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.
You're free to respect him, I have very little reason to respect a not-so-lowly Priest, in my estimation.
My Priest has suffered quite a bit because he dared to rebuke my Bishop, but he did it the way a man does it and should do it. Leaving himself unassailable, and much respected by his Parishoners because he conducted himself with honor.
If a Priest talked to me like Fr. Heidt, I'd hightail it out of there, if I could, and find another Priest who understood what Honor is really all about.
Regardless of whether you dislike this priest for doing the right thing, the public knowledge of Archbishop Levada's apostasy is well known. There is much more out there than one holy priest's account. As I mentioned above, St. Paul publicly rebuked Peter for much less. Fr. Heidt had nothing to gain and everything to lose (and did) when he defended the Faith to Levada. As Catholics, we are required to resist priests, bishops and even a Pope if they lead us away from Catholic teaching. Pope Pius IX said so as well as others.
We are not doing Levada any favors by giving false obedience to his error. He should have been demoted and reprimanded for his evil behavior. We should work for his conversion or containment.
Yes, he did. He had a problem with Peter's over association with Jewish custom. Read Acts. It's the same situation.
Levada's association with the Chinese communist schismatic priests (and his defense of it!)
--
http://www.cardinalkungfoundation.org/cpa/openletter.html
III. WHY ARE ROMAN CATHOLIC BISHOPS IN THE UNITED STATES GRANTING
PRIESTLY FACULTIES TO PRIESTS OF THE CPA?
1. Background: In the United States, such as in the New York
and San Francisco archdioceses, Ordinaries have granted priestly
faculties to priests of the schismatic CPA. These priests were allowed
to offer Holy Mass publicly in Roman Catholic Churches and to
administer other sacraments openly in parishes. No specific mention
was made in parish bulletins that the priest in question belonged to
the CPA and no explanation was made about the schismatic nature of the
CPA.
2. Responses to our Inquiries: In response to our inquiry about
this practice of granting priestly faculties to CPA priests:
Archbishop William Levada of San Francisco, wrote: "I would like
to invite the Foundation to be more accurate in its statements
concerning the Church in China and in particular concerning the
priests from China who have been welcomed by the dioceses of this
country. The program of their [CPA priests'] formation and of
their apostolic ministry is being carried out according to directives
received from the Holy See." The archbishop does not specify to
which directives he refers.
------
In The Wanderer, May 12, 2005 is a letter to the "Catholic Replies" section:
Q. At a parish in San Francisco, the full-time man in charge of the religious education of youngsters in grades K-8 is a practicing homosexual who lives openly with another man. It is difficult for adults to get into the classrooms, and our pastor is pro-homosexual and would resist any attempt to relieve this individual of his duties. We believe that he is not a good role model for our children and is not fit to be giving religious instruction. What can we do?
A. [Mr. Drummey gives the Catholic teaching on homosexual acts, etc. and also delineates the teachings on those in education. I won't transcribe all of those details, however the last sentence is instructional given the appointment of Archbishop Levada. Here is the last sentence:]
If your pastor won't do anything about this scandalous situation, then the archbishop should be contacted and asked to have this person removed from his position.
+++++++++++++++++
So are we now to believe that Archbishop Levada will do what he did not do as bishop of San Francisco????
--------
Galatians
Chapter 2
11 But when Peter was come to Antioch, I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.If this is the text you're referring to, I don't it at all as analagous.
12 For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision.
13 And the other Jews dissembled likewise with him; insomuch that Barnabas also was carried away with their dissimulation.
14 But when I saw that they walked not uprightly according to the truth of the gospel, I said unto Peter before them all, If thou, being a Jew, livest after the manner of Gentiles, and not as do the Jews, why compellest thou the Gentiles to live as do the Jews?
Please see post 46, inadvertantly posted to myself.
You have provided zero proof of "apostasy" by Archbishop Levada. Even Hans Kung said that he would give Benedict XVI a 100 grace period before he began criticizing him. You can't even wait that long. Unbelievable.
After yesterday I thought I'd heard the worst of the news. I guess not.
