Jim Forsyth, our stringer in San Antonio, Texas, reports:
San Antonio has been hard hit by the swine flu, but if local Roman Catholics go to Mass to pray for deliverance from the disease, they may not get the relief they had hoped for. Archbishop Jose Gomez has issued a letter to priests in the archdiocese recommending they make changes in the Mass because of the swine flu outbreak.
“I am requesting that you offer Holy Communion under only one species, bread only,” Gomez told his priests. “Also, during the Lord’s Prayer, please suspend the holding of hands and the shaking of hands or embracing during the sign of peace.”
“Common sense would dictate that washing of hands by ministers and others who come in contact with people can be effective in preventing the spread of swine flu,” Gomez wrote.
The archbishop also held out the possibility of not holding church services at all if public health officials say gatherings may spread swine flu.
San Antonio, the oldest continuously operating Catholic diocese in the United States, has also been one of the areas hit hardest by the outbreak, with tens of thousands of students out of class due to school closings. Gomez, a native of Mexico, also asked his parishioners to pray for the families in Mexico who lave lost loved ones due to the swine flu outbreak there.
(Photos: Catholics attend Mass in Mexico City’s cathedral, 26 April 2009/Eliana Aponte)
Paraguay’s political opposition whipped out the heavy artillery on Tuesday, taking President Fernando Lugo to task for having fathered a child while he still served as a Roman Catholic bishop.
Lugo was known as the “bishop of the poor” during the 10 years he labored in a forlorn rural area of landlocked Paraguay. The president campaigned on pledges to ease crushing poverty in the South American nation, but opposition lawmaker Carlos Maria Soler said: “I hope the poverty vows the bishop took do not go the way of his chastity vows, because then we’d really be in trouble.”
But while his political rivals slammed him in Congress, analysts said Lugo’s roughly 70 percent approval ratings are unlikely to sink in response to the revelation. And one of his siblings, Pompeyo Lugo, defended the president’s behavior to Argentine radio station Continental.
“This is the most important love story to happen in Paraguay in this century and the last one,” Pompeyo Lugo said. “Love is more important than the obligation to be celibate, which is a commitment but it also punishes human nature.”
A paternity suit filed by lawyers for the child’s mother - who later said she had not authorized the suit - said Lugo met and seduced her when she was 16 years old and then continued a relationship with her. The legal age of sexual consent in Paraguay is 17.
Lugo shed his cassock in late 2006 to launch his political career despite opposition from the Catholic Church. After he won Paraguay’s presidential vote in April of last year, the Vatican granted him an unprecedented waiver to allow him to hold the country’s top political post.
The Paraguayan Episcopal Conference made a broad plea to society on Tuesday: ”We ask all Catholics and people of good will to pray for us so that we may stay faithful to our priestly and episcopal mission.”
President Lugo acted quickly to legally recognize his paternity. His son will turn 2 years old in May.
Photo of Lugo taken in Montevideo, Uruguay, on March 27, 2009. REUTERS/ Pablo La Rosa.
Paraguay’s president, Fernando Lugo, admitted he fathered a child with a woman he had a relationship with when he was still known as the ”bishop of the poor” who served an impoverished rural area as a Roman Catholic bishop.
The Catholic Church frowned on his getting into politics, but eventually the Vatican granted him an unprecedented dispensation to serve as president of the South American country without breaking Church rules. Would the pope have been moved to such leniency if he had known Lugo broke his vows?
Picture of President Fernando Lugo taken April 13, 2009, REUTERS/Rafael Urzua; picture of Viviana Carrillo, the woman he fathered a child with, taken April 7, 2009, REUTERS/Courtesy Ultima Hora.
Tens of thousands of people have signed petitions either backing or criticising Pope Benedict for readmitting ultra-traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson into the Roman Catholic Church. The supporters are ahead in statistical terms, but this isn’t really a representative sample so it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions. It does give some idea, though, of how much interest the issue has created.
