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Fr. Eugene Heidt and Archbishop Levada (A diocesan priest's experience)
Priest Where Is Thy Mass, Mass Where Is Thy Priest? | January 2004

Posted on 05/13/2005 9:57:43 PM PDT by Canticle_of_Deborah

Fr. Eugene Heidt and Archbishop Levada

Excerpted from “Priest Where Is Thy Mass, Mass Where Is Thy Priest.”

Q: So obedience is not really an objection against saying the traditional Mass, when you consider that it’s not forbidden by the Church?

Fr. H: Correct. There is no question of disobedience involved here, no way.

Q: How did your convictions about the old Mass sit with the Chancery?

Fr. H: Things just got worse. A couple of years before, I had written a letter about what they called the “Stewardship Council.” That was a program that they used to raise money for the operation of the Archdiocese. I told the people in the parish that we couldn’t contribute to that. I black-balled the “Stewardship Council”!

Q: Why did you black-ball it?

Fr. H: Because of the immoral causes that they were promoting. I named some of them in the letter I wrote. But I have to go back a little bit to explain some of this. It all came to a head with this question of the money for the “Stewardship Council” – that’s what really got Archbishop Levada going. I remember coming home from meeting with him on one of those occasions. I said, “You know, that man isn’t Catholic. The Archbishop is not Catholic!” I was telling the whole parish this. No wonder he got so angry with me, in the end of it all!

When Archbishop Levada had first come to the Archdiocese, I was the first one to have an appointment with him after he was installed. I went in there for an hour and a half, and I poured out my heart to him, because I was told he was a good, traditional, orthodox bishop, and that he was going to straighten this Archdiocese out. So I really churned my heart out to him, and he just sat there. He was like an episcopal vacuum cleaner, sucking all this stuff up and listening to it. I told him about the homosexuality in the Church, and I said “I can name six or seven homosexual priests in the diocese. They call themselves the ‘altar society.’” He said, “You’ve come in here with a bunch of rumors, and I’m not going to listen to that.” I said, “Well, one day, somebody is going to have to pay!” But he wouldn’t listen.

Every time I went to see him, I’d go in and argue with him. I think there is only one pastoral letter he wrote, supposedly on the Mass and the Eucharist. I read the thing and I took it to his office, and I said, “Did you write this? Is this supposed to be a complete treatise on the Eucharist and the Mass? How did you manage to get through this whole thing without once mentioning Transubstantiation?” “Well, that’s such a long and difficult term anyway,” he said, “and we don’t use that term anymore.”

I said, “I don’t think that’s the correct estimate of that word. When I was in the first grade and our good little Benedictine Sister was preparing us for First Holy Communion, I can remember her putting that up on the board. She put ‘trans,’ and then she put a line. Then she put ‘substantiation,’ and then she went through and explained what each of those things meant. She was able to put it in terms we could understand, so that we knew that the Bread and the Wine are substantially different from what they were before the Consecration.” He just repeated “That’s such a confusing term!” So, I said, “Let’s go on to the next item.”

The “next item” was his having gone to Our Lady of Atonement Parish – that’s what they called a “Catholic-Lutheran joint parish,” where they have a priest on one end of the altar and a Lutheran minister on the other, and they go back and forth. I asked, “What did you do over there?” and he answered, “We concelebrated liturgy.” “What does that mean?” I asked, “Did you and the Lutheran minister say Mass together? What did you do?” He just wouldn’t discuss it any more.

And then, one night during all this “Stewardship” business, the Archbishop really got angry. He called me up, it was after hours, 5:05 pm! He was supposed to be on his way home, but he stopped and called me. He was SO livid, he could hardly talk on the phone. He said, “You be in my office at ten o’clock tomorrow morning before the diocesan consulters and the other bishops of the diocese. Plead your case there!” I said, “Well, all right, I will be glad to come in and do that, but I haven’t got any time to document all this.” He said, “That’s okay, just come on in and tell us what’s on your mind.”

So, I was in there probably an hour altogether, and those priests were lined up in a big horseshoe, you know, and I was at the table on the end by myself. I had my tape recorder, which I set up beside me, and, as I was trying to plug it in, I heard a voice up at the other end: “Hey, you can’t use a recorder in here!” I turned around, and it was the archbishop. I asked, “Why not?” He said, “We don’t record this kind of meeting.” And I said, “Oh, all right, but I’ll plug it in while I’m talking and unplug it while you’re talking, how’s that?” Then I set up a chair beside me, and one of the bishops, who used to be a very good friend of mine, asked what the chair was for. They were waiting for an attorney to come in, I suppose. I said “Well, that’s for my Guardian Angel.” And these priests looked at me like I was kind of crazy, you know.

