Posted on 10/07/2015 2:02:53 PM PDT by NYer
In a recent letter to The New York Times, Marquette theologian Daniel Maguire suggested that the Catholic Church was headed toward a three-way schism.
Writing about Pope Francis’ reforms to the annulment process, Maguire predicted:
Catholicism is going the way of its parent, Judaism. In Judaism there are Reform as well as Conservative and Orthodox communities. This arrangement is not yet formalized in Catholicism, but the outlines of a similar broadening are in place …. While conservative and orthodox Catholics welcome this annulment concession by the Vatican, reform Catholics don’t need it. Their consciences are their Vatican. Reform Catholics, whose numbers are swelling, are still bonded to the church but not to the Roman curia.
It is certainly possible to discern three tribes within American Catholicism. However, using the Jewish terminology is confusing. “Orthodox,” “Conservative,” and “Reform” do not translate well into American Catholicism. Clearer titles for the three tribes might be “Traditionalist” which correlates with the Jewish “Orthodox.” “Magisterial” because “conservative” Catholics adhere to papal teachings and the magisterium, while “Progressive” reflects the “Reformed” group in Judaism.
Three in One and One in Three
What marks these three tribes? Let’s be positive and say what each group is for rather than what they’re against.
Broadly speaking, “Traditionalists” adhere to the Extraordinary Form of the Mass, the Baltimore Catechism, and Church teachings from before the Second Vatican Council. They are positively pro-life, they support traditional family structures, and encourage fine music, beautiful liturgy, art, and architecture. They are in favor of celibacy for an all-male priesthood, a renewal of the enclosed religious life, and support a wide range of traditional devotions.
“Magisterial” Catholics put loyalty to the authority of the pope and magisterial teaching first and foremost. They are happy with the principles of the Second Vatican Council, but want to “Reform the Reform.” They want to celebrate the Novus Ordo Mass with solemnity, reverence, and fine music. “Magisterial” Catholics are likely to be enthusiastic about apologetics, evangelization, and a range of pro-life ministries. They think the Church needs to relate to the modern world, use new media, and connect with the younger generation, but they look to the pope and Church teachings to help them do that faithfully. They uphold traditional Catholic teaching in faith and morals, but wish to communicate and live these truths in an up-to-date and relevant way. George Weigel dubbed them “Evangelical Catholics.”
The “Progressives” are vitally interested in peace and justice issues. They’re enthusiastic about serving the marginalized and working for institutional change. They are likely to embrace freer forms of worship, dabble in alternative spiritualities, and be eager to make the Catholic faith relevant and practical. Progressives believe the Church should adapt to the modern age. They are sensitive to ecumenical and “pastoral” needs and are likely to see Catholic doctrines and moral precepts as “guidelines” that need to be used flexibly depending on the individual and his circumstances.
I agree with Maguire that these three tribes can be discerned within American Catholicism. Where I disagree is that there can be any formalized arrangement that establishes three separate groups. The three groups exist within the Catholic Church in an uneasy alliance, and that’s how it has to stay. I’m surprised that a theologian of Maguire’s standing seems unfamiliar with the term “schism,” because any group that separates from the Catholic Church would cease to be Catholic — even if they called themselves Catholic.
Maguire envisions three different “Catholic” groups emerging as separate entities, but why just three? In fact, a plethora of groups have already parted ways with the Catholic Church, and set up shop as “independent Catholic Churches.” A quick rummage through the Web reveals a fascinating set of alternative Catholic denominations who (to use Maguire’s phrase) “don’t need the Vatican. Their conscience is their Vatican.”
They comprise an intriguing collection of eccentric characters who live in a churchy fantasy land of their own making. Self-appointed bishops, archbishops, patriarchs, eparchs, and popes, they are both ultra-traditionalist and ultra-progressive. They live in the basement of Mother Church like a twenty-something who dwells in his mother’s basement, plays video games, and dreams about being a football hero. Exploring their alternative world is like a visit to an ecclesiastical Believe it Or Not museum.
The jury is still out as to whether the Society of St. Pius X is formally in schism, but as traditionalists who reject the Novus Ordo Mass and the authority of the Second Vatican Council, they’re high on the list. Nevertheless, their leaders continue to flirt with Vatican authorities and recently Pope Francis granted their priests faculties to hear confessions, so rapprochement is possible.
