Risks of isolated communities: SSPX community in St. Marys, Kansas

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There’s an article in The Atlantic’s website about St. Marys, Kansas, and the Catholic community that’s developed there–mostly it’s dominated by an SSPX parish–and how the residents are there to live immersed as fully as possible in a Catholic lifestyle.


I can’t open it anymore it’s subscription only, and I used up my free articles.

Here’s my question–what happens if a community (any community) isolates itself and the leaders make mistakes? An anecdote in the article describes a young woman who confessed that a friend of hers had had an abortion, and the priest told her that her sin was unforgivable and she was excommunicated because she hadn’t stopped her friend from having it. I’m 99.9% sure the priest was wrong.

In any case, what happens if the leaders of an insular community make mistakes, and the members of the community are led astray or somehow harmed?
 
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Isolated religious communities often end up as cults. And eventually you end up with authoritarian leaders and members who are spiritually and otherwise abused.
 
Isolation is not one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
Christianity draws one into communion, not isolation.
Bad things happen to isolated people.
 
I just got through reading the article. It is outstanding — of all the liberal secular magazines, The Atlantic is probably my favorite, very balanced and fair-minded, always excellent journalism. It is the kind of print magazine you’d want to take if you got one of these sweepstakes things or something, that offered x number of magazines for a bargain price.
 
ARTICLE: “SSPX parishioners believe they know God’s way and try to follow it, largely unencumbered by those who do not share their views. But there is peril in the premise that we would all be better off living among our own. Democracy depends on the friction that comes from encounters with difference. The movements for abolition, enfranchisement, labor dignity, and civil rights all stemmed from factions of Americans demanding rights and basic respect from their neighbors”
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ARTICLE: “But as much as SSPX may still think of itself as raising children to be warriors in the faith, the metaphor is no longer a good fit. What the Society has built in St. Marys is more like a haven for those retreating from the culture wars than a training ground for battle. Safe behind its walls, parishioners can seem uninterested in the moral failings of the outside world and untroubled by the country’s political turmoil.”
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Author seems to be confusing political battle (for power) with spiritual battle (for souls).

Author is assessing SSPX on its ability to wage the former when SSPX far more concerned with the latter.
 
Tough to build up God’s kingdom on Earth if we withdraw from the world.
 
This thread makes me think of my Protestant evangelical days. Due I think to the (perhaps) over-empowerment of the individual’s view of scripture, the lack of an authoritative magisterium, and the pursuit of “distinctives” to make themselves unique in the crowd of churches, many Protestant groups can become very isolated, with an ever increasing “us and them” mentality. Or a mentality of “we’re the only real Christians, the others are second class Christians at best”. I hate to say this because there is such good faith and fruit amongst our separated brethren! I know it sounds uncharitable, but this separateness and the pride underlying it was widespread. It is so contrary to the passionate prayer of Jesus in John 17 where he asked 3 times that we might be one. It makes me sad.
 
None of the following responses from me are an endorsement of that level of separation from the mainstream.
Ean_Fanaiochta said:
Isolated religious communities often end up as cults. And eventually you end up with authoritarian leaders and members who are spiritually and otherwise abused.
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The Amish, Hutterites and Bruderhofs aren’t cults. And there are definitely cases of abuse in those communities but they’re no worse than others.
And authoritarian leaders do abuse member in communities that aren’t isolated.
goout said:
Isolation is not one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit.
Christianity draws one into communion, not isolation.
Bad things happen to isolated people .
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I’m not sure about that.
The Amish, Hutterites and Bruderhofs aren’t dysfunctional.
Bad things can happen to anyone. Plenty of bad things, if not more, happen to people in the mainstream.
 
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Only a few do anything in the world.
 
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tafan2 said:
Tough to build up God’s kingdom on Earth if we withdraw from the world.
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The article doesn’t give sufficient “credit” as to how toxic, how anti Christian the “world” has become.
Minimizing this crucial feature weakens the whole piece.

The community’s main focus appears to be on children. We need to provide a nurturing community for families to do their mission. There always are some persons nearby who need to be evangelized, and or healed. As young people grow older, many will move away, bringing their faith to more individuals.

It’s hard to build up the Kingdom of God unless it can be (somewhat, imperfectly) incarnated here and there, made visible.
 
