In her own day, St. Catherine of Sienna found much corruption within the Holy
Church. Homosexuality and many other deeply rooted problems were found among the
clergy and Our Lord spoke to this Doctor of the Church about these problems
(pride, loss of sacred identity, loss of faith, worldliness, and sensuality).
These conversations were laid out in St. Catherine's book entitled "Dialogue,"
and most especially in that portion of the book labelled "The Mystical Body of
Holy Church."
While St. Catherine cautions her readers not to engage in
blanket condemnations aimed at the clergy in general (using scandals as an
excuse to denigrate priests
in general), and refers to such people as
"irreverent persecutors" of the clergy, still,
she was told by Our Lord that
those who will not receive correction and those who will not give it are like
the limbs of a body beginning to rot.
In our sacharrin society, medicinal
rebuke is often mistaken for a "lack of charity" when in actuality such
constructive criticism aids in healing. In his excellent work entitled
"Liberalism is a sin," Fr. Felix Sarda Y Salvany writes:
"If the
propagation of good and the necessity of combating evil require the employment
of terms somewhat harsh against error and its supporters, this usage is
certainly not against charity. This is a corollary or consequence of the
principle we have just demonstrated. We must render evil odious and detestable.
We cannot attain this result without pointing out the dangers of evil, without
showing how and why it is odious, detestable and contemptible. Christian oratory
of all ages has ever employed the most vigorous and emphatic rhetoric in the
arsenal of human speech against impiety. In the writings of the great athletes
of Christianity the usage of irony, imprecation, execration and of the most
crushing epithets is continual. Hence the only law is the opportunity and the
truth.
But there is another justification for such an usage. Popular
propagation and apologetics cannot preserve elegant and constrained academic
forms. In order to convince the people we must speak to their heart and their
imagination which can only be touched by ardent, brilliant, and impassioned
language. To be impassioned is not to be reprehensible----when our heat is the
holy ardor of truth.
The supposed violence of modern Ultramontane
journalism not only falls short of Liberal journalism, but is amply justified by
every page of the works of our great Catholic polemicists of other epochs. This
is easily verified. St. John the Baptist calls the Pharisees "race of vipers,"
Jesus Christ, our Divine Savior, hurls at them the epithets "hypocrites,
whitened sepulchers, a perverse and adulterous generation" without thinking for
this reason that He sullies the sanctity of His benevolent speech. St. Paul
criticizes the schismatic Cretins as "always liars, evil beasts, slothful
bellies." The same apostle calls Elymas the magician a "seducer, full of guile
and deceit, child of the Devil, enemy of all justice."
If we open the
Fathers we find the same vigorous castigation of heresy and heretics. St. Jerome
arguing against Vigilantius casts in his face his former occupation of
saloonkeeper: "From your infancy," he says to him, "you have learned other
things than theology and betaken yourself to other pursuits. To verify at the
same time the value of your money accounts and the value of Scriptural texts, to
sample wines and grasp the meaning of the prophets and apostles are certainly
not occupations which the same man can accomplish with credit." On another
occasion attacking the same Vigilantius, who denied the excellence of virginity
and of fasting, St. Jerome, with his usual sprightliness, asks him if he spoke
thus "in order not to diminish the receipts of his saloon?" Heavens! What an
outcry would be raised if one of our Ultramontane controversialists were to
write against a Liberal critic or heretic of our own day in this fashion!
What shall we say of St. John Chrysostom? His famous invective against
Eutropius is not comparable, in its personal and aggressive character, to the
cruel invectives of Cicero against Catiline and against Verres! The gentle St.
Bernard did not honey his words when he attacked the enemies of the faith.
Addressing Arnold of Brescia, the great Liberal agitator of his times, he calls
him in all his letters "seducer, vase of injuries, scorpion, cruel wolf."
The pacific St. Thomas of Acquinas forgets the calm of his cold
syllogisms when he hurls his violent apostrophe against William of St. Amour and
his disciples: "Enemies of God," he cries out, "ministers of the Devil, members
of antiChrist, ignorami, perverts, reprobates!" Never did the illustrious Louis
Veuillot speak so boldly. The seraphic St. Bonaventure, so full of sweetness,
overwhelms his adversary Gerard with such epithets as "impudent, calumniator,
spirit of malice, impious, shameless, ignorant, impostor, malefactor,
perfidious, ingrate!" Did St. Francis de Sales, so delicately exquisite and
tender, ever purr softly over the heretics of his age and country? He pardoned
their injuries, heaped benefits on them even to the point of saving the lives of
those who sought to take his, but with the enemies of the faith he preserved
neither moderation nor consideration. Asked by a Catholic, who desired to know
if it were permissible to speak evil of a heretic who propagated false
doctrines, he replied: "Yes, you can, on the condition that you adhere to the
exact truth, to what you know of his bad conduct, presenting that which is
doubtful as doubtful according to the degree of doubt which you may have in this
regard." In his Introduction to a Devout Life, that precious and popular work,
he expresses himself again: "If the declared enemies of God and of the Church
ought to be blamed and censured with all possible vigor, charity obliges us to
cry 'wolf' when the wolf slips into the midst of the flock, and in every way and
place we may meet him."
