Posted on 05/04/2019 12:49:18 AM PDT by robowombat
Notre Dame fire represents a Church that must finish burning and ‘finally die’: priest
CHESTNUT HILL, Massachusetts, May 3, 2019 (LifeSiteNews) – A Chilean priest caused outrage when he commented on the Notre Dame cathedral fire, saying the destructive event represents how the Church has become “insignificant” and needs to “finish burning and dying.”
"What a prophetic beginning of Holy Week!” wrote Fr. Nemo Castelli, SJ on Facebook in Spanish. “I know that it is a marvelous heritage of the humanity of the 12th century, that it took almost 200 years to build it, that it is the most visited in Europe and that it is horrifying to see it being consumed.”
"But it can represent a type of Church that has to finish burning and dying: a Church more like a museum, insignificant in the daily life of the people, that conceals and cares for the institution before the justice of the Kingdom and whose norms and style end up distancing the youth from God," he added.
Castelli thought enough of his opinion to publish it on Twitter.
Again proclaiming the disaster “a prophetic beginning of Holy Week,” the Chilean priest wrote in Spanish:
“I know that it is a marvel of 12th-century humanity's heritage, but it can represent a type of Church that must finally die: that which is like a museum, insignificant in one's life, that cares for the institution and whose norms distance it from God.”
After an outcry, Castelli apologized on Twitter to those who love the venerable cathedral.
“And I'm sorry for the inconvenience. I didn’t mean to offend the faith of those who have found comfort for centuries in Notre Dame, nor to the Paris community, which together with thousands of us mourn this accident,” he wrote.
“I just think it's an image that can make us reflect as a church.”
Castelli, a native of Chile, is currently associated with Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry. Last month, he gave a Spanish-language interview in which he said Chile’s young people are disenchanted with organizations, including the Catholic Church.
“There is widespread disenchantment with institutions and collective organizations,” he said.
“Given this, there are particular features in the case of the Catholic Church that aggravate this sensation. In the first place, there is a growing gap between people's lives and Catholic doctrine, especially in the area of sexual morality. It no longer seems that there exists a way to humanize this area of life.”
He added that the “inconsistency” of Catholics makes “our way of life” lack credibility, and also that people “are tired of being told what to do and think, without respecting the autonomy of their conscience and their capacity for self-determination.” Finally, Castelli believes the Chileans are disgusted by the revelations of clerical sexual abuse.
In terms of young people, the priest believes that they and the Church have “decoupled.”
“There is a complete decoupling,” he said.
“The Church is not successful in working with those who are searching, and with the language and the culture that are emerging. Associated with this, the main mistake we make as Church is to blame the goats because we do not understand their culture and they do not ‘get’ us, and we conclude ‘it is that the young are not like before,’ ‘it is that the youth are so bad, so uncommitted, so individualistic, so consumerist, that they forget God.’”
Castelli called this assumption “the second mistake,” saying the young are looking for “the transcendent.”
“If you look at the numbers of religious studies, what is happening is that young people continue to believe, but their religiosity is changing. And when they go to the Catholic Church they don't find or don't tune in to its proposal, so they are looking elsewhere.” he said.
Castelli proposed that the Church learn from these young people.
“The first thing is to take young people seriously, to learn from their sensibilities that are different from ours and to tune in to their searches,” he said.
“For example, they find God more easily in nature and simplicity; they integrate corporality and pleasure better in life; they understand that truth has to do with authenticity and coherence between what I say and what I do; they are more realistic in demanding a heroism that accepts their own and others' vulnerability; they are more open to accepting diversity in every sense, and they value the autonomy of the subject very much.”
Catholic philosopher and author Peter Kwasniewski suggested that Castelli does not speak for all young Catholics.
“I'm sure that some young people fit Castelli's description, but that is primarily because they have been abandoned by the very authorities to whom they should be able to look for guidance: their biological parents in the family and their spiritual fathers, the bishops and priests, in the Church,” Kwasniewski told LifeSiteNews.
“Most young people are cast adrift into secularizing schools that fill their heads with garbage and malform their consciences. Churchmen, for their part, instead of offering the youth a challenging and inspiring countercultural message, just offer them a stale, second-rate version of contemporary culture,” he continued.
“No wonder the youth feel bored and uninterested in the Church; it has nothing to offer them. If Castelli's advice were taken, it would only further secularize and dilute the Catholic Church, until it simply merged into the background of the rest of society.”
In 2010, the Church in Chile was plunged into a massive scandal over homosexual predation by members of clergy and its cover-up by bishops. The outrage surrounding the crimes of Fr. Fernando Karadima was exacerbated in 2015 when Pope Francis appointed Chilean Bishop Juan Barros, who had close ties to Karadima, to the See of Osorno. It flared up again when the pontiff said the Catholics of Osorno were suffering because they were “dumb.”
