The Next Pope Should Clean House

The sooner, the better...

I have seen underneath the surface of the mainstream media coverage of the passing of Pope John Paul the Great, a curious counter-current aimed at diminishing the Pontiff's achievements during his reign. As far as the reporting goes, they represent but a dissenting trickle, but interesting still regarding their chosen pet peeves.

The Washington Times quotes some of them:

• Joy Barnes, head of the Women's Ordination Conference, a Catholic group that supports the ordination of female priests, said, "The church took significant steps backward in the struggle for women's equality" under John Paul.


• Linda Pieczynski, a spokeswoman for the liberal Catholic group Call to Action, blamed John Paul for having "created an atmosphere of fear and mistrust, particularly among theologians and liberal Catholics who would have liked freer discussion, particularly on issues of human sexuality."


• Mario Cuomo: "There are a lot of people who feel that rules with respect to women should have changed a long time ago," the Democrat said. "And the church does have the capacity to change. It always has when it felt it necessary. But it takes a long time. There's a lot of impatience with some Catholics."


• The Rev. Andrew Greeley, an outspoken critic of the Catholic hierarchy, accused John Paul of "repression" of dissent within the church, which he called "one of the great blunders in Catholic history…He tried to stabilize [the church] by resorting to the old techniques of repression," Father Greeley told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. "But it didn't work, and it destabilized the church even more, and it polarized it."

Another quote from the Cape Times captures one from the redoubtable Frances Kissling, President of "Catholics" for a Free Choice:

• "He will go down in history as a pope who didn't understand and who wasn't friendly to women...He couldn't have slammed the door shut more loudly on the question of the ordination of women. He will go down as a fifth-century pope in terms of who women are."

Speaking of "redoubtable" persons, we must mention dissident Swiss theologian Hans Küng, who summarized his position thusly:

• "In my view, Karol Wojtyla is not the greatest, but certainly the most contradictory, pope of the 20th century. A pope of many great gifts and many wrong decisions! To summarize his tenure and reduce it to a common denominator: His "foreign policy" demands conversion, reform and dialogue from the rest of the world. But this is sharply contradicted by his "domestic policy," which is oriented toward the restoration of the pre-council status quo, obstructing reform, denying dialogue within the church, and absolute Roman dominance. This inconsistency is evident in many areas. While expressly acknowledging the positive sides of this pontificate, which, incidentally, have received plenty of official emphasis, I would like to focus on the nine most glaring contradictions..."

What has happened to Küng? He used to be cool. I actually enjoyed reading his On Being a Christian. That book was still susceptible to orthodox interpretations or better still, I didn't do too much violence to traditional understandings. Apparently, Küng has inmatured with age and now all he can do is pout and screech.

These liberal dissidents dislike Pope John Paul because they didn't get their way. All of them invoke the "spirit of Vatican II" yet none of them can quote a single document from that Council to support their "reformist" positions even if their lives depended on it. They are nothing but a bunch of disobedient brats speaking in no one's name but their own. It is tragic that some of them are priests, like Father Greeley above, or Fr. Richard McBrien (not quoted here), whose book Catholicism I read with glee, even the unorthodox parts, because they were thought-provoking and pushed me to investigate what the Church really taught through the centuries about the issues that Fr. McBrien questioned directly or indirectly (i.e., the virgin birth, the bodily resurrection of Christ, the role of the theologians and their relationship with the Magisterium). Fathers Greely and McBrien, like Küng, also have inmatured with age.

The fact of the matter is that there could be only one authentic interpretation of the meaning of Vatican II and that was the pope's prerogative. Now, Pope Paul VI did not take upon himself the task of interpreting authoritatively and authentically the Council, and that created a vacuum that other eager "interpreters" moved to fill. That way lies Küng, for example. Now, when Pope John Paul II came along and said "No, you are not part of the Magisterium, you are not charged with guarding, keeping, and interpreting the Deposit of Faith, and by the way, your interpretations are nevertheless wrong and cannot authentically guide the Magisterium anyway," this clique found itself marginalized and angry that the Vatican II renewal was proceeding very with no need for their inputs and permissions.

