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That dreadful Bergoglian apologist nonpareil Austin Ivereigh has struck again! Let me start out with Ed Peters's reaction to Ivereigh's latest quintessentially perverted tirade against Catholics who don't think like he and Bergoglio do...
Come over here and say that
August 11, 2017
Austen Ivereigh, in one of the most embarrassing essays Crux has ever run, recently smeared seven talented Catholic commentators as suffering from ‘convert neurosis’. Not once in passing, but repeatedly, Ivereigh uses ‘neurosis’ and ‘neurotic’ in regard to some seven writers, Ross Douthat, Daniel Hitchens, Carl Olson, Edward Pentin, Rusty Reno, Matthew Schmitz, and John-Henry Westen.
Ivereigh even offers a primer on what “neurosis” means, suggesting a war-scarred woman’s throwing herself to the ground when later stopped by a policeman as, one supposes, an example of how ‘convert neurotics’, supposedly being persons given to extreme reactions to un-realities in the Church, might behave.
While an expert in psychology can tell us whether any of these men are, in fact, “neurotic”, and an expert in morals can tell us whether Ivereigh’s employing and Crux’s circulating of such labels against brothers in the Lord meets any standard of decency in Christian discourse, Ivereigh’s constant referral to these Catholics as “converts” draws my attention.
Ivereigh’s description of several figures (Douthat and Reno as former Episcopalians, Olson as a former Protestant fundamentalist, and Hitchens and Pentin as former Anglicans) plus what I gather about Westen (a once fallen-away Catholic who went through an atheistic period) and Schmitz (who talks respectfully about his days as a Protestant), suggests that not one of them - not one - would, under American catechetical criteria, qualify as “converts” at all — let alone as neurotic ones.
According to the (US) National Statutes for the Catechumenate (November, 1986) no. 2, “the term ‘convert’ should be reserved strictly for those converted from unbelief to Christian belief and never used of those baptized Christians who are received into the full communion of the Catholic Church.”
Number 3 reiterates that this “holds true even … [for] baptized Catholic Christians … whose Christian initiation has not been completed by confirmation and Eucharist” (Westen) and [for] “baptized Christians who have been members of another Church or ecclesial community and seek to be received into the full Communion of the Catholic Church” (the other six authors).
Now perhaps the circles Ivereigh runs in ‘over there’ do not bother with this important distinction among persons entering into full communion, and I grant that some Catholics ‘over here’ might still show ecclesial insensitivity by referring to separated Christians coming into full communion as “converts”, i.e., as if they had not been baptized.
But, as most of the men Ivereigh chastises are Americans, and as the American bishops are trying to get American Catholics to think more accurately about these things, I thought Ivereigh’s outdated and inaccurate use of the word “convert” — to say nothing of his abuse of the tragedy that is “neurosis” — worth noting.
So, Father Z notes the above, after he himself (who had been a Lutheran) took apart Ivereigh's latest Bergoglio-manic outrage published by the equally Bergoglio-manic Crux (whose editor John Allen recently warned us gleefully that since the average length of pontificates is 14 years, Bergoglio may well be around at least another 10 years)[God forbid!]... I shall follow with Fr Z's fisking of the Ivereigh article and his comments...
Austen Ivereigh, like a papolatrous gnostic,
calls converts who disagree with him 'neurotic'
aUGUST 10, 2017
A couple of weeks ago, the Wile E. Coyote of the catholic Left, Michael Sean Winters of the Fishwrap sniggered with fellow lib Massimo “Beans” Faggioli about converts. To quote Winters: "I am so tired of converts telling us that the pope is not Catholic."
Typical. Converts don’t have the right to say anything because they’re converts.
Now Austen Ivereigh has a piece at CRUX (why the KCs pay for this rubbish is beyond me) against converts who disagree with him. He tries to be soooo nuanced, soooo sophisticated in his condescension.
FAIL!
