Why do heretics remain in the Church?
I have no time for those whiners who profess heretical views and yet remain in the church. Take those German bishops in the Catholic Church for example. Take the woke, pinko-liberals in the Church of England. Recently I read a good article on this subject by a lady named Jennifer Bryson. Herewith:
Fifty years ago, then-Fr.
Joseph Ratzinger and Ida Friederike
Görres were watching their era’s equivalent of a livestream
of the implosion of the Church in Europe. And they were asking the same
questions about the “reformers” in the Church that many of us are asking today:
Why are they so optimistic about their efforts that
are patently leading to a decline in the Church? And why do these people remain
in a Church they so clearly despise? And, daring to utter the s-word, when will
the powers that be finally pull out a red card and declare, “schism”?
In the early 1970s, Ratzinger was a rising young
prelate and Görres was an elderly lay author near the end of her life. Their
lives intersected. Ratzinger and Görres carried on a correspondence from the
1960s until her death in 1971, when Ratzinger gave the eulogy at her funeral.1
When it came to the destroyers in the 1970s, Ratzinger noticed that optimism was a central characteristic. He
developed three hypotheses to explain their optimism. In a talk Ratzinger gave
on “Hope” in 1986, he used the Church in Holland in the early 1970s as one of
his case studies of hope’s incompatible counterpart, optimism.2 He
described how the state of the Church in Holland was a much-discussed topic
among his confrères at the time.
After a visit to Holland, one of them brought back
a report of “empty seminaries, religious orders with no novices, priests and
religious who in shoals were turning their backs on their vocation, the
disappearance of confession, the dramatic decline in Mass attendance, and so
on.” What came as “the real surprise,” said Ratzinger, was the prevalence of
“optimism.” Ratzinger recounted how the returning visitor to Holland told them:
Nowhere was there any pessimism, everyone was
looking forward to the morrow with optimism. The phenomenon of general optimism
allowed all the decadence and destruction to be forgotten: it sufficed to make
up for all that was negative.
Ratzinger explored three hypotheses for this
optimism in the face of unambiguous collapse.
One was that “optimism could possibly be merely a
cover behind which lurked the despair that one was trying to overcome.”
A second hypothesis, he said, “could be something
worse.” He explained:
Possibly this optimism was the method come up with
by those who desire the destruction of the old Church and under the guise of
reform wanted without much fuss to build a totally different Church, a Church
after their own taste.
Ratzinger mused that such destruction would be
“Something they could not set in motion if their intention was noticed too
soon.” He identified that this second hypothesis required two types of
optimism: that of the destroyers and that of naive followers.
Thus, the image of “the public optimism” maintained
by the destroyers “would be a way of reassuring the faithful in order to create
the climate in which one could dismantle the Church as quietly as possible and
gain power over it.” To make this second approach possible, reflected Ratzinger,
it was necessary to have “the trustfulness, indeed the blindness of the
faithful who let themselves be reassured by fine words.”
He concluded, “this optimism of the arrogance of
apostasy would however make use of a naive optimism on the other side and
indeed deliberately nurture it.” This type of optimism would be presented
deceptively as if it “were nothing other than…the divine virtue of hope,” when,
however, “in reality it is a parody of faith and hope.” This second type of
optimism, he said, would be “a deliberate strategy to rebuild the Church so
that…our own will” not God’s, “would have the last word.”
His third hypothesis was that “this optimism…was
simply a variant of the liberal faith in continuous progress—the bourgeois
substitute for the lost hope of faith.”
Ratzinger concluded that likely all three types of
optimism were at work, “Without it being easy to determine which of them had
the decisive weight and when and where.”
In 1970, there was another hypothesis about the Dutch forerunner of today’s Synodal Way, this time
developed by Ida Görres. In a letter to her friend Fr. Paulus Gordan, OSB, she
explained that a priest brought materials from the Church in Holland. She
responded, “In view of this, I cannot understand why, in Rome, one does not
simply declare schism, which has in fact long since taken place”—a schism, she
said, that “is now only disguised with the contemptuous formulas of diplomacy.”
Then she explained why from the other side, in Holland, those who have
essentially left the Church show no eagerness to step out the door:
The gentlemen in Holland are surely clever enough
to know that, officially detached, they would sink into the abyss of
uninteresting insignificance, whereas this way, they, of course, go on and
on playing a splendid sensational role and yet, at the same time, do what suits
them.3
Bright, cheery
optimism and love for media attention are on display again today among the
enthusiasts of the Synodal Way in Germany. Year after year, more and more
Germans are leaving the Church; but at the Synodal Way they’re more optimistic
than ever. They enthuse about a future with women’s ordination, allowing
divorce, extending the sacrament of marriage to same-sex pairs, and so on. And
they’re quick to make their case known in any media channel they can. And all
the while they “do what suits them” not what suits the Church.
We are, by now, in the umpteenth episode of the
umpteenth season of a tragic series known as “The Crisis in the Church.” In the
latest episode, the Synodal Way in Germany, which has already strewn outrage
after outrage on its path, is now embracing one heretical set of views after
the other and doing so ever more brazenly.
And as we watch the livestream of this, again, and
still, we are asking: Why are these people who pursue destruction so filled
with optimism? When will enough be enough for de facto schism to be declared
openly? And why do these people who hate the Church remain in her?
- Joseph Ratzinger, “Eulogy for Ida Friederike Görres,” trans. Jennifer S. Bryson, Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 23, no. 4 (September 9, 2020): 148–55.
- Joseph Ratzinger, To Look on Christ: Exercises in Faith, Hope, and Love (New York: Crossroad, 1991), 40–42.
- Ida Friederike Görres, Letter to Paulus Gordan, January 30, 1970 in “Wirklich Die Neue Phönixgestalt?” Über Kirche Und Konzil; Unbekannte Briefe 1962-1971 von Ida Friederike Görres an Paulus Gordan, ed. Hanna-Barbara Gerl-Falkovitz (Heiligenkreuz im Wienerwald, Austria: Be+Be Verlag, 2015), 439–440. Quotes translated by Bryson.
Methinks the answer has a lot to do with this:
ReplyDelete"(The heretics) are surely clever enough to know that, officially detached, they would sink into the abyss of uninteresting insignificance, whereas this way, (by staying) they, of course, go on and on playing a splendid sensational role and yet, at the same time, do what suits them."
In other words outside the Church they know they would be nothing more than snarling nobodies.
GENE
This would only hold true if the people whom you call heretics were secretive or underhand in proclaiming their beliefs about such matters as Christian attitudes to sexuality. They are not. Nor do they argue for a total change in doctrine, but rather for greater inclusiveness such as is proposed by St Paul in Galatians 3:28. He was proposing the inclusion of the greatest disparities he could imagine: Jews, Greeks, men, women, slaves, free men - who are all one in Christ Jesus. That is why we stay in the church - to enable its ministry to become available to all who are willing to receive it, irrespective of any of their differences, be these political, emotional, social, intellectual or sexual. I worship each week alongside people who think that homosexuality is a sin, or a sickness to be cured. They recite the same creed that I do and reconcile their beliefs about sexuality with that creed, as I do, and accept my right to a different belief from theirs in the acceptance of that creed - as I accept their right to believe differently. The “snarling nobodies” you speak of are the narrow minded bigots who are unable to accept that there are many ways to live a Christian life other than the one they wish to impose on everyone else. They snarl because they have to bully others to think as they do, as they cannot make a valid intellectual case based on Christ’s teaching for their bigotry. And they are nobodies because they lack humility in believing that theirs is the only way to believe. And their unhealthy obsession with the sexuality of others is probably rooted in uncertainty about their own.
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