At the end of my little speech, the Archbishop said, “Okay, I agree with you on everything except for the question of homosexuality in the Seminary. We took care of that a couple of weeks ago. Of course, you wouldn’t know about that meeting, but it’s already been taken care of.” But he sided with me on the rest of the other complaints that I had.

Afterwards, he got on my case, and he finally told me to take a sabbatical. He said, “You can take you sabbatical if you want, and you are free to write up a proposal of what you want to do.” I agreed, and I took a month to get my plan together and brought it back to him.

I told him that I wanted to spend five months or so studying the Council of Trent, Vatican I, Vatican II, and all of the papal encyclicals from the last two hundred years. But he said, “No, No, That’s non-productive. You will go to the University and take their ‘Credo’ course” (which was an updating in theology). But I said “No, No.” I said, like the boys said when it was time to go to Vietnam: “Hell no, I won’t go! No thanks.” So he said, “Then I’ll send you to a monastery for your sabbatical, and I will draw up a course of studies for you. You will have a private mentor.” I said, “No, I do not need a guru.” Finally, he told me to go ahead and do what I wanted.

I said then that I wanted to spend the last couple of weeks of my sabbatical in Fatima, to talk all this stuff over with our Blessed Lady, and then I would come back. And he agreed. Well, I never got to Fatima, but in the meantime this place came up for sale, and I knew I had been had by that time. When I went back to see him, after the sabbatical was over, he told me that, because I had said the Latin Mass in “excommunicated” chapels, mainly Portland and Veneta [Oregon], he could no longer use my services. So I said, “Okay. You do what you have to do. But you’re going to have to tie me up in chains to stop me from offering the Latin Mass.” He threatened to suspend me if I didn’t stop.

A month or so went by, and I got a letter from him telling me to get an attorney so that we could have a hearing in Portland. I thought it was over, and I decided that, no matter who I got, the result would be the same. In conscience, no Novus Ordo priest could defend me, and, if I got one of the Society of St. Pius X priests, they wouldn’t listen to him. So I wrote back to him and asked him to appoint an attorney for me. I sent this priest the whole case, and he read it and sent it back to me. He said to go back to the Archbishop and tell him that I was sorry and then submit and obey the Archbishop. And then, at the end of the letter, he said, “Besides, the traditional Latin Mass is a thing of the past, and within ten years it will be nothing more than a footnote in the history of the Church.” And so I get nowhere with that. The next thing I knew, the Archbishop sent me a letter of suspension. I never did have a hearing.

I moved up here in 1988, the very weekend that Archbishop Lefebvre ordained the four Bishops. Then, I asked Fr. Laisney if I could help him out in the chapels in Portland and Venata, and he said, “Welcome aboard!” And I have been doing it ever since.

Q: So you’re a renegade because you won’t give up the traditional idea of the priesthood and the Mass. How would you describe the new idea of the priest? What do they think the priest is, in those theological updating courses, for instance?

Fr. H: I don’t know because I never went.

Q: You never went to a seminar?

Fr. H: No, I stopped that right in the beginning. They used to have three-day seminars, once a year. I went to the first one, and I stayed the first morning. At mid-morning, we met with the Archbishop, and we could ask him any kind of questions that we wanted. Well, the Archbishop started out with one of the directives that came from Rome, and he said that the Masses of priests who use anything other than unleavened bread and sacramental wine are to be questioned. But the Archbishop himself was pooh-poohing the idea. So these priest go the idea that they could go ahead and use pita bread, cookie dough, whatever. You could go down to Safeway and get a jug of wine or even grape juice! It didn’t seem to make too much difference to him.

I poked the priest sitting to one side of me and said, “Hey did you hear what he just said?” He said yes. I poked the one on the other side (he was a classmate of mine), and I said, “Did you hear what he just said?” He said yes. I said, “Well, in my book that’s unacceptable!” and I got up and walked out the door and went home. And that’s the last one I attended. I don’t know what they say anymore about the priesthood, the sacraments, or whatever. I just don’t pay any attention to them.


TOPICS: Apologetics; Catholic; Ecumenism; History; Ministry/Outreach; Prayer; Religion & Culture; Theology; Worship
KEYWORDS: catholic; cdf; levada
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To: american colleen

Facts are facts. I have had a personal interaction with Levada. My opinion of him is neither rash nor in error.

To the contrary, he is shaping up to be worse than I suspected.


