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| Fr. Philip Endean, S.J. |
We are the victims of an abuse of power and of gross incompetence. That said, the world is not lost. We are indeed being led into something new. But this new reality has the character of no longer feeling at home in a Church that, for all its faults, I have loved and tried to serve as best I can. Now it's as though a spouse has left me, as though I simply have no ecclesial home.
The Kingdom of God in some ways will have to be found beyond, outside the liturgy-perhaps exclusively so. God will still be there for me somehow, I have no doubt-but the Church has finally said it's not a welcoming place for me and for right-thinking people.
Link (here) to America Magazine go down in the comments section of Fr. James Martin's blog post on the new Mass Translation to read this comment by British Jesuit Fr. Philip Endean, S.J.
7 comments:
Rather it is the Jesuits who left the Church quite some time ago yet still pretend to be a part of it, with some even perniciously sowing seeds of disunion. If this Jesuit is so unhappy with the Church's liturgy that he believes the Kingdom of God will have to be found outside of the Church's liturgy, may I be the first to invite him to leave? But he would never do that because he is a coward; lacking the courage of his convictions (such as they are), he will live his materially comfortable life in a Jesuit residence with his cushy job (such as it is) and cast stones at those who are doing the real work of the Kingdom of God.
As Fr. Hardon SJ was wont to say: "kindly do us all a favor and leave".
The Church changes, traditions change. But that perspective overlooks that there is often real loss or real gain that accompanies those changes. In the case of the Sacramentary, there is a real loss.
How we confront real loss is a component of how we are judged. Do we react emotionally? Do we consider our community? Do we weigh trade-offs into the future? Do we apply sound, well-reasoned judgment based on our current understanding?
The loss of the Sacramentary is a small loss. The loss of a priest is a large loss. Would a real priest, someone capable of reflecting God’s judgment, make such a decision?
Fr. Endean's statement is the fruit of 60 years of Liberation Theology taught in every major Jesuit Seminary and Theology Department. He can no longer tell up from down, order from disorder.
"The Kingdom of God in some ways will have to be found beyond, outside the liturgy-perhaps exclusively so"
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"Statements abound in which Father Gerald makes no secret of the malice of sin in a priest, and of the harm he does to the Church by his infidelity. "Who has struck the beautiful spouse of Christ? What has disfigured the spouse of Christ? The sins of priests." (D-130).
Unworthy priests are more than a source of scandal to the faithful. They renew the mockery of the Mystical Christ today, even as the Roman soldiers mocked the physical Christ during His Passion on Holy Thursday night.
Those poor soldiers, all they thought was that Jesus was a poor dreamer, a poor seer and perhaps, a half-wit, a poor victim of the mob who was given to them that they might have some fun according to their ideas of fun. As cruel men sometimes cast a poor little rabbit to the hounds after they have caught it, or a poor little mouse to the cat to be played with, they did not know that this was the King of Kings.
But, when I or another priest of God do anything unworthy, I step up to Him and bow my knee in mockery, and make the world laugh. The world who hates Christ and does not believe. They smile and say, "There is your priest for you." I set the crown back hard and deep into the Sacred Seat of Divine Wisdom. Oh, this is a mystery of suffering that is especially continued through time.
How Christ suffers in being mocked in the person of His priest! It is too late for a priest to make a decision, would to God it was not, it is too late for a priest to turn back and be something else. (J-4, p. 38).
But they cannot be anything else. They are ordained forever. And even if they try to forget, the world never forgets. It knows, as by supernatural instinct, what a priest should be and if he shows himself unfaithful, the whole Church suffers by the counterwitness he gives to everyone who enters his life."
--Spiritual Biography: Fr. Gerald Fitzgerald, by John Hardon SJ
As Fr. Hardon said, "Are we having those chops broiled this evening?"
Philip Endean has this subject on the brain and has published many insidious, negative articles on the subject in Britain and abroad. Perhaps he does not realise that he sounds like disaffected Catholics of the mid-Sixties who objected to the introduction of the vernacular when Latin was largely abolished. He is entirely a man of the 1970s, poor fellow.
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