Readers of this blog will have seen herein the following passage from S John Henry Newman on a number of occasions:
"There was a temporary suspense of the functions of the 'Ecclesia docens'. The body of Bishops failed in the confession of the Faith. They spoke variously, one against another; there was nothing, after Nicaea, of firm unvarying, consistent testimony, for nearly sixty years. There were untrustworthy Councils, unfaithful Bishops; there was weakness, fear of consequences, misguidance, delusion, hallucinations ... extending itself into nearly every corner of the Catholic Church. The comparatively few who remained faithful were discredited and driven into exile; the rest were either deceivers or were deceived.".
I am grateful to Professor Tighe for sharing with me a paper by Professor Tracey Rowlands which takes off from this point (The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review, Volume 87, Number 2, April 2023, pp. 233-254 (Article)). It contains a great deal of plain very good sense about this Synod business. I propose to offer you some snippets. But every word of her paper is eminently worth reading.
... one of the common criteria for selection as a synod delegate has been employment by the Catholic Church. Synods are very time-consuming events and those chosen to attend are not paid to do so. Most working Catholics or Catholic mothers rearing children do not have the ability, either in terms of time or financial capacity ... those already on the Church's payroll have no such problems.Yet being on the payroll of the Church is scarcely synonymous with an education in the Church's theological tradition, or even with regular Mass attendance or familiarity with Sacred Scripture ...
... this is especially so in countries where the Church is comparatively wealthy and manages numerous institutions, such as Germany and Australia ...
More bureaucracy--not more sanctity--is the proposal of many advocates of synodality.
Some lay Catholics argue that the two classes in the Church today are not the clerics and the laity, but the bureaucrats (lay and clerical) and the nonbureaucrats.
[Nobody] becomes a sportsman as a result of being deeply involved in the structure of the Olympic Committee [Ratzinger].
The worst thing about Nazism was not that it was lacking in democratic elements, but that it elevated itself beyond the Ten Commandments
... the general attitude is that more bureaucracy, not more sanctity, is the solution to this problem.
Newman quoted St Jerome as saying that by A.D.361 'nearly all the churches in the whole world, under the pretence of peace and the emperor, are polluted with the communion of the Arians'.
... [a] dominant group is comprised of people who wish to base ecclesial governance upon the latest fashionable practices in business management schools.
7 comments:
Is Prof Rowlands's article available online? If so, could you let us have a link?
Well said, Professor Rowland [sic].
Tracey Rowland, Father.
Yes, the ecclesial equivalent of the impersonal, soulless, and dictatorial "managerial state" of which Samuel Francis writes. It is the most insidious tool of tyrants, for who can hold accountable faceless bureaucrats hiding in anonymous committees making decisions for people they do not know and likely do not care for. So, the personnel for the heretical revamping of Catholic Truth and moral will be in place and it will be very difficult to point to real culprits or to even resist them. How right a certain much-calumniated French archbishop was about the impossibility and dangers of dealing or co-existing with these monsters. In due time, the "approved" traditional orders will learn that they are merely down the hit list of the heretics but not exempt from it---the lovely success of St. Mary's Warrington and others not-withstanding. A masterstroke from the Father of Lies.
The whole of Prof Rowland's article is available only to those who are "authenticated"; i.e. who have their own login and password to Project MUSE. However,in lieu of an abstract, there is a brief excerpt of the content at this link:
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/16/article/893499
This has to be the least surprising news of 2023. The lay participants in the Sin Odd are hand picked Church employees who can be relied on to follow any party line?
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