Liberals Planning for Vatican III

I guess it was just a matter of time. As you and I both know, critics of the Church are taking advantage of the sex scandal to push forward their own agendas. We've seen it time and again in newspaper editorials, radio call-in shows, and TV interview programs.

And now, to the list, we can add The National Catholic Reporter (NCR) -- that venerable old institution of tedious (and increasingly gray-haired) dissent. CRISIS reader Danny deBruin alerted us to NCR's latest overturn-the-Church scheme.

The newest issue sports a provocative cover story: "Blueprint for Vatican III." And in case you're wondering, the article does not disappoint.

Here's how it works: The NCR's editors sent a request to "Catholics in various parts of the world." They asked each person to list three issues they believe a future general council of the Catholic Church must address, along with 12 additional items they'd like to see on the council's agenda. The results were collated, edited, and printed in NCR.

Who were these "Catholics" chosen to represent the opinions of the universal Church? We're never told. Everything was conducted anonymously. But NCR does tease us a bit, saying that the respondents included one cardinal and three bishops (the remainder consisted of nuns, priests, and laity).

I know, I know. You can't wait to get the results. Well, I won't torture you, so here they are... Shockingly enough, NCR discovered that "the people of God" want to see the next council mandate a married clergy, women priests, complete freedom on all the sexual issues (contraception, homosexuality, etc., etc.), and democratization in the leadership of the Church.

"Respondents wanted the widest possible participation of all the church in the next council, laity -- single and married -- and women religious and priests present as a group in proportion to the number of bishops present. A cardinal in a developing country wrote that all religions should be invited 'and have the right to vote.'"

[Did you catch that last bit? So, non-Christians should be given the right to vote on Catholic doctrine? Hmm... I wonder how Muslims and Buddhists would vote on the issue of Christ's divinity?]

"I would like to see a discipleship of equals. The issue goes to the heart of the patriarchal and hierarchical structure of the church and the false holding of one person above another. It means opening all church offices to women. It means shifting the weight of power away from Rome and church pulpits to the people of God. It means getting rid of all parent-child terminology like "Father" (Holy and otherwise), and attendant behaviors."

[Get rid of "Father" terminology? Sounds like this respondent has more of a problem with Jesus than with the Church.]

"We must search for a coherent and persuasive moral stance on sexual morality: marriage and its support systems, family planning, reconciliation after divorce, homosexual activity, natural law."

[I wonder what that respondent's "persuasive moral stance" on those issues might be?]

"Now, only the hierarchy has real power. Others are merely tokens. This accounts for all the ills of the church, from pedophilia to financial abuse to theological violence."

[Ah yes, a powerful Church hierarchy caused pedophilia. Isn't it more likely that the sex-abuse scandal -- which again ISN'T pedophilia -- could have something to do with the outrageous number of active homosexuals in the priesthood? And aren't those active homosexuals there because of the liberal seminary policies urged on by the kinds of people who read NCR? A little food for thought.]

"Seminaries need to be closed and modeled after the experimental seminary training proposed by Brazilian Archbishop Dom Helder Camara and some Protestant types of training such as Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge and Berkeley Feminist D. Min courses."

[Yes, that should pack in the seminarians. After all, what young man doesn't want to be harangued by an angry feminist for his "misogyny" and "homophobia"?]

"The whole question of infallibility and the role of the magisterium needs to be looked at. Both of these issues can be like nuclear weapons in the wrong hands."

Well, you get the picture. NCR devotees, like so many other aging radicals, still live in a past where 1960s-style dissent is bright and new. But the truth is something quite different. The mainline liberal Protestant churches are fading away... some predict that the Methodist and Episcopal churches may not even exist a century from now. Which Protestant denominations are growing? The conservative, orthodox, evangelical churches.

This same phenomenon holds true in the Catholic Church. The orthodox dioceses are vibrant and bursting with vocations. Just take a trip to Denver or Northern Virginia if you doubt it. Conversely, the dioceses that likely receive NCR in their chanceries are shriveling up.

It's revealing, I think, that out of the 300 requests NCR sent out, only 60 came back. That's a pretty sad response for a group that claims to speak for the average Catholic.

