anticlericalism

Onward Christian Soldiers

in anticlericalism, Politics 4 Comments Tags: ,

Commonweal is unhappy with Bishop Daniel Jenky of Peoria, who gave a talk to a Catholic men’s group calling them to defend the Church, citing Obamacare as an example of an attack on the Church

The offending remarks are:

The Church will survive the entrenched corruption and sheer incompetence of our Illinois state government, and even the calculated disdain of the President of the United States, his appointed bureaucrats in HHS, and of the current majority of the federal Senate.

May God have mercy on the souls of those politicians who pretend to be Catholic in church, but in their public lives, rather like Judas Iscariot, betray Jesus Christ by how they vote and how they willingly cooperate with intrinsic evil.

As Christians we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, but as Christians we must also stand up for what we believe and always be ready to fight for the Faith. The days in which we live now require heroic Catholicism, not casual Catholicism. We can no longer be Catholics by accident, but instead be Catholics by conviction.

In our own families, in our parishes, where we live and where we work – like that very first apostolic generation – we must be bold witnesses to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We must be a fearless army of Catholic men, ready to give everything we have for the Lord, who gave everything for our salvation.

Remember that in past history other governments have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches like the first disciples locked up in the Upper Room.

In the late 19th century, Bismarck waged his “Kulturkampf,” a Culture War, against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down every Catholic school and hospital, convent and monastery in Imperial Germany.

Clemenceau, nicknamed “the priest eater,” tried the same thing in France in the first decade of the 20th Century.

Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.

In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.

One of the chronic problems in Christianity is how to get or keep men attached to the church. One way is to awaken the protective instinct in men. Men who perhaps care little for religion, which they leave to priests, women, and children, will nonetheless rally to the defense of their community when they feel it is threatened, like the Irish toughs who fought the Know-Nothings.

Knights were among the first to do respond to this appeal. They often behaved liked murderous thugs, but responded to the call to reconquer the Holy Land and defend Christianity against the Moors. The clergy had tried to control knightly violence, without much success, and decided to send them off somewhere far away to fight the infidel. At least it made life easier for the long-suffering peasantry at home. But the results of the Crusades were not good, because crusaders  too often forgot to behave like Christians as well as warriors.

Jenky is not really comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin, but he is correct is that all three seemed to regard religion as something that occurred in the sanctuary, and only in the sanctuary. Stalin never tried to change the Orthodox liturgy or doctrine; therefore he claimed that the USSR had freedom of religion. Liberal secularists and totalitarians seem to share a common definition of religion, a definition with which Catholics and almost all Christians would disagree. Charitable works are not extraneous to the Gospel; they are part of the Gospel.

Could anticlericalism in the U.S. ever become as aggressive as it did in Europe?

I tend to doubt it, but constant government pressure for churches to change their attitudes might have the same effect – a soft totalitarianism, and I think this is what Jenky fears.

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Ye Shall Be As Gods

in anticlericalism, clericalism 19 Comments Tags:

Clericalism is destructive and provokes the reaction of an irrational and even murderous anticlericalism. In attempting to get the laity to pay some attention to what priests are telling them (not a bad idea), the Church has made some wild claims about the clergy.

     Innocent III claimed that scripture called priests gods: “‘Diis no detrahes,’ [Ex. 22:28] sacerdotes intelligens, qui propter excellentiam ordinis et offici dignitatem  nomine nuncupator” (You shall not revile gods, meaning priests, who are called by the name of gods because of the excellency of the order and the dignity of the office).

