Russell Shaw writes an absolutely great article on clericalism at Inside Catholic. This is the first of a multi part series on clericalism. The article has a great balance in explaining this with the necessary caveats in that clericalism is a distortion of the role of the priesthood and condemning clericalism does not mean blurring the lines between the priesthood of the faithful and the ordained priesthood. I also likes the examples he used to explain clericalism which made me to see more fully what this term means.

We can forget about the dangers of clericalism when what we mostly see is the danger of those that seem to be reducing the role of priests to some kind of sacramental dispenser.

It also seems to me that the women’s ordination movement is also a form of clericalism. Where these women seem to think that the only way to serve the Church is via the priesthood only. In this day and age of specialists this is no surprise since we can see the priesthood as the ultimate religious specialist and we forget that holiness is not caused by our vocational state in life, but by fully responding with love to the vocation we have. The Devil tempts priests and religious by making them long for the lay life and the Devil tempts the laity to long for the priesthood and religious life even when they don’t have a vocation to it.

It is ironic that sometimes clericalism is used to support blurring the lines between the laity and the priesthood as for example Bishop Clark has managed to do in his diocese. He uses the term ministerium which is also used by many Protestants to do some of this blurring I must admit when I saw the term ministerium today in a headline in association to the bishops ministerium event I thought that the word was a contraction for minimizing the magisterium.

The fourth-annual ministerium event brought together people who serve in various leadership positions across the diocese. Participants are invited by Bishop Clark, who had introduced the term ministerium — Latin for "body of ministers" — in 2001 to define those who exercise an official of ecclesial ministry. This group is inclusive of ordained priests and deacons, and also such people who are considered lay ecclesial ministers: women religious, pastoral administrators, pastoral associates, religious-education coordinators, youth ministers, hospital chaplains, campus ministers, prison chaplains, Catholic-school principals, parish volunteers with significant ministerial responsibilities and diocesan employees.

Under Canon Law to be chaplain in the first place you must be an ordained priest. It really isn’t correct to term lay volunteers to these ministries as chaplains. The definition of ministry in this context is a mirror form of clericalism where to be doing something for the Church this means physically doing something for the local diocese as an employee or volunteer to the parish or diocese. Lay apologists, the faithful praying at home for the Church, etc, are left out of this equation. This is like the distorted meaning of active participation meaning physically doing something during Mass.

Time Magazine asks in an actually readable story Is Liberal Catholicism Dead? Even though it quotes the usual suspects it brings up some interesting points such as how the progressives in their positions have done nothing to distinguish themselves from liberal Protestantism. I don’t think however that the Pope speaking out on sex abuse has changed the dynamic. Groups such as VOTF who latched on to priestly sexual abuse to advance their own agenda were never really influential and peaked pretty quickly as far as membership goes.

I think though that the real question is was liberal Catholicism ever alive in the first place. Any movement whether it arises on the so-called right or the left that denies some doctrines or diminishes them and places too much emphasis on another can never be truly alive. Only the truth is alive. When truth and error are mixed in we don’t get something fully alive, but something stillborn that can never successfully reproduce itself. The birth defect of error ensures that while it might cause a commotion for a time, that without a true promotion of the faith it is bound to die out. The Church has bounded over constant heresies and while they might have tossed the Ark of the Church about the Church always stayed on course since the Holy Spirit is her steersman.

Modernism has not brought the Church to the world, but tried to bring the world into the Church. Modernism has worked like a canal lock, but instead of raising the world to the Church, has tried to lower the Church to the world. This equivocation has been detrimental in vocations. Why answer the call of sacrifice when all forms of sacrifice and self-restraint are suppose to be a sign of an unbalanced personality. Where sin becomes just guilt to be overcome on a psychologists couch and not the confessional.

There has been talk about the graying of the Call to Action crowd and the same thing for those convents and monasteries that have in most ways abandoned the faith for a bunch of modernist pottage. It is always a temptation to follow something new that seems exciting at the time if you are on the cusp of some new fad. The pride of thinking that your insights into the faith despite the fact that they contradict the constant teaching of the Church is what is in fact true. In a culture of constant change and invention it is attractive to invent something new when it comes to the faith. This is an easy path since it is much harder to truly absorb the faith and to meditate on it and to perhaps even illumine the mysteries of the faith further in contemplation. So while it is exciting to be involved in the latest theology that brings much itch to the ears, later generations will see it as the fad it was; though this won’t keep them from following a different fad.

We are not exactly conditioned to giving our fiat to the Church when we are buffeted about by the winds of rugged individualism. That to be an individual it to have an opinion different from other individuals. Though mostly this gets played out by doing exactly the same thing as a bunch of other individuals who are proclaiming their individuality. I do thank God for my own experience in the military since it removed so many false ideas from when I was a wannabe hippie. It prepared me for the Church militant where I could both be fully alive as a person and also a part of the body of Christ. That obedience to Christ and his Church is a joy and I have not lost any freedom, but only gained true freedom by doing what I ought.

