Reject excommunication?
I find all the head lines "Married archbishop rejects Vatican's excommunication" to be rather dumb. Exactly when in the history of the Church did anybody ever accept an excommunication? It makes it sound like excommunications are served like subpoenas, except with a yes/no block on it to be filled out as to whether you accept it or not. People are excommunicated in the first place because there was something wrong with their judgment, so whether they accept it or not just does not matter.
Now there have been plenty of those who were excommunicated and in a way did accept it. They came to see that they were wrong and repented of their disobedience. You have to wonder though in the modern climate just how effective an excommunication is compared to in the past. It is not exactly a mark of Cain to many people and might even be considered by some as a reason to approve of a person. It is harder for someone to repent of a sin when they are supported by so many.
News coverage has often be laughable in describing excommunication as kicking somebody out of the Church or as a declaration that somebody is no longer Catholic or within the Catholic Church. You won't hear that it is a medicinal and spiritual penalty that bars a person from the sacraments until they have repented and the penalty has been lifted.
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Even if you could theoretically reject an excommunication, it's pretty obvious they don't give a hoot what the Vatican says anyway since they did something clearly in contradiction to the Church. So why is he making a hoot & holler about it?? What's with this "I want to dissent...but only from within the Church" attitude???
Maybe he's realizing that by getting himself booted, he's lost influence. The best thing the Church can do is make this LOUD so that people can't be fooled into believing that in some way this is a kind of progressive catholicism that they can take or leave.
Not so. He's OUT, farther OUT than Luther, farther OUT than the SSPX, farther out than hindus, muslims, cow-worshippers. GONE.
'reject excommunication' LMAO
what a nutcase
Anyone who remembers Seinfeld will remember this one...when George Costanza told his girlfriend that he wanted to break up. She went on with the wedding invitations (or whatever she was doing), laughed, and said, "We're not breaking up."
And so it was...they didn't break up because she laughed at him. Apparently the media takes "Seinfeld" as their "bible" (capital "B" intentionally omitted), and suggest, subliminally, that if they suggest that "Rejecting excommunication" ala "We're not breaking up" means the Church will fall...well...as we already knew, none of this bunch has been living in the real world for a very long time.....
I just wish I could be a fly on the wall on Judgment Day...except I'm worried about my own sentence.
Reminds me of that joke e-mail that used to go around, the rejection letter rejection letter. "Due to the large number of rejection letters I have received, I am unable to accept them all. Please expect me to begin my employment on thus-and-such date."
Of course, then we knew it was just a joke.
Unfortunately some will even wear the excommunication as a badge of "honor"
ummm.. didn't Milingo excommunicate HIMSELF? The Vatican just made sure we all KNEW what he did. They didn't excommunicate squat, so his "rejection" is even more pointless
Excommunications just ain't what they used to be!
As I've always understood it, one is excommunicated automatically by their own actions -- with or without knowledge of their actions by others. On occasion, the Church FORMALLY declares someone excommunicated because their actions, and typically it's persistent actions, have caused discord in the Body of Christ and they indicate that they will take no steps towards correction.
For me to say that I "reject my excommunication" is a bit like saying "I reject that I am a female." It's just a fact, whether I accept it or not. But of course nowadays, I'm told constantly I can reject being an XX chromosome person too.
I guess the upshot is, there are no such thing as facts. It's all relative!
Wow. For this Milingo character to "reject an excommunication", he must have a very vivid imagination.
BMP
I may be wrong, but I thought Martin Luther, when he received the Papal Bull which instructed him to desist from his teachings or be excommunicated, burned the letter in the public square and embraced excommunication.
In this age of many denominations, I have to admit I'm baffled that after being excommunicated, folks don't just jump ship to another denomination or start their own. Why the insistence on changing the Catholic church?
I am glad that we are spending so much time and effort deciding the rules on who gets to be in and who gets kicked out of our club. It's not like there's a bunch of starving people out there or anything. By the way, wasn't Jesus excommunicated?