My emphases and comments(in red):
Pope Francis and the convert problem
[In which Ivereigh's very title says volumes about the church of Francis that arrogantly and quite unbelievably ignores Christ's Great Mandate to "Go forth to all nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit", because, Bergoglio dixit, 'God loves us as we are' and preaches religious indifferentism, which is a denial that Jesus founded the one true Church, which certainly ain't the church of Bergoglio!]
The dog days of August are a time to smuggle in the kind of article you’ve been meaning to write but putting off because of all the trouble it’s going to bring you. But still, I hesitate even now to write about convert neurosis, and how it conditions critiques of Pope Francis. [He hesitates, but he’ll do it anyway, because people might not notice. It’s August, after all, and the internet is on vacation. Actually, he’s just being smarmy.]
For one, I don’t want to be seen to be sniffy and condescending towards people who become Catholic, which is how Dr. Stephen Bullivant, writing in First Things, said he felt about a comment in Michael Sean Winters’s blogpost. “I am so tired of converts telling us that the pope is not Catholic,” complained the sage of the National Catholic Reporter. [Oh no… he’s not going to be condescending. No, not at all.] [And the Wile E. Coyote of Fishwrap is a sage by Ivereigh's standards!]
Winters was reacting to a debate on Al Jazeera between Matthew Schmitz, youthful literary editor of First Things, and me, on the perennial topic of the Francis pontificate.
Schmitz, a young convert, had undergone a second conversion since 2013. At first he welcomed Francis’s election. But then came a series of realizations.
He had now come to see that Francis was building his program of reform “at the expense of children orphaned by the culture of divorce left by the 1960s,” attempting to restore a “discredited version of Catholicism,” and who “builds his popularity by shucking off traditions and formulas of the office” of pope. Oh, and introducing the antinomian, Protestant notion that truth and mercy are counter to the law.
(Incidentally, ‘antinomian’ is not a word to bandy about on Al-Jazeera, but then, I accused Schmitz of wanting to bring back the seda gestatoria, which must have furrowed brows in Qatar.) [Isn’t Austen just a hoot?]
Now, Schmitz never actually said the pope wasn’t Catholic, [do you hear the “but” coming?] but his narrative and that of many of Francis’s angry, vociferous critics adds up to something rather like it, namely, that he is, in Ross Douthat’s phrase, the “chief plotter” in a conspiracy to change the Catholic faith. [Ross is a “angry, vociferous critic”? Has he ever met Ross Douthat or heard him speak?]
For the record: The Church is missionary, and exists to spread the Gospel, [From Bergoglio's record as pope so far, it doesn't look like the Church - at least not 'his church' - is missionary at all in the sense of 'existing to spread the Gospel'. How can a church do that if its leader continually says that it doesn't matter what your faith is - it's just another way to be a good man (never mind if your faith tells you to kill anyone you think is an enemy of your faith, as Islamists do)??? and some of those it touches will want to become Catholic, and that’s wonderful. People who have thought and prayed their way to faith are special, and bring great gifts with which they have been showered. We love converts. [Sure you do, Austen. Perhaps when they bow to your wisdom as you impart your secret teachings about what the Holy Spirit does in the Church.]
Winters wasn’t being sniffy about converts either, but simply pointing out the – let’s just call it, for the time being, incongruity – of those who join the Catholic Church in a blaze of Damascene fervor later announcing noisily, after a new pope is elected, that the pope is not doing what they believe popes should do. [Never mind that one of the things that converts have to figure out when they enter the Church is precise “what Popes should do”.]
And if the many retweets of my retweet of Winters’s complaint is anything to go by, many share his view not just that this stance is not just incongruous, but annoying, because rather than consider the possibility that there may be something deficient in their own view of the Church and its tradition, they prefer to assume that it is the successor of St. Peter – chosen by the Holy Spirit in a conclave free from outside interference – who is lacking. [I wish Ivereigh had neater syntax!] [So, the Pope is “chosen by the Holy Spirit”. Non-convert Joseph Ratzinger has a healthier view. Ratzinger, who has more experience of conclaves than Ivereigh, was interviewed by a Bavarian TV network. He was asked:
Your Eminence, you are very familiar with church history and know well what has happened in papal elections…. Do you really believe that the Holy Spirit plays a role in the election of the pope?