     This sort of rhetoric gave the clergy a severe case of the notions. St. Alphonse de Ligouri, a doctor of the Church, taught that “in obedience to the words of his priests – HOC EST CORPUS MEUM – God Himself descends on the altar, that He comes wherever they call Him, and as often as they call Him, and places Himself in their hands, even though they should be His enemies. And after having come, He remains, entirely at their disposal.” In 1907 the Rev. Pierre  Chaignon told his fellow priests that they were like Mary  “for the Word of God made flesh puts Himself under our control as He had put himself under hers and obeys us as He deigned to obey her.” In 1974 in The Faith of Millions: the Credentials of the Catholic Religion (Our Sunday Visitor) the Rev. John O’Brien claimed “The priest speaks and lo! Christ, the eternal and omnipotent God bows his head in humble obedience to the priest’s command.”  Such incredible pretensions could go to a priest’s head.The Rev. Edward Donelan of the Santa Fe diocese was the ultimate clericalist.  Someone who heard his Holy Thursday sermon reported that Donelan preached:

that a priest carries a terrible burden and responsibility in that they, from and above all other men, have been chosen by God as His priests; that during the consecration, the priest had the authority, and the terrible responsibility, to command God to be present at the altar; that God, because He had allowed this man to be a priest after the order of Melchizedek, must obey the priests and transubstantiate the bread and wine; and that we, the miscreant parishioners, must do everything we can to support our priests as they face this experience daily. Some of that sounds like good Catholic doctrine. Some of it sounds dangerous.”

It was very dangerous. Donelan thought that if he could control God, he could certainly control the bodies of the boys at his reform school, La Casa de los Muchachos. He sexually abused the boys until one ran away to escape the abuse and froze to death in the New Mexico Mountains.

     As Montes warned, divinizing a priest has catastrophic consequences. I also believe there is the matter of the First Commandment.

      One can accept the Catholic theology of the ministerial priesthood – yes, the priest is ontologically different from the laymen, because he receives a sacramental character which, like the baptismal character. Changes his soul permanently and therefore cannot be repeated. But the far greater sacrament of baptism does not have all the effects that clericalists claim for the lesser sacrament of orders. When a priest performs a sacrament, it is Christ who performs it – Augustine made that clear, in his controversy with the Donatists. And the church, like any organization, needs a government and good order and reasonable obedience. But Catholics seem to have a thirst of idols, and the clergy, including the popes, are too willing to be made into idols.

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Young Male Idiots

in anticlericalism, law enforcement, Masculinity 6 Comments

I often wonder at what age the male mind starts functioning in a rational manner (some women say never).

 

The NYT has an article on a young song writer who thought it would be hilarious

 

·       To sing an innocuous children’s song to a grade school class

 

·       Video their response

 

·       Go home and on his computer change the song to an obscene song

 

·       Show the kids as if they were reacting to his singing obscene lyrics and making obscene gestures

 

·       Post it on You Tube 

Mr. Emory, 21, an aspiring singer and songwriter, became a household name here last month when he edited a video to make it appear that elementary school children in a local classroom were listening to him sing a song with graphic sexual lyrics. He then showed the video in a nightclub and posted it on YouTube.  

His friends thought it was a scream. The police are taking a different view of the matter. He was arrested for child pornography and is facing twenty years and a lifetime on the child abuse register.

 

He is an idiot; but if all young male idiots were put in prison the world would rapidly empty out.

 

The conflict of young men and the clergy in France was a major contributor to anticlericalism. From the draft of my revised book:

 

Specifically masculine anticlericalism predates the Revolution. First of all was the battle of the village curé, as the agent of the Counter-Reformation and as the representative of the forces of decency and order, against the young unattached males, who, in France as elsewhere and always, were difficult to keep under control and to civilize. Philip Hoffman recounts this 1777 incident in the diocese of Lyon: a youth, Jean Marie Bonnefond, snitched a few cherries for the curé’s orchard. This was the last straw for the curé. The young men had been trampling his wheat and stealing his fruit. “Worse, Bonnefond was one of a number of youths who gathered each Sunday in front of the church to play the flute and pound on wine barrels.” On the day of the theft, the curé had asked them to stop because he was hearing confession, but the youths refused. The curé took a stick, pursued Bonnefond, and gave him a thrashing. The boy filed charges against the curé, who counterfiled charges, because Bonnefond and his friends “danced and sang defamatory songs in front of the curé’s house.”  In villages the youths would leave doing mass; the priests would lock the doors; the youths would break them open. The  curés also tried to put a stop to cruel sports at saints’ festivals — such a tying a goose up by its neck and then whacking it until it was decapitated — and tried to stop the male use of gang rape as a means to control the girls of the village. One has sympathy for the clergy.

