Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Liberation Theology Jesuit Aloysius Pieris Says, "The Domineering Spirit With Which The Vestiges Of A Pagan Cultic Priesthood Of Rome"

Asian Theology of Liberation and Aloysius Pieris, S. J.

TWO THERE ARE, YOUR HOLINESS
Suggestions for the Next Pope’s Agenda in Line with John Paul II’s Invitation in Ut Unum Sint

By Aloysius Pieris, S.J.

An excerpt.

The superior sacerdotal character attributed to the word "priest" (when this word is misapplied as a synonym for the presbyter) is, therefore, misleading because it undermines the one priesthood of Christ shared by the community through which the Holy Spirit summons the presbyter to preside also over the community’s worship. In fact, after Vatican II, there was a tendency to return to the older vocabulary, referring to the (ordained) ministers as "presbyters" (presbyteri) rather than "priests" (sacerdotes). Regrettably, a return to the imprecise language of the pre-conciliar past is noticed again in official Church documents.

The unexamined but widely vulgarized assumption that Jesus "ordained priests" at the last supper and the other related belief that the (ordained) priest confects the sacrament by pronouncing words of consecration over bread and wine, do recur in official documents even today but are conspicuously absent in post-Vatican II works that reflect the spirit of Vatican II (Wicks 1975:99-165). That Jesus together with his whole body, the Church (head and members), exercises his one sole priesthood in all sacraments, and most eminently, in the Eucharist, must be officially endorsed so that the presbyters may re-learn to exercise their leadership role without ritually expressing or theologically claiming a superior sacerdotal character; rather let them manifest, in an appropriate liturgical idiom, their vocation to community service, a vocation they receive from God through the mediation of that same sacerdotal community of the laos.

This means two things. First of all, the statement that Bob Kaiser attributes to Cardinal Schotte (the man who organized the last synod in 2001), namely, that the bishops are not accountable to the laity but to the pope and the pope to Christ (Kaiser 2001), reflects an ecclesiology and a Christology that cannot claim Vatican II as their source. As Schillebeeckx has pointed out, it is precisely "what came from (the community) below" that was believed in the early Church to have "come from (God/Christ) above" (Schillebeeckx, 5). All office bearers of the Church, including the pope, are accountable to the laos, the Body of Christ.

Secondly, the current liturgical practices have to be entirely reformed in conformity with the dialectical relationship between the sacerdotal character which all the faithful enjoy through their baptism and the leadership or pastoral role for which the presbyters are ordained (i.e., designated and commissioned) within that one sole sacerdotium Christi.

This means that, particularly at the Eucharist, the emperor’s clothes, obsolete headgear, and wands of authority that set apart the presbyter (and bishop!) as a higher being, and also the domineering spirit with which the vestiges of a pagan cultic priesthood of Rome are perpetuated at the altar Sunday after Sunday through imposingly commanding postures and gestures of a cultic class, must yield place to a more humble mode of remembering the exaltation on the Cross and a more ardent manner of celebrating the intimacy of the Last Supper.

If Roman officials refuse to believe that such radical changes are possible without disturbing the laity, we, who do not entertain such a condescendingly clerical view of

the laity, are more than willing to supply good examples of such eucharistic celebrations from Asia,
where a nonclerical assembly of priestly laity led by a presbyter anticipate the domination-free Church of the Future (Pieris 2000:428-35).

Hence the frontier ministers of the frontier churches appeal to His Holiness: Two there are in the making of an ecclesial community priestly ministry of the laity that constitutes the mission of the Church and the leadership ministry of the presbyter who serves that Church pastorally without being served by it. Of course, the seminary curriculum would have to be thoroughly revised to accommodate pastors along this perspective, as the Brazilian Archbishop Helder Camara had perceptively anticipated in the diocese of Recife!

Link (here) to the rest of the essay

Fr. Aloysius Pieris s.j.

TULANA was founded by the leading Asian Jesuit Liberation Theologian and Buddhist scholar Fr. Aloysius Pieris s.j. after he witnessed the series of events that led to the Marxist inspired youth insurrection of 1971 in Sri Lanka. He has initiated an apostolate which has responded to two challenges – the challenge of the spirituality and philosophy of Sri Lanka’s major religion, Buddhism, and the challenge of the socio-political aspirations of the highly educated but marginalised rural youth.

Link (here)

Below is a small excerpt from a much larger article on Fr. Pieris, S.J. David Armstrong's, Biblical Defense of Catholicism. His piece is entitled, Kevin Johnson and the Boys at ReformedCatholicism Again Appeal to Dissident Heterodox Catholics in Order to Bash Orthodox Catholicism read it (here)

On Cardinal Ratzinger now His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI

Fr. Pieris, S.J. warned in a Sept. 30 talk of
"a Catholic fundamentalism raising its head among some members of the hierarchy in Europe, which is at once defensive against what is non-Christian and what is non-Catholic."

After you have read this post and have read the links I encourage you to read this link (here) last it is an article from America magazine by the reprimanded Jesuit theologian Fr. Roger Haight you will find all the elements sanitized and rehashed in one place.

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