RATZINGER:I would not say so in the sense that the Holy Spirit picks out the pope, because there are too many contrary instances of popes the Holy Spirit would obviously not have picked. I would say that the Spirit does not exactly take control of the affair, but rather like a good educator, as it were, leaves us much space, much freedom, without entirely abandoning us. Thus the Spirit’s role should be understood in a much more elastic sense, not that he dictates the candidate for whom one must vote. Probably the only assurance he offers is that the thing cannot be totally ruined.”
Now it is quite possible that elegant commentators such as Ross Douthat and Matthew’s boss Rusty Reno (both former Episcopalians), or, at the rougher end, writers such as Carl Orlson (ex-Protestant fundamentalist) [OLSON – NB: Olson took Ivereigh apart in 2016 for the false claims he made. Ivereigh had said that: ‘Dissenters’ from Amoris laetitia are predominantly wealthy lay people fixated on ‘reason”. Now he is expanding his pool to “neurotic converts”. Read on.] and John Henry Westen (ex-atheist), or indeed ex-Anglicans in my own patch such as Daniel Hitchens of the Catholic Herald and Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register in Rome, are all correct in their readings.
But it is a lot more likely that their baggage has distorted their hermeneutic, and they are suffering from convert neurosis. [His argument boils down to: If you disagree with what I hold, then you are a neurotic who doesn’t understand the Holy Spirit – like I do.]
A neurosis is a pathological or extreme reaction to something that simply doesn’t correspond to reality. A war-scarred victim, for example, might react to a friendly cop’s question by throwing herself on the ground and covering her ears. You understand why she does it, but it’s neurotic. [How unbelievably condescending and insensitive.] [I could give a more immediate example of neurosis - almost all of Jorge Bergoglio's pet theories about poverty and war and terrorism, none of which corresponds to reality!]
I began to notice this reaction among former Anglicans during the synods of 2014-15. A friend, a Catholic priest, told me he had seen these kinds of arguments before in the Church of England, and they always ended badly; and that he hadn’t joined the Catholic Church to go through it all again. He was deeply disturbed by what he imagined was happening, fueled by Douthat’s predictions of a schism and his dark warning that the pope “may be preserved from error only if the Church itself resists him.” [Remember what happened during the Synods of 2014-15? The sorts of things that Ivereigh wants to happen, probably including “rigging” so that the process marginalizes those who hold fast and serves a predetermined outcome.
And there has indeed been a time when the resisting Church helped a Pope to avoid heresy. The Avignon Pope John XXII (+1334) publicly taught in sermons that the souls of the just, even after Purgatory, would not enjoy the Beatific Vision until after the resurrection of the flesh following the General Judgment. Many (read: “the Church”) resisted this false teaching to the point that John XXII corrected himself. And it was a hard fought process, too, that did not involve papolatry or toadies.
No less than the historian and late Archbp. of Milan, Bl. Idelfonso Schuster, wrote of the conflict between Pope and faithful that John XXII, “offered the entire Church, the humiliating spectacle of the princes, clergy and universities steering the Pontiff onto the right path of Catholic theological tradition, and placing him in the very difficult situation of having to contradict himself.”
But – remember – according to Ivereigh, John XXII was directly chosen by the Holy Spirit. He would, no doubt, have both been entirely with John before he corrected himself, writing that John’s neurotic opponents didn’t understand the Holy Spirit, and also with John after he corrected himself, saying “See! I told you so!”]
What in fact happened, as was obvious it would to those free of neurosis, was a vigorous good-faith disagreement that resolved in a two-thirds majority vote that laid the basis for an apostolic exhortation. [BIG FAT LIE that even Bergoglio indulges in!] [WHOA! Hang on! Ivereigh has tried this caper before. In 2016 Fr. Murray called him on it. HIvereigh had written: “…everything in Amoris Laetitia – including the controversial Chapter 8 – received a two-thirds majority in a synod that was notoriously frank, open, and drawn out.” Not so.
