D
DCV
Guest
I didn’t notice your last post until a little while ago, or I would have responded to it much earlier…
I appreciate your apology for your claims about the numbers of priests in the IVE. However, surely you can recognize that when you claim that a religious order is lying (for that was your assertion) about how many members it has, and you yourself present a much smaller number that has no basis in anything but your own best guess of what it might be and then present it as factual, what you are doing is indeed smearing. Such a cavalier attitude toward the truth severely damages your credibility.
What troubles me about the sincerity of your apology is that you continue to reject our given number without any explanation, and instead have simply doubled your original fictitious estimate to 200: Thanks, but no thanks! There are about 350 priests in our religious order, and to have a further argument about this with someone who has absolutely no idea except that someone somewhere told him 50% of our priests had left is bizarre in the extreme.
Regarding being “kicked out” of Argentina: it is simply inaccurate, and the allegation was presumably made in the same spirit as your claim that he have fewer than 100 priests. However, I will elaborate regarding your secondary claims. About 10 years ago there was a roughly 3-year period when the local ordinary in the diocese of San Rafael refused to ordain our seminarians. We run our own seminary and have a traditional approach to priestly formation. We base our curriculum around the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and refused to teach Rahner, Bultmann, and other modernist conceptions of theology, exegesis, and philosophy. We also absolutely reject the idea of teaching liberation theology and other doctrines incompatible with Catholic social doctrine and the Magisterium. For these reasons (among other) we were not very popular with everyone.
There were a number of important figures in the Church in Argentina (I’ll call them X) who were bitterly opposed to our existence, and were especially galled by fact that our seminary had grown so large. Really they wanted our seminary to be closed. To give you a sense of the animosity, in some dioceses priests I personally know were forbidden from even celebrating mass in parish churches when they went home to visit their families simply because they were in the IVE, even though they had faculties and had incurred no irregularity. Anyway, these folks asked for an official visitation of our seminary. The Holy See agreed to this request, and X asked for one of their fellow travelers to head the visitation. That suggestion was accepted, and not surprisingly this visitor determined that there were grave problems in our seminary (NB: nothing to do with sexual perversity of any kind)—namely, that we were ultra-right, had a spirit of disobedience to the Holy See and Vatican II (totally untrue!), and so on. He recommended that Fr. Buela leave Argentina and have nothing to do with the IVE or its seminary—this despite the fact that no specific canonical charge had been made against him. Fr. Buela accepted this judgment (that is obedience) and went to Peru. But there was a great uproar at what was patently an unjust process and sentence. Ultimately the Holy See arranged another visitation, this time by an unbiased visitor chosen by Holy See. This visitor determined that there was absolutely nothing wrong with our seminary or our priests and Fr. Buela was called back from Peru. It was, however, a difficult time for our religious family, to say the least.
Around the same time, Bishop Andrea Erba of Velletri-Segni (one of the suburbicarian dioceses around Rome) invited us into his diocese, and offered to establish us as a Religious Congregation of Diocesan Right. Naturally we accepted, and de facto our general government moved to Italy. (Ultimately our general government moved to Rome, as being the most appropriate place for an international missionary congregation.) Frankly, we don’t talk much about these difficulties (especially with laypeople and novices) because it doesn’t reflect well on parts of the Church in Argentina, and it was rather traumatic for us—especially those men who had to wait three years to be ordained, or who spend three years as transitional deacons! Regarding your canon law question on the responsibility of the local ordinary in withholding ordination: no comment.
Your next allegations are about Cardinal McCarrick—you don’t mention his name in your post, but you do on your website. It has not escaped us that he has a reputation for being in the liberal camp in the Church. Neither I nor the IVE are in any way capable of speaking for him–either as regards his own positions or why he has concerned himself with us. We have not gone out “finding” bishops and cardinals to support us. Cardinal McCarrick was archbishop of Washington, which is where our seminary is located, and over the years (even after his retirement) he has been a great help to us. I have no idea what moved him to help us as much as he has, but we are very grateful for that help. However, I would encourage anyone interested in my religious family to judge our doctrinal orthodoxy and our position on important moral and social issues on our own merits. There is simply nothing in Church teaching or canon law that the IVE dissents from. Period. So judge us based on those things for which we are responsible.