Schismatic traditionalists fall into two main groups. The sedevacantists (the See is vacant) who believe there is no longer a valid pope, and the conclavists who have gone one step further and elected their own pope. The Society of St Pius V, a sedevacantist group based in New York, is steered by Bishop Joseph Santay, while the Traditional Roman Catholic Church, founded by His Lordship Sherman R. Pius Mosly, is based in New Jersey. Another sedevacantist group is The Congregation of Mary Immaculate Queen. Founded by Francis Konrad Schuckardt (d. 2006), they are dedicated to the messages of Fatima and are part of Schuckardt’s Tridentine Latin Rite Catholic Church.
Conclavists are distinguished by having their own pope. The Palmarian Catholic Church is a notable conclavist group from Spain where they follow Pope Gregory XVIII. Noteworthy American anti-popes are Pope Michael, who lives with his parents in Kansas; the Rev. Lucian Pulvermacher, known as Pope Pius XIII (d. 2009), and a former Episcopal priest, Chester Olszewski of Pennsylvania, who reigns as Pope Peter II. South African Victor Von Pentz (Pope Linus II) lives in Hertfordshire, England, while Argentinian Alejandro Tomás Greico is Pope Alexander IX. Around the world, there are about a dozen other papal claimants whose “conscience is their Vatican,” including convicted sex offender William Kamm, whose papal apartment is a jail cell in Germany.
Among the traditionally minded, there are also some intriguing groups that overlap with other Catholic-minded traditions. They often have curious histories that meld not only Catholicism and Anglicanism, but also link with Eastern Orthodoxy, Syrian, Coptic, and Celtic Christianity. A good example is the group recently established by His Eminence, Rutherford Cardinal Johnson, Patriarch of The Anglican Rite Roman Catholic Church. His Eminence claims that the ARRCC is rooted in the Catholicism of 16th-century Tuscany and the ancient English Catholic rite. The Church of the Culdees, led by the Most Rev. Ivan MacKillop, OCC, celebrates medieval Anglo-Irish Monasticism, while The Celtic Orthodox Church has revived the ancient Coptic-Celtic traditions of Brittany, Ireland, and Western Britain.
The Progressives
Not enthusiastic about popes at the best of times, Catholic progressives don’t consecrate their own anti-popes, but they do boast more than 20 “Independent Catholic Churches” with their own bishops and archbishops. Not counting the Eastern Orthodox and more than 100 independent Anglican denominations, the progressive schisms are made up of Independent Catholics, Old Catholics, and Alternative Catholics. Like the traditionalist groups, most of them claim apostolic succession from the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht — which was established in the 1870s in disagreement over the definition of papal infallibility.
Typical examples of progressive Catholic groups are The Reformed Catholic Church and the Worldwide Ecumenical Catholic Church of Christ with Archbishop Karl Rodig. Then there is the Ecumenical Catholic Church, not forgetting the Ecumenical Catholic Communion and The American National Catholic Church. Most of the progressive groups endorse remarriage after divorce, women’s ordination, married clergy, same sex unions, and contraception. Some exclude women priests, but those Catholics whose “conscience is their Vatican” can affirm women’s ordination by joining The Association of Roman Catholic Women Priests.
Among the more unusual progressive schisms are The Antiochian Church in America, a little church in Tennessee with a taste for Eastern Orthodoxy; the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation founded in 1989 by former priest George Augustus Stalling Jr., and The Traditionalist Mexican-American Catholic Church known for their veneration of Sante Muerte and drug trafficking. Their current archbishop, David Romo Guillén, is serving a 66-year jail sentence for kidnapping and money laundering.
While some progressive Catholics find a home in the “Independent Catholic Churches,” more find their way to the the mainstream liturgical Protestant churches. With the same progressive agenda, and a stronger infrastructure, the Episcopal, Lutheran, and Methodist churches also offer a Catholic atmosphere for Catholics who are bonded to the Church, but not to the Roman Curia.
Cafeteria Catholics?
Some might suggest that Catholics whose “conscience is their Vatican” stop being hypocrites, follow their conscience, and join one of the many groups with whom they are in agreement. If a progressive Catholic wants married priests, New Age spirituality, women’s ordination, artificial contraception, same-sex marriage, and abortion, wouldn’t they be happier with Christians with whom they agree?