Consider the issue of so-called "women's ordination." This issue is closed. Pope John Paul the Great himself said it back in 1994 in the Apostolic Letter Ordinatio Sacerdotalis and I quote:

Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church's divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment is to be definitively held by all the Church's faithful.

Proponents of the ordination of women are unable to take "no" for an answer and they keep pressuring, writing their little self-important manifestos, and agitating for unneeded, undesired and ultimately illicit change. They fail to understand that the Petrine Ministry of the Church is not in any way analogous to say, that of the Supreme Court in the American political system. Here in the US, those who disagree with a court decision can continue to agitate for years in the hope that some other court down the road will see things their way. Not so in the Church, where a definitive pronouncement from the Pope--as the above one certainly was--is irreformable of itself, cannot be undone by the next Pope, and does not depend on the consent of the faithful or of the bishops for its binding validity. Unless, of course, we throw Vatican I to the dogs in order to prop up the "spirit" of Vatican II.

In fact, if these disgruntled Catholic women feel so strongly that they are called to the ministerial priesthood, they must know--or they must be made aware--that their calling is not for the Catholic priesthood, but for something else. If there still apostolic authority within the Church--and we Catholics hold that there still is and will be until the end of time--then Jesus has spoken through Peter whose immediate successor the Pope is, objectively manifesting the will of His will on this matter, as well as the authentic interpretation of the relevant biblical passages and the evidence from the Fathers and Holy Tradition. That's not the prerogative of Barnes, or of Pieczynski, Greely, Keesling, etc. Is the prerogative of the Magisterium of the Bishops in union with the Supreme Pastor, the Pope. The dissident clique should learn their place.

These folks want to deconstruct the Church and disassemble her traditional self-understanding, and turn her into a bigger version of the Episcopal Church. They want to set the today's Church free from the self-understanding of the Church of previous centuries, and to effect a divorce from past understandings in discipline as well as in doctrine, if the will of the democratic majority of her members demands it. Or, if the people become apathetic or indifferent to change, then change will be imposed by an independent ecclesiastical judicial branch whose decisions will be based solely on self-referent canons to be interpreted according to the norms established by legal positivism.

You think I'm making this up? All you have to do is read the proposed "Constitution of the Catholic Church" supported by the "Association for the Rights of Catholics in the Church" (ARCC) to truly appreciate what these folks are up to.

This "constitution" is designed to destroy the Church's episcopal polity in place since the first Pauline communities to this day. The designers of this document injected the principle of absolute spiritual autonomy as a right for every baptized Catholic; it gives no weigh to the goal of pursuing a supernatural life and salvation. Its judicial system, as designed, will ensure endless litigation unto the ages of ages and, if the right of judicial review is asserted, it can nullify all other initiatives. This would be a body that the "reformists" will seek to control at all costs in order to perpetuate their vision and ultimately, their power. This "constitution" is a disastrous document, but it illustrates well where all these dissenters wish to take the Church.

But, what about abortion, euthanasia, human sexuality, etc.? All these matters are also closed: Roma locuta est, causa finita est. They belong to the doctrinal corpus of the Church and as such, they are not up for a vote!

Let there be no doubt. These agitpropagandists who in America and elsewhere keep trying to get their way stand in clear disobedience of papal magisterium and as such are morally outside the Church. What I propose is to formalize their exit. Good bye and good riddance.

Pope John Paul II took his job as Successor of Peter and Vicar of Christ very seriously and that's what rankles the liberal dissenters. Pope John Paul the Great rightly shut them off. If I fault Pope John Paul the Great for anything, is that he was too patient with these disobedient
brats. I hope and pray that the next Pope not be as patient and that, for the good of the Church, hastens the exit of Küng, Kissling et al. from the Church as soon as possible and the sooner, the better.

- Read "Liberal Catholics Condemn the Pope" in the Washington Times

- Read "Reformist women feel that the pope betrayed them" in the Cape Times.

- Read "The Pope's Contradictions" by Hans Küng in Der Spiegel.

- Read the "Constitution of the Catholic Church" at the ARCC's site.