Editorial
Age Old Fears and Calls for a 'New Church'


By Fr. Paul Stenhouse, M.S.C., Ph., D.

Catholics have sometimes been accused of over-emphasising what's wrong with the World, instead of looking for things about it to praise. I doubt that anyone who reads Annals regularly would find grounds for holding such a view.

However, I willingly admit to being impatient at the genuine or feigned ignorance of the so-called 'real' world, displayed by many critics of the Catholic Church. For that worrld, whether one considers it secular or numerous religious faces, has no belief in or sympathy for unequivocal truth. The unchallenged assumption upon which the world's imposing if precarious edifice stands, is that nothing is unequivocal. Hence the anger and frustration felt towards Catholicism with its dogmas, authority and belief in unchanging principles.

Elsewhere in this issue we carry a review by James Murray, our media writer, of Paul Collins's Papal Power: a Proposal for Change in Catholicism's Third Millennium. Suffice to say here that there is nothing new in this latest attack on the Papacy by an author whom reviewer Max Charlesworth 1 described as 'until recently an ABC luminary.'

Charlesworth applauds Collins for showing how fear of change has led to 'all authority and power in the Church... now (being) centred in the Pope and the Vatican bureaucracy' with 'papalism' now becoming 'a threat to the life of the Church itself.' 'Papal Power' has a long, if dubiously distinguished, literary and religious ancestry. It belongs with a myriad other works that in this century have aimed at the destruction of the papacy and the re-construction of Christianity along more 'democratic' lines: Alfred Loisy's My Duel with the Vatican; Charles Chiniquy's The Church of Rome: the enemy of the Holy Virgin and of Jesus Christ; and Fifty years in the Church of Rome; the Adventist prophet Ellen White's The Great Controversy: Nino Lo Bello's The Vatican Empire; Peter de Rosa's Vicars of Christ: The Dark Side of the Papacy; Michael Baigent's The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail - to mention only a few of the better known money-spinners that have concentrated on attacking the allegedly malign influence of the papacy and the Church of Rome.

These go many steps further than the infamous Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot (1713-1784) whose frontispiece illustration relegated theology to a remote twig on the tree of knowledge. Along with the secular world, many religious writers in the last moments of the second Millennium seems hell-bent on reducing theological truth – along with historical, moral and all other truths - to whatever the Market will bear.

Jean Messelier, Diderot's contemporary, proposed that 'the last king be strangled with the guts of the last priest' - a sentiment applauded by the proponents of the French Revolution, and by many of their modern-day counterparts who, given half the chance, and having abandoned all pretence of respect for 'Reason,' would enthrone Mammon in the very Sanctuary of God's Church.

The French revolutionaries' cries of 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity' cloaked an ineradicable intolerance for any views that contradicted their own: and a violence and hatred far surpassing anything they were allegedly opposing. Modern 'liberals' who call for 'abortion on demand,' 'euthanasia,' 'relativism in morals,' 'abolition of celibacy' and 'democracy in the Church,' are no more tolerant of dissent from their relativistic tenets, than was the dictator Maximilien Marie Isidore Robespierre.

Like that former Catholic of Irish origin who ruled France for a brief moment during the 'Terror,' they may well find themselves casualties of the 'reforms' they seek, on unhistorical grounds, to impose on others.

Diderot's Encyclopédie was meant by the publisher - Le Breton - who commissioned the work, to be a revision of Chambers Cyclopaedia (1727). In the hands of this able atheist what was meant to be a source of information became what has been described as 'an engine of war' 2 used in a veritable no-holds-barred campaign against belief in God, Catholicism and the monarchy. The anti-clericalism of former Catholics like Diderot and Gibbon, and their contemporaries, many of whom never lived to see the fruits of their labours in the unspeakable destruction wrought by the French Revolution, continues apace.