121 posted on 05/14/2005 5:36:15 PM PDT by Canticle_of_Deborah
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To: Canticle_of_Deborah

I once had a personal interaction with Bernard Cardinal Law... he was not as I expected him to be. In fact, I came away very humbled. My opinon of him had been rash and in error.


122 posted on 05/14/2005 5:41:32 PM PDT by american colleen (Long live Benedict XVI!)
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To: Canticle_of_Deborah
They are flaming, out in the open apostates who don't practice what they put in writing.

Please provide the written evidence, then.

205. How does a Catholic sin against faith?

A Catholic sins against faith by apostasy, heresy, indifferentism, and by taking part in non-Catholic worship.

Apostasy means completely leaving the faith of Christ to profess a non-Christian religion or none at all.

Heresy is a deliberate denial of one or more of the truths of faith by which one professes to be a Christian.

Straight from the St. Joseph Baltimore Catechism, with notes by Fr. Bennet, C.P. So, what non-Christian religion has Levada taken up? Is he a Jew, a Muslim, or what?

123 posted on 05/14/2005 5:42:35 PM PDT by gbcdoj (Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.)
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To: gbcdoj
Catholic sins against faith by apostasy, heresy, indifferentism, and by taking part in non-Catholic worship.

Levada concelebrated Mass with a Lutheran minister.

124 posted on 05/14/2005 5:46:40 PM PDT by Canticle_of_Deborah
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To: Canticle_of_Deborah
Levada concelebrated Mass with a Lutheran minister.

Lutheran ministers can't offer Mass, and there's no real proof that Levada did any such thing.

Anyway, you didn't answer my question. What non-Christian religion has Abp. Levada embraced, so that you would be justified in calling him an apostate? Is he a Jew, a Muslim, or what?

125 posted on 05/14/2005 5:52:05 PM PDT by gbcdoj (Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.)
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To: gbcdoj

Apparently he believes in some New Age, pagan type thing. Did you see the invocation the four directions on his website? Not to mention his support of the URI, aka, one world religion. I'd call that an abandonment of the Catholic Faith.


126 posted on 05/14/2005 5:57:12 PM PDT by Canticle_of_Deborah
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To: gbcdoj
During Lent we had a series of quotes of the Great Saints printed on the back of our bulletin. Here are a few that I liked, saw myself in, and that seem to apply here:

As a flame always rises upwards, especially if the burning matter is poked and turned, so the heart of a vain man cannot become humble. As soon as you say something to him for his own good, his heart exalts itself more and more; if he is denounced and amonished, he argues heatedly; if he is praised and welcomed, he puffs himself up still more.
(St. Simeon the New Theologian)

It is only by hammer blows that God manages to humble us, no matter how good our native disposition. (St. Anthony Mary Claret)

Often, actually very often, God allows His greatest servants to make the most humiliating mistakes. This humbles them in their own eyes and in the eyes of their fellow men. It prevents them from seeing and taking pride in the graces God bestows on them. (St. Louis Marie de Montfort)


127 posted on 05/14/2005 5:57:40 PM PDT by AlbionGirl
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To: Canticle_of_Deborah
Did you see the invocation the four directions on his website?

Did you see any reason to believe that Levada put that up there? It's gone now - suppose that has to do with the complaints he got?

What statements has Levada made supporting the idea of "one world religion"?

128 posted on 05/14/2005 6:01:40 PM PDT by gbcdoj (Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.)
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To: Canticle_of_Deborah
Lutheran ministers can't offer Mass, and there's no real proof that Levada did any such thing.

Lo and behold, I finally managed to track down exactly what happens at Mission of the Atonement.

http://motaspirit.org/communion_of_churches.htm

Each Sunday we gather as one community in the church, where we have the Liturgy of the Word together, including the homily and the Prayers of the Faithful. After the collection, with an exchange of peace and a sung blessing, we separate for Eucharist. We alternate using the adjoining hall or the chapel for our separate Eucharist services.

No concelebration there, although a joint homily is bad enough (a Lutheran minister giving the homily to Catholics?).

129 posted on 05/14/2005 6:06:17 PM PDT by gbcdoj (Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.)
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Was just wondering what the heck Catholics disagreed over back before there was media or printed word - plus the problem of widespread overwhelming illiteracy. I mean, most people probably were hazy on who the pope was, never mind who he appointed to the various curial positions. How does knowing this stuff intimately help us live our lives as Catholics?


130 posted on 05/14/2005 6:06:23 PM PDT by american colleen (Long live Benedict XVI!)
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To: AlbionGirl

Good quotes!


