The Apostate, the Heretic, and the Englishman

The title of this post is bigoted, xenophobic and offensive.

But it's where I used to come from. The pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Church was extremely bigoted. There was no salvation outside that Church (and sometimes even within it). You could not renounce your "faith". There just wasn't any box there to tick. And, of course, Irish Catholics were a shining example to all mankind.

The three characters referred to in the title, sounding like something out of a Batman comic, are all members of the Church of Ireland. In fact they are priests in that Church.

They are great people. They are tolerant (sometimes to a fault) and they are all reaching out to their congregations and beyond. Despite its heresies, impending schisms, and other undesirable characteristics, in my contact to date with the Church of Ireland I have found it to be a warm place.

The Apostate

My ninety year old cousin (many times removed and now finally departed) pointed him out to me. He used to be a Roman Catholic priest and is now a Protestant rector. I introduced myself and it wasn't long before I asked him the question that had been on my mind since he was first mentioned. Was he sensitive about having defected to the enemy? Would he mind me mentioning it in a piece I was doing on his church? Not a bother on him. He was open as the day is long. And when an occasion arose where I, an unbeliever, was faced with proclaiming the Gospel (well, epistle, really), from his altar, still no problem. I found this very refreshing, coming from my pre-Conciliar RCC background. As a child I would have been in a state of mortal sin the minute I crossed the threshold of such a forbidden building. And so would he.

The Heretic

I came across the Heretic online. His blog posts seemed like a rock of common sense and I commented on a few of them. A canon, and son of a bishop himself, his replies were as open and Christian as the Apostate's. I now interact regularly with him on Twitter and I think he owes me a pint.

The Englishman

I came across him online also. He was Rector of the Protestant church in my old parish, a place into whose history I have been delving for the past forty years. We swopped historical information online and I read his blog posts and his Sunday homilies. Again, while not sharing his faith, I encountered the same openess that marked the Apostate and the Heretic.

The Moral

After all this, who could blame me for taking a fancy to the modern version of the Church which oppressed my ancestors for centuries?

Watch your Back

Reflections on a talk by Fr. Jim Corkery SJ, entitled

“Speak Freely - but watch your back”
Dissent and dissenters in the Catholic Church today
This is one of a series of lectures in St. Mary's RC Church, Haddington Road. The lectures are open to all and are of a high quality. They were instituted some years ago by the Parish Priest, Fr. Paddy Finn, and the series will henceforth be known as the Patrick Finn Lectures in his honour.

Fr. Corkery's talk was subtle and complex and I would need a lot of time and a script in front of me to fully come to terms with it. He was walking a tricky line on a subject that is controversial, sensitive, and positively dangerous for those dealing with it from within the current Roman Catholic Church.

So I am not going to attempt to convey what he actually said. Instead, I will confine myself to setting out what I took away from the lecture. So this is a subjective account for which Fr. Corkery can not be held entirely responsible. [CDF please note]

Traditionally "dissent" has involved people who wish to bring down the institution from which they dissent. But there is now a new kind of dissent within the RCC which aims at redeeming, or improving, the institution itself. The term has occurred with increasing frequency in official church documents from only as recently as the 1990s.

A careful analysis of church documents suggests that it is in order to freely undertake research into matters doctrinal and theological provided this does not result in public dissent. However, in the modern age of mass communications and intrusive journalism, it is very hard, if not impossible, to keep things under wraps, so the private eventually becomes the public.

You might therefore think that the instruction injuncts complete silence where the results of any such research appear to conflict with the current teaching of the church (the mysterious magisterium).

However, if you really put your mind to it, it's not that simple.

In the first place, what is the magisterium. There are varying levels of certainty and compulsion involved in church teaching. There's the truly infallible stuff, requiring the presence of 5 conditions, including the formal declaration of the infallibility of the teaching concerned. The Pope can teach infallibly, under these conditions. And this has only been resorted to twice in church history (the immaculate conception and the assumption). Ecumenical Councils of the church can also teach doctrines infallibly. Then there are the secondary objects of infallibility, which I would term infallible derivatives, which must be firmly accepted and held. And finally there is a whole lot of other stuff, which is less important. This last category would arguably include Humanae Vitae which is an encyclical and belongs to the ordinary papal magisterium.