This is real meat for real Catholics. It was Sir
Edmund Burke who said that, "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph in the
world is for good people to do nothing." When we witness another Catholic (and
yes, even a priest) promoting homosexuality, abortion, contraception, New Age,
witchcraft, or dissent in general,
we have an obligation (in charity) to speak
the truth and to show others how that individual's words, ideas or actions fail
to hold up when placed in the Lumen Christi - when held up to the Magisterial
teaching of the Church.
Just a few years ago, Pope Benedict XVI insisted
that the role of the laity in the Church is essential. In other words, he reminded us that the laity
are not "second-class" citizens within the Church.
The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us
that: "Since, like all the faithful, lay Christians are entrusted by God with
the apostolate by virtue of their Baptism and Confirmation, they have the right
and duty, individually or grouped in associations, to work so that the divine
message of salvation may be known and accepted by all men throughout the earth.
This duty is the more pressing when it is only through them that men can hear
the Gospel and know Christ. Their activity in ecclesial communities is so
necessary that, for the most part, the apostolate of the pastors cannot be fully
effective without it." (CCC , 900).
In
his Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation Christifideles Laici (The Lay Members of
Christ's Faithful People), Pope John Paul II reminded us that, "The voice of the
Lord clearly resounds in the depths of each of Christ's followers who, through
faith and the sacraments of Christian initiation is made like to Jesus Christ,
is incorporated as a living member in the Church and has an active part in her
mission of salvation." (No. 3).
Sadly, there are all too many clerics who haven't
really embraced this authentic teaching of the Magisterium. For such clerics,
the laity are second-class citizens who are tolerated but not really embraced
fully as collaborators in the life and mission of the Church. This is most
unfortunate, for, as Pope Pius XII said, "The Faithful, more precisely
the lay faithful, find themselves on the front lines of the Church's life; for
them the Church is the animating principle for human society. Therefore, they in
particular, ought to have an ever-clearer consciousness not only of belonging
the Church, but of being the Church, that is to say, the community of the
faithful on earth under the leadership of the Pope, the head of all, and of the
Bishops in communion with him. These are the Church..." (Pius XII, Discourse to
the New Cardinals, February 20, 1946: AAS 38 (1946),
149).
The truth of lay participation in the
priesthood of Christ follows logically from the doctrine of the Mystical Body.
Everyone who is incorporated into the Mystical Body participates in the
dignities, honors, and offices of the Mystical Head (Jesus). "Because Christ is
our head," says St. Thomas Aquinas, "that which was conferred upon him, was also
in him conferred upon us" (Summa Theologica, III, q. 58, a.4, ad 1).
Or, as Pope John Paul II put it: "Referring to the baptized as 'new born babes',
the apostle Peter writes: 'Come to him, to that living stone, rejected by men
but in God's sight chosen and precious; and like living stones be yourselves
built into a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual
sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ ... you are a chosen race, a
royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that you may declare the
wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light'
(1 Pt 2:4-5, 9).
A new
aspect to the grace and dignity coming from Baptism is here introduced: the lay
faithful participate, for their part, in the threefold mission of Christ as
Priest, Prophet and King. This aspect has never been forgotten in the living
tradition of the Church, as exemplified in the explanation which St. Augustine
offers for Psalm 26: 'David was anointed king. In those days only a king and a
priest were anointed. These two persons prefigured the one and only priest and
king who was to come, Christ (the name "Christ" means "anointed"). Not only has
our head been anointed but we, his body, have also been anointed ... therefore
anointing comes to all Christians, even though in Old Testament times it
belonged only to two persons. Clearly we are the Body of Christ because we are
all "anointed" and in him are "christs", that is, "anointed ones", as well as
Christ himself, "The Anointed One". In a certain way, then, it thus happens that
with head and body the whole Christ is formed..'
In
the wake of the Second Vatican Council, at the beginning of my pastoral
ministry, my aim was to emphasize forcefully the priestly, prophetic and kingly
dignity of the entire People of God..." (Christifideles Laici, No.
14).
How quickly some have forgotten this threefold dignity of the laity!
