The results from the Medjugorje Litmus Test

A few months ago, Bishop Ratko Peric (Mostar-Duvno) reported that "something similar to a schism" was occurring in his diocese.  He attributed it to the alleged apparitions in Medjugorje, and said:

Therefore I responsibly call upon those who claim themselves to be "seers", as well as those persons behind the "messages", to demonstrate ecclesiastical obedience and to cease with these public manifestations and messages in this parish. In this fashion they shall show their necessary adherence to the Church, by neither placing private "apparitions" nor private sayings before the official position of the Church.

As New Advent said in July, It's a simple litmus test in the Church, confirmed by centuries of practical experience:  if the apparitions are true, they'll stop now.

Well, three months have passed, and as Dawn Eden pointed out yesterday, the apparitions didn't stop.  This suggests one of two things:

• the "visionaries" are making it up, and they blew a good chance to save face and fall silent, or
• the visionaries are indeed seeing a real person, but whoever that person is, he's an expert at arousing human curiosity while undermining Church authority.

Either way, Medjugorje calls for extreme caution, to say the least.

Someone recently gave me a copy of a book called Understanding Medjugorje:  Heavenly Visions or Religious Illusion? by Donal Foley.  I haven't read it yet, but since the situation in Medjugorje is continuing to deteriorate, it might be a good time to start.  I'll post a review later on New Advent.  (In case you're interested, free PDF extracts of the book are available here.)

In the meantime, if you've read Foley's book yourself, please give us your thoughts -- pro or con -- in the comment boxes below.

EXCLUSIVE: The Vatican's view of the Egan letter

Edward Cardinal Egan, Archbishop of New York, is reeling today from the scathing letter being circulated among the priests of his archdiocese.

The anonymous authors of the letter requested a vote of No Confidence to "encourage the Papal Nuncio and the Holy Father to strongly consider accepting the Cardinal's resignation in April, 2007, when he reaches the age of retirement, rather than at a future and uncertain date before his 80th birthday, as can often be the case with retiring Cardinals."

Now, word comes from New Advent's source in the Congregation for Bishops that the Holy See is watching this case very closely -- and based on its long institutional memory of similar cases, the Vatican doesn't like what it's seeing.

Our source told us that "we want to leave no doubt in the minds of the faithful that the Holy Father is sovereign in the appointment and removal of bishops."

He suggested that the effort in New York would backfire on its proponents.  "They will not attain what they're trying to accomplish.  If they did, it would set a harmful precedent, and the door would be opened to all sorts of groups trying to pressure the removal of unpopular bishops."

The Congregation official cited two cases with parallels to New York:  Santiago in the late 1980s, and Dallas in the early 2000s.

In the first case, he said, a group of laymen and priests in Santiago, Chile, wrote an open letter to the Holy See, requesting the speedy resignation of Juan Francisco Cardinal Fresno.  In response, the Holy See actually held up acceptance of his resignation "for several months longer" than would have occurred otherwise.

In the second case, our source revealed that the Congregation for Bishops felt its hands tied by grassroots efforts seeking the removal of Bishop Charles Grahmann from Dallas.  The anti-Grahmann drive backfired, he told us, by removing the most plausible options for early retirement, and possibly delaying the acceptance of the canonical resignation that Grahmann offered in July 2006.

Our source said the response of the Roman curia will be simple:  "The letter will be treated like it doesn't exist."

Turning east

Journalist Rod Dreher details his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy here. I'm not going to dwell on this too much, but I want to make four points:

First, take it as a personal warning.

Rod candidly admits that his devotion to Christ was eclipsed by golden calves of his own making. These include:

• All-consuming anger -- "I became so tormented over what had happened to those children at the hands of the Catholic clergy and hierarchy that I could see nothing else but pursuing justice. And my own pursuit of justice allowed me to turn wrath into an idol. I didn't know I was doing this at the time. . . . That is something that could happen to anybody, Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox or what have you. Be warned."
• Politicized faith -- "I can look back also and see that my own intellectual pride helped me build a weak foundation for my faith. When I converted to Catholicism in 1992 . . . it was a sincere Christian conversion. But I also took on as my own all the cultural and intellectual trappings of the American Catholic right."
• Churchcraft as a hobby -- "I had become the sort of Catholic who thought preoccupying himself with Church controversies and Church politics was the same thing as preoccupying himself with Christ. Me and my friends would go on for hours and hours about what was wrong with the Church, and everything we had to say was true. But if you keep on like that, it will have its effect."
• Clericalism -- "Without quite realizing what was happening, I became a Professional Catholic, and got so caught up in identifying with the various controversies in the American church that I began to substitute that for an authentic spirituality. This is nobody's fault but my own. Part of that involved hero-worshipping Pope John Paul II, and despite having a healthy awareness of the sins and failings of various bishops, exaggerating the virtues of bishops my side deemed 'orthodox.'"

