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[Catholic Caucus] Popular priest accuses some Catholics of ‘self-righteousness’ who receive Communion on tongue kneeling 'Fr. Longenecker should publicly support Catholics who wish to honor their Lord and God with all their heart, soul, mind, and bodily strength' At St. Peter’s Basilica on November 3, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI distributes Holy Communion on the tongue to the kneeling faithful. July 21, 2020 (LifeSiteNews) — On July 19, Fr. Longenecker tweeted the following: He begins by setting up an alternative: “Which is better?” It may turn out that neither option is good, as if one were to say: “Which is better?...

What would Thomas Aquinas, in his wisdom, say about President Trump’s executive order temporarily banning travel from seven Muslim countries, in terms of its justness and conformity to right reason?… I am grateful to The Imaginative Conservative for publishing Fr. Dwight Longenecker’s reasoned defence of President Trump’s executive order placing a ninety day moratorium on immigration from countries deemed to pose a terrorist threat to the United States. I am grateful also for a recent essay by John Horvat II in which Mr. Horvat discusses what Thomas Aquinas says on the thorny topic of immigration.[1] Both of these essays have served as...

This column has more than once examined the sophistical method of popular neo-Catholic blogger Fr. Dwight Longenecker, who seems to specialize in advancing radically liberal positions under the guise of “conservative” Catholicism. Fr. Longenecker has now employed his method to neutralize the Vatican’s repeated instructions that homosexuals are not to be admitted to the seminary and, if detected, are not to be allowed to advance to ordination. In discussing the just-released document “The Gift of the Priestly Vocation” (Gift), Fr. Longenecker’s article begins by noting that Gift “re-affirmed the ban on the admission of homosexuals to seminary.” Indeed, the most...

The other day I saw a snarky comment about the legend of St Patrick casting all the snakes out of Ireland: “Thing is” said snarker “Ireland never had any snakes anyway. The climate is too damp and cold. Duh.” Duh indeed. The legend was never about snakes anyway. It was about serpents–meaning Satan and the demons. Hearing this legend and coming up with such a snarky comment is about as smart as reading the poem and saying, “That’s dumb. My love isn’t like a red, red, rose. I mean, she doesn’t even have thorns!” Patrick went as a missionary to...

Fr. Dwight Longenecker, posting on his“Standing on my Head” blog (appropriately named given the frequency with which pontifications seem to flow so freely from his other end), recently suggested that traditionalists (aka Catholics) are “getting old.” Obviously, he’s never been to a “traditionalist” gathering to witness the overwhelming presence of young, often quite large, families. “Not only are they dying out,” he wrote, “but their ideas are dying out.” It isn’t immediately clear what “ideas” he has in mind, but presumably he is speaking of such notions as the Social Kingship of Christ as taught with such stunning clarity by...

One of the sweet things about being a priest is being able to minister at a person’s deathbed. The veil between this world and the next is very thin at that point, and you can see so much. When I say you can “see” so much what I mean is that so much is revealed. At that point the person who is dying is usually very vulnerable and open. Their worldly facade is fading. Their accomplishments and pride are forgotten. They realize that all the stuff of this world will soon be left behind.Often the person is quietly sleeping. The...

Fr. Dwight Longenecker, in a fit of charity seldom demonstrated by the Internet Sanhedrin, recently asked: “Do we need Michael Voris?” In the lead up to the US presidential election, I watched quite a bit of Michael Voris, but ever since the election of Pope Francis, I haven’t been visiting The Vortex very often. Mr. Voris has a lot of interesting things to say, but it is mostly the same complaint about the bishops, and never seems willing to go to the heart of the matter. In fact, I spend more time on the Catholic Answers forum than I do...

>There have been some rumblings amongst traditionalist Catholics that Pope Francis is going to turn out to be a liturgical liberal. Apparently a few extremists are worried that Pope Benedict’s encouragement of the Latin Mass and his bringing back some of the older styles of clerical dress and papal customs are going to be thrown out in favor of happy clappy masses, clowns, balloons and big puppets.Everyone should stop and take a deep breath and get a sense of priorities. I am myself, on the more traditionalist side of the liturgy wars. I dislike anodyne, sentimental church music, a game...

