What you said is true, but only to a certain point.
For example, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton (auxiliary bishop of Detroit) has PUBLICLY dissented, attacked, and undermined the Church since the 1960s. He is the darling poster-child of all the heretical groups in America, yet he remains a bishop in good standing despite having served under three if not four cardinals in that time. Gumbleton is hardly unknown (just do a google search).
Many of those in charge simply turn a blind eye out of political correctness, IMHO.
Good point. Father Hans Kung was a professor that worked with Benedict XVI at a university in Germany some time ago when the Holy Father was a professor too. But then Kung said a bunch of rather heterodox things. He also came out with a book that challenged Papal Infallibility.
Funny enough, Ratzinger got to be a professor through Hans Kung’s recomendation.
Kung is definitely not an obscure man. You could hear of him even in a 100-level ethics course in a university. Although he is so radically-heterodox in what he says, he hasn’t been excommunicated, and he visited the Pope and the two ate a meal together like the old friends that they are, even though one is the Pope and the other questions the Pope’s authority.
Perhaps it’s fraternal love that our Bishops see as a necessity to keep the Church together. Maybe we’re just not viewing it correctly, and we’re forcing on a belief that anyone who steps out of line should be disciplined or cut out. Maybe we’re just lacking the charity to understand that? I’m guilty of that sin myself.
The media tries to portray the Church as divisive like that and intolerant of anyone who steps out of line; but we can see how that isn’t actually the case.
I’ve been talking to Bishop Gumbleton through e-mail in the last year. I like him immensely as a successor to the Apostles and a fellow human being, but I found it odd that someone with rather radical views got to be a Bishop in the first place.
Yet, Bishop Gumbleton was never excommunicated. It’s customary for all Bishops to offer their resignation when they turn 75; Bishop Gumbleton refused to do it. He finally gave it a year later, but he still stayed on as a pastor of a parish in Detroit where, last I heard, he still is. Cardinal Maida, the Archbishop of Detroit, could very well remove him from the post, but it hasn’t been done. It’s been quite some time since this has all happened, and Cardinal Maida had all this time to remove Bishop Gumbleton, but he still hasn’t done anything like that. Perhaps it’s just the respect that the Cardinal has for the Bishop, even though the Bishop is the subordinate.
One thing I realised, we might be discounting the mutual respect that exists with clerics. They hold each other in esteem because they all are members of the same sacred Mystical Body of Christ. Maybe we’re overlooking the respect they have for each other; perhaps it’s also just a part of the universal experience, where some Catholics may dissent from others. Does this mean that a split or excommunication can only happen when there’s a hugely egregious mistake? We do know that Church Unity is a very important principle that our leaders take, since it was, after all, one of the final wishes of Jesus before He was Crucified.
Another Bishop in the extremes is a man by the name Emmanuel Milingo. He was the Catholic Archbishop in Zambia. He was a proponent of clerical marriage, and you won’t believe what he did about it.
Ever heard of the Sun Myung Moon cult? The followers are often called “Moonies.” Read about them and you’ll find a lot of absolute crazy things the cult does. One thing they did was have a massive wedding with hundreds of men marrying hundreds of women. The couples didn’t even get to select each other; they were just assigned to marry each other and met right there at the ceremony.
Well, Archbishop Milingo actually took part in that and got married to a woman he never met before.
Yet, Milingo wasn’t excommunicated for it. There are certainly grounds for it, particularly as John Paul II privately sent a plea to ask Milingo to stop it.
Eventually, Milingo left the woman and went to live in a monastery in Italy, and he claimed that the Moonies brainwashed him. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Milingo left the monastery and got back with the woman. He wasn’t even excommunicated for that.
After all of that, neither John Paul II nor Benedict XVI decided to excommunicate Milingo. Much of it is apparently because of fraternal love between brother Bishops and clerics and the need for unity.
But he finally was excommunicated earlier this year when he ordained a couple other Bishops without any permission from the Pope. This calls for an automatic excommunication for Milingo and his new Bishops.
Essentially, Milingo excommunicated himself.
