Remember being 9 with your Easy-Bake Oven (Mommy/MDs excommunicated)?

Allison Hantschell writes:

I had an Easy-Bake Oven, when I was 9. It made tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since I read about the girl in Brazil.

I don’t know her name, but she’s 9 years old, living in Brazil. Brutally raped by her stepfather, multiple times over a period of years, and finally impregnated with twins.

Nine years old. And instead of playing baseball, or learning numbers, or baking tiny cupcakes and itty-bitty cookies, this little girl is at the center of a worldwide controversy over the Roman Catholic Church, its views on abortion, and, above all, the role of mercy and the incoherence of men.

Raped by a parent until precocious adolescence led to pregnancy, and the church at last took action . . . .

Update: Brazilian Govt./Catholic Church agree to disagree and cooperate on anti-AIDS/HIV effort

Bishop Williamson warned against further Holocaust denial

Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) head Bishop Bernard Fellay has declared that Bishop Richard Williamson would be excluded from the order if he reiterated his holocaust-denial.

While Bishop Williamson’s recent apology for his Holocaust denial (which he failed to recant) is an “important step,” Bishop Fellay said, Bishop Williamson should probably stay quiet and “in a corner somewhere.”

Williamson is the only Holocaust-denier among four Catholic bishops whose excommunication was lifted by the Vatican on Jan. 21 as a first step toward healing a division between the church and SSPX. All four are members of the Lefebvre movement, whose long, troubled relationship with Judiasm was documented by the National Catholic Reporter.

Bishop Fellay’s declaration suggests that SSPX strongly wishes to proceed with restoration, and will cast out Bishop Williamson to do so if it must.

SSPX is not rushing to the reconciliation offered by Pope Benedict XVI

Debate over church statistics and assignment of theological blame, is not unique to the Southern Baptist Convention, as we may see from the Vatican statistical yearbook delivered to the Pope last week. It says, reports BBC, “that the number of priests has increased by several hundred each year since 2000, after two decades of decline.” And the “percentage of Catholics worldwide remains stable, at about 17.3% of the global population.”

Turnaround accomplished, it seems.

Today Bishop Bernard Fellay of the rightist Society of Saint Pius X employed undocumented statistics to explain why SSPX, which he heads, is not ready to meet the Feb. 4 Vatican requirement that “a full recognition of the Second Vatican Council and the Magisterium of Popes John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I, John Paul II and Benedict XVI himself is an indispensable condition for any future recognition of the Society of Saint Pius X.”

In an interview with a Swiss newspaper he said:

The aftermath of the [Second Vatican] Council has been to empty seminaries, nunneries and churches. Thousands of priests have left their orders and millions of faithful have stopped being practicing Catholics and have joined sects. If these are the fruits of the Council, they’re strange indeed.

You may recall that Pope Benedict XVI lifted the excommunications of Bishop Fellay and three other bishops, who were ordained against papal orders in 1988, as a step toward dialogue and reconciliation. One of the four is Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson, whose disingenuous apology and failure to recant was well-rejected by the Vatican last week.

Williamson wants more time to consider whether the Holocaust occurred and Fellay says that if the Vatican requirement is met, it will be the after “doctrinal discussions” with his society. As if the Holocaust were really in doubt and rollback of Vatican II were actually on the block.

We wonder if there is a decidedly unhopeful SSPX pattern here?

U.S. Bishops demand a stern standard for full reconciliation

The price of full reconciliation of the four disastrously un-excommunicated, right-wing Catholic Bishops?

A full-throated end to their anti-Semitism and holocaust denial, demanded the The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on Tuesday.

Cardinal Francis E. George of Chicago, the president of the group, also “called the statements by Bishop Richard Williamson ‘deeply offensive and utterly false’ and called the outrage from Jews and Catholics ‘understandable.’”