Likewise, if a traditionalist Catholic finds himself continually worked up because Pope Francis is too leftist, the new Mass is too informal, and he is dismayed by what he perceives as the hypocrisy of “liberal” Catholics, spineless bishops, poor catechesis, lax clergy, and heretical leadership, shouldn’t he let his “conscience be his Vatican” and either scoot off to join one of the traditionalist schisms or start his own?
The answer is “no.”
The Catholic Church needs diversity of opinion. It’s healthy for family members to disagree, and debate is one of the ways the Holy Spirit leads the Church. But both progressives and traditionalists must constantly measure their personal opinions and preferences against the magisterium of the Church and her authority.
Discontented progressives and traditionalists should not march off in a huff and join a schism. Instead, both sides should remember the definitions of difficulties, doubt, and dissent. A difficulty is when we honestly face a problem with the faith, scratch our heads, and wonder, “How can that be?” A doubt is when we nurse an attitude of rejection and rebellion, saying, “That can’t be!” Dissent is when we act on our doubt and openly disagree with, dismiss, and disobey Church teachings without regret or repentance.
The answer for cafeteria Catholics is not to leave the Church. Instead, the answer is for those with difficulties to work through them, for those with doubts to develop a curious and affirming attitude to Church teaching, and for those who dissent to pray for a change in their hearts and minds so they might come at last to the place where they can joyfully assent to the fullness of the Catholic faith.
So which one would be THE one true, true church?
they always forget the Eastern Church, so please read “And Eastern Rites” into the Traditionalist column...
I thought he was Left.
St. Malachi died in the year 1148. The so-called prophecy was "discovered" in 1595. Significantly, the "prophecies" from the intervening 447 years (1148-1595) were a pretty good match (as they would be, if they were written after the fact!!) and the "prophecies" dealing with popes after 1595 are ludicrously vague, very much like the prophecies in fortune cookies.
They can all be nicely interpreted ex post facto, of course.
But the Church's attitude is that it's not private revelation, it's a forgery.
Agreed! Most of those liturgies draw directly from the synagogue worship service. Jesus was a Jew and the the Apostles set out to bring the "good news", first to the East and then to the West. Peter served as the bishop of Antioch before he went to Rome.
Take this with a grain of salt from a leftist professor.
Daniel Maguire of Marquette University, whose own college president admitted that the theologian’s views are “not totally consonant with Catholic teaching.”
The noble traditions of Judaism – ...
www.sacredchoices.org, 4 Aug 2014 [cached]
The noble traditions of Judaism – stressing justice for the downtrodden – are being soiled by the endless cruelties that Israel and its current leaders heap on the Palestinians, including the latest slaughter of more than 1,700 Gazans, many of them children, a moral catastrophe addressed by theologian Daniel C. Maguire.
In the spring of 2007, Daniel C. Maguire was condemned by U.S. bishops for his progressive writings, because, the New York Times reported, Maguire’s pamphlets on abortion and same-sex marriage “are written in a very popular and lively style, and from what the bishops knew, they were very widely distributed. Praised by Ms.magazine as one of “40 male heroes who took a chance for women,” Maguire is a noted theologian and ethicist whose controversial views and irreverent style have rankled conservatives for nearly thirty years. In this pithy guide to progressive Catholicism, Maguire shows how tragically far conservative Catholic politics have strayed from the best Catholic social teaching.
...
Daniel C. Maguire is Professor of Moral Theological Ethics at Marquette University and the president of the Religious Consultation on Population, Reproductive Health, and Ethics. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly and USA Today, and he has written several books, including Sacred Choices: The Right to Contraception and Abortion in Ten World Religions. He lives in Wisconsin.
No, there are Catholics and then there are those who claim the affiliation but are quite willing to denounce essential elements of the faith.
It is one thing to fall short of living up to those essential elements, and quite another matter to denounce them.
What’s a magisterialist?
“Martin Luther was Right.”
Are your referring to the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist or Mary’s perpetual virginity?
Such drivel. SSPX (unlike Gregory of Narek, Francis' new "Doctor of the Church") has never been in schism.
When a Maguire writes as he has in this cited article, it is to set up false claims of moral equivalence between Catholics OTOH and pro-aborts, pro-sexual perversion folks, advocates of the "rights" of the divorced and remarried without annulment as though they were not divorced and remarried without annulment.