(Photo: Bishop Williamson leaves for London after expulsion order from Argentina, 24 Feb 2009/Enrique Marcarian)
The Süddeutsche Zeitung in Munich reports today that about 30,000 people, including many theologians, have signed a petition criticising the readmission of ultra-traditionalist Bishop Richard Williamson and urging Pope Benedict to defend the reforms of the Second Vatican Council. The petition (here in English translation) was launched by the lay reform movement Wir sind Kirche (We are Church), which the SZ says will present it to German bishops holding an assembly in Hamburg next week.
Searching on the support side, I found a French-based petition claiming 47,222 signatures so far. It praises Benedict for lifting the excommunications of the four SSPX bishops and adds: “By this brave gesture, You acted (as) the Good Shepherd of the flock entrusted to You by God.” The site includes a “letter of encouragement” by Rev. Régis de Cacqueray, head of the large French chapter of the SSPX, and sports a selection of logos from traditionalist websites — mostly not SSPX — supporting the petition.
One other petition that popped up on a google search was on the website of the French Catholic weekly La Vie, this one critical of the move as its title signals: “No negationists in the Church.” It doesn’t tally its figures but it has 90 intellectuals as initial signatories and over 6,000 comments from readers.
Pope Benedict met the Devil in Düsseldorf on Monday. To be more precise, a large papier-mâché figure of the German-born pontiff shook hands with another figure depicting the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson. The mock encounter was part of the annual carnival parade on Monday, known as Rose Monday in Germany, where the parade floats traditionally poke fun at public figures.
Benedict’s decision to readmit four excommunicated bishops of the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) last month sparked off loud protests among Catholics and Jews, especially in the German-speaking countries because Williamson appeared in a Swedish television interview only days before and denied the Nazis used gas chambers or killed six million Jews. The wing on the Williamson figure says “Anti-Semitism” and the brush at the end of his tail says Piusbrüder (Pius Brothers, the German term for the SSPX priests).
Just so there’s no confusion, the Williamson figure sports an armband clearly identifying who Benedict is shaking hands with. Thanks to Ina Fassbender for these shots.
UPDATE: Cardinal Joachim Meisner in nearby Cologne has criticised this float as “not only wrong but hurtful … When mirth becomes malice, a joke becomes a jab and a fantasy becomes a fraud, then the carival suffers.” By contrast, most readers commenting on the website of the local daily Rheinische Post liked it.
Whether such a handshake will ever happen in real life is highly doubtful. Although their 1988 excommunications have been lifted and they have been readmitted into the Roman fold, the four SSPX bishops still have to negotiate their future roles in the Catholic Church. SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay will probably lead the talks and there is no need for Williamson — who has been ordered to leave Argentina — to be present. After the public relations disaster over the interview, the last thing Benedict will want to do is receive the man at the Vatican.
At 68, Williamson’s most likely posting seems to be retirement, possibly with a virtual diocese out somewhere in cyberspace. He’s kept posting on his blog Dinoscopus. In his review of the film Doubt, he says approvingly that it shows “a Church collapsing for lack of God” but faults its lead actress because “nothing in Meryl Streep’s performance suggests that it is anchored in God.” He also promotes four volumes of his collected sermons and writings. It will be no surprise if we hear still more from him.
Bishop Bernard Fellay, head of the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX), has made some interesting comments in an in-house video interview shown at a meeting of his supporters in Paris on Thursday evening. First of all, he said he was surprised to see how quickly the Vatican lifted excommunication orders against him and three other bishops. Relations with Rome had been “rather cold” for months, he said, since he declined to accept a Vatican ultimatum last June to stop criticising the pope and to accept his authority in doctrinal matters. Fellay said he wrote to the Vatican in December requesting the retraction of the excommunications as a way to make contact again. “Since the letter was relatively severe, I didn’t expect a quick response. It was just a way to reestablish contact,” he said.