I appreciate your apology for your claims about the numbers of priests in the IVE. However, surely you can recognize that when you claim that a religious order is lying (for that was your assertion) about how many members it has, and you yourself present a much smaller number that has no basis in anything but your own best guess of what it might be and then present it as factual, what you are doing is indeed smearing. Such a cavalier attitude toward the truth severely damages your credibility.
What troubles me about the sincerity of your apology is that you continue to reject our given number without any explanation, and instead have simply doubled your original fictitious estimate to 200: Thanks, but no thanks! There are about 350 priests in our religious order, and to have a further argument about this with someone who has absolutely no idea except that someone somewhere told him 50% of our priests had left is bizarre in the extreme.
Regarding being “kicked out” of Argentina: it is simply inaccurate, and the allegation was presumably made in the same spirit as your claim that he have fewer than 100 priests. However, I will elaborate regarding your secondary claims. About 10 years ago there was a roughly 3-year period when the local ordinary in the diocese of San Rafael refused to ordain our seminarians. We run our own seminary and have a traditional approach to priestly formation. We base our curriculum around the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas and refused to teach Rahner, Bultmann, and other modernist conceptions of theology, exegesis, and philosophy. We also absolutely reject the idea of teaching liberation theology and other doctrines incompatible with Catholic social doctrine and the Magisterium. For these reasons (among other) we were not very popular with everyone.
There were a number of important figures in the Church in Argentina (I’ll call them X) who were bitterly opposed to our existence, and were especially galled by fact that our seminary had grown so large. Really they wanted our seminary to be closed. To give you a sense of the animosity, in some dioceses priests I personally know were forbidden from even celebrating mass in parish churches when they went home to visit their families simply because they were in the IVE, even though they had faculties and had incurred no irregularity. Anyway, these folks asked for an official visitation of our seminary. The Holy See agreed to this request, and X asked for one of their fellow travelers to head the visitation. That suggestion was accepted, and not surprisingly this visitor determined that there were grave problems in our seminary (NB: nothing to do with sexual perversity of any kind)—namely, that we were ultra-right, had a spirit of disobedience to the Holy See and Vatican II (totally untrue!), and so on. He recommended that Fr. Buela leave Argentina and have nothing to do with the IVE or its seminary—this despite the fact that no specific canonical charge had been made against him. Fr. Buela accepted this judgment (that is obedience) and went to Peru. But there was a great uproar at what was patently an unjust process and sentence. Ultimately the Holy See arranged another visitation, this time by an unbiased visitor chosen by Holy See. This visitor determined that there was absolutely nothing wrong with our seminary or our priests and Fr. Buela was called back from Peru. It was, however, a difficult time for our religious family, to say the least.
Around the same time, Bishop Andrea Erba of Velletri-Segni (one of the suburbicarian dioceses around Rome) invited us into his diocese, and offered to establish us as a Religious Congregation of Diocesan Right. Naturally we accepted, and de facto our general government moved to Italy. (Ultimately our general government moved to Rome, as being the most appropriate place for an international missionary congregation.) Frankly, we don’t talk much about these difficulties (especially with laypeople and novices) because it doesn’t reflect well on parts of the Church in Argentina, and it was rather traumatic for us—especially those men who had to wait three years to be ordained, or who spend three years as transitional deacons! Regarding your canon law question on the responsibility of the local ordinary in withholding ordination: no comment.
Your next allegations are about Cardinal McCarrick—you don’t mention his name in your post, but you do on your website. It has not escaped us that he has a reputation for being in the liberal camp in the Church. Neither I nor the IVE are in any way capable of speaking for him–either as regards his own positions or why he has concerned himself with us. We have not gone out “finding” bishops and cardinals to support us. Cardinal McCarrick was archbishop of Washington, which is where our seminary is located, and over the years (even after his retirement) he has been a great help to us. I have no idea what moved him to help us as much as he has, but we are very grateful for that help. However, I would encourage anyone interested in my religious family to judge our doctrinal orthodoxy and our position on important moral and social issues on our own merits. There is simply nothing in Church teaching or canon law that the IVE dissents from. Period. So judge us based on those things for which we are responsible.