Village louts were not the only ones to express their masculine dislike of the church. Even among the aristocracy, contempt shown the Church could have catastrophic consequences. Jean François Lefevre, chevalier de La Barre, was about nineteen years old when he was accused of blasphemy and sacrilege. He had sung blasphemous and bawdy songs, had refused to take off his hat for a religious procession and had (possibly) vandalized a crucifix.  For this he was tried in a secular court and condemned. The judgment declared on July 1, 1766 he   

will have the tongue cut out and will then be taken in the said tumbrel to the public marketplace of this city to have his head cut off on a scaffold; his body and his head will then be thrown on a pyre to be destroyed, burnt, reduced to ashes and these thrown to the wind. We order that before the execution of the said Lefebvre de La Barre the ordinary and the extraordinary question will be applied to have from his mouth the truth of several facts of the trial and revelation about his accomplices.

The Church had asked for a pardon for de La Barre, who was a victim of local intrigues. Voltaire was both horrified by an execution for adolescent folly and terrified, because when de La Barre’s room had been searched, in addition to some pornography, a copy of Voltaire’s Dictionaire Philosophique had been found, and the philosophes were being blamed for de La Barre’s conduct.The trial and execution did not endear either the philosophes or young men to the French union of state and church.

young males, irresponsibility, chevalier de La barre
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Freemasonry and the Sacred Crocodile

in anticlericalism, Freemasonry 22 Comments Tags: , ,

I am including a chapter on anticlericalism in my revised The Church Impotent.

 

When I was a student at St. Matthew’s Grammar School in Baltimore in the mid 1950s, I remember being told by a nun that Leo XII had a vision of Freemasonry. He looked at all the grades from the lowest to the highest, and fainted when he reached the top because there was the Head Freemason: Satan!

 

I recently came across the inspiration of this interesting story: Leo Taxil. Her is a bookseller’s summary of the career of Leo Taxil and his role in anticlericalism: 

Leo Taxil (ne Marie Joseph Gabriel Antoine Jogand-Pages), 1854-1907, was a piece of work. He was raised Catholic but turned against the Church at an early age and became a prolific author and publisher of scurrilous (and often semi-pornographic) attacks on the Catholic Church and the clergy. He attracted a considerable following in anti-clerical and Freethought circles throughout France. Thus, it was big news for his old following as well as for Catholics when, in 1885, he converted to Catholicism and renounced his past writings. His new main bugaboo was Freemasonry & he applied the same degree of venom and zealotry against Freemasonry that he had used against the church. Masons were corrupt, conspiratorial, followers of Satan, etc. Initially his conversion was accepted enthusiastically; he even had an audience with Pope Leo XIII. As time went on, however, his claims became increasingly grandiose. He announced that he had taken under his wing one Diana Vaughan, daughter of a prominent Freemason and descendant of the alchemist Thomas Vaughan, who had left the Order and denounced its Satanic orgies, etc. Diana’s stories became wilder and wilder and all but Taxil’s most fervent followers became increaingly uneasy Church officials began to ask for a public appearance with Diana telling her story herself. At one point Taxil revealed that Diana’s real father was Asmodeus and that, angered by a Freemason’s plot to kill his daughter, he turned the errant Mason into a crocodile who was forced to remain in his mansion playing the piano with the tip of his tail. The pressure became overwhelming and Taxil promised to produce the girl on April 19, 1897. The large crowd of Catholics and journalists was met with Taxil’s denunciation of their gullibility and the confession that the whole thing was a hoax. The Paris police got him out in one piece and he retired from the whole schmier.

Perhaps the piano playing aroused people’s suspicions. Of course it was entirely believable that a Freemason would be changed into a crocodile, but could a crocodile really play the piano with the tip of his tail? That seems a bit far-fetched.

 

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Women and Confession

in anticlericalism 27 Comments Tags: , ,

 

Crowhill makes the point:

There is a perspective on the problem of (heterosexual) abuse that I think Catholics avoid — for obvious reasons.

