O Rose, Thou Art Sick.

This has been a troubling week for many Catholics. It is not hard to hear the rumbling of the secular cannons in the distance, as those in favor of iconoclastic and violent means of change set their sights on the Church, toppling images of St. Junipero Serra, threatening to take the Cathedral in St. Louis, and, at the height of the rioting, coyly suggesting that:

“All murals and stained glass windows of white Jesus, his European mother and their white friends should come down.

They are a gross form white supremacy.

Created as tools of oppression.

Racist propaganda.

They should all come down.”

Activist Shaun King

This necessarily brings uncertainty and trepidation as those familiar with history prepare for the clashes we have seen play out before.

Locally, if we expected words of comfort and exhortations to courage, we were destined for disappointment. The events of the week also revealed once again that the petty gods of liability management and optics continue to have their fervent votives among our leadership.

One of our readers summarized pithily:

What we’re fighting for now is every priest’s solemn duty to have the FREEDOM TO PREACH: To preach the truth in and out of season! And this extends way beyond Father Rothrock’s situation. This goes straight to the bureaucratic, phony-evangelistic, corporate nerve-center of Uniting in Heart and Divine Renovation that is about to be unleashed on our diocese: treating our priests as if they never went to seminary, never learned anything, and haven’t picked up any wisdom of their own since their ordinations. Nope! Our priests will be given pre-packaged “messages” that must be delivered, per corporate instructions, with as much manufactured sincerity and passion that they can muster or there will be hell to pay back at headquarters.

-Layperson

It becomes more and more obvious that planning, formation, and directives from the diocese are built upon control, distrust, and micromanagement, a sad parody of the motherhood the Church is meant to embody.

This is not how the Church exists. It is not how it thrives. It is not how it grows. It is not how souls are saved. It is not what we “sign up for” when we profess our Faith “in word and sacrament.”

The metaphor of the nerve center is an apt one. Can the head hate and fear the body’s movements and functions, and the organism yet remain healthy? One is reminded of the struggles of persons with anorexia, who cannot hear the groaning of their own organs, nor see the wasting of their flesh, as their minds obsess ritualistically over every morsel they must consume.

We asked you to pray with us and to offer sacrifices, and we renew that call.

However, as we speak to other Catholics, seeing their just needs of genuine pastoral care and a healthy environment in which their children may experience the Faith, we cannot see that quietly riding out the coming storm will suffice. The diocese is poised to be wounded, and an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.

Let us make an unpopular observation: The Church is not and never has been merely synonymous with the hierarchy.

As Princeton research scholar Bronwen McShea writes:

We need a change of attitude. Laypersons and even clergymen under episcopal authority need not confuse filial deference to bishops and popes with uncritical, docile acceptance of all the forms of power the hierarchy currently wields. Some of these powers are new in the history of the Church and are concentrated by happenstance in the hands of the hierarchy, due to the historical conditions of the Church’s self-preserving self-extrication from modern political regimes.

Faithful and informed Catholics have filial duties to their mother—the Church herself—not only to their clerical fathers. They should call attention to problems and propose solutions, mindful that by virtue of holy baptism and confirmation, they have been gifted by the Holy Spirit not only with piety and fear of the Lord, but also with wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, and fortitude.

. . . Catholics today need not dream of restoring Christendom and its tightly woven fabric of clerical and secular rule. But perhaps the sexual abuse crisis serves to remind us that it was traditionally the duty and right of the laity to protect the physical, temporal body of the Church—to safeguard her orphans, widows, and all manner of persons endangered by malignant forces prowling about within the corpus Christianum, as well as outside of her.

Today, the safety and well-being of the Christian people’s children and young clergymen are in question. Laypersons may be called at this hour to assert their traditional rights within the Church as a whole, in order to secure the common good of our spiritual communion. We will need to pursue that duty in ­creative ways suited to present-day conditions. And we should anticipate—with the sober realism that the Church’s messy history engenders—that more than one exalted churchman will oppose worthy reforms with this or that implement from his modern stockpile of ecclesial power. 

For those who will read this as a a denial of the the hierarchy’s authority, let us be clear in saying this is not so. What Christ gave us as a principle of unity and legitimate governance, an archetype and participation of Himself, we accept and indeed revere. However, the detritus of clericalism that has built up around that institution should be seen for what it is, and what McShea calls the “uncritical, docile acceptance” would be better replaced with self-sacrificial truth telling for the good of all, including that of the Catholic bishops themselves.

Further, where that office is turned against itself in some way, and therefore against the good of the Church as a whole, the Faithful must defend. They must find within themselves the threefold office of priest, prophet and king, because it was shared with them by Christ’s own will and design through the sacraments. It is not for decoration, an ornamental weapon merely to be cooed about in the prayer group and bible study. It is for use.

It is very clear-cut and easy to see this duty in those situations involving the McCarricks of the world. The layman crying out with a thousand tongues is nothing more than just.

But the scourge of pedophilia is not the only, or even the primary, way in which the Christian people can be abused. It is simply one dark facet of a frankly sinful worldview, where the Faithful are inanimate pieces to jumble and reassemble as one wishes–squeezing for money here, coolly shuttering a community or taking away its pious traditions there. Or where they are peons, the low-ranking soldiers who must march to whatever beat is drummed–even if the path leads them further from Christ, or over a precipice. It was not for this purpose that Christ shared His authority.

