A few weeks ago many Catholic blogs were abuzz with the news
that Archbishop Vincent Nichols of Westminster, England had attacked Catholic blogs, labeling them as vehicles of complaint and gossip. Of course that news
resulted in considerable push-back from Catholic bloggers, being eerily reminiscent
of similar charges
from high placed
clerics in Canada.
Why is this story important? I believe it is important in
that it reveals something very flawed—even insidious—about Catholic clergy who
regard the laity (at least the ones with some opinion and/or influence) as some
kind of uninformed and nuisance peasantry that needs to discover its place and
keep silent. How very convenient that would be! Read the article
and follow through on all the links to get a fuller picture.
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Episcopal Attack on Catholic
Bloggers, But we will not hold our tongues: And Aquinas and Newman are with us
‘If
the faith is in imminent peril,’ said St Thomas, ‘prelates ought to be accused
by their subjects, even in public.’ What a blogger he would have made…
Not
for the first time in his own indispensable blog, Protect the Pope, Deacon Nick has drawn
our attention to another attack on Catholic blogs, coming from a familiar
prelatical source.
In a
homily given during the Diocese of Westminster’s recent Mass following the
election of Pope Francis, Archbishop Nichols quoted the new Pope’s reflection
on the disciples complaining on their journey to Emmaus and extended it to make
it look as though Pope Francis had been criticising Catholic blogs for
spreading complaints and destroying love in the Church.
“Pope
Francis,” he said, “has already identified two kinds of behaviour that destroy
love in the Church. They are complaining and gossiping. He is a practical man.
He knows that we live in a society in which complaining and gossip is a
standard fare. They sell newspapers and attract us to blogs because we love
hear complaints and to read gossip. But Pope Francis is clear: they should have
no place in the Church.”
What,
blogs? Pope Francis was saying that blogs should have no place in the Church?
But he doesn’t say anything at all about blogs. “We, as Catholics,” concluded
the archbishop, “are always ready to profess our love for the Lord. But now
Pope Francis is calling us to show that love in down-to-earth ways. How
wonderful it would be if our Church was known to be a place that was free of
the sound of complaining and the whisper of gossip! Then the light of Christ
would indeed shine brightly.”
Free
of the sound of complaining, eh? No blogs, eh? But as Deacon Nick points out,
Pope Francis’s reflection on complaining was actually about difficulties in our
life of faith, and not about complaints about the Church and the way it is
conducted. The Holy Father said this: “I think that many times when difficult
things happen, including when we are visited by the cross, we run the risk of
closing ourselves off in complaints… They were afraid. All of the disciples
were afraid,” he said. As they walked toward Emmaus and discussed everything
that had happened, they were sad and complaining. “And the more they
complained, the more they were closed in on themselves: they did not have a
horizon before them, only a wall,” the Pope explained.
I was
wondering what Catholic blogs the archbishop had in mind; then I read this
comment by Deacon Nick: “Archbishop Nichols has pushed Pope Francis’s words
beyond their original meaning to express his own personal desire that ‘the
Church would be free from the sound of complaining’. Here Archbishop Nichols’s
words echo his intemperate demand that faithful Catholics complaining about the
Soho Masses should ‘hold their tongues’. Is this the silence that he hopes for
in the Church of England and Wales?”
Who
knows? – but I have good reason to believe that that remark about critics of
the Soho Masses “holding their tongues” was aimed at this particular column
among others. So one has to ask again what the duty of a layman is when he
firmly believes that duly constituted local authority is setting itself against
Church teaching. The usual response on such occasions is rightly and appositely
to quote St Thomas Aquinas’s famous dictum: “If the faith is in imminent peril,
prelates ought to be accused by their subjects, even in public.” St Thomas also
said that “Augustine says in his Rule: ‘Show mercy not only to yourselves, but
also to him who, being in the higher position among you, is therefore in
greater danger.’ But fraternal correction is a work of mercy. Therefore even
prelates ought to be corrected.” [Summa Theologica II, II, q. 33, a. 4, Sed
Contra].
One
could also recall Newman’s writings about
various times in the history of the Church when it was the faithful rather than
their bishops who were the defenders of faith, times when “there was a
temporary suspense of the functions of the ‘Ecclesia docens’, when, “the body
of Bishops failed in the confession of the faith. They spoke variously, one
against another; there was nothing, after Nicæa, of firm, unvarying, consistent
testimony, for nearly 60 years. There were untrustworthy Councils, unfaithful
bishops; there was weakness, fear of consequences, misguidance, delusion,
hallucination, endless, hopeless, extending itself into nearly every corner of
the Catholic Church. The comparatively few who remained faithfu1 were
discredited and driven into exile; the rest were either deceivers or were
deceived.”
You
may say that things are not so desperate now: but are there no bishops who, for
instance, allow known and blatant heretics to teach the faithful, with their
support and within the curtilage of their own cathedral? We know that there are
many and that precisely this has happened here recently: and that the official
teachings of the Roman Catholic Church, in what is still a post-conciliar
period, are lightly regarded or set at nought by some in positions of authority
in our own Church. The times we are living in are not so very far from the
history of the Church in the times Newman so famously
described in Arians of the Fourth Century.
“The
episcopate,” he wrote, “whose action was so prompt and concordant at Nicæa on
the rise of Arianism, did not, as a class or order of men, play a good part in
the troubles consequent upon the Council; and the laity did. The Catholic
people, in the length and breadth of Christendom, were the obstinate champions
of Catholic truth, and the bishops were not… on the whole, taking a wide view
of the history, we are obliged to say that the governing body of the Church
came short, and the governed were pre-eminent in faith, zeal, courage, and
constancy.”
Can we
not say something similar – not about all the bishops or about all the
laity, but certainly about many of them – to describe the English Church over
the last 30 years and more? There is, certainly, good reason for hope today,
largely because of the pontificate which has now, regretfully, come to a
premature end. But until these hopes come to fruition, the laity should not “hold
their tongue” when they believe that the faith is in peril through the actions
of those set over them. Certainly, I shall not, for as long as my arthritic
fingers can, even feebly, still press down on the keyboard.
Dr William Oddie is a leading
English Catholic writer and broadcaster. He edited The Catholic Herald from
1998 to 2004 and is the author of The Roman Option and Chesterton and the
Romance of Orthodoxy.
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