Theological liberals have no right to take the moral high ground

[DuMaurier]

I dont know if this is the right forum but there was an excellent in the Sydney Morning Herald today about liberal attacks on the conservative Cardinal Pell. I’ve been waiting for someone to articulate what I’ve been feeling. It’s a good read.

The unstated objection to Pell is that he is a bishop who promotes and defends the Catholic faith that they have sought radically to re-interpret if not to reject. Theological liberalism is a sterile project that will be seen in a century’s time as the regrettable aberration of a few troubled decades.

I just wish it would hurry up and die.

Amen.

smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/25/1093246615896.html?oneclick=true

 

[Gottle_of_Geer]

DuMaurier:

I dont know if this is the right forum but there was an excellent in the Sydney Morning Herald today about liberal attacks on the conservative Cardinal Pell. I’ve been waiting for someone to articulate what I’ve been feeling. It’s a good read.

Amen.

smh.com.au/articles/2004/08/25/1093246615896.html?oneclick=true

Short reply: neither do theological conservatives.​

Why do people have to diss each other all the time ? ##

 

[DuMaurier]

Hmm, seems that you may have to register so I’ll try to post the article here.

The theological liberals have no right to take the moral high ground
August 26, 2004

Cardinal George Pell’s opponents should at least have the fortitude to argue against his ideas, writes Ephraem Chifley.

Theological discussion in the Catholic Church in Australia has become intellectually sterile and profoundly boring. The broadside by Father John Crothers against Cardinal George Pell on this page earlier this week was a case in point. It would have brightened our morning to have read someone with the wit and directness of an Auberon Waugh who said of another archbishop: “He’s an awful little man and I wish he’d hurry up and die.”

Instead, we heard a string of complaints without much substance: that Pell has made inappropriate public statements, such as that on the divorce tax proposal, has made conservative appointments in the parish of Redfern and has set up a second Catholic University in Sydney. There were also complaints that the Congregation for the Faith had determined that gluten-free hosts “are invalid matter for the celebration of the Eucharist”.

My objection is not that liberals such as Crothers should disagree with the archbishop - for me Pell’s republican barracking was pretty embarrassing - but that they don’t have the fortitude to argue against the Cardinal’s ideas.

Hand-wringing about gluten-free wafers, (which was in fact a binding Roman ruling which has nothing to do with Pell) is a red herring. Similarly the decoration of the seminary chapel, clergy appointments to sensitive parishes and support for Notre Dame University are all issues of mundane administration. Even Pell’s intervention on divorce was really a question of political prudence.

Crothers brought them up because he implies ideas don’t matter any more, management is all that’s left. Pell, he says, is at liberty to indulge his ultra-conservative opinions. He wrote, “Being conservative or liberal is neither right nor wrong, it’s just the way we are” - as Jerry Seinfeld might have said. Why then should it matter whether “neo-conservatives” are appointed to Redfern or the seminary chapel tizzied up?

What matters is that the church isn’t a bowling club or a hamburger franchise. It has something to say about God and mankind that it believes comes from Jesus Christ.

The language of managerialism, described by Don Watson in his book Death Sentence - with cant terms like “models of church” or “leadership style” - obscures this basic theological issue.

The question is whether or not the church has a divine origin with a set of structures and teachings that are unchangeable. Pell holds to that view with intelligence and tenacity. For him the church is far more than an institution - it represents God to the world.

His opponents emphasise the human and cultural elements of Catholicism, often to the exclusion of what others see as integral aspects of belief and practice. If religion is a mostly human invention then it can be radically re-interpreted: scripture, creeds, the moral law, worship, priesthood, even the very notion of God himself. Often all that remains are the liberal super-dogmas of tolerance and inclusivity - the only doctrines that Jesus taught according to their rewrite of scripture.

The history of the past 40 years of the Catholic Church in Australia has yet to be written. But the view that theological liberals have had some sort of monopoly on the high moral ground of inclusivity and tolerance will not cut much ice with future historians.

continued…

 

[DuMaurier]

There are too many well-documented instances of systematic abuse of human rights when liberals have had their hands on the levers of power: seminarians being forbidden by seminary authorities from saying the rosary or thrown out because they disliked sensitivity sessions involving middle-aged nuns and massage oil.

Then there are those progressive priests who “renovated” churches by demolishing well-loved marble monuments and removing icons and statues in scenes reminiscent of Cromwell’s purges during the Reformation. There is a famous photograph of the then dean of one Catholic cathedral actually at the controls of a bulldozer doing a Lazlo Toth on the High Altar.

What about those who have refused communion to worshippers choosing to kneel to receive Holy Communion or, worse, bishops calling in the police to evict them as happened in Quebec? Even this may be reckoned a question of management, but it throws into relief complaints by liberal clergy about being “on the outer” and inflexible styles of church leadership. While superficially irenic, the churchspeak employed by Pell’s opponents conceals a specific theological agenda that historically has not tolerated any opposition or difference of opinion.

The unstated objection to Pell is that he is a bishop who promotes and defends the Catholic faith that they have sought radically to re-interpret if not to reject. Theological liberalism is a sterile project that will be seen in a century’s time as the regrettable aberration of a few troubled decades.

I just wish it would hurry up and die.

Ephraem Chifley is a Dominican friar resident at St James Priory in Glebe.