131 posted on 05/14/2005 6:06:30 PM PDT by gbcdoj (Lord, to whom shall we go? Thou hast the words of eternal life.)
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To: american colleen
>>>>>Was just wondering what the heck Catholics disagreed over back before there was media or printed word - plus the problem of widespread overwhelming illiteracy. I mean, most people probably were hazy on who the pope was, never mind who he appointed to the various curial positions.

For most Catholics for most of his history, their only exposure to any member of the clergy was to their parish priest. They seldom saw a bishop; the church records for my ancestral village show three confirmations in the village over a 175 year period. Yet their faith was stronger than that of most Americans who have access to all sorts of media. Your final question is a very good one.

132 posted on 05/14/2005 6:31:32 PM PDT by Thorin ("I won't be reconstructed, and I do not give a damn.")
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To: american colleen
Hey, Colleen, I've been lurking on this thread and watching the flow of conversation. I just wanted to let you know -- YOU ROCK!

Thanks for saying what I was meaning to...

133 posted on 05/14/2005 6:35:59 PM PDT by GipperGal
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To: Frank Sheed

As will I! Thank you for your post. I heard someone say,years ago that one of the problems of our Catholic Church is that there are too many people who think they are pope.


134 posted on 05/14/2005 7:22:24 PM PDT by Lady In Blue (Pope Benedict XVI: THE CAFETERIA IS CLOSED)
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To: american colleen

Thank you for your kind comments. On page 381 of Sheed's Theology and Sanity, in the Chapter called Habituation to Man, he states much of what Thomas a Kempis states in another manner. In essence, since we, ourselves, are in constant chaos and cannot predict what we ourselves will do, we cannot judge another as we simply haven't the knowledge. And, this is not to say anything of Christ's Scriptural proscription to "Judge not, lest ye be judged."

That is all I had hoped to get across. We cannot see what lies ahead and many fears may be realized. But, our ways are not God's ways. As Fr. Corapi says, "Out of the greatest evil of all time--Deicide--in which creatures killed the Creator, salvation was accomplished." That boggles the mind.

Frank


135 posted on 05/14/2005 7:34:59 PM PDT by Frank Sheed
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To: AlbionGirl

This priest has great courage and knows who the boss is, JESUS CHRIST. Praise God for someone who is willing to come forward just as Jesus did...


136 posted on 05/14/2005 8:34:27 PM PDT by Fred
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To: Canticle_of_Deborah; All

They just don't know better.

Folks time to do research on your dioceses. You will be surprised and shocked as to the goings ons. I know I was.

We desperately need reform in the RCC in the US. If we want the RCC in the US to start recovering we need CLEAN UP, NOT COVER UP....



137 posted on 05/14/2005 8:39:45 PM PDT by Fred
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To: AlbionGirl; All
Northern California Zen/Ch’an – Catholic Dialogue January 20-23, 2005 At San Francisco Zen Center

Not even scratching the surface... embarrassing nonsense...approved by the Bishops!!! Wake Up!!!

This is why DOMINUS IESUS had to be written

138 posted on 05/14/2005 9:02:34 PM PDT by Fred
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To: Fred; Canticle_of_Deborah; vox_freedom; Gerard.P; te lucis
I recall, when the rumor that Levada was going to be chosen for the CDF was first circulating, many people on this forum dismissed it as just a rumor, "surely B16 would not choose him", they said. Most freepers did not think that Levada would be a good choice for various objective reasons. One freeper even suggested that the rumor was started by trads or liberals trying to make B16 look bad.

However, now that the choice has been made everyone has started defending Levada. All of a sudden, in the mind of these freepers, he has been transformed into an staunch defender of the faith. Why? Is there any objective evidence to support this belief in his sudden transformation? None I can see. The only reason I can think of is that deep down they harbor the notion that the pope is impeccable, that he cannot make an error in judgment or make a poor choice. That it is ridiculous to believe that any politics played a part in this choice instead of considering only who would be best for the job. Therefor, if the pope chose him, he must be orthodox. We now must ignore and deny all evidence to the contrary, lest we risk being accused of dissent, rash judgment, attacking the pope etc.

139 posted on 05/14/2005 9:46:06 PM PDT by murphE (These are days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed but his own. --G.K. Chesterton)
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To: murphE

Excellent point. It's 1984 here in the Novus Ordo Church.


140 posted on 05/14/2005 10:14:08 PM PDT by Gerard.P (The lips of liberals drip with honey while their hands drip with blood--Bishop Williamson)
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