Posted on 07/29/2020 5:27:10 PM PDT by ebb tide
SAN RAFAEL, Argentina, July 29, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) ― An Argentinian bishop, backed by the Vatican, has closed down his diocesan seminary because priests connected to the seminary refused to follow his directive that Holy Communion be only administered to people in the hand.
Bishop Eduardo Maria Taussig, the Bishop of San Rafael, grieved Catholics in his conservative diocese when, after the state permitted churches to reopen, he ordered the laity to receive the Blessed Sacrament only in their hands. Although the practise of receiving communion in the hand has become commonplace in the Church since its illicit introduction in the 1960s, the Catholics of San Rafael have remained faithful to the traditional practice of receiving communion on their tongues while kneeling.
After Fr. Alejandro Miguel Ciarrocchi, the rector of the diocesan seminary, defended the right of his seminarians to receive the Blessed Sacrament according to the traditional norms, Bishop Taussig retaliated by dismissing him from his post. Then, as other priests were also administering communion according to the traditional preferences of their parishioners, Taussig shut down the seminary itself.
In a recent video message posted on Facebook, Father José Antonio Álvarez, spokesman for the Diocese of San Rafael, blamed the clergy of this diocese for their “undisciplined reaction” and said that the order to shut the seminary had come from the Vatican Congregation for Clergy.
“In accordance with instructions from the Holy See, it has been decided to close the seminary,” the priest said.
“The measure taken by the Congregation for the Clergy, which is just the dicastery of the Holy Father that has jurisdictions over these cases, takes into consideration that due to the undisciplined reaction of a good portion of the clergy of the diocese, at this moment, this diocese is not able to put together a group of teachers who will conform to the church's discipline,” Álvarez stated.
“Since that is something that cannot be resolved immediately... Well ... to safeguard the formation of the seminarians so that they can continue with their formation, they will be sent to other seminaries. That is something that will be the subject of an ongoing dialogue in the remaining months of the academic year.”
The Catholic Church states clearly in Redemptionis Sacramentum that a Catholic “always has the right to receive Holy Communion on the tongue,” a right that cannot simply be taken away.
Dr. Peter Kwasniewski has argued that a bishop oversteps his authority in denying Catholics this right. “Many bishops are abusing their authority right now because…they’re supposed to uphold Canon Law and Canon Law is really clear that the faithful have the right to receive communion on the tongue. That's it,” he said in a July 2020 interview with The John-Henry Westen Show.
Last month, twenty-one Austrian doctors told their country’s Bishops’ Conference that receiving Communion on the tongue is “safer” than in hand.
An article published yesterday in the Spanish-language Wanderer website questioned whether the decision came from the Vatican Congregation or from the bishop himself.
“It is very rare for the Holy See to take on its own accord such a serious measure - we are talking about the largest seminary in Argentina - closing it in such a short time and without even a visit or further investigation. This is not the way of proceeding of the Curia,” a blogger at the Wanderer wrote.
“What I believe is that Mgr. Taussig himself offered Rome the corpse of his seminary. That is, he communicated things to Rome only according to his version of the events, he told them that he wanted to close the seminary, and Rome, logically, gave its support. And not so much because San Rafael was a conservative seminary, but because that was the will of its bishop, who is a prince in his diocese.”
The blogger also called Taussig’s strategy, which shifted the blame for his decision to his priests, “mean-spirited and duplicitous.” The writer acknowledged that one of his readers had blamed the laity for behaving “recklessly” in the dispute but said he did not believe this was true.
“What the laity did was to respectfully request the bishop to allow them to receive Holy Communion in the mouth and then gather together to pray at the doors of the seminary and the cathedral,” he wrote.
According to this and other accounts, Taussig is now very unpopular with the people of the diocese. The blogger said that the bishop had behaved with “enormous recklessness” in announcing the closure of the seminary months before its implementation, in December.
“A prudent ruler would have announced only the appointment of a new rector and, at the end of the year, announce the closure,” he stated.
“How will the rector govern [in] the remaining months? The atmosphere of the seminaries is always unhealthy; in this case it will be unbreathable. It would not be surprising if within a month, of the forty seminarians only four remain. What reason will the poor boys have to stay there?”
The blogger voiced his hope that the orthodox seminarians would not go to other, less orthodox, seminaries in Argentina but instead opt for such tradition-loving apostolates as the Institute of the Good Shepherd, the Institute of Christ the King, or the Fraternity of the Priests of Saint Peter.
“Despite the fact that my sins are many and I hope yet to save my soul, I would not want to be in the shoes of Bishop Taussig when, on his deathbed, he confronts his history and conscience and, loaded with those duffel bags, he presents himself before the Divine Court.”
A source known to LifeSiteNews told a reporter that there were 40 “good and well-formed” seminarians who now are unsure what they will do. He called the closing of the San Rafael seminary a “real disaster” as he believes it to be “the last really Catholic seminary in Catholic Argentina.”
Taussig, the descendant of Czech immigrants to Argentina, was appointed the Bishop of San Rafael by St. John Paul II in 2004. He was co-consecrated by the Primate of Argentina of the time, Cardinal Archbishop Jorge Bergoglio (who is now Pope Francis), and a number of other bishops.
LifeSiteNews’ Gualberto Garcia Jones and Pete Baklinski contributed to this report.