When a man gives a woman spiritual counsel, it is an intrinsically intimate thing and the possibility of sexual entanglement is very real. The husband is the head of the home and of his wife. When a priest gives “spiritual direction” to a married woman, he is usurping the husband’s place and creating sexual tension.

No man, priest or not, has any business giving spiritual counsel to any woman who is not his wife. And no woman has any business giving spiritual counsel to a man.

I have been researching anticlericalism. It is much milder in Protestant countries than in Catholic countries, where it sometimes becomes murderous.

 

A recurring theme in Catholic anticlericalism is the resentment and jealousy that the husband feels when his wife starts talking intimately to another man, whether in confession or spiritual direction.

 

Jules Michelet, the French historian, was horrified by this intrusion into the relationship of husband and wife. He objected to confession because priests asked detailed questions about sexual practices. One historian has observed that French disliked priests “because through the confessional, where the penitents were mostly women, they exercised power over men’s sexuality.”

 

A really sore point in France for Catholic men was contraception. If the married couple practiced coitus interruptus, the wife was blameless; the sin was solely the husband’s. The French bishops in 1870 at the First Vatican Council were going to ask the Council to allow priests to give absolution to a man if he was practicing coitus interruptus, but the Council adjourned because of  the political situation before the matter could be discussed.

 

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German Catholicism and Celibacy – A Short History

in anticlericalism, Celibacy, clergy sex abuse scandal, Germany, homosexuality, Masculinity, Moral Theology, Pope Benedict, Vatican 9 Comments Tags: , ,

 Supi, celibacy is going to disappear,and you can marry me – or?

 

German Catholics have long manifested a discontent with clerical celibacy. One of Luther’s first acts was to abolish clerical celibacy; Germans currently criticize Zwangszölibat, compulsory celibacy, forced celibacy. As Cardinal Brandmüller points out, the term Zwangszölibat misrepresents the discipline; no one is forced to be celibate.

 

Now a third of German theologians have come out asking for an end to clerical celibacy (and also demanding women priests and the acceptance of gay couples and divorced and remarried couples while we’re at it).

The appeal, published in newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s Friday edition, called on the church’s leadership to stop excluding gay couples and remarried Christians.

“The Church also needs married priests and women holding positions in the clergy,” the appeal said—in clear defiance of the Vatican’s dogmas.

In Germany theologians need the Vatican’s approval to hold chairs of Catholic theology, so this situatSupim cleibacy is going to disappear,a nd oyu can marry me, or…ion is ripe for conflict.

 

Josef Ratzinger himself at one time had asked for a discussion of the possibility of married priests.

 

The background of this conflict is the tension between German (and other national) Catholicisms and ultramontane Catholicism espoused by the Vatican, and behind that at least in part are conflicting images of masculinity: the one that sees sexual expression as an almost universal, necessary, and good aspect of masculinity and the other that sees celibacy as an expression of masculine self-discipline.

 

During the Kulturkampf in German (c. 1875) the Catholic Church was attacked as feminized and perverse. This accusation stung Catholic men, and a reform group in Munich, the Krausgesellschaft,  arose which tried to show that masculinity and Catholicism were compatible. 

 

 One of the aims of this group was the end of clerical celibacy, because it kept young men with healthy drives out of the priesthood and let in perverse types such as were exposed in a series of scandals around 1900 – scandals which turned out to be baseless. Furthermore, celibacy kept these healthy young German men from reproducing, and degenerate types, many of these Catholic reformers went on to say, were reproducing, and they should be sterilized. And German priests should produce German children because the Aryan race was the purest and most important race and the Jews were polluting it and… I think you can see where this ended up.

 

Historians have been puzzled why Nazism arose in Munich; later of course the conflict between Nazism and the Catholic Church was bitter, but at the beginning Catholic reformers – and remember, these were reformers –  were espousing naturalist and racial theories in Munich. The young Heinrich Himmler was a pious Catholic university student in Munich.

 

This is not to say that the current crop of German reformers are racialists or Nazis, but the Vatican has a long memory, and suspects with justice that demands for a change in the discipline of clerical celibacy often lead to demands for radical changes in Christian doctrine. The theologians who coupled  a demand for the end to clerical celibacy with a demand for the acceptance of homosexual couples have simply strengthened the Vatican’s determination not to make any major changes in the discipline of celibacy at this time. 