In a gesture of repentance for the Chilean scandals, all of Chile’s bishops tendered their resignation to Pope Francis in 2018. This March, the pontiff accepted the resignation of Ricardo Ezzati Andrello, the cardinal archbishop of Santiago, Chile.
Cardinal Ezzati has been implicated in a cover-up of abuse committed by Fr. Oscar Muñoz Toledo, the former chancellor of the Archdiocese of Santiago. Muñoz is alleged to have seven victims, five of them his own nephews. Ezzati denies that he was involved in a cover-up.
Ezzati was replaced by Bishop Celestino Aós who, last month, refused Holy Communion to worshippers because they knelt to receive the sacrament.
LifeSiteNews attempted to reach out to Castelli on social media but was not successful.
Why is everything taken as a symbol, and not just what it is?
...”but it can represent a type of Church that must finally die: that which is like a museum, insignificant in one’s life, that cares for the institution and whose norms distance it from God.”
+1 spot on
In the good ‘ol days guys like this were burned at the stake. Now they’re given headlines and fame.
““There is widespread disenchantment with institutions and collective organizations,” he said. “
Agreed.
But that is as descriptive of what is taking place as saying “there is widespread disenchantment with the town and those who run it”. It tells you NOTHING about anything that identifies exactly what regarding the town and its administrators - or their actions - that has made anyone disenchanted. It’s no better than saying “there is a problem” and with no idea of the nature of the problem. But understand and have observed for a long time that Roman Catholic priests have been trained in an intellectual tradition that likes to speak in euphemisms. Saying something without really saying anything.
“In the first place, there is a growing gap between people’s lives and Catholic doctrine, especially in the area of sexual morality. It no longer seems that there exists a way to humanize this area of life.”
My sense is that his sense of the church’s failure is that the church has been unwilling to just go along with a social change its teachings reject, and he does not see the church’s failure as a failure to sustain its teachings among the people, that other forces that reject the church’s teachings have torn many people away from the church. He seems to believe the church should bend more than it should stand up for itself.
Homosexuality has destroyed Christianity and this Pope is an agent of Satan.
Please take a moment to check the results of research done by “The Joshua Project”. Putting Catholicism aside, evangelicals are growing at a rate of 2.6% per year -worldwide.
In fact, the evangelical church growth is entirely the result of what is happening in non-western countries.
Joshuaproject.net
Thanks for that link. I should have confined my comments to the USA. I think that Africa has the fastest growing number of Christians? (I’ll have to check out that site!)
We have a church within our church full of folks from Africa - and it is growing fast. We have a combined worship with them once a month. We learn a lot from them!
Uh, because we're not supposed to "humanize" fleshly desires, but instead focus on God's Word and His design for society and for marriage. Which is to be between one man and one woman.
Keep in mind that the SJ following his name represents the fact that he is a Jesuit. That explains alot. A lot of Jesuits have left reality.
It’s important to avoid defeatist language. Satan is the source of hopelessness and fatalism, not God.
Are you saying that my statement expresses a false dichotomy - or are you saying the statement is false because it's impossible for a person to "venerate art work, buildings and relics and fail to understand that the church is the body of Believers..", or are you saying something else?
In all sincerity, I don't sees how I'm guilty of expressing a 'false dichotomy' unless one believes it's impossible for a person to "venerate art work, buildings and relics and fail to understand that the church is the body of Believers.."
Help me understand what you see as a 'false dichotomy'.
WoW!
I just spoke today with a dear missionary friend, a native Ghanaian man, about the very subject you raise. Yesterday, he said “Good-bye” to 3 young men (late teens, early twenties) who just spent 4 months in northern Ghana.
He told them, “Now go! and be missionaries in the USA!”
Their time in Ghana included preaching, evangelism, teaching, training, ministering to the needy, and a host of other life-changing experiences.
New, vibrant churches are being established regularly. These churches are led by men who are trained by Ghanaian leaders- not Westerners.
The same thing can be said of Nigeria, Kenya, The Congo, and I am sure other places.
I’ve even heard of a reversal of what was once called the “Silk Road” - people from the far East are sending missionaries to Europe and the United States, where we are suffering from post-modernism and abandonment of Christianity, having replaced the Truth with lies!
May God Bless you richly!
firstthings.com
Jesuits and The Catholic Mind | K. E. Colombini
My first brush with the Society of Jesus was not a positive one. I was in eighth grade, my first year in a Catholic school. One of the parish’s associate pastors was a Jesuit, and he visited our class one day to talk about Genesis. To put it charitably, our class was a tad skeptical when he told us the story of Adam and Eve was a myth.