“The measure taken by the Congregation for the Clergy, which is just the dicastery of the Holy Father that has jurisdictions over these cases, takes into consideration that due to the undisciplined reaction of a good portion of the clergy of the diocese, at this moment, this diocese is not able to put together a group of teachers who will conform to the church's discipline,” Álvarez stated.
So Francis' Congregation for the Clergy has been active lately, telling Fr. Pavone to back off Trump's re-election efforts and now shutting down an orthodox seminary.
Ping
At first glance, I misread “communion” as “communism.”
Prayers up for Holy Mother Church.
As a result of the Satan Council’s plan to destroy traditional orthodox Roman Catholicism, the Holy Tridentine Latin Mass was replaced worldwide by the Protestant-inspired Novus Ordo. That sacrilegious service, which mandates communion “in the paw”, has driven millions of the faithful out of the church.
They're not clueless. They're downright evil and they have an agenda. The pope of francismercy has just shut down another orthodox seminary, one of several the dictator has shuttered.
Wow.
Excellence,
I am confused and hurt to hear the news from the international press about the decision to close the Seminary of the Diocese of San Rafael and to dismiss its Rector, Fr Alejandro Miguel Ciarrocchi.
This decision would have been taken, on His zealous signaling, by the Congregation for the Clergy, who considered the refusal by clerics under His jurisdiction to administer and receive the Holy Eucharist in the mouth and not in the hand inadmissible. I imagine that the laudable and coherent behavior of the priests, clerics and faithful of San Rafael offered you an excellent excuse to close the largest Argentine seminary and disperse the seminarians to re-educate them elsewhere, in seminaries so exemplary that they have now emptied. Your Excellency has admirably been able to translate into practice that invitation to parrhesia , in the name of which the scourge of clericalism denounced by the highest Soglio should be defeated.
I can understand your disappointment in seeing that, despite the pounding work of ultra-modernist indoctrination carried out in these decades, there are still good priests and clerics who do not put courtesy obedience before due respect for the Blessed Sacrament; and I can imagine His spite in seeing that even the lay faithful and entire families - of what is called ” the Vendée of the Andes ” - follow the good shepherds, of whom, as the Gospel says, ”recognize the voice” , and not mercenaries who do not care about sheep (Jn 10, 4.13).
These episodes confirm the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church: the Paraclete infuses the gift of the Fortress into the humble and the weak and confuses the proud and powerful, making manifest the faith in the August Sacrament of the Altar on the one hand, and his guilty desecration for human respect on the other. Conforming to the mentality of the world may perhaps deserve to your Excellency the easy and interested applause of the enemies of the Church, but it will not avoid either the unanimous regret of the good, nor the Judgment of God, which under the Eucharistic veils is present in Body, Blood , Soul and Divinity. And who asks the Sacred Shepherds to be His witnesses, not His traitors and persecutors.
Your Excellency will allow me to point out to you a certain inconsistency of your behavior with the motto that you have chosen for your emblem: Paterna atque fraterna charitate. I do not see anything paternal in punishing Priests who do not want to desecrate the Holy Host, nor any form of true Charity for those who have disobeyed an inadmissible order. Charity is exercised for Good and for Truth: if it has error as its beginning and evil as its end, it is only a grotesque parody of Virtue. A Bishop who instead of defending the honor due to the King of kings and praising those who strive for this noble purpose comes to close a flourishing Seminary and publicly reprimand his clerics does not perform an action of Charity, but a regrettable abuse, of which he will be called to answer before the tribunal of God. I pray that you will understand how serious his gesture, evaluated sub specie aeternitatis , is in itself and a scandal for the simple. Your studies atAngelicum should help your Excellency in this work of healthy resipiscence, which imposes even the necessary reparation sub serious .
The press reports that in the Diocese of Basel, in the church of Rigi-Kaltbad, a woman dressed in sacred vestments usually simulates the celebration of Mass, in the absence of an ordained priest, omitting only the words of the Institution. I wonder if Msgr. Felix Gmür will be distinguished by the same zeal that animated her, and if she will resort to the Roman Dicasteries to have the sacrilegious staging punished in an exemplary way. However, I fear that the inflexibility shown by you in punishing the Priests who have dutifully disobeyed you will not find emulates in Switzerland. Certainly, if on that altar a Priest had celebrated Mass in the Tridentine Rite, the arrows of the Ordinary would not have been slow to strike him; but a woman who celebrates abusively and sacrilegiously the Mass is today considered a negligible thing, as much as exposing the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar to desecration.
Together with the clergy and lay people of your Diocese, whom you have unjustly struck and seriously offended, I pray for you, Your Excellency, for the principals of the Holy See, and in particular for Cardinal Beniamino Stella whom I met as a devoted priest and faithful Apostolic Nuncio , to which as Delegate for the Pontifical Representations I visited Bogota. Once my friend, I worked with him for years in the Secretariat of State: unfortunately for some time now I can no longer recognize him as such, for his participation in the demolition of the Church of Christ.
Let us pray for your conversion, a conversion to which we are all called, but which is indifferent to those who work not for the glory of God, but against the good of souls and the honor of the Church.
We all pray for the seminarians and for the faithful of San Rafael to whom you, Your Excellency, have declared war.
With fraternal Charity, in Truth,
+ Carlo Maria Viganò , Archbishop
“I fear that the inflexibility shown by you in punishing the Priests who have dutifully disobeyed you...”
Priests dutifully disobeying their local ordinary.
Dutifully disobeying.
Yes.
Archbishop Vigano has accurately described the priests in question.
They are being dutiful, in that they are obeying higher authority.
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