Don't think you're personally immune from errors like these.  You're not, and I'm not.  (Read Matthew 24:22.)

Second, skip the temptation to snipe, and pray for Rod.

It's the best thing we can do, and he himself asks for it:  "I can't keep any of you from saying whatever you will . . . still, those of you more charitably inclined, please just pray for me and my family, that we always live in truth, and do the right thing, and be found pleasing to God, the Father of us all."

(In this spirit, please refrain from harsh personal attacks over this in the comboxes.  They'll just be deleted.)

Third, he's right when he enumerates the problems in the Catholic Church.

But these are poor reasons to leave the Church.  On the contrary, they demand a hotter zeal and spirit of reform among all who have ever received the Sacrament of Confirmation.  (And yes, Christ will someday judge us on how well we respond to these graces.)

Fourth, never forget Frank Sheed's sound advice:

I'll repeat it until I turn blue:

"We are not baptized into the hierarchy; do not receive the Cardinals sacramentally; will not spend an eternity in the beatific vision of the pope. Christ is the point. I, myself, admire the present pope, but even if I criticised him as harshly as some do, even if his successor proved to be as bad as some of those who have gone before, even if I find the Church, as I have to live with it, a pain in the neck, I should still say that nothing that a pope (or a priest) could do or say would make me wish to leave the Church, although I might well wish that they would leave."

It's still just a rumor, but . . .

. . . the mainstream newspapers are starting to say that Pope Benedict has signed some sort of document that loosens restrictions on the traditional Latin Mass.

The rumor (or scoop, perhaps) seems to have started with Hong Kong's Cardinal Zen, who supposedly told an English priest (Fr. Martin Edwards) that the document had been signed.  A resourceful Catholic blog, the Cornell Society for a Good Time, reported it, and the London Times wrote an entire piece based on the blog post.

An Associated Press reporter, Victor Simpson, follows up this morning with a new quote from his own source:

The pope's intent is to "help overcome the schism and help bring (the ultraconservatives) back to the Church," said the official, who asked that his name not be used because the papal document has not yet been released.

It was not immediately clear when the pope will make his decision public, but the Vatican official said it was expected soon. The Times of London, in a report Wednesday, said the pope had already signed the order and it could be published in the next few weeks.

We've been through this all before, so a healthy I'll-believe-it-when-I-see-it attitude is in order.  But New Advent will keep monitoring this story, so stay tuned.

Error in pairs

On the 1274th anniversary of the Battle of Tours . . .

A few months after the cartoon controversy, things are heating up again in Denmark.  A group of thugs from the "Danish People's Party" released a video designed to insult Muslims and Muhammed.  The video made it to YouTube and television news, enraging Muslims worldwide, and the situation threatens to get much worse in the coming days.

So whose side should we take?  C.S. Lewis has the best answer in the form of a warning:

The Devil always sends errors into the world in pairs -- pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.

In the early Church, it was Nestorianism vs. Monophysitism.  In the last century, it was Communism vs. Nazism.  And in 2006 -- and probably in 2056 -- it's Islam vs. Secularism.

Those who especially dislike Secularism might be tempted to forget that Islam, whenever it is ascendant or dominant in a culture, reveals an unusually thin-skinned, violent, and repressive nature.  (If you don't believe me, go count the number of churches in Saudi Arabia, and multiply it by the number of critics who actually read Pope Benedict's Regensburg address in its entirety.)

Those who especially dislike Islam might be tempted to excuse the toxicity of our own secularized culture, especially when it displays its contempt for women (contraception and pornography) or innocent children (divorce and abortion).  (Awful as it is, terrorism pales by comparison to infanticide.)  They might too easily dismiss the importance of our good Muslim friends in the battle for God's rights.

Don't despair, though.  C.S. Lewis also reminds us of the solution:

Do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors.

In other words, orthodoxy.  Straight through between both errors, by the grace of Christ and the guidance of His Church.  If we can master that, and learn how to announce the Gospel to each side, we'll be well equipped to handle the current Danish situation, and to serve God in the coming Dramatic Century that it foreshadows.