- First, exquisitely “notorious” was the theft of mail by the Synod’s organizers who illegally removed books delivered through the postal service to members of the Synod.
- Next, and more to the point, when the members of the Synod voted on what should go into the final report to the Holy Father, Paragraph 52 received 104 “yes” (“placet”) votes, and 74 “no” (“non placet) votes. Paragraph 53 received 112 “yes” and 64 “no” votes. They did not receive the required two-thirds approval and thus ought to have been excluded from the final report according to the rules of the synod. [But the pope, of course, ignored the rules and put them on the agenda for the next synod!]
What Ivereigh said is not only inaccurate, it is a falsehood. After all, the truth has been pointed out to him, but he sticks to his story. Isn’t there a dictum about repeating falsehoods?] [And isn't it the duty of an editor - John Allen, in this case, to interpose a note to indicate that the writer has stated a provable falsehood, and to make the necessary correction??? But Allen, of course, is the quintessential advocacy journalist who believes in allowing demonstrable falsehoods within a news report or a news commentary if it reflects the writer's opinion!]
Amoris Laetitia did not settle forever those disagreements – when do they ever go away? – but provided a basis for the Church to move forward, still one body, while staying faithful to doctrine. [There are those who have asked whether or not Amoris is consistent with the Church’s doctrine.] That’s the difference between disagreeing under a papal magisterium, and disagreeing in the absence of one. [HUH? Does anyone understand that last bit?] [Told you, Ivereigh has a problem - and not just with syntax - but with what he thinks he believes, because if you are confused about what you think you believe, then your language is bound to come out confused!]
Then there is the neurosis of the convert escaping the shifting sands of relativism, who projects onto the Church the idea of something fixed and distant and unchangeable, frozen at some point prior to the Council. This makes them susceptible to the traditionalist Catholic horror not just of the Council’s reforms, but of the very idea of change, as if this could be avoided. [I know a lot of traditionalists. Only a few think that “nothing can change”, and they don’t write anything serious for public consumption. The trads I know do think that things can change. Doctrine, for example, changes in the sense that it deepens and evolves while remain consistent and true with its roots in the Deposit of Faith. However, I suspect that that is not the case for Ivereigh.] [Because the 'deposit of faith' is just a worthless dustbin of history, as far as Bergoglio and his followers are concerned!]
Yet the Church’s tradition has always been made up of the new things brought by the Holy Spirit revealing “new aspects of Revelation,” as Evangelii Gaudium puts it. Francis approaches the past as all popes must do, with discernment, preserving what must be protected, and removing what has become an obstacle to evangelization.[Bullcrap! What evangelization is he doing? It is more like counter-evangelization, but then, what else would an anti-Catholic do???] [Which rings the gong of obsequious flattery. Sorry.]
The Church has always required perpetual conversion in order to recover what has been lost – the centrality of Christ, the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and closeness to the concrete lives of ordinary people. Catholics trust the pope to discern what needs to change.
Of course, you don’t need to be a convert to be critical of Francis, and plenty of converts are delighted with him (which is why Bullivant was wrong to think that Winters was getting at converts per se.) But this isn’t about liking or disliking Pope Francis. It’s about an attitude to the papacy on the part of some. [It is, isn’t it. And, frankly, what he is peddling smacks of unhealthy papolatry.]
A friend in Ireland writes: “I keep seeing people who seem to have converted mainly because the Church teaches things that match their ideological outlook, whereas when I came back it was a case of doing so because I thought the Church had historical authority to teach things even if they sounded mad or were inconvenient.”
Conversion is an act of humility. It involves a renunciation of sovereignty, the idea that I know best. [Listen to yourself!] It involves trust – in Jesus Christ, and in His Church, and in the successor of St. Peter – even when they challenge my preconceptions.
This doesn’t mean agreeing with everything a pope says or does: Complaining about popes is nothing new, and anyway, Francis welcomes it. [Does he?]