Last week at Ten Reasons Rich Leonardi posted an article from one of Bishop Clark’s pastoral administrator.

As pastoral administrator of St. Mary’s Church in Rochester, I have been blessed with the responsibility for the pastoral and administrative care of a Roman Catholic community of 900 families who gather for worship in a beautiful city-center church. I collaborate with a talented pastoral staff including a full-time priest and a retired priest who serves us voluntarily.

I can’t imagine a better place to be. We are in a city that is showing such positive signs of new life. Our church tradition has a rich and beautiful wealth of spirituality, theology and liturgy. We are in a diocese that has a courageous, encouraging leader in Bishop Matthew Clark.

Traditionally, the leader of a parish would have been an ordained priest. At present, only an ordained priest may preside at Eucharist, give absolution and anoint the sick. However, as a lay pastoral leader, I do not feel less capable in serving the community in most other ways. Readily we seek to offer care, compassion and spiritual guidance, as well as teaching and administrative leadership.

The sure sign of the progressive is to use the words "at present." But as Chesterton noted on modernists is that they might as well call themselves Thurdayites. I idea of the constant teaching of the Church changing in a contradictory way to me is a nightmare and certainly nothing to hope for. To paraphrase Flannery O’Connor if the Church can change her doctrines than the Hell with her. This of course does not apply to the development of doctrine, but a democratic view of doctrine where the Holy Spirit doesn’t get a vote. Where Apostolic Tradition doesn’t get a proxy vote. Were the Church to do such a thing I would have no choice but cynicism and atheism since the Church is all or nothing. This is something I will never loose any sleep over since with Peter I would say "Where would I go, you have the words of eternal life."

I do wonder what metrics she uses for evidence of positive signs of new life, I get the feeling our understanding on what constitute new life would vary. The only real metric is one that we can’t know in this life and that is just how many of the parishioners make it to Heaven. The training for life in Christ seems to me to be the fundamental purpose of a diocese just as it is the fundamental concern of parents to raise their children in Christ.

I would think that a diocese that has to resort to pastoral administrators which as Rich mentioned is canonically legitimate only under temporary and exceptional circumstances. I also would think that the response to vocations in the priestly and religious life would be an important indicator of new life. When your vocation chart represents the flat line of an EKG connected to someone dead you might think their might be a problem there or maybe resorting to pastoral administrators is the same thing as the plot of Weekend at Bernie. We’re alive here!, just don’t look too closely. As many have mentioned there is no vocation crisis, their is a response to vocation crisis. When the priesthood and religious life becomes just social work why not just be a social worker for better pay and conditions? By theological diminishing the ordained faithful and raising the priesthood of the faithful to an equal level why exactly should we be surprised that answering to the vocational call is met with resistance?

Other metrics I would look at for seeing if a diocese is truly alive is Mass attendance, lines for Confession, a falling divorce rate, etc. The metric for most people seems to be how faithful is the Catholic Church to them and not how faithful they are to the Catholic Church. There is only vibrant orthodoxy and vibrant heterodoxy is an oxymoron. But even orthodoxy can be lived in an unorthodox manner when it becomes a narrowing instead of the large thumping creature that it is since it is the very heartbeat of truth. Pope Benedict when speaking to Catholic educators said that Catholic education can not "be equated simply with orthodoxy of course content." Orthodoxy of course content is the foundation to be built upon and when it is not, as modernism demonstrates, it is the foundation built on rocky ground that Jesus preached about.

When I think of liberalism/modernism/progressivism or whatever ism it is going by I can only think of what G.K. Chesterton said.

�A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.�

A reader sent me a link to the following interview between Larry King and Michael Moore.

King: What about how he’s handled the Rev. [Jeremiah] Wright thing?

Moore: Jeez, you know, I mean I go to Mass still. I’m a practicing Catholic. I’ve been that way all my life. But if I had — if I had gotten up every time I heard a priest from the pulpit in my travels around the country say things like I’ve heard them say, that birth control is a sin, that women should not be priests, that women should have a different role in church …

King: You’d be walking out all the time?

Moore: I would have been walking out so much — that would have been so much aerobic activity for me … I wouldn’t look like this.

I thinks I will call BS on this. Either that or I would like a list of churches he has attended that actually mention birth control and women’s ordination. But even if true it can’t me much of a shock or surprise to hear a homily that actually teaches what the Church teaches.

Though what is really ridiculous is his comparison of Wright’s rants with the constant teaching of the Catholic Church. As if the Church teaching against contraception is the same thing as saying that the government invented AIDS to kill black people. This is just relativism used to divert a question. Just like when Obama was asked about Ayers he said he was also friends with Sen. Coburn as if being friends with a pro-life senator is the same thing as opening your senate campaign in the home of a unrepentant domestic terrorist. In Moore’s case just mentioning the Catholic Church is sure to get no follow up from Larry King since the Catholic Church is the epitome of evil for liberals.