A political party is not a church. Subtracting numbers for purity leaves you on the outside looking in. A church is not a political party. Subtracting purity for numbers leaves you on the outside looking in.

An Associated Press article intimates that Father Thomas J. Reese's decision to resign as editor of the liberal Catholic publication America came as the result of Vatican pressure. The piece notes that during Reese's recent trip to Rome a superior had "mentioned there had been complaints about a couple of articles." It doesn't offer any proof that Rome forced Reese to depart, although the entire tone of the article suggests it.

The famous Cardinal Ratzinger t-shirt explains, "Putting the Smackdown on Heresy Since 1981." While the pope's friends and foes benefit from laying Reese's resignation at his feet, there is no evidence suggesting that he compelled the liberal Jesuit scribe to leave the magazine America. Reese himself, in his resignation letter, makes no such charge. The fact that his successor, Father Drew Christiansen, shares Reese's left-wing views makes it unlikely that any such Rome-engineered coup occured.

But what if it did? Does not every church have the right to lay out its beliefs and have those beliefs accepted or rejected? If Thomas Reese wishes to start his own religion with women priests, divorce, homosexual marriage, and a clergy of the laity, he's entitled. He's not entitled to glom on to a two-thousand-year-old religion and hijack it for his own ends.

There's already a number of religions preaching the gospel according to liberals. Rather than join those sects, liberal anti-Catholics focus their energies on shutting down the religion that so offends them. Just as Unitarians have the right to remove believers in God from their pulpits, Catholics have the right to choose their own spokesmen based on their own beliefs.

I am no longer Catholic. But my understanding is that while the Pope is elected, the Church itself is NOT a democracy. He has absolute authority over church doctrine does he not?

Be well,

Sponge

Sponge,

Not exactly. If a Pope wanted to, say, change the Church's teaching on the immaculate conception and deny that Mary was born without original sin, he could not do so.

The Pope has broad doctrinal authority, but not unlimited authority.

Perhaps someone can help me understand the psychology of so-called pious dissenters. Buchanan attempted to do so late last month (http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=43966)

a second question: Assuming of course that there is no third testament, no new revelation (beside the personal revelations of Mary), do liberal catholics believe the holy spirit is working through them a manifestation of a new testament? Is that theologically possible? that is to ask, can the holy spirit work in opposition to the chosen and already revealed work within the magisterium?

perhaps 'short' has thought about these questions.

Hi yeti: I don't think the Marian apparitions and prophesies (e.g., about the Russia in the 20c.) count as revelation. As far as I understand it, there is no new revelation in the technical sense after the deposit of faith in the church of believers lead by the apostles (including its expression in scripture etc etc).

To the extent that people who proclaim to be Christian contradict this basic, infallible, and ancient revelation they are not actually Christian. And that certainly goes for the really lefty "Catholics" who would just as soon worship the pantheistic Great Spirit as they would the Trinity. But it also goes for each one of us -- insofar as we sin, we are in material denial of the truth of the faith, and therefore to that extent are not Christian.

Yes, I think the real radicals, the extreme "pious dissenters" think that God is working through them towads a development of the faith. Perhaps they are the new John the Baptists for a new, post-Modern universal faith in nothing offensive (and nothing special).

thanks short. However, it is the Church's position that the Marian apparitions (those that have been approved/accepted -- I'm unclear as to the technical theological claim being made) are to be considered private revelation, and for that reason Catholics are under no obligation to believe in them. Though, I would say, that after God becoming man, they are far easier to believe.

Your second point about the pantheistic spirit brings me to abother question: to what extent does the enlightenment (specifically the french kind) play in interpreting Vatican II? Surely we would agree that the impetus for the council's formation is to respond to the enlightenment (i.e., defend the deposit of faith against its violent assault), and if that is the case, how best to read its commentators--do they or do they not respond to the enlightenment? I ask because of the recent comments of B16 on the threats to Europe and because of the reviled work of Cardinal Ratzinger.

First up: I am not competant to answer these questions, but I'll give you my hunches.

Point taken on the personal revelation vs. doctrinal revelation, but I'd like more explanation... maybe later.

About V2: I take it as a reponse to modernity in general and the modern world -- not just to the enlightenment, which to me exemplifies one aspect of modernity. But it's not clear to people how/that in V2 the Church is refuting modernity... While V1 was quite explicitly anti-modern, and V2 was supposed to be a completion of V1, people act as though in V2 the Church was adapting to modernity. This is allowed by a shift in rhetorical stance, I think. While in V1 they basically said "NO, NO, NO!" to modernity, in V2 they try to express often the same doctrine more subtly: they seem to go for a "Yes, OK, but also..." attitude. (The only point where this doesn't hold at all, I think, is on religious freedom, which is a clear shift in a non-fallible position.) This means that lot's of the commentators from the left, as far as I know, can pretend that V2 was a departure from tradition, and the whole generation seemed to assume (because it was the 60s) that there was more to follow. (And they have waited their whole lives for this "more to follow.") In other words, I think the lefties take V2 as a partial acceptance of enlightenment/modern views, to be completed later. That saves them from ever having to think critically about the enlightenment/modernity.

They view V2 as a promise that the Church, too, will enter their progressive view of history, and become modern as most other institutions have. I think Ratzinger was reviled partly because he didn't view V2 as a first stage in a process of radical change in the church.

I saw the story on Reese and found it odd myself that it was written about as if it could have been some smackdown by Rome. I am hopeful that there will be a shift towards that in some areas (particularly regarding those teaching theology in Catholic schools and the organization in general of seminaries) but I doubt that the editor of a Jesuit magazine in the U.S. was forced out by the Vatican because of problems with some of the articles published in it. I don't see Benedict interfering with the running of thet journal in any direct or hardly any indirect way at all.