So if you have a problem you can have a go at limiting the range of the compulsory magisterium. To assist you here, you should bear in mind that earlier church teachings on the acceptability of slavery and on there being no salvation outside the church itself, which were vehemently imposed on the faithful, have, in fact, changed over time. Also, from being forbidden to engage in serious theological conversation with our heretic Protestant brethern, we are now encouraged to enter positive dialogue with them.

If challenging the breadth of the magisterium doesn't work, you can quibble over the question of public dissent. This is where the principle of double effect comes into play. As long as you can show you didn't set out to create a public fuss, you just might be able to construct a workable defence.

As the lecture was given on the 50th anniversary, to the day, of the opening of the Second Vatican Council, I had better not leave that out. One of the features of that Council was substitution of the hand me down hierarchical model of the church with a more inclusive and broader concept of the discerning of truth, with the Holy Spirit not simply revealing the divine will to the Pope in the privacy of his study, but rather operating in a more diffuse manner through the whole church. This is the idea of the church as the People of God and it carries with it the dangerous idea of reception (ie widespread acceptance) as a criterion for establishing truth. Tricky stuff, you'll have to admit. And it was sufficiently vague at the time to allow the Curia and the Pope to effectively ignore the Council and slide back into the old ways. However, now, 50 years later, questions are being asked.

So where does all this leave us. Some brave souls feel that the spirit of Vatican II is capable of being reclaimed and they are attempting to lead the church (including the ordinary faithful) along this path. Sadly, the silencing of many in this community of optimists suggests that those who currently hold the reins of power will not give it up without a bitter fight. They are already resorting to the modern equivalent of the inquisition.

So, in an attempt to confuse the enemy, I have awarded myself a NIHIL OBSTAT and an IMPRIMATUR. I understand, however, that, these days, even possession of valid versions of these splendid artifacts may not be a sufficient defence against Holy Supergag Orders from Vatican HQ.

So, speak freely, but watch your back.

Back to the Future

This post is part of Blog Action Day
What better definition of collegiality than The Power of We?

The trick is to make the We inclusive of all the "faithful".

Otherwise we're back to the future and the era of Pius XII which is becoming increasingly familiar in the way the RCC is moving.

"Holy Superinjunctions", as Batman's boy Robin might exclaim.

If we're going back we need to go back much further to the very beginnings of Christianity and the motto of the Three Musketeers, "one for all and all for one".

Introibo ...

This is Fr. Morgan Costello.

As a young altar boy I served a load of his masses and a few Easter ceremonies. He was a young likeable priest on his first assignment. This was in a convent where he was chaplain around 1960.

It was around this time that he started writing religious pamphlets for Veritas, the Roman Catholic publishing company. The first pamphlet was a biography of Saint Maria Goretti, a young girl who had been killed while defending her virginity against an attempting rapist.

He moved from there to Castledermot, where I visited him and had a cup of tea and scones.

He moved from there to St. Catherine's, in Meath St. in Dublin's Liberties. I had meanwhile acquired a printing press and got an order from him for a book of baptism certificate blanks, which I duly provided, and fully filled in versions of which are now, no doubt, spread around the city and beyond.

That was the last I saw of him, but I was aware that he was well regarded in the Diocese. At least I assumed that to be the case, as he had been chosen to advance the causes for the beatification/canonisation of Edel Quinn and Matt Talbot.

And there my unremarkable story ends.

Until, that is, during the week in the course of a chat about the baptismal font in St. Catherine's, I mentioned his name to a former colleague. I was shocked when he indicated that Fr. Costello had been involved in abuse in Meath St.