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Aquinas11 said:
Author is assessing SSPX on its ability to wage the former when SSPX far more concerned with the latter.
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Apparently not, in this case. The SSPX chapter described seems to have developed into a religious . . . cult of sorts. One of the young women in the community decided to marry a . . . Catholic in the Roman Catholic in that town, which is in full communion with the Apostolic See in Rome. . . . The SSPX priest informed her family members that attending the wedding would be a sin. Only a . . . priest . . . not in full communion with Rome . . . would say that. . . .
 
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I don’t see any problem with like-minded people, who just happen to share a religion, moving into a town, becoming the majority, being elected to public office, and essentially running the place according to their convictions. Would anyone be moaning and groaning if a colony of “conservative Novus Ordo” Catholics found a small town with a college campus that had gone out of business, restarted the college according to their principles, and created a town that attracted people who like that kind of thing?

Mutatis mutandis, Front Royal, Virginia and Christendom College come immediately to mind — they don’t “run” Front Royal, it was already a good-sized town before they got there, but they are a prominent presence. Ave Maria, Florida is another example.

And St Marys, Kansas is not all that isolated. Just judging from the map, it looks to be basically an exurb (or “ruburb”) of Topeka, a fairly good-sized city. It’s closer to Topeka than Front Royal is to Winchester (the nearest city of any size), Harrisonburg, or the far western fringes of the DC metro area (Manassas/Prince William County).
 
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GordonP said:
“Democracy depends on the friction that comes from encounters …”
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There are so many false or unsubstantiated assumptions here, I don’t know where to start.

Author thinks the US is a democracy. It isn’t. Author thinks democracy is “good”, no evidence offered.

Author thinks encountering many different kinds of people is better for democracy than homogeneity. Did author examine different countries, different time periods, to reach that conclusion?

If author were writing for the high school paper the editor might say"not bad, just need to look at the Objevity thing".

A generation ago this would never have made it into This magazine.
 
Interesting encounter with the St. Mary’s group this spring.

St. Mary’s Catholic School in Lincoln (NE) announced early this year that it was closing at the end of the academic year. Later in the spring, I went to Sam’s Club in Lincoln and there were students there in matching school uniforms soliciting funds for “St. Mary’s”.

St. Mary’s Academy in St. Marys, Kansas…not St. Mary’s School in Lincoln. I wonder how many people thought they were donating to save the local school, not to a school 150 miles away.
 
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Glennon_P said:
St. Mary’s Academy in St. Marys, Kansas…not St. Mary’s School in Lincoln. I wonder how many people thought they were donating to save the local school, not to a school 150 miles away.
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That’s downright nasty and deceitful. And I would expect that to be only the tip of the iceberg. Where there is smoke, there is fire.
 
Is Front Royal super-duper Catholic? It’s within my diocese…
 
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Never heard of the Bruderhofs. I’m familiar enough with the Amish to know that their brand of insulation isn’t quite the same as what is in the article.

The SSPX Catholics are ostensibly Roman Catholic. Roman Catholicism is directly networked to Rome. It is a church that leaves little room for local interpretation on matters of Faith & Morals. The apostolic tradition has been maintained for 2019 years.

The Amish, on the other hand, are networked with each other up to a point, but there is no centralized authority (other than the Bible) that maintains a code of Faith & Morals. Each district maintains its own Ordnung (sort of similar to the CCC).

A Roman Catholic congregation can’t develop its own interpretations–hence my wondering about how insulation could eventually lead to shifting away from Rome.
 
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Walling ourselves off from the world is contrary not just to history but also to the entire Christian mission of evangelization. Granted, there’s more than a few things in the world which we’d do well to avoid (to put it mildly) but the same could be said of almost any other era in history. If anything, compared to say the Roman Empire or medieval times our society could probably be considered positively pure! Throughout history, the baptismal vocation of every Christian has been to take the good news into the world, regardless of how wicked a place that might be.

Of course the SSPX community referred to might say that they are evangelising by the witness their actions provided, but imho this ignores the words “go out” in the command Jesus gives this his disciples at the end of Mark’s gospel. Simply sitting back and waiting for others to come to us isn’t how it’s supposed to work. In fact Luke goes further with his Parable of the Great Supper where the master tells his servants to “compel” people to come in.

The difference with (contemplative) monastic communities is that their intention isn’t to ignore the outside world but to engage in a ministry of prayer for the world out of a burning love for it and its people - Therese of Lisieux is perhaps the best example of this. Similarly, the Cistercian constitutions speak of "performing a service for God’s people and the whole human race.
 
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