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I am certainly most happy that someone authoritative has chosen to take on the increasingly noxious and obnoxious Cardinal Schoenborn - him with the slimy smile that represents hypocrisy at its worst, he to whom the adjective 'Slytherine' immediately comes to my mind, referring to the infamous Hogwarts house Slytherin whose members are chosen by the Sorting Hat because they represent cunning, resourcefulness and ambition, and a highly developed sense of self preservation, and whose symbol is, of course, the slithering serpent.
I probably dislike 'the Graf' (German for the title 'Count'), as Fr Hunwicke likes to refer to him, as much as I dislike Bergoglio, and am therefore equally prejudiced against him a priori. But he still carries a lot of weight in the media because after all, he has been on everyone's list of papabile in the past two decades, but since AL, more because Bergoglio has publicly made him his theological reference point, who promptly rubberstamps all of the papal heterodoxies and near-heresies as being 'orthodox' and therefore reassures Bergoglio that he has not so far crossed the line into material heresy.
Therefore, when the man who chaired the editorial committee of the 1992 Catechism of the Catholic Church says anything these days that has to do with the Church, one must assume he is not merely advancing his own ideas but floating out Bergoglian initiatives to test the waters, as it were... Ed Peters reacts to Schoenborn's latest floater - and one can understand that with Lettergate followed closely by Hellgate, the 'Goad and insult' offensive and by Barrosgate, few have really taken notice of the Graf's latest foray at being Bergoglio's canary in the coal mine, if you will excuse my mixed metaphors.
Should one take Cardinal Schönborn’s
comments on female ordination seriously?
April 11, 2018
Symptomatic of a society experiencing a breakdown of its order are, among other things, casual assertions by prestigious figures within that society that, if taken according to the plain meaning of their words, are deeply opposed to fundamental values within that society, but which, though uttered, raise nary an eyebrow among those charged with care for that society.
Recent comments from Viennese prelate Christoph Cardinal Schönborn, apparently supportive of ordaining women, are opposed, I suggest, to at least three fundamental ecclesiological values but they have occasioned, as far I have seen, no correction whatsoever from Church leadership, and thus seem to be a chilling illustration of the erosion of order in the Church.
Consider, please.
Apparently Schönborn holds that “The question of ordination [of women] is a question which clearly can only be clarified by a council. That cannot be decided upon by a pope alone. That is a question too big that it could be decided from the desk of a pope.” There are least three serious errors in these remarks, all them ecclesiological, and all of them (assuming we are to take cardinals giving formal interviews at their word), quite disturbing.
First, the possibility of ordaining women to the priesthood (and episcopate) was definitively ruled out on ecclesiological grounds by Pope John Paul II in Ordinatio sacerdotalis (1994) n. 4 when he declared that that "the Church has no authority whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women”. [Not an argument at all to be used with Bergoglio who blithely overruled JPII's 'last word' on communion for RCDs in Familiaris consortio!]
Whatever additional sacramental, Scriptural, or historical arguments against female ordination John Paul II could have relied on, he framed his conclusive ruling against female sacerdotal ordination in terms of the Church’s in-ability confer such orders on such persons. Schönborn’s claim, therefore, that female “deaconesses, female priests, and female bishops” could someday happen is to contradict a central ecclesiological assertion set out in Ordinatio.
Second, for Schönborn to say that a pope cannot, on his own, rule 0n (specifically, against) the possibility of female ordination is directly to challenge a pope’s authority in the Church as set out in Canon 331, specifically, that the pope “possesses supreme, full, immediate, and universal ordinary power in the Church, which he is always able to exercise freely.”*
* Canon 331 draws heavily here from Lumen gentium 22 and Christus Dominus 2, both of which conciliar documents Schönborn himself cited in crafting the accurate description of papal authority that he provided for the Catechism of the Catholic Church nn. 882 and 937.
Given that John Paul II ruled (yes, from his desk, gasp!) that the Church had no power ordain women to priesthood and that his ruling was “to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful”, Schönborn’s statement, I suggest, directly denies the authority of the pope to issue such an ecclesiological teaching and/or such a directive to the faithful.
Third, in the same breath wherein he denies the authority of a pope to rule as John Paul II ruled, Schönborn claims that the female ordination question (humoring him that there even is such a question in regard to the sacerdotal state) can only be decided by an ecumenical council, committing thereby, I suggest, the ecclesiological error of holding ecumenical councils to be superior to popes and coming thereby perilously close to crossing a line that few modern canonists thought ever could be crossed, that one marked out in Canon 1372, which states “A person who makes recourse against an act of the Roman Pontiff to an ecumenical council or the college of bishops is to be punished with a censure.”
