Following on from my previous post, there is almost no end
to the reasons why I'm not going to join the Ordinariate. The business we are
engaged in at Swanvale Halt – attempting to build bridges between the Catholic
tradition as the Church of England has experienced it and the modern world, and
translating the one in terms that the other can understand – seems to be a
creative and worthwhile exercise, and one which enthuses me. I don't want to go
anywhere else, and it certainly doesn't seem to me that the eternal fate of my
soul or those of the people here depends on denominational boundaries.
Sometimes I regard the ranks of the Roman Catholic
congregation at Swanvale Halt making their way into the church, and find myself
envying their commitment, eclecticism and internationalism, but that's all I
envy. It only takes a brief excursion into the wastelands of conservative Roman
Catholicism to remind me why I don't want to go there, however much sympathy I
may have with that way of doing things in liturgical terms. I did this a couple
of days ago, and realised yet again how the blog of the New Liturgical Movement
may be a helpful resource for recondite liturgical information or historical
detail, but anything more ideological is deeply depressing. So this articleargues that the Synods on the Family convened by Pope Francis are the 'logical
continuation and completion of the conciliar reforms', that is, the changes in
ritual consequent on Vatican 2; alter the services and you end up being not
quite as horrible to gays as the Church has been in the past, which is of
course a terrible, terrible thing.
I am shocked that I am still shocked by things at my
advanced age, but discovering the views of the NLM's poster-boy Cardinal
Raymond Burke (whose liturgical activities are avidly reported on the blog)
about gays did catch me out. It's one thing to regard it as impossible for two
people of the same sex to celebrate the sacrament of matrimony (which is my
line). It's another to view State promotion of same-sex marriage as wrong. It's
another, still, to regard homosexual acts as sinful. But it strikes me that you
can hold all, or any, of these beliefs, and still not argue that homosexuals
should be ostracised by their families – or ‘discouraged from attending family
occasions such as Christmas', as Cardinal Burke put it. The mere presence of
sinners normalises sin, I suppose the idea is, and so the family as the core
unit of value-formation must be kept clean and pure from such behaviour. Where such
cruelty, even within its own terms, leaves a Lord who‘sits and eats with
sinners', I am at a loss to understand.
None of this has anything to do with the Gospel of Jesus
Christ. It's about defending the integrity of the tribe, and if the Pope, as
totem of the tribe as well as its titular chief, questions the nature and
purpose of the tribe and its rites, the tribe reels and clutches its head and
contemplates an act of expiatory violence. Mr Kwasniewski in the article cited above
castigates Pope Paul VI for his ‘scandalous’ attacks on the Latin Mass, and by
implication Pope Francis for his apostasy from Catholic truth (Francis notoriously removed Cardinal Burke from his judicial role in the Vatican and gave him an entirely honorary position looking after a chivalric order). If the basis of
your ecclesiology is that the magisterium of the Church is guided by the Holy
Spirit, and also that it chooses the Supreme Pontiff under the guidance of the
same Spirit, is there not, to say the least, some cognitive dissonance involved
in this business of picking which Popes you like and which you don't? Isn't
this, effectively, chaos, Protestantism, in which only the monomanic voices of
the Sede-Vacantists offer a logical way out?
My interlocutor of a few days ago seemed quite well disposed
towards Papa Francesco; but I'm not going to go anywhere near all this. The Church
of England seems to me, for all its ambiguities and shabby compromises, to have
got the Gospel so much more right. I'd rather have the arguments I have here
than the bitterer arguments I'd surely have on the further bank of the Tiber.
No comments:
Post a Comment