Maguire's modus operandi is to claim that pro-aborts, for example, are every bit as Catholic as members of the somewhat schismatic SSPX and SSPV, as two examples. I have made no secret of my own opposition to SSPX and SSPV as schismatic groups both of which reject the promise of Jesus Christ to be with HIS Church all days to the end of the world and pretentiously claim to be that church as opposed to the actual Roman Catholic Church HQ'd in the Vatican. Even I do not share Maguire's pretension that his favirite deviations from Catholic Truth are no more serious deviations than the somewhat innocent matters of liturgical taste that govern SSPX and SSPV.
God has protected his Church from popes far more foolish or negligent than Pope Francis. Alexander VI (Borgia) comes immediately to mind but there are numerous others.
What Maguire calls "Magisterial" Catholics are Catholics who mostly attend the Novus Ordo vernacular language Masses of the post-Vatican II era, accept the magisterial teachings of the Church and have a preference for music at Mass which does not praise pagan godesses like Gaia, secular economists like Marx or Lenin, but rather is rooted in the exceptionally high quality liturgical music of pre-Vatican II happy memory not the modern hootenanny festivals which afflict "progressive" venues. They believe in seven sacraments, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass even in a low rent liturgy but are recognizably Catholic in all respects.
As to "progressive""Catholicism," bear in mind that, untreated, cancer and tuberculosis and Alzheimers' are also "progressive" diseases as corrosive to the body as "progressive""Catholicism" is to the well-being of one's soul.
In Traditional circles, we have longed joked that the Third Secret of Fatima, given by Our Lady in 1917 to Lucia Santos, Francesco Marto and Jacinta Marto was: Whatever the Church may do in the future, do NOT hold a Council!
If any person who claims Catholicism agrees with Maguire that we need "diversity" of opinion WITHIN the Church and internal debate and similar heretical nonsense, that person should obtain a copy of Pope St. Pius X's brilliant encyclical Pascendi Domenici Gregis (On the Errors of the Modernists) defining the Modernist heresy as "the synthesis of all heresies" (published September 8, 1907) and its accompanying Lamentabile Sane, a Syllabus of Errors of the Modernists (published July 3, 1907), two documents of blazing clarity which make clear to any reader what "progressive""Catholicism" actually is, always has been and always will be: Heresy!
Those "Catholic" "churches" claiming Apostolic Succession through the Utrecht line of ecclesiastical rebellion have a name already and it is NOT Catholic. They are heretics, whatever their liturgy may be similar to, no matter what actual Catholic beliefs they may retain in some shadow form. They reject papal authority outright, reject papal infallibility as defined by Vatican I and solemnized as dogma by Pope Pius IX. They play at being "make believe" Catholic, a proposition toward which their common heresy gives the lie.
Catholic doctrine and dogma is not a do it yourself hobby, as we Catholics well understand.
The wait to find out won’t be long now.
The “wait to find out” could be short, medium, or long, depending on how long the Lord delays. Yes, we are in the End Times: and have been since Pentecost, 33 AD.
I was just asking myself the same question! Great minds think alike. :’)
Nevermind, I completely missed the reference.
I would argue that “Magisterial” Catholics do not “uphold traditional Catholic teaching in faith and morals” as long as they believe that Vatican II is Catholic (although I do believe that they are sincere).
No....the Eastern schism many moons ago, will be resolved one of these days and the two will be as one again. The Church is universal and eternal, they need not hurry to do anything, they have until the end of time to preach their Gospel and so far, for 2,015 years, it has worked pretty well. When Christ promised to be with the Catholic church until the end of time, He wasn’t kidding.
I pronounce it “said-uh-vuh-CANT-ist”.
I could be wrong.
Agnosticism
Evangelicalism
Traditionalist Protestantism (e.g., neo-Anglicanism)
Eastern Orthodoxy
How does one find one of those?
Actually they have been doing just fine, thank you...
dissidents have appeared over the years since people in the time of Christ...all have failed and all will fail.
The Catholic church is what the Catholic church is....if you don't agree...O.K., everyone is entitled to start his/her interpretation of what true Christianity is. I think that I will stick with the status quo and the present Pope. Do I agree with everything he says, of course not, he was raised and educated in a predominantly socialist country and has been influenced by that. Who cares, he has done nothing to weaken Catholic teaching and has merely expressed his own opinions, some of which I don't agree with......big deal...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.