In our world of Hi-tech, micro-chips and fast food, priest-bashing has become a media event that is a guaranteed 'crowd pleaser'. Just as Jews have discovered to their sorrow that Jews make the most virulent anti-Semites, so modern Catholics are learning to theirs that former Catholics seem most dedicated to the virulent anti-Catholicism that is a feature of our times. None is more adept than the disaffected priest or religious or layperson. 3

British journalist Christopher Hitchens's mean-minded attack on Mother Teresa, 4 as 'a pernicious bigot' who 'has pledged (sic!) the propagation of a faith whose tenets descend from the worst excesses of the Counter Reformation; that she has garnered large amounts of global cash from her base in Calcutta, most of which has gone to extend and sustain the worldwide diffusion of a fundamentalist cult; that she... has happily laundered the proceeds of thieves,' and that 'hers is one of the great religious frauds of the century,' 5 will offend Catholics but it hardly surprises.

We are no longer surprised to find that Hans Kung accuses Pope John Paul II of having 'no understanding of modern life' and of using 'the practices of the inquisitors to muzzle opponents'. So we should be prepared for his apparent willingness to abandon belief in the Trinity and the Incarnation so that the 'liberal' message of Jesus about the one and only God may get through. 6

Gordon Urquhart's award winning entry in this netherworld of half-examined motives and half-truths is entitled The Pope's Armada: Unlocking the Secrets of Mysterious and Powerful New Sects in the Church. The author, described as a 'film direaor'. Attacks the Focolare Movement, and the popular Italian Catholic movement Communione e Liberazione, along with the Neocatechumenate.

Setting aside fulminations, fiction and ridicule, it appears that the principal reason these organizations are attacked is because the Pope approves of them, and because they have their 'administrative bases in Italy.'

The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart have been approved by the Pope, and we have our administrative base in Italy. Does our Congregation also fall under Urquhart's condemnation?

Can there be some hidden agendum behind Urquhart's tirades against the Pope and these Catholic organisations? It seems that there is; and that Urquhart's disaffection with these movements stems from his association with the Focolare Movement over a period of nine years. He apparently joined it as a young man, and was banned rather than helped by the experience.

Deplorable as that may be, is it any reason to launch into print with an attack on the Pope, and the hierarchical structure of the Church, with calls for some 'new' Church built along 'democratic' principles?

Is the undoubted pain that poor negroes, whites or hispanics feel in the US, a legitimate argument against democracy? Are the scandals rocking Buckingham Palace any kind of argument against the monarchy?

In an article predictably reprinted by The Canberra Times, 7 from The Guardian, Urquhart returns to the attack and looks forward to the time 'in which centralised authority will diminish and the local churches (will) finally be allowed to flourish as never before.'

Does Urquhart seriously suggest that the local churches have somehow been stifled by Papal authority? Most Catholics who have been privileged to experience pre- and post-Vatican II life in the Church would, I am confident, disagree. If Catholic life is being stifled it isn't because of the Pope; it is because of the unwillingness of some brought up on a diet of pragmatic, utilitarian and relativistic philosophies, to accept any authority other than their own in matters of faith and morals.

Local churches flourished in the past, and still flourish, wherever respect for the Universal Catholic Church's authority prevails, along with a love for her tradition – written and unwritten - and her laws. To think otherwise is to ignore history, or to re-write it.

- Paul Stenhouse, MSC

Footnotes

  1. South Australian Catholic. March 1997.
  2. See Chambers's Biographical Dictionary, ed. 1897, p.298.
  3. See 'Ode to a Lost Friend' by John Birmingham Good Weekend, The Sydney Morning Herald March 8, 1997. It commences 'The good father was drunk...'
  4. The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice. 1995.
  5. Nigel Spivey, 'All made of faith and service' in The September. November 11, 1995 p-52.
  6. Hans Kung, Judaism. 1992.
  7. Thursday August 1, 1996.


Associated Articles

From "Annals Australia" March 1997

Subscription Rates to "Annals Australasia" and "Catholic Answers to Bible Christians"


See "Annals Australasia's Un-official Home Page
What's New? at Sean Ó Lachtnáin's Home Page
Sean Ó Lachtnáin's Home Page