Fortunately, not all my experiences with Jesuits were negative. In college, I knew two extraordinary Jesuits, Thomas McGovern and Gerard Steckler. They had rare gifts seldom found together: brilliance and clarity. They were witty, each in his own way. I recall Fr. Steckler praying for vocations at Mass, but “only to seminaries that teach the truth.” He in particular seemed to relish the outlaw-in-exile aspect of his life as a faithful Jesuit. I thought about these two great priests when I read that Fr. James Schall had passed away during Holy Week, for he was another brilliant, clear, and witty Jesuit.
I never met Fr. Schall, but have long admired his writing. Two books on my shelf show his depth and humor. One is Remembering Belloc, a collection of essays he wrote on Hilaire Belloc. The other, a more recent offering from Ignatius Press, spans what he refers to as The Order of Things. Schall’s numerous essays show his interests were as catholic as his convictions.
We are blessed to find good Jesuits at a time when mocking the Society of Jesus comes so easy. You know how it goes: A man once asked a Franciscan and a Jesuit whether it was moral to pray a novena for a Ferrari. “What’s a Ferrari?” asked the Franciscan. “What’s a novena?” asked the Jesuit. Truth often lurks within these jokes. Aside from Pope Francis, the most famous Jesuit today is Fr. James Martin, who is famous for swimming against the traditional Christian current—especially on gender issues.
Francis and Martin get all the good press when it comes to Jesuits, but it should have been Schall. Or perhaps Fr. Joseph Fessio, who founded the Ignatius Press empire and has fought the good fight for years behind enemy lines in San Francisco. Another Jesuit publisher, Fr. Kenneth Baker, edited the Homiletic and Pastoral Review for over 30 years. Now, HPR is part of the Ignatius Press family, and is edited by another smart Jesuit: Fr. David Meconi at St. Louis University. The Jesuit intellectual tradition has been carried on well by these formidable fathers, and St. Ignatius must take some consolation therein.
An old blue hardcover published in 1952 also sits on my bookshelf. The Catholic Mind Through Fifty Years was published to celebrate the half-century mark of The Catholic Mind, a monthly magazine published by America Press, the Jesuit-owned publishing house. Remarkably, this book captures the Catholic mind in the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, it also shows how much things have deteriorated in recent years. America Press, after all, publishes America magazine, which has been printed every week since 1909. Fr. Martin pens pieces for it often, as the magazine’s “editor at large.”
The first essay in the collection, written in 1945 by Thomas F. Woodlock, makes the concept of the Catholic mind clear: “The ‘Catholic mind’ is a sort of Ariadne-thread which enables a man to find his way through the labyrinth of confusion which characterizes the thought of the modern world upon the life of man on this earth.” Woodlock was a Wall Street Journal editor and was awarded the prestigious Laetare Medal from the University of Notre Dame in 1943. He posited that there is a “categorical question concerning the most important fact in all history” that we all must answer: “What think ye of Christ? Is he God and man, or only man?” When he wrote this, as World War II lurched toward its inexorable conclusion, Woodlock knew true peace could only be attained with a positive response.
This 1952 collection is astounding, considering what now passes for Jesuit journalism. The book includes writings from nearly every major figure in the Catholic literary and theological world. Maisie Ward, Arnold Lunn, Christopher Dawson, and Belloc himself are contributors. Then-prominent Church leaders such as Cardinals John Glennon, Francis Bourne, Francis Spellman, and William O’Connell are also present. Many priests and laity are featured who should be known more widely than they are.
The topics are diverse and the opinions are orthodox. Homosexuality and related issues are not present, but abortion and contraception are covered, with a Jesuit priest referring to proponents of the latter as bloodsuckers. “The ostensible purpose of these vampires of society is to improve the human race,” writes Fr. Paul L. Blakely, S.J. “This they will do by popularizing a practice which directly and primarily makes the continuance of the human race impossible.” Blakely was associate editor of America for nearly three decades before passing away in 1943. Not many Jesuits write like that anymore.
In his long life, Fr. Schall seems to have been published in every medium of import to the thinking Catholic. He would have been at home in The Catholic Mind. While my dusty collection does not include any pieces from him—he had only joined the Jesuits in 1948—in 2008 he published a collection titled The Mind That Is Catholic. He concludes the eponymous essay contained therein with these words:
In the end, this is the Catholic mind, to hold the truth because it knows that it is itself mind open to what is, to what is true from whatever source its evidence might arise, even from common sense, even from reason, yes, even from the revelation handed down to us.
This truth is the “Ariadne-thread” of which Woodlock spoke, guiding us back to our real home amid the confusion of the world—a world so many of Schall’s confreres in Christ may have succumbed to. Despite our concerns about the Jesuits’ orthodoxy today, we must not forget the great Jesuits that deserve to be praised and remembered.
K. E. Colombini writes from St. Louis.
Photo by Bro. Jeffrey Pioquinto, S.J. via Creative Commons.
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