The simple truth is the heady days of dissent are dead and gone. It just seems that some people refuse to leave the funeral.

As far as the Vatican is concerned, you will have to take into consideration sovereign immunity since the Vatican is a sovereign nation. As far as the necessity for a Vatican III or even the desireability of such a thing, there has been exactly one council convened in the last 150 years. That was the Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, in retrospect a rank disaster. I rather doubt that there will be any more councils during the lifetime of anyone who experienced the aftermath of the last one.

Money is only money. Councils are called for reasons of doctrine such as the Council of Trent (known as the Counterreformation Council) called almost 150 years after Luther tacked his theses to the cathedral door at Wittenberg when immediate enthusiasms had passed and a due period of deliberation had been afforded. The First Vatican Council of the mid-19th Century defined the long-held internal Church belief in the doctrine of infallibility.

When Vatican II was improvidently called by the overly optimistic John XXIII (who would not, at his age, have to live with the consequences as have many of us), he proclaimed a desire to open the windows of the Church to allow the fresh air to enter in a "spirit of aggiornamento". This was basically a way of saying that 1960s liberals and worse, Catholic style, had a lot of itches that wanted scratching after orthodox pontificates such as those of Pope Pius IX (1846-1878), Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), Pope St. Pius X (1903-1914), Pope Pius XI (1923-1939) and Pope Pius XII (1939-1958). The only relief that the liberal termites had was the pontificate of Pope Benedict XV (1914-1923) who cancelled improvidently the anti-modernist loyalty and purge requirements of Pope St. Pius X. Even Benedict codified Canon Law although his legacy is that he gave the modernist heretics the little hidey hole that allowed them to survive.

Well, John XXIII opened the windows and the aroma of sanctity wafted out the windows to be replaced by the stench of multiplying incestuous heresies festering just beneath the surface (which had been too fearful of Pope Pius XII to show their ugly heads in public within the Church) and the licentious Gramscian obsessions polluting the modern world outside the Church.

In the early part of his pontificate, Pope Paul VI observed publicly as to the result: "The smoke of Satan surrounds our altars." Let it be observed that Paul VI, while sound enough on birth control to reject an initiative by a committee appointed by his predecessor and to issue the encyclical Humanae Vitae to rule out artificial birth control once and for all (largely written by a then obscure Polish Archbishop Karol Wojtlywa who is now John Paul II), was nonetheless a raging liberal in Church terms.

It was only with the election of Albino Cardinal Luciani, Patriarch of Venice, as Pope John Paul I and his very short but orthodox pontificate and the election of John Paul II and his long pontificate that orthodoxy began to be restored. The next pope's prime challenge is the complete restoration of orthodoxy. When the Church is orthodox, money and vocations flourish. No one wants to fund or make lifetime commitments with real sacrifices to a Church whose leaders grovel before the trend of the week.

Pope John Paul II has appointed a College of Cardinals who will see to it that his papacy will be followed by one which will enthusiastically take up the task of purging the clergy of the net results of the Woodstock moral mud bath that was the legacy of "the spirit of Vatican II", including so many sexually disordered people who have infested the seminaries and the rectories and even many chanceries here since.

In short, a Church council is an extraordinary event which ought not to be called any more often than absolutely necessary (marked in centuries normally, not years) and then only to confirm aggressively some long-held doctrine of strictly orthodox purpose not yet formally defined and then promulgated only with the specific approval of the pope.

The bishops are not some sort of board of directors or some sort of legislature. They are more like executives who are successors of the apostles (who did not make moral decisions by democratic vote) who usually have diocesan responsibilities to govern. As the performance of some of them remind us, Judas too was an apostle. Fortunately, as with the original 12, predominantly we have John the Evangelist or James the Greater or James the Less or Andrew. We always have at least one Peter emulating his good behavior and very rarely his human weaknesses, but always Peter.

As to mere lawyers in a feeding frenzy, we need not fear them any more than we needed to fear Stalin, Hitler, Nero, Caligula, Diocletian or others far more capable and dangerous than mere lawyers or judges or their transitory nations, for that matter. We can see both the forest and the trees.

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