(Bishop Fellay’s interview in French on Feb 5 in Paris, issued on Feb 12 by SSPX communications office DICI/also on gloria.tv)
Another reason not to expect any change in his status, Fellay said, was the fact that rumours he heard from Rome said the Vatican was thinking of reaffirming his excommunication because he was leading a “schismatic drift”. Just before he was due to leave for Rome in mid-January to make courtesy calls on some Vatican officials, he said, he got a call saying officials there wanted urgently to discuss the excommunications with him.
We know the rest of the story from there. The excommunications were lifted, Bishop Richard Williamson’s interview caused an uproar and the Vatican handled the whole thing very poorly. What is striking in this part of Fellay’s account is the apparently sloppy handling of this even beforehand. Let’s step back and remember that this split was the most important schismatic act since the Second Vatican Council. The Vatican has been dealing with this issue for years. Why such a rush all of a sudden?
(UPDATE: Le Figaro’s Jean-Marie Guénois reports that the decree lifting the excommunications was “signed on the pope’s orders by Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re on Saturday Jan 17 and handed the same day to Bishop Fellay, who had been summoned to the Vatican for this purpose.”)
Fellay did not discuss the much-criticised Vatican handling of the excommunications announcement. He blamed the uproar over Williamson on “progressives and left-wingers” in the Catholic Church who “used the unfortunate comments of Bishop Williamson to force Rome to go back” on its opening to the SSPX. He denied the SSPX was anti-Semitic and said it was often labelled unfairly. It had earlier been branded as excommunicated and was now being branded as anti-Semitic. “We don’t like this label at all, it’s worse than the other one,” he said.
Asked about the future, he said the negotiations with the Vatican over rehabilitating the four SSPX bishops would be “not necessarily short, maybe even long”. As for the SSPX position going into such talks, he said, “The principle of the solution is in the purification of thought. We have to get back to Church doctrine in all its purity … one cannot hope for a stable and profound unity of the Church without a clear proclamation of the faith without any ambiguity, as it was done down all the centuries.”
Pope Benedict is trying to patch up relations with Jews but the rumbling still goes on within the Church, especially in the Germans-speaking countries. Benedict confirmed on Thursday that he will go ahead with his planned trip to Israel, which is due in May. This story may be settling down after the initial uproar, but the Israel visit on the horizon promises to keep a certain tension that could flare up again at any time.
Liberation Theology has long been out of fashion at the Vatican, but its effects have lived on in Latin America. One is a tradition of foreign-born Catholic priests who went to the region to preach its message of justice for the poor and oppressed. But the falling number of priests in Europe and the United States and a turn away from this activist view of the Gospels has taken its toll. The clerics defending peasants against landowners and denouncing child prostitution, drug trafficking and illegal logging are growing old and the flow of foreign priests is drying up. There are Brazilian priests, but with family members living in the country, they are often more vulnerable to death threats.
Stuart Grudgings, senior correspondent in our Rio de Janeiro bureau, travelled to Abaetetuba at the mouth of the Amazon in northeastern Brazil to visit Italian-born Bishop Flavio Giovenale and other members of this disappearing breed of priests.
What should be done with Bishop Richard Williamson? In the wave of protests following his denial of the Holocaust, many critics argued he should have no place in the Roman Catholic Church. He gave them more ammunition over the weekend by telling Der Spiegel that he would have to study the historical evidence before deciding whether to publicly recant, as the Vatican has demanded. But he and his three fellow rebel bishops from the ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) have already been let back into the Church thanks to Pope Benedict’s decision to lift their excommunications. They now have to find an official niche in the Church to occupy.
(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)
It’s not clear when the SSPX bishops will begin negotiating their rehabilitation with the Vatican, partly because we don’t know how long Williamson will take for his new history assignment. But whenever those talks get under way, one of their goals will be to find a role for the four men who, although illicitly ordained, are valid bishops. And if they are rehabilitated, they will have to be bishops of somewhere or something. As the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, bishops “are appointed for the government of one portion of the faithful of the Church, under the direction and authority of the sovereign pontiff, who can determine and restrain their powers, but not annihilate them”.