Specifically about full reconciliation, reported the Boston Globe, George said:

The Holy Father’s lifting of the excommunications is but a first step toward receiving these four bishops, and the priests who serve under them, back into full communion with the Catholic Church. If these bishops are to exercise their ministry as true teachers and pastors of the Catholic Church, they, like all Catholic bishops, will have to give their assent to all that the Church professes, including the teachings of the Second Vatican Council.

Mention of the Second Vatican Council is important here. because it resulted in the church’s renunciation of anti-Semitism and led to a historic warming of relations between Catholics and Jews.

Until Tuesday the U.S. Catholic bishops were largely silent on the matter, thus provoking criticism.

Now, they are apparently pushing back against any real or perceived Vatican impulse to give the bishops of the Society of Saint Pius X any but the most exacting path to full reconciliation.

Pushing back is what service of their church requires, given the pope’s refusal to invest more heavily in quieting the waters he has whipped into an unrelenting storm.

Update:

Vatican demands holocaust-denier repudiate his positions.

The Lefebvre movement’s troubled relationship with Judaism

The four Catholic bishops whose excommunication was lifted by the Vatican on Jan. 21 are members of the Lefebvre movement, whose long, troubled relationship with Judaism the National Catholic Reporter documents today.

John L. Allen Jr. writes:

A troubled history with Judaism has long been part of the Catholic traditionalist movement associated with the late French Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre — beginning with Lefebvre himself, who spoke approvingly of both the World War II-era Vichy Regime in France and the far-right National Front, and who identified the contemporary enemies of the faith as “Jews, Communists and Freemasons” in an Aug. 31, 1985, letter to Pope John Paul II.

That helps explain in part why a man with the extreme views expressed by Bishop Richard Williamson, who denies the Holocaust, can find a home there. Other Lefebvre followers have taken similarly extreme positions, as Allen documents:

In 1997, one of the four bishops ordained by Lefebvre in 1988, Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, said, “The church for its part has at all times forbidden and condemned the killing of Jews, even when ‘their grave defects rendered them odious to the nations among which they were established.’ … All this makes us think that the Jews are the most active artisans for the coming of Antichrist.”

Nor has their record been confined simply to making statements. In 1989, Paul Touvier, a fugitive charged with ordering the execution of seven Jews in 1944, was arrested in a priory of the Fraternity of St. Pius X in Nice, France. The fraternity stated at the time that Touvier had been granted asylum as “an act of charity to a homeless man.” When Touvier died in 1996, a parish church operated by the fraternity offered a requiem Mass in his honor.

We can perhaps accept that Pope Benedict XVI’s action in no way canonized such views, but rather acted to promote church unity and avoid schism.

We can accept that all that happened was that the four had their excommunications lifted. As far as the church is concerned, all four remain suspended.

We can accept that any further restoration will be part of a long process.

Yet the Lefebvre movement’s anti-Semitic views and sometimes actions and the associated history loom over every aspect of the Vatican’s action.

As Allen concluded:

Early returns, however, suggest that in the court of broader public opinion, disentangling the pope’s logic from the taint of association with anti-Semitism will be a tough sell. The chief rabbi of Rome, Riccardo Di Segni, sounded despondent on Monday about where things will go from here.

“I don’t know what kind of resolution there can be at this point,” Di Segni said.

Price of advocating women in the priesthood

The Vatican is threatening to excommunicate Maryknoll Priest Roy Bourgeois for supporting ordination of women into priesthood and he’s flying home to defend himself.

Bourgeois’ interview with Amy Goodman is at Democracy Now. He begins:

Yes. Let me put it this way, Amy. For eighteen years, I have been speaking out against the injustice of the School of the Americas, and for many years I’ve been speaking out against the injustice of the war in Iraq. As a Catholic priest for thirty-six years, in conscience, I cannot remain silent about injustice in my Church. I and many have come to the conclusion that the exclusion of women in the Catholic Church is a grave injustice, and I simply must—I cannot, in conscience, accept the Vatican’s demand that I recant my belief and my public statements in support of women’s ordination. This is simply wrong.

Read the entire interview here.