I didn't pursue the matter then, but, today, I googled him and was further shocked and upset to find him charged with repeatedly buggering a young man, who was working in the church, over a period of two years (1967-69). He appeared in court in January 2010 and the case was listed for a hearing on 30 July 2012. The State has since decided not to prosecute the case and it is terminated. The Director of Public Prosecutions does not give reasons for such a move. Morgan Costello is no longer listed in the Dublin diocesan directory.

So why am I posting this when I wasn't the one abused?

I don't really know the answer. The initial shock has turned to anger. And I suppose, in a way, it just brings further home to me that the rational, relatively friendly, world I lived in as a youth has been falling apart in the last few years.

I worked in Jersey (CI) in 1961 and fell in love with the place. Now I find that while I was there, rampant child abuse was taking place in Haut de la Garenne and other places.

The church I grew up in has turned out to be rotten at the core. Even though perpetrated by a minority of priests, the scale of child sex abuse was enormous. Central HQ and others covered it up, and, at a broader level, have held on implacably to power, giving two fingers to the Second Vatican Council and jackbooting the faithfull in the face.

And, of course, there was more abuse, outside church and state institutions, in ordinary homes the length and breadth of the country.

The political system of governance which I had thought a democracy, in the full sense of that word, has turned out to be a sham and a scam.

The European Union, which I initially found inspiring, and which was meant, among other things, to be a counter weight to the USA, has turned out to be the lackey of the war mongering mad max USA administration. It has also failed in its duty of care to its citizens and has created one of the most horrible messes, short of outright war on the home front.

So there really isn't a lot of my youth, outside of my own family, whose integrity has not suffered over the last decades.

... ad altare Dei, ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

Fat chance.

Pro Bono Publico

In 1932 the Lord Mayor of Dublin welcomed Cardinal Lauri, the Pope's envoy to the Eucharistic Congress, by kneeling before him and kissing the Cardinal's ring.

It was quite clear from the the Dublin City Council's address of homage which he presented to the Pope, during a visit to the Vatican in 1933, that the Lord Mayor considered he was speaking for all the citizens of Dublin, regardless of religious faith or denomination.

"Impelled by filial love, we, the members of the Dublin City Council, humbly prostrate at the feet of Your Holiness, tender, through our Lord Mayor, the homage and the unalterable fidelity of the Citizens of Dublin to the Apostolic See."

Now, fast-forward to 1998, when President McAleese is visiting Boston.

Cardinal Bernard Law had no problem telling her he was "sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as President" and went on to insult a junior minister who was accompanying the then president.

The President, a Roman Catholic in high standing, was not slow to point out to the Cardinal that she was the "President of Ireland and not just of Catholic Ireland".

The point at issue here was that, prior to becoming President, she had spoken in favour of the ordination of women to the Roman Catholic priesthood.

The Cardinal's arrogant attack was certainly in the mainstream Vatican tradition. But the President's response indicated how far we had come since 1932.

Then, the Lord Mayor, taking it upon himself to represent all the citizens of Dublin, was delivering the loyalty of non Roman Catholic citizens to the Pope.

Now, representing all the people of Ireland, the President was invoking her office in defence not only of non-Roman Catholics, but of those within the Roman Catholic church who might not go along with the increasingly regressive teaching of the Vatican.

Mary McAleese's Presidency ended on a high note with a visit to Ireland by Queen Elizabeth II. She has just published a book on collegiality in Canon Law, a topic the Pope and the Curia neatly subverted after the Council itself.

Cardinal Law exited Boston in disgrace over his part in covering up clerical child sex-abuse. He was subsequently fixed up with a job in the Vatican.

Peter Rocks

In these difficult times when women are definitively barred from the priesthood for all time, I would like to offer this newly discovered picture of Peter reassuring the two Marys that this would not be the case and telling them to go forth and bear witness.

Can you really look these three disciples in the eye and say the Vatican is correct in its ban and neither of these two ladies merit ordination.

The location was one of the holy halls of the capital city and the period as recent as the beginning of the second Vatican Council.

The Holy Ghost haunts the oddest of places, does he not?