The operative word here is “restrain”. SSPX leader Bishop Bernard Fellay could be made bishop of a personal prelature, on the model of Opus Dei, but that still leaves the other three without official positions. The two others — Alfonso de Galarreta and Bernard Tissier de Mallerais — haven’t received too much media attention yet and it’s not clear what they might end up doing. But Williamson looks set for the sidelines even if he pops up on YouTube doing penitential readings from Saul Friedländer’s books.
(Photo: Bishop Jacques Gaillot/partenia.org)
The Vatican has a way of restraining insubordinate bishops. They can be appointed to a “titular see,” i.e. a see (diocese) in name only. These sees are normally given to bishops who don’t run a diocese, for example a bishop working in the Curia. But the case of French Bishop Jacques Gaillot shows they can also be used to sidetrack someone. Gaillot was bishop of Evreux in France from 1982 to 1995 and stood out for his left-wing political and theological views (including blessing a same-sex union in 1988).
In 1995, the Vatican told Gaillot to resign or be removed from his see. He refused to resign and was reassigned to the titular see of Partenia, a diocese now lost under the sands of the Algerian Sahara. It ceased to exist in the fifth (yes, 5th) century after Huneric, the King of the Vandals, drove its bishop Rogatus into exile.
Gaillot didn’t stop his activism, however. He created a Partenia website in seven languages that declares the extinct see a “diocese without borders” where he fields questions, comments on current events, gives Biblical interpretations, runs a forum and chat room and provides a collection of mostly left-wing links.
Despite his 68 years, Williamson is quite at home with cyberspace. He has his own blog, Dinoscopus, which has become a must-read for journalists following this saga. It features a caricature of him as a dinosaur (at left) that shows he has a good portion of self-deprecating British humour. There are so many unclaimed titular sees that the Vatican would have no problem finding him one. But no matter where they assign him, it’s a pretty good bet his new address will start with http://…
Vatican Secretary of State Tarcisio Bertone, who is Number 2 to Pope Benedict at the Holy See, ordered Bishop Richard Williamson to recant his Holocaust denial “absolutely, unequivocally and publicly” if he wants to serve as a prelate in the Roman Catholic Church. The tough statement, reported here by our Vatican correspondent Phil Pullella, came after a mounting chorus of Catholic bishops denounced Williamson’s statement and more or less clearly urged the apparently reluctant Vatican to take some strong disciplinary measures. Many of those appeals included calls for Williamson’s ultra-traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) to support Second Vatican Council reforms they have until now rejected.
(Photo: Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, 19 June 2008/stringer)
Bertone’s statement (original here in Italian) also said clearly that an indispensible condition for a rehabilitation of the four SSPX bishops whose excommunications were lifted last week was “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.”
This might seem like the logical next step in the Vatican’s damage control campaign. But now look at the interview with Bertone the Italian Catholic daily Avvenire published just yesterday. When asked about Williamson’s comments, he answered: “There’s no need to confuse things… The Society of Saint Pius X …has asked the pope for forgiveness for this regrettable episode. The pope spoke clearly on Wednesday. It seems to me that the question can be considered closed.” (emphasis mine).
I wonder what the last straw was that made Bertone (and Benedict) suddenly change tack. Those unusual comments from German Chancellor Angela Merkel? The mounting chorus of comments from German and other bishops? Whatever it was, this does seem to bear out a fact that several readers posting comments in recent days either fail or refuse to recognise – that the Church operates in the world and adopting a stand of sublime isolation from it can have its costs. That doesn’t mean it should not have lifted Williamson’s excommunication, but it could have considered the context and explained it from the start.
(Photo: Bishop Richard Williamson, 28 Feb 2007/Jens Falk)
Sandro Magister, a veteran Vatican watcher, has posted a detailed and informative analysis on his website www.chiesa – Double Disaster at the Vatican: Of Governance, and of Communication. He has tough words for Bertone: “With Bertone, the curia seems even more disorganized than before, perhaps in part because he has never completely dedicated himself to fixing its problems.:
The fallout from the SSPX issue continues to rain down on the Vatican. Several items over the weekend showed how messy it can get when the Vatican botches its presentation of a potentially controversial decision.