Brian...that's a classic strawman argument.
Let's see...oh! There's another issue in the Church...maybe we should spend ALL our resources discussing that! That way we can ignore the other things that are going on, stick our heads in the sand, and just focus on one thing.
As far as Jesus being excommunicated...what's your point? He was punished as a criminal for our sins, and he was INNOCENT of any wrongdoing. Milingo, on the other hand, has WILLFULLY disobeyed, has married a Moonie, and has done many wrong things and is in need of our prayers. This is not even in the same category of what you so incorrectly refer to as Jesus' "excommunication". To put it accurately, Jesus was murdered. By US. And by US I also include YOU.
So now we are judging each others' sins? Maybe we should all be excommunicated.
That's right, Brian. We shouldn't judge each other's sins at all. In fact, let's close the courts, open the jails, and find new jobs for police officers. Because nobody has the right to say anything is wrong.
MissJean, how DARE you say it's wrong to say something is wrong!? The only sin is thinking that something is sinful. I find your judgmentalism is very disturbing. But, uh, in a very nonjudgmental way, you see.... Oh, bother.
^_^;;
Listen all I am saying is that our first inclination should be to treat each other with forgiveness and compassion and not condemnation. I don't think that anyone here would argue that. I'm not advocating a decent into relativism, but the truth is that we all sin. It is up to a person's well formed conscience to determine a sin, not me or anyone else. Why is it that some sins get one kicked out of the family and others do not? We, as a Catholic community, seem to stand ready with stones in hand for anyone who has a progressive idea. Well, I'm not joining the march back to Trent.
Milingo wasn't "kicked out of the family" for having "a progressive idea." He was excommunicated for inflicting a serious wound in the body of Christ for ordaining his own cadre of bishops. Just like Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre and his merry band of Trent-marchers.
Also, conscience does not mean that morality is subjective. Jesus and Paul certainly did not preach as if it were, and the constant practice of the Church has been to impose ecclesiastical penalties, including excommunication, both for the good of the excommunicated person (so he might see that his conscience was not as well-formed as he thought and repent) and of the Church as a whole (so they won't think that whatever X did was hunky-dory and do the same).
This whole "primacy of conscience" nonsense goes back to the way reformation thinkers divided the mind and the body. "Faith" matters, but not works- good intentions justify the means, they claimed. This is why some dissidents can justify ESCR ("I have good intentions- I want to improve the health of people 40 years down the road. So what if I'm killing babies to do it? I have good intentions! I have faith!")
Conscience, in the Catholic sense, is radar, scanning the horizon for Truth. In the reformed/modernist sense, conscience is the supreme arbiter of reality, enabling a man to do what he wishes.
This is why the protestant reformers and modernist Catholic dissidents strip away the beauty of Churches- the Eucharist is the soul of the Mass and the church building is its body. Just as the reformers/modernists divide soul and body in the human being, they divide them in the church building- as long as people are focused on the celebration (the soul/mind of the Mass), that's all that matters- it doesn't need a body to glorify it, they claim.
The modernists believe that we only go to Church to THINK about Jesus. If this were true, we wouldn't have to go toe Mass at all- we could stay home, and spend 10 minutes thinking about being with Jesus (which is basically how the religious observance of most modernist laypeople works). In reality, we must GO to Mass, and be with a real physical presence of Jesus, and that can only take place if the PHYSICAL aspects are present- the proper wine, the proper bread, and a validly ordained Priest. Without these things, there is no Sacrament- no outward sign of God's true conferrance of grace.
In short, true Catholics do not divide mind/matter, soul/body, faith/reason. We unite them, and it is for this reason that "conscience" must always bend to the Truth of God, as revealed by Scripture and Sacred Tradition.
Incidentally, if you reject Trent, you MUST reject Vatican II. There's no point in believing in Vatican II if you don't believe in Trent, because Vatican II affirmed everything Trent claimed (Whether Vatican II will be as successful as Trent remains to be seen, but I strongly suspect it will not).