Bishop Frank J. Dewane
When does this end!
Posted on 01/21/2008 2:04:22 PM PST by NYer
Last Sunday, Diocese of Venice Bishop Frank Dewane celebrated Mass at a Sarasota church accompanied by priests wearing colorful Ferris wheels, clowns, giraffes, unicycles, lions and merry-go-rounds on their vestments.
This was the annual circus Mass, Dewane said, honoring the nearly 100-year history of the Ringling family on Florida’s west coast and the importance of itinerant people like circus performers to the Catholic universal church.
Last Sunday, Ave Maria founder Tom Monaghan spoke inside his new 100-foot-tall, $24-million oratory at Ave Maria town accompanied by residents and supporters of the private university in the Catholic tradition.
This was the Picnic at the Prep honoring the first year of Ave Maria’s K-12 Grammar and Preparatory school.
Last Sunday was the day Monaghan and university President Nick Healy had invited Dewane to celebrate dedicatory Mass at the oratory after consecrating it as a sacred place.
Last Sunday came and went.
Without Dewane’s consecration, no one can celebrate Mass inside the oratory.
The diocese and the university confirmed that conversations between the two sides are continuing, but there’s been no resolution. No one directly involved in the discussions will address details other than to say negotiations are confidential.
“I’m here for a different celebration today, my good friend,” Dewane said when asked about the oratory after the circus Mass.
He declined further comment.
“We won’t make any comment about the relationship with the diocese,” Healy said last week. “We’re very hopeful that things will get resolved and it will become clear. There are issues that are not easily understood and hard to explain and we don’t want to comment on it.”
Those issues may relate to intricacies of Catholic church laws relating to the relationship between the official church and individual Catholics. The laws, known as canon laws, govern all interactions in the church regarding authority, ownership and control over spiritual and practical matters alike.
Canon law experts said there’s little precedent to address the situation facing Ave Maria’s oratory, both as the most high-profile symbol of a university founded and administered by Catholic laymen and the center of a new town.
The oratory’s consecration is both a simple and complicated issue in the law, experts said.
“In one sense it’s very complex; in another it’s not complex at all,” said the Rev. Phillip J. Brown, an associate professor at Catholic University’s School of Canon Law. “Nothing can be done without the authority of the bishop.”
By law, the bishop can grant a number of statuses to the oratory after consecration. The broadest would be parish church status. A parish would serve more than the university community, likely town residents as well.
Parishes are individual Catholics’ most direct tie to the official church and all sacred celebrations, like baptisms, weddings and funerals are performed inside parish churches.
The university requested the oratory receive parish church status more than three years ago. A parish’s head priest, known as a pastor, is traditionally appointed by the bishop.
One difference between Ave Maria and some of the older Catholic universities in the country is that Ave Maria’s founders are laymen, not members of Catholic religious orders like Jesuits or Franciscans.
Some parishes are attached to Catholic universities like at Jesuit schools Creighton (Neb.) University, Xavier (Ohio) University and Saint Louis University.
The pastors there, officials at all three schools said, are nominated by the school’s Jesuit community and then confirmed by the bishop — a power in canon law called the “right of presentation.”
But should Ave Maria want to present a pastor for a potential Ave Maria parish church it would have two strikes against it, experts said.
Today, Catholic laymen are rarely, if ever, granted that power and changes in canon law nearly 25 years ago have made doing so nearly impossible.
“A right of presentation would never be granted to a new parish today,” Brown said.
The Rev. Francis Morrisey, an adjunct canon law professor at the University of Saint Paul in Ottawa, Canada, said since the church revised its laws in 1983, he’s not aware of any lay group that has been granted a right of presentation.
Instead, the prerogative for choosing pastors is the bishop’s alone, Morrisey said.
A status less broad than a parish church would be one where the oratory would serve as no more than the university’s chapel. That’s the situation at the majority of Catholic universities, although exactly how it works differs depending on the school.
At the University of Notre Dame, the school’s famed Basilica of the Sacred Heart — next to the “Golden Dome” landmark to which Monaghan has compared the oratory — is not a parish church.
Instead, a parish is located in the crypt below the basilica and Masses are celebrated at both locations. Public worship occurs at both.