But it does mean respecting the office founded by Jesus Christ, and trusting that the Holy Spirit guides its current occupant. That, surely, is a big part of why people become Catholic in the first place. [Again and again, he plays the Holy Spirit card to the point that he comes off as a papolatrous gnostic.[And that's Bergoglian apostasy right there!]
I thought the readers' reactions were just as worthwhile reading:
Ariseyedead says:
To the lukewarm, authentic zeal is always considered a neurosis. As is courage to the cowardly.
scholastica says:
I converted when I saw that the Catholic Church holds the full deposit of Faith as given her by Our Lord Jesus Christ. I do get a bit neurotic when I see her cradle children squander and diminish their inheritance and now mine!
thomistking says:
I know people that don’t like converts; it’s clearly because these converts prick their conscience. They remind these people of their own lukewarm (at best) fidelity to the faith, and that the Catholic faith is the only true religion.
Oxonian95 says:
I’m a convert. I know quite a few converts. And I think I’ve noticed precisely the same thing as Mr Ivereigh: Non-Catholics attracted to the Catholic Church are attracted to it by qualities that Mr Ivereigh finds repellent, and repelled by those qualities that Mr Ivereigh finds attractive. Does Mr Ivereigh find the Holy Spirit at work in conversion? Or did I come to the Church all on my own?
donato2 says:
Maybe this explains why some left-leaning Catholics (including Pope Francis) inveigh (“ivereigh”?) so heavily against proselytizing — it might bring more converts into the Church.
oldconvert says:
The point is that we adult converts chose the Catholic Church. That is why it’s special to us.
KT127 says:
Wow, that’s pretty nasty...I know some people might think these things. Some people might even say them aloud in the heat of the moment. But what kind of neurosis causes someone to write it down and publish it for all the world to see?
rayrondini says:
I suppose the obvious question to ask is: What did Mr. Ivereigh have to say at the publication of Summorum Pontificum or Universae Ecclesiae?
[Fr Z: I have no doubt but that he said, “Pope Benedict – the Pope – did it, therefore it is inspired by the Holy Spirit. We have to live up behind behind his Holy Spirit guided decision.]
Giuseppe says:
“[Ross is a “angry, vociferous critic”? Has he ever met Ross Douthat or heard him speak?] I DoubtThat.
JustaSinner says:
Count me as a convert then… Many of my fellow cradle Catholics haven’t darkened the door to a Church this millennium! And don’t most of them work for such’publications’ as the fishwrap and other heretical rags?
Charles E Flynn says:
From Musings on the gift and grace of conversion, by Carl E. Olson, for the Catholic World Report: All of us are converts, for all of us are being converted. Or should be. So stop using the term “converts” as an ideological stick."
Back pew sitter says:
I thank God for the converts we have who love God and the Church.
Andrew1054 says:
His assertion that converts shouldn’t have a voice is akin to saying immigrants shouldn’t have a say about their newly adopted countries. There are no second class citizens in democracies and there are no second class members in the Body of Christ. I converted 26 years ago. Does my opinion not matter as much as a cradle Catholic? Poppycock!
St. John the Baptist deals with this attitude quite clearly in Matthew 3:9. What he says there applies well to smug cradle Catholics. God does not care about whether you were born into the Faith. He cares whether you practice the Faith. Birth claims mean very little.
And do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father,’ for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children for Abraham.”
Papabile says:
You miss the ball on why Ivereigh wouldn’t care about John XXII...
You see, it’s an entirely different Church after 1965. The previous Church of the sullied accretions is dead. It wasn’t the Church anyway. We have finally re-found the Church.
Rich says:
Ivereigh holds a rather rigid view of how exactly the Holy Spirit would lead one to think and express his or her faith as a Catholic. It is so restrictive as to be, dare I say, quite neurotic.
Kostadinov says:
'Chosen by the Holy Spirit in a conclave free from outside interference'? Mr Ivereigh himself boasted in a book about Team Bergoglio campaigning in the last conclave… How to reconcile these two statements? Spirit of surprises? Of VII?
[Fr Z: Caught in his own special pleading.]
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 12/08/2017 01:41] |