(The information about the Krausgesellschaft comes from Derek Hastings’ article  “Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany.”)

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Celibacy and the Mission of the Church

in anticlericalism, Celibacy 7 Comments Tags: , ,

In Männer Glauben Anders, Markus Hofer sketches the situation in the early church: the married men heading local churches and the wandering celibate missionary.

 

In Death Comes to the Archbishop, it is clear that the missionary priests must be celibate, because they have to be ready to go anywhere, into dangerous situations, on a moment’s notice. Celibacy can be lonely, especially for a missionary far from his native land and extended family, but it is necessary to spread the kingdom. The model of the celibate missionary won out in the Western Church, although it was not observed with great care. The constant legislation against clerical marriage and clerical concubinage indicates that priests were not following the discipline. For a priest who lived in a village his whole life it was hard to see the missionary purpose of celibacy.

 

After Ignatius of Loyola’s conversion, he established for his followers an intensely masculine environment in which they had to be ready to go anywhere at anytime to do the work of God. It was an adventurous masculine life, and obviously incommpatible with marriage. Ignatius would upset the local clergy in Spain when he arrived and tried to get the local bishop to enforce the discipline of celibacy.

 

The missionaries of the Church have an obvious connection with celibacy. While I respect married Protestant missionaries, I wonder how they can bring their wives and especially their children into dangerous environments. These do not have to be in the recesses of Africa or New Guinea. Many urban areas are dangerous, both in the United States and Europe. A priest in Naples who tried to keep young men out of organized crime was murdered by the Mafia.

 

Perhaps (and I emphasize perhaps) the missionary vitality of the Western Church as compared with the Eastern Churches is at least in part explained by the celibacy of it clergy.

 

As to celibacy being a sign in a sex-obsessed age – I don’t know. We do not know how often violations, even criminal violations, occur; but they get a lot of publicity and they discredit celibacy, and give evidence for the belief that celibates are hypocrites. However, I have been researching the anticlericalism of the Spanish Civil War, and the anticlericals had a special and intense hatred for truly celibate priests. Some priests were told their lives would be spared if they had sex; the priests refused to violate their vows and were shot – shot if they were lucky. Sexual torture was a favorite weapon of the Republican anticlericals.  So perhaps celibacy is a sign of contradiction, and a necessary one.

 

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The Best and Worst

in anticlericalism, clergy sex abuse scandal, priesthood, Spain 9 Comments Tags: , , ,

Pope Benedict  has approved the beatification of six more martyrs of the Spanish Civil War. Because they were martyred, a proof of a miracle is not required, only that they had been killed because of hatred of Christ and had forgiven their persecutors. 

About 2,000 more cases are wending their way through the Vatican. About 10,000 priests religious, and laity were killed during the war because of hatred of Christianity. It has been on the pope’s mind recently; although much of the criticism of the clergy and sexual abuse is fair, some of it begins to look like the anticlericalism of the Spanish Civil War.

 

I have been researching the backgrounds of clerical abusers in old newspapers. One, William Kuder, was loathsome. He abused a 9 year old boy with oral and anal rape, and used confession and threats to keep it secret.

 

Kuder can’t be blamed on dissent or Vatican II; he was ordained in the mid-1930s. He turned up in an old newspaper because he accompanied a black prisoner, who was Catholic, to the execution chamber.

 

On the same day, September 4, 1936, the newspaper headline was Spanish Premier Resigns Post: City of Irun Engulfed in Flames. The retreating Republican forces had set fire to the city (film of evacuation).

 

They did something else. 

In the early morning the monks of Fuenterrabia monastery had been shot by the defenders of Irun, Their bodies, clothed in white robes, could be seen lying on the roof of the monastery from vantage points in Hendaye [in France]. 

The Republicans also shot the bishop of Valladolid, who happened to be in Irun.

 

What to make of it? –  the wheat and the tares, the best and the worst. And how to sort them out?

 

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