Posted on 01/11/2004 5:56:57 AM PST by NYer
Everybody likes Mel Gibson. He’s an award-winning actor, he’s box-office gold and he seems like a nice guy. But because of his fame and The Passion, his forthcoming movie about Christ, a lot of his fans would like to be clear on where he stands with respect to the Catholic Church, a Dallas-based author says.
Kevin Orlin Johnson, Ph.D., is an associate of the Canon Law Society of America and a best-selling writer whose book Rosary: Mysteries, Meditations, and the Telling of the Beads includes one of the most graphic accounts of the Crucifixion ever published. He’ll definitely see Gibson’s film about the sufferings of Christ on the Cross. But Gibson’s campaign to build a church in Malibu, California, raises some serious issues about the actor’s relationship with the Catholic Church.
“You can’t just build your own church,” Johnson says. Parishes are geographical entities, set up by bishops in conformance with the Church’s laws and subject to their authority. “There are no free-lance churches in the Catholic Church. You live in a parish, and you go to its church.” Every place in California is already part of a parish, which has its own church.
Gibson’s parish, then, would be the aptly named Our Lady of Malibu on Winter Canyon Road, Johnson says, looking through a Los Angeles Catholic directory. But, according to The New York Times Magazine, the actor’s privately funded Church of the Holy Family in Malibu is not affiliated with any diocese. So, according to Church law, it’s schismatic, not a Catholic church at all.
The Church’s Code of Canon Law defines schism--separation from the Church--as “the refusal of submission to the Supreme Pontiff or of communion with the members of the Church subject to him.” Gibson’s father, Houston, Texas resident Hutton Gibson, is an outspoken critic of the Catholic Church and a vocal adherent of the “sedevacantist” movement, so called from the Latin phrase meaning “empty seat”--their claim being that every pope since 1960 has been spurious.
While Gibson himself is said to disagree with his father on many counts, the actor has been quoted often as waxing nostalgic for the Mass said in Latin and the doctrines as they were for almost 2000 years. But, as Johnson explains in his booklet What About the Latin Mass?, the Latin Mass that traditionalists long for is nothing like 2000 years old--the early Mass was often in Greek, and Gibson probably remembers only the Latin Mass that wasn’t finalized until 1962. “So if he was born in 1956,” Johnson says, “his Latin Mass is really younger than he is himself.” That Latin version is still used in the Church by special permission, and it’s actively encouraged by authentic Catholic organizations like the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter, headquartered in Elmhurst, Pennsylvania.
The difference is that these groups nurture the Latin Mass in full unity with the Catholic Church. “Fringe groups who reject Vatican II stand away from the Church and go off on their own,” he says. “They’re largely reacting to the sloppy or even destructive way in which Vatican II’s decrees were put into effect here in the United States.”
Vatican II--officially the Second Vatican Council--was convened by Pope John XXIII in 1962 and strove to clarify the Church’s activities to better serve the modern world, mandating simplification of the liturgy and the use of the local vernacular languages instead of Latin everywhere.
“Of course, you have to use the liturgy as a way to look to the substance of the Faith,” Johnson says. “You can’t just stop at appearances.” Vatican II mandated no changes in Church doctrine whatever--“the Church’s teachings are the teachings of Christ,” he says, “and therefore no human agency can add to them or take any away, and the Church never has,” although many Catholics still seem to be confused about that point.
Johnson believes that the confusion started when American bishops took Vatican II as an excuse to sweep away any part of the Church that they didn’t like personally--“not just the Latin of the liturgy but, as we’ve seen, even the most basic doctrines of human decency.” Since 1993, more than 80 percent of the Catholic bishops in the United States have been directly implicated in court cases of priestly pedophilia or in using their positions to shield such activity over the past 40 years or more, according to a study compiled by reporters Brooks Egerton and Reese Dunklin of the Dallas Morning News last year.
That corruption of the clergy makes it hard to find authentic teaching or authentic liturgy in the United States today, Johnson says, but it doesn’t mean that people can just run out and start up their own church instead. The new English Mass is perfectly legitimate and a lot closer to the simplicity of early-Christian practice--when Latin itself was the vernacular, the everyday language of the people. And with a little effort, he says, “you can get a Latin Mass celebrated regularly at your proper parish, and know that you’re doing so in full communion with the Church that really is almost 2000 years old.”
So where does that leave Gibson? “Well, I hope he’s Catholic," Johnson says. "We’d love to have him.” END
LOL, don't criticize anyone ever again for attending the Mass of "schismatics".
No, you're right. It's not. None of us are the judge and jury of Mel Gibson's soul or those of his family.
Where, exactly -- chapter and verse -- does the Bible state that?
One example would be the most important words in the entire Bible, the words that are attributed to Jesus.
How could the early Christians be "Bible Christians" before any of the books of the Bible were written down? Moreover, how could Christians be "Bible Christians" before the year 400 A.D., when the New Testament was finally canonized?