Now the modern Canon 1372 had, as it happens, a Pio-Benedictine predecessor norm, 1917 CIC 2332, which read as follows: "Each and every one of whatever status, grade, or condition, even if they are regal, episcopal, or cardinatial, appealing from the laws, decrees, or mandates of the Roman Pontiff existing at that time to a Universal Council, are suspected of heresy and by that fact incur excommunication specially reserved to the Apostolic See …" .
The great Swiss/American canonist Dom Augustine, commenting on Canon 2332 (in his Commentary VIII: 327-328), granted that appealing to a general council rested on a theory that was “absurd” and “ridiculous”, adding that such an attempt would be “neither excusable nor intelligible”. He observed, in any case, that even cardinals could be charged under its terms and that “it makes no difference whether the general council appealed to is in session or to be held in the future”. Finally, said the scholar, the papal act being contested could be any papal “decree, either dogmatical or disciplinary.” Ordinatio, clearly, is a papal act both dogmatic and disciplinary.
In sum, that such comments, coming from one of the most prestigious figures in the Church today, comments that, if understood according to their plain sense, expressly impugn the sufficiency of a prominent papal act, deny the capacity of a pope to issue such rulings on his own, and imply that an ecumenical council is the only authority that could decide certain ecclesiological matters, that such comments, I say, have not elicited, as far I can tell, a single fraternal correction, is, I think, a sign of how urgently a restoration of order in the Church is needed.
Unless, of course, Cdl. Schönborn is not to be regarded as one who says what he means and means what he says. [Slytherine that he is, surely Schoenborn gave due consideration to each and every word he said and how he said it - this is all by express design. Consider the timing too. Just when some Latin American commission has told the pope he ought to call a synod on the role of women in the Church! Nothing subtle at all about these orchestrations towards the next great Bergoglian initiative - WYMYN PRYSTS!
I really couldn't care less if the Graf makes an ass of himself all over the place - as with his pre-James Martin coddling of LGBTs and hosting a 'seance' for one of the Medjugorje 'seers' in the Cathedral of Vienna (I believe Our Lady missed her 'daily' appointment with the seer on that day). But I care very much, indeed, because he drags Benedict XVI with him into these roiling insalubrious waters, since the media still bill him as 'Ratzinger's star pupil' or 'Ratzinger's protege' - in fact, I think he is still president of the Foundation established by the Ratzinger Schuelerkreis to carry on their objectives). Imagine that he is now the anti-Benedict anti-Catholic pope's theologian du jour!
And BTW, to Carl Olson and Jeff Mirus and all those well-meaning and highly intelligent commentators who insist on praising Bergoglio for the Catholic parts of the "Goad and insult' document, aren't you missing two very important points?
1) Do you really care about the thick and fluffy fancy icing on a cake when all it does is camouflage all the nasty arsenic barbs within? and
2) Should you not hold an author responsible for making a call to holiness when he is himself the prime generator of all the unholiness simmering and burbling in the Church today, and for a lot of personal nastiness that he does not hesitate to indulge in, even in a document that is supposedly a call to holiness? Does this blatant hypocrisy not bother you at all?
Father Scalese had far less technical because far more general objections to the Graf's assertions.
So Cardinal Schoenborn says, echoing the pope:
'Doctrinal development does exist'
Translated from
April 9, 2018
In recent days, Sandro Magister has published on his blog a post in which he showshow Pope Francis uses three different methods to communicate what he wants to:
- By saying so himself in public what he wants and what he thinks without any control or prior verification;
- By making others say in public what he tells them in private conversation; and
- By recommending that the world listen to persons who say what he himself has not said in public or in private, but wants it to be said anyway. [In other words, his basic communications tactic and strategy is subterfuge, deceit, dishonesty – call it what you will - but it is, in effect, a hallmark of this pontificate.]
He makes some examples of how the pope has used these modalities in recent days. Concerning the third one, Magister cites two recent interviews published in the Germanophone press: one by the Benedictine Anselm Grün in the Augsburger Allgemeine on Marhc 30, 2018, and that of the Archbishop of Vienna, Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn, to a number of media outlets, among which was the Salzburger Nachrichten, on April 1.
OnePeterFive’s indefatigable Maike Hickson wrote about both interviews on April 2 and April 6, respectively. Would it be a simple coincidence that within a few days (from Good Friday to Easter Sunday!), two interviews should be published touching on the same topic, namely, the priestly ordination fo women?
Here is what Grün said about it: “There are no theological reasons to cite against the abolition of priestly celibacy or against women priests, women bishops and even a female pope. It is merely a question of historical process. It needs time. And the first step should be the ordination of female deacons”. A message there for those who, ingenuously, consider an eventual opening of the diaconate to women very much possible.
For his part, Cardinal Schoenborn commented: “The question of ordaining women is oen that can be decided only by a council. It cannot be decided by a pope all by himself. It is too big a question to be settled from the desk of a pope.”