“It is unique,” said the Rev. Peter Rocca, the basilica’s rector. “It evolved out of the very nature of the needs of the parish versus the needs of a college-educated community.”
But Ave Maria falls into a different canonical category than Notre Dame.
According to the church, Ave Maria is not a “Catholic university,” but rather “a private university in the Catholic tradition.”
The distinction means more than pure semantics. Catholic universities must agree to follow a number of church norms on education, usually under the administration of the bishop.
Instead, according to Healy, the university community is a “private association of the faithful,” a status granted by Dewane’s predecessor Bishop John Nevins.
Nevins, Healy said, confirmed the Rev. Robert Garrity, a university employee, as the association’s chaplain or more technically a spiritual adviser.
The 1983 changes in canon law, Brown said, helped codify the status of private lay associations in the official church and were in keeping with the landmark Second Vatican Council of the 1960s that encouraged more lay participation in the church.
Private associations are required to submit to the bishop’s authority in different ways than Catholic universities, but it is unclear whether this status would impact the oratory’s consecration.
“It’s not an association that represents the church publicly,” Brown said. “It’s purely private.”
As the center of the new town, presumably both Ave Maria and the diocese would want the oratory open for public worship and not limited to the university community, whether it’s a parish or not.
Masses at Notre Dame’s basilica are televised and its landmark status attracted roughly 100,000 visitors last year, according to statistics provided by Rocca.
At Ave Maria, already the oratory is hosting community and university events, with a lecture and Byzantine choir concert held on Saturday.
When does this end!
“One difference between Ave Maria and some of the older Catholic universities in the country is that Ave Maria’s founders are laymen, not members of Catholic religious orders like Jesuits or Franciscans.”
as stated later in the story, it is ‘in the Catholic traditin’ which is also a major difference between Ava Maria and most of the older “Catholic” universities.
What kind of Bishop is this guy? If he’s like MINE, they are in deep trouble here.
"For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not sit down first and count the cost, whether he has enough to finish it— lest, after he has laid the foundation, and is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build and was not able to finish’?
- Luke 14: 28-30, NKJV
I believe Bp Dewane is negative towards the TLM, too. Several Florida bishops have done everything but tell the Pope to go take a flying leap,and I think unfortunately, Bp Dewane also issued “guidelines” to that effect. He was appointed by BXVI, but he seems to have forgotten that.
The conflict at Ave Maria has nothing to do with liturgy, however, since the powers that be at Ave Maria are also opposed to the old Mass.
Sounds like a common problem with gimicks and fads.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1956255/posts
Anyone got a picture of the themed vestments?
The Oratory is finished; it needs to be consecrated. That task normally falls to the local ordinary - the bishop. What’s your point?
I don't think there is one.
opposed to the old Mass? How can that be; I just went to the old Mass at St. Agnes in Manhattan. It was confusing to me. But then I read about it, and it was very interesting. I understood much more.
I truly valued and revered my experience.
V’s wife
“When does this end!”
When the Roman Catholic laity realize that they have the obligation and the authority to topple these heresiarchs from their gilded thrones and not one minute earlier!
Do you have the power to topple your Patriarch? By what authority? How was he appointed, by whom and who decides when he has stepped over the bounds?
You don't think there is one .... what? One Oratory? One Bishop?
point, I think.
Freegards
“Do you have the power to topple your Patriarch?”
Yup; darn need did it a few years ago, too.
“By what authority?”
The same authority we have to reject pronouncements of councils, which we have used when necessary throughout the past 2000 years.
“How was he appointed, by whom and who decides when he has stepped over the bounds?”
That depends on the church. Usually a hierarch is appointed by a synod of bishops but in some cases, like the Church of Cyprus, the election involves the lower clergy, monastics and the laity. The people can decide if a hierarch has overstepped his bounds, but so can other hierarchs. If the people rise up against a hierarch, it is almost invariably other hierarchs who remove the offending one. This is what happened with Archbishop Spyridon of America a few years back and with the Patriarch of Jerusalem more recently. Near the end of the Spyridon misrule, the EP himself was near removal.
I can’t understand how they can be opposed, either. Partly, I think it’s a control issue, because some bishops are also anti-Rome. They don’t dare to be too outspoken about this, however, and instead they express themselves by quietly obstructing anything the Pope wants.
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