened. An American Catholic named Marc Balestrieri sent a letter to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith concerning whether Kerry's stand on abortion constituted heresy. (He put two questions to the CDF in Latin, in the style of formal dubia: one as to whether the teaching on abortion is part of the "divine and Catholic faith," thus in effect infallible, the other whether supporting laws favoring abortion is heresy.) The CDF, having never heard of Balestrieri, thought he was a college student working on a research project. Dominican Fr. Augustine DiNoia, the number three official at the CDF, asked a fellow Dominican theologian in Washington, D.C., Fr. Basil Cole, to respond -- not as an officer of the CDF, but simply as a courtesy to the correspondent.
At the outset of his letter to Balestrieri, Cole states that it is an unofficial response. After detailing the various reasons he believes denying the grave immorality of abortion would be heresy, the heart of his four-page reply is the following:
"For anyone to maintain a right to an abortion piggybacks on the heresy and becomes part of its darkness. Consequently, if a Catholic publicly and obstinately supports the civil right to abortion, knowing that the church teaches officially against that legislation, he or she commits that heresy envisioned by Can. 751 of the Code. Provided that presumptions of knowledge of the law and penalty (Can. 15, § 2) and imputability (Can. 1321, § 3) are not rebutted in the external forum, one is automatically excommunicated according to Can. 1364, § 1."
Despite Cole's caution that the letter was "unofficial," Balestrieri went on the Catholic television network EWTN and left the impression that "the Vatican" had declared Kerry excommunicated. Word spread rapidly on the Internet, and ended up in The New York Times and other secular news outlets.
Quickly, both Cole and the Vatican tried to stamp out the story. From the CDF, DiNoia released a two-line statement, which said that the Vatican had no contact with Balestrieri, and that claims of an official Vatican statement on Kerry were without foundation.
For his part, Cole gave the following reply to a query from NCR's Joe Feuerherd: "Neither Fr. DiNoia nor I had any knowledge that [Balestrieri] was going to 'go after' Kerry or any other Catholic figure for their public stance concerning the evil of abortion. I began by mentioning that my letter is a personal and private opinion to him about anyone who would publicly and persistently teach that abortion is not morally prohibited. It in no way is authoritative from the Congregation, nor was I representing the congregation. Its only weight is that of a priest and a theologian who appeals to sacred sources. I was helping out Fr. DiNoia who asked me to do this for him."
Whatever one makes of the issues raised by Balestrieri's original questions, the saga of Cole's response makes an important point. The Vatican has a serious communications problem, because the outside world finds it impossible to distinguish between a formal response and what someone says in an unofficial capacity. If this were the American government, and a response to a letter to the White House came from a deputy insurance commissioner in North Dakota, most people would instinctively understand that it's not terribly authoritative; the same sensitivity does not apply to the Holy See, where somebody can chat up a Swiss Guard and then run around claiming to have a "Vatican response." This is an especially volatile problem in campaign season, where every utterance is presumed to have partisan political significance.
Balestrieri issued a statement Oct. 20 asserting that "although 'formaliter' the response is unofficial, 'materialiter' its contents can never be denied." He has also told reporters that many Vatican officials agree with him. There may be some degree of truth to that -- certainly there are officials in the Holy See who believe the church has to be tougher with public officials who dissent from magisterial teaching. On the specific issue of excommunication in such a circumstance, however, my experience is that there is a wide spread of opinion in the Vatican, and nothing like a consensus.
The simple solution is for the CDF to issue a formal answer.
I doubt Ratzinger will ever do that.
They muddy the issue by asserting that there is a wide disparity of opinion in the Vatican about what to do on this issue. There may well be a wide disparity of opinion. But that doesn't alter the fact that the response is materially a summation of the Magisterium.
You see, stating that people hold differing opinions is not a statement that the facts are affected by that. I may be of the opinion that the car which just passed was red - you might think it was blue. But neither of our opinions change the color of the car. The car's color is what it is. Saying that some in the Vatican hold one opinion, others another, means absolutely nothing. The teaching is what it is. That's the point DiNoia and company are currently forced to dance around.
Either Fr. Cole's summary is accurate or it isn't. If it isn't, then someone should say so. But no one has.
And there is the problem.
Given the content of the response, Ratzinger's silence and DiNoia's silence in regards to the accuracy of the contents of the opinion speak volumes.
On the contrary, DiNoia has said that there is no heresy. If you want the Vatican's position, that is it.
You see, DiNoia knows full well that there are two kinds of heretics: material and formal. And he didn't distinguish which kind of heresy he was referring to in his response. What he means is, Kerry has not yet undergone formal canonical trial to declare him a heretic, therefore he is not - in the formal sense - a heretic. Is Kerry a material heretic? I bet no one has asked DiNoia that question, and I know he won't answer it if anyone does.
At no point has Fr. DiNoia said Fr. Cole's response was erroneous. Instead, he has called it "sound."
Further, the unnamed Vatican source said Kerry was not going to be excommunicated because you can only incur automatic excommunication for assisting directly in an abortion (that, btw, is not technically true, as canon law lists at least five other ways you can automatically excommunicate yourself). All that means is the Vatican formally recognizes that Kerry has never directly participated in a surgical abortion to anyone's knowledge.
But that isn't the issue, is it? Kerry may well be excommunicate on other grounds - he just isn't excommunicate on the grounds that he directly participated in abortion. All the Vatican did was deny something that no one alleged in the first place.
Both of the responses on Kerry were classic examples of misdirection. The reporters on the story were either too stupid, or too smart to raise the right questions. You see, if they asked the right questions, they would never get insider access at the Vatican again. And everyone knows it. At this point, the reporters are, for their own selfish reasons, just helping Fr. DiNoia cover his tracks.
It is, as Scott Adam eloquently puts it, the Way of the Weasel.
Actually, though, the next Pope will probably be from a Muslim country.
Think about it. At the beginning of the 20th century, our biggest problem was fascism. We got Pope Pius XII, who had been papal nuncio to Germany. He levelled the fascists. Then communism raised its ugly head. We got John Paul II, who had been archbishop in Poland and knew EXACTLY how to take those guys down.
Now we need someone to take the Muslims out. We will probably have a couple of interim popes who have no real clue what to do about them, but then we'll get someone who has served a long time in a Muslim country, and he'll take them out like yesterday's garbage.
Point taken.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.