Reading these statements, I was reminded of those made seven years ago by the then Patriarch of Lisbon, Cardinal Jose da Cruz Policarpo, and other Portuguese bishops, and which I wrote about in June 2011. At that time, the cardinal was forced to make a public retraction [of what he had said about female ordination] shortly before he retired and then died not long after.
[Policarpo had said in an interview that “John Paul II at a certain point appeared to have resolved the question, but I think it cannot be resolved that way. Theologically, there is no fundamental obstacle [to ordaining women priests], but there is this tradition, shall we say, that ‘the Church has never done otherwise’.” Fr Scalese commented at the time:
I would like to know what notion Cardinal Policarpo has of ‘theology’ and of ‘tradition’. But what leaves me more stunned is that a Cardinal Patriarch does not seem to appreciate the weight of pontifical interventions. A pope had resolved the question in a definitive and infallible way, and what does the Cardinal Patriarch do? He thinks it is his right to say, “I don’t think the question can be resolved this way”. Well, Your Eminence, how should it be resolved?
Scalese explains that once informed of his faux pas,
, the cardinal wrote a letter acknowledging that “he had never really thought systematically about the question (so then, why did he speak so categorically of it?). The reactions to my interview have forced me to consider the subject with more attention, and I have confirmed that, above all, for failing to take into account the latest declarations of the Magisterium on the subject, I myself provoked the reactions.” (So it took the indignant reactions for him to realize that he had not ‘taken into account the latest declarations of the Magisterium on the subject’?).
He proceeds to reaffirm his absolute communion with the Holy Father (if you can call it communion to ignore or trample his infallible magisterium) and the dignity of women in the Church (which has never been called into question). He ends up reiterating that the question of ordaining women priests only initially seems to be an open question, but that the most recent declarations on the subject by the Magisterium interpret the tradition of ordaining only men as priests “not just as a practical matter, which can change according to the rhythms of the Holy Spirit’s actions [I find it offensive that the catch phrase “The Spirit blows where it wills” has been used to depict the Holy Spirit as capricious and arbitrary!], but as an expression of the mystery of the Church herself which we must accept in good faith”. So why did he not say all this in the interview? He had to wait for the ensuing polemics in order to consider the question seriously and arrive at his new conclusions? In short, the cardinal’s remedy seems even worse than his original offense.”
Since then, however, this progressivist idea of ordaining women priests has continued to circulate undisturbed and today, it is being re-proposed with vigor and unapologetically, evidently with confidence that the time has come for the final push towards its realization.
I do not wish to go back to the merits of the issue. I have nothing to add to what I wrote seven years ago. Nor do I marvel that there are persons who do sustain this thesis, despite all the solemn declarations made by the last popes before Francis. But one is most disappointed at Schoenborn’s turnaround.
What is of greatest concern is the possibility, aired by Magister, that these interventions by Grün and Schoenborn are indirect manifestations of the reigning pope’s own preference. It is true, as Magister notes in a self-correcting note, that Bergoglio has spoken at least twice on the subject by making reference to John Paul II’s definitive No in Ordinatio sacerdotalis. [Which does not mean anything because JPII also closed the door on communion for remarried divorcees, but Bergoglio deliberately set out to overturn that through his two ‘family synods’ and AL!]
But it is also true that last October 11, on the 25th anniversary of the post-Vatican II Catechism of the Catholic Church, the same Bergoglio spoke openly of ‘progress in doctrine’. So was it just coincidence that Shcoenborn in his interview, seeking to justify the possibility of radical changes in the Church spoke precisely of the ‘development of doctrine’, referring directly – who would have thunk? - to what the pope had said on October 11: “There is a traditional Catholic principle on the development of doctrine. Right now, we are experiencing a most interesting phase in the development of doctrine. Pope Francis clearly affirmed on the 25th anniversary of the Catechism, “[The possibility of] doctrinal development exists!” (Es gibt eine Lehrentwicklung).
I am growing old and therefore am becoming more suspicious – in that whatever statements may be made these days, I do not consider them casual in any way, but functional towards achieving a given objective. We have now all understood that this pontificate has an agenda to realize – and we have spoken about this on a few occasions – and is gradually realizing it, according to a timetable that has been carefully planned.
The technique is this:
- The Vatican starts by saying that ‘doctrine does not change’ or ‘doctrine is not being changed’, and that it is just pastoral practice that has to keep up with the times.
- Now, we have passed on to the second phase, as one would logically predict: pastoral renewal is no longer sufficient – one must also question even those doctrinal questions that have already been resolved ‘definitively’ by previous Pontiffs. But how to do this? We have been told how: ‘Doctrinal development exists!”
Neither Bergoglio nor Schoenborn will, of course, ever bring up Cardinal Newman's ideas on this so-called development of doctrine, nor those of the other Church Fathers Fr H frequently reminds his readers about often enough.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 15/04/2018 05:49] |