I guess this Papal election was just a sham scam orchestrated by perverts and crackpots headed-up by the still-then, Cardinal Ratzinger. All that talk of retiring was just a clever (dare I say it "devilish?") ruse.
I guess we were just fooled again and doom is cracking (apologies to Robert Byrd) and we are being revolutionized and queerized and the Church has apostasized and the faithful are being marginalized and terrorized and with some schism we must now identify.
Hmmm, I wonder if I can sell that last sentence to Jesse Jackson?
You have got to be kidding.
I'm beginning to think there is nothing some of you won't tolerate. Levada suppresses sex scandals, supports homosexuals and pedophiles, gives communist schismatics diocesan privileges, waters down Eucharistic teaching and promotes use of invalid matter just to name a FEW of his errors.
And you want to attack the messengers. Unreal.
QUOTE OF THE DAY: "From the perspective of society, the tendency to 'privatize' the moral dimension, so common to America with its slogan 'separation of church and state,' can potentially have disastrous consequences." - Archbishop William J. Levada, just appointed to be pope Benedict XVI's guardian of orthodoxy. Even back in 1995, Levada was singling out one political party, the Democrats, for censure. And, for Levada, church-state separation is now merely a "slogan," not a fundamental principle of a free society? Another sign of where Benedict is going.
The anti-Benedict and anti-Levada hysteriac I am quoting is Andrew Sullivan, who would surely be surprised to learn that Levada is part of a secret homosexual conspiracy to destroy the Church.
Archbishop Levada, is that you????
Years ago Mahony and his diocesan buddies used to frequent the AOL chat rooms. As you and I both know, you never know who is behind the screen name. I'm beginning to wonder about some of these Levada supporters.
You have provided zero credible proof for any of these charges. You may wish to join Andrew Sullivan and stage an anti-Levada rally somewhere. You can hold your sign, "Schismatic for the Catholic Church," and Andrew can hold his, "Homosexual for the Catholic Church," and you can tell all and sundry that John Paul II was a disaster, that Benedict XVI is a disaster, that Archbishop Levada is a disaster, and that if Rome would just listen to YOU, all our problems would be solved.
Of course, you and Sullivan would part company on what your own particular solutions would be, but you would each be quite vociferous in your condemnation of Rome and all its works.
DECREE CONCERNING THE THINGS TO BE OBSERVED, AND TO BE AVOIDED, IN THE CELEBRATION OF MASS.
In the next place, that irreverence may be avoided, each, in his own diocese, shall forbid that any wandering or unknown priest be allowed to celebrate mass
I guess we are expected to take as Gospel the hearsay evidence of a priest who engages in activity denounced by Trent.
"In order to save Tradition we must destroy Tradition" appears to be the motto of far too many
No, just an ordinary Catholic layman from Cleveland who thought that John Paul II was a great, good, and holy man--one of the few giants of our age--and who thinks that Benedict XVI is a remarkable man who shows every promise of being a remarkable Pope.
Everybody calm down here. What we have is the report of one priest, who even though he is no doubt sincere, is still reporting on incidents as he remembers them. This priest does not have all the info that Bishop Levada had.
One of the most serious sources for eroneous reporting is when one side puts out a position as though that is the only side that counts. It sort of reminds me of an old saying that my Mom attributed to her Dad. My Grandfather used to say about a divorcing couple, "Well, there's his side, her side and the Truth!"
Keep reading. There are more excerpts from a variety of sources on this thread.
I appreciate all the pings you send my way. I have been seriously overwhelmed, but that may be coming to an end, at which time I will be able to participate a bit more, and even ping my lists properly.
Thanks for this comment about despair - it is akin to suicide, which as similarly an offense against God. It's voluntarily and faithlessly turning our backs on Him, His love and mercy. Refusing Him. Closing our hearts, locking the door. It has a component of anger as well, just as depression is often (usually?) founded on anger.
I will make a point to read this in depth later.
Despair and hopelessness is something I used to struggle with for a long time, on and off, even after I came to understand that God does indeed exist and is the supreme Friend and Lord. I was in such a deep dark place that it has taken a long time to get into the light!
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