Three points to consider:

The Governing Office of A Bishop:

The Good Shepherd ought to be the model and “form” of the bishop’s pastoral office. Conscious of his own weaknesses, “the bishop . . . can have compassion for those who are ignorant and erring. He should not refuse to listen to his subjects whose welfare he promotes as of his very own children. . . . The faithful . . . should be closely attached to the bishop as the Church is to Jesus Christ, and as Jesus Christ is to the Father”

CCC 896

Recall the secretive process of the UiH plan, which seemingly intends the dissolution of parishes but won’t say so truthfully. The silencing of the plan’s critics by threat of firing and demotion, and the sly implication that concerned individuals were working against “what the Holy Spirit is leading us to.” The requirement, decided without genuine dialogue with the priests and people, created under a false pretense of listening, that all parishes will be adapting all their practices to a new, prescribed model. The uprooting of almost all clergy to make the demolition easier, and in many cases, to place it in the hands of the more compliant, while sifting out and rewiring those who stubbornly remained concerned. The money trail that leads to the diocese’s collaboration with outside bodies that decide what our parishes should be, and walk away with a pocketful of cash.

Have you formed the impression that our current leadership perceives us with the loving eye of a father looking upon his own children? Listens to our needs for our parishes? Has trust been built such that we can be “closely attached to the bishop as Church is to Jesus Christ?” Or do you think that something has gone wrong in what should be a deeply sacred bond? If so, is the blame all on the side of the laity?

The Sanctifying Office of A Bishop:

The bishop is “the steward of the grace of the supreme priesthood,” especially in the Eucharist which he offers personally or whose offering he assures through the priests, his co-workers. The Eucharist is the center of the life of the particular Church. The bishop and priests sanctify the Church by their prayer and work, by their ministry of the word and of the sacraments. 

CCC 893

This weekend, we entered the third phase of COVID re-opening. Diocesan directives held church gathering capacity to 50%, yet gave us a large reduction in the number of Masses able to be offered. One need not be much of a mathematician to observe that in practical terms, in many places, this meant that up to half of our fellow Catholics were effectively denied participation in the Mass and the reception of the Eucharist this weekend. Again. After months of no sacramental life.

What remedy has been offered for this from the diocese? Is “pastoral care” now reducible to just watching stuff on YouTube and wishing you were there? Trying, as the diocese advised in an earlier COVID response phase, to make a perfect Act of Contrition for your sins, because they weren’t going to let you have absolution?

Is this what we have to look forward to from now on? Do you, readers, believe that the diocese’s current approach, and that displayed throughout the whole COVID crisis, acknowledges the centrality of the Eucharist “in the life of the particular Church”? Or is something else occupying that place of centrality? And with a diocesan plan in which the Holy Eucharist was added as an afterthought, it is difficult to imagine things getting better.

The Teaching Office of A Bishop:

Bishops, with priests as co-workers, have as their first task “to preach the Gospel of God to all men,” in keeping with the Lord’s command. They are “heralds of faith, who draw new disciples to Christ; they are authentic teachers” of the apostolic faith “endowed with the authority of Christ.”

CCC 888

And finally, we now find ourselves confronted with the events in Carmel surrounding the treatment of Fr. Theodore Rothrock, which many now view as a debacle. This involved some of the strictest penalties an ordinary can impose upon a priest being applied to Fr. Rothrock, in order to comply with demands of a small activist group who celebrated his downfall and screamed for more. Regardless of where one stands on the matter of Fr. Rothrock’s tone or terms, it is not difficult to see that the application of this most heavy penalty created the distinct impression of bending the Church’s teaching to the angry mobs of the world, and also fired a warning shot to all other priests of the diocese, in case they preach on uncomfortable topics.

Arguably, this has opened the door for future actions of a similar kind. Perhaps our priests had best stay mum on things like gender ideology, lest the LGBTQ groups come marching in with their deadly phalanx of rainbow flags. Perhaps we should let the whole “abortion is murder” thing slide, since hordes of angry, bare-breasted feminists might descend with their fearsome coat hangers and malevolent pink hats.

And should a priest or deacon decide the risk to natural and revealed Truth and/or the souls of mankind justifies preaching upon the unpopular, will they first have to avoid the eyes of the the new diocesan Homily Censors and Priest Watchers, and then the danger of the bishop’s own willingness to deliver their heads upon a silver platter to the Social Justice Salomes of the day?

The bishop is our chief teacher and shepherd in this diocese. Is the Faith being “heralded” and protected in a manner consistent with this office, “in season and out of season”? Was the truth taught clearly this week by the words and deeds in Carmel?

“If any man would come after Me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.”

We’ve received emails requesting help and advice, asking whether protests should take place or letters be written. Red Wolf cannot tell you how to act as this must be discerned within yourself, but we can remind you that each of us shares the burden of the good of the Church. And it is a burden carried willingly out of love. You each can be assured of our prayers.

Weigh and consider these matters yourself. Decide if you think all is well in the diocese of Lafayette-in-Indiana, or if we are indeed in a time of crisis and growing alienation from our leadership. Consult your consciences and speak to one another. Be angry, if you need to, as St. Paul advises, but do not sin. Pray for yourself and your bishop, and then take up your cross. Let us not offer ourselves the false consolation that it is “someone else’s job.”

Do you have ideas or suggestions to help strengthen our Faith and community and rise to meet the difficulties we face? Share below.