These various forms of unity are the object of the prayer after the Last Supper, when Christ prays for His own and asks "that they may be one" as the Father and the Son are one (John, xvii, 21, 22). Those who violate the laws of unity shall become strangers to Christ and his spiritual family: "And if he will not hear the Church, let him be to thee as the heathen and publican" (Matt., xviii, 17).In faithful imitation of his Master's teaching St. Paul often refers to the unity of the Church, describing it as one edifice, one body, a body between whose members exists the same solidarity as between the members of the human body (I Cor., xii; Eph., iv). He enumerates its various aspects and sources: "For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, . . . and in one Spirit we have all been made to drink" (I Cor xii, 13); "For we, being many, are one bread, one body, all that partake of one bread" (ibid., x, 17). He sums it up in the following formula: "One body and one Spirit; . . . one Lord, one faith, one baptism" (Eph., iv, 4-5). Finally he arrives at the logical conclusion when he anathematizes doctrinal novelties and the authors of them (Gal., i, 9), likewise when he writes to Titus: "A man that is a heretic, after the first and second admonition, avoid" (Tit., iii, 10); and again when he so energetically condemns the dissensions of the community of Corinth: "There are contentions among you. . . . every one of you saith: I am indeed of Paul; and I am of Apollo; and I of Cephas; and I of Christ. Is Christ divided? Was Paul then crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?" (I Cor., i, 11-13). "Now, I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms among you; but that you be perfect in the same mind, and in the same judgment" (I Cor., i, 10). St. Luke speaking in praise of the primitive church mentions its unanimity of belief, obedience, and worship: "They were persevering in the doctrine of the apostles, and in the communication of the breaking of bread, and in prayers" (Acts, ii, 42). All the first Epistle of St. John is directed against contemporary innovators and schismatics; and the author regards them as so foreign to the Church that in contrast to its members "the Children of God", he calls them "the children of the devil", (I John, iii, 10); the children "of the world" (iv, 5), even Antichrist (ii, 22; iv, 3).
889 In order to preserve the Church in the purity of the faith handed on by the apostles, Christ who is the Truth willed to confer on her a share in his own infallibility. By a "supernatural sense of faith" the People of God, under the guidance of the Church's living Magisterium, "unfailingly adheres to this faith."417
890 The mission of the Magisterium is linked to the definitive nature of the covenant established by God with his people in Christ. It is this Magisterium's task to preserve God's people from deviations and defections and to guarantee them the objective possibility of professing the true faith without error. Thus, the pastoral duty of the Magisterium is aimed at seeing to it that the People of God abides in the truth that liberates. To fulfill this service, Christ endowed the Church's shepherds with the charism of infallibility in matters of faith and morals. The exercise of this charism takes several forms:
891 "The Roman Pontiff, head of the college of bishops, enjoys this infallibility in virtue of his office, when, as supreme pastor and teacher of all the faithful - who confirms his brethren in the faith he proclaims by a definitive act a doctrine pertaining to faith or morals. . . . The infallibility promised to the Church is also present in the body of bishops when, together with Peter's successor, they exercise the supreme Magisterium," above all in an Ecumenical Council.418 When the Church through its supreme Magisterium proposes a doctrine "for belief as being divinely revealed,"419 and as the teaching of Christ, the definitions "must be adhered to with the obedience of faith."420 This infallibility extends as far as the deposit of divine Revelation itself.421
892 Divine assistance is also given to the successors of the apostles, teaching in communion with the successor of Peter, and, in a particular way, to the bishop of Rome, pastor of the whole Church, when, without arriving at an infallible definition and without pronouncing in a "definitive manner," they propose in the exercise of the ordinary Magisterium a teaching that leads to better understanding of Revelation in matters of faith and morals. To this ordinary teaching the faithful "are to adhere to it with religious assent"422 which, though distinct from the assent of faith, is nonetheless an extension of it.
Echoing the personal opinions of those who succor the schism is not persuasive - except to schismatics
Speaking of this, what Latin Missal are folks using? Is the 1962 version acceptable?
The only thing you can do is make repeated, unsourced, assertions. You can't source any of these inane assertions because they do not exist.
If you ever decide to post a document from the Living Magisterium that retracts the excommunications, ping me.
I stopped there since there is NO unity when others disregard Biblical teachings.
On what basis do you reject this teaching of Jesus, which is in the Bible?
Do you hold to the belief that the true "church" is the body of believers? If so, how do you reconcile that belief with Jesus' command to take our disputes to the church (not churches)? For Jesus' command to make sense, there must be one, visible, and doctrinally united Church of Christ. You won't find that in the disparate Protestant sects. But you will find one, visible and doctrinally united Catholic Church.
[FYI, Church doctrine is based on written (Scripture) and oral Tradition]
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