Rod Dreher's recent defection to the Eastern Orthodox reminds all of us of the need to see the Church upside down in order to see it the way it really is.We converts from Protestantism find it difficult to shake the idea that the church should be what we expect it to be: a congregation of good people just like us. We have religious utopianism running in our Puritan veins. We expect the church to be made up of saints who are already perfect...just like us.Oh yes, in theory we say that we are all 'redeemed sinners'. We love to...

My conversion to the Catholic faith began in the world of Protestant fundamentalism. After being brought up in an independent Bible church, I attended the fundamentalist Bob Jones University. While there I became an Anglican; later, I went to England to become an Anglican priest. My pilgrimage of faith came to a crisis in the early 1990s as the Anglican Church struggled over the question of the ordination of women. By instinct I was against the innovation, but I wanted to be positive and affirm new ideas rather than reject them just because they were new. I decided to put...

Dwight Longenecker a graduate of Bob Jones University and a former Anglican priest is going to be ordained as part of the Pastoral Provision. He spent much of his life in England, but is back in South Carolina now. I reviewed his book Adventures in Orthodoxy before and so has Julie at Happy Catholic. I also recently read his St. Benedict and St. Therese: The Little Rule & the Little Way. He has a great Chestertonian way of looking at things and writing in such as way to make you look more closely to.On another note of former Anglican's now...

Despite attempts by modern biblical scholarship to debunk the gospel account of three magi visiting the newborn Jesus in Bethlehem, the stories were “historically true” according to extensive research by author Dwight Longenecker. In his new book, Mystery of the Magi: The Quest to Identify the Three Wise Men, Longenecker, a scholar and Catholic priest, states that an impartial study of the relevant data “shows beyond reasonable doubt” that the Magi of Matthew’s gospel were historical figures. For many years, Longenecker writes, skeptical scholars have rejected the possibility that the infancy stories about Jesus could be historical for a number...

Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor agreed that “tenderness leads to the gas chambers,” and what they were trying to get through our thick heads is that tenderness without truth is tyranny. As Rodney Stark has pointed out in The Rise of Christianity, the Roman Empire was a harsh, unforgiving, cruel, and relentless society in which to live. Women were little better than possessions, children were considered undeveloped human beings. Slavery, violence, bloodshed, and revenge mingled with fire, famine, flood, pestilence, and plague. In the midst of the horror Christians rescued discarded babies, despised abortion, loved their spouses, tended the sick,...

When Pope Benedict warned about “the Dictatorship of Relativism,” he meant it. Literally.This was hammered home not long ago when I was speaking to a group of students about the issue of same sex marriage. I prefaced the discussion with a description of relativism saying that this non-philosophy was now the mainstream, default setting in our society. “The way you can tell that relativism is mainstream,” I said, “is that there is no such thing as rational debate. In the absence of objective truth, there can be no debate, for a debate is dependent on the assumption that there...

Someone was joking recently that the reason the Eastern Orthodox cannot have women bishops is because one can’t call a woman “Patriarch.” Behind the wisecrack is some wisdom, and the existence of women ministers in non-Catholic denominations raises the question of just how patriarchal the Christian religion must be.  Is it necessary to call priests “Father” and refer to the Pope as “Holy Father”? The title “Abbot” comes from the ancient term “Abba-Father,” and “pope” comes from the Greek word pappas — “daddy.” Are these no more than human traditions? Are these just social constructs? Or is the idea of...

CHIPPENHAM, England, AUG. 18, 2004 (Zenit.org).- A Benedictine oblate and father of four has discovered how to relate the guidelines of St. Benedict to his domestic church. Dwight Longenecker, an American-born author and broadcaster who has lived in England for more than 20 years, penned his application of the Rule of St. Benedict to family life in his book, "Listen My Son: St. Benedict for Fathers" (Morehouse). He shared with ZENIT how the wisdom of the father of religious life can help modern dads humbly guide their families and provide loving discipline. Q: Briefly, what are the main tenets of...