A demonstration against Williamson at the Vatican nunciature in Paris by several dozen Jewish protesters on Sunday. The Reuters photo below by Mal Langsdon shows a man holding a cartoon from the Paris daily Le Monde in which two SSPX bishops say in mock Latin “The gas chamber doesn’t exist.” Pope Benedict holds up a cloak which says “Down with Vatican II” and comments: “As long as they don’t say it in Hebrew, I’m not saying anything.” Will there be more of these elsewhere?
Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, one of the four SSPX bishops whose excommunications Pope Benedict lifted last week, told the Italian daily La Stampa (here in English) that the rebel prelates have no intention of changing their traditionalist views when they negotiate their reinstatement in the Roman Catholic Church with Vatican officials.” No, absolutely not,”he said. “We do not change our positions, but we have the intention of converting Rome, that is, to lead Rome towards our positions.” This is the man who in 2005 told the traditionalist U.S. weekly The Remnant“I will say, one day the Church should erase this Council. She will not speak of it anymore. She must forget it. The Church will be wise if she forgets this council.” Until now, most attention has focused on SSPX Superior General Bishop Bernard Fellay and the Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson. Fellay is considered the most moderate of the group and statements from the others are likely to take a tougher stand against any concessions to the Vatican.
(Photo: Bishop Bernard Tissier de Mallerais, May 2008/SSPX)
Several news outlets such as The Times and the BBC have picked up a story from Austria that the pope had approved the appointment of a new auxiliary bishop of Linz, Gerhard Wagner, who once described Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for sin and sexual excess in New Orleans and denounced the Harry Potter books for “spreading Satanism.” In a new interview with the Austrian Catholic agency Kath.net, he says “Islam is really a danger.” How much would you bet this would have gone unnoticed if there hadn’t been other negative news about the Vatican?
New statements and comments are popping up all over. A few trends emerge:
Denunciations of anti-Semitism by SSPX bishops. Bishop Fellay has made several such statements, each stronger than the previous one. His latest, to the French weekly Famille Chrétienne, calls Jews “our older brothers.” Fr. Franz Schmidberger, the head of the SSPX in Germany who has been quoted as saying the Jews must be converted, has also distanced himself from Williamson’s comments. While these statements have been welcomed, they have not answered the real question of whether the SSPX will accept Vatican II documents such as Nostra Aetate that changed the traditional Church position on the Jews (see Bishop Tissier above…).
Continued criticism of Bishop Richard Williamson and his denial of the Holocaust. Several Jewish and some Catholic leaders have said his apology to the Vatican for causing the uproar was not enough. The message is that he may have apologised and Pope Benedict may have condemned the Holocaust, but where are his full retractions, more direct criticisms of him and his denial or statements that people expressing such views have no place as office holders in the Church? The Central Council of Jews in Germany says it expects to see some “consequences” from the Vatican to prove it supports continued dialogue with and respect for Jews. One suggestion is that it suspend the procedure to beatify Pope Pius XII and later make him a saint.
Criticism of the Vatican for botching its public relations. This is going Catholic mainstream, with even Radio Vatican (German service says:“This concurrence of the lifting the excommunication and the Holocaust-denial by Bishop Williamson was fatal. Simply fatal.”) and Benedict’s close ally Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn openly complaining about it. As veteran Vatican watcher John Allen wrote: “The way this decision was communicated was a colossal blunder, and one that’s frankly difficult to either understand or excuse.”Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz openly criticised Cardinal Darío Castrillón Hoyos — head of the office dealing with the SSPX — of not doing his homework on Williamson’s controversial views.
Concern about a pattern in Benedict’s controversial statements. As Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, said: “We’ve heard the pope’s speech about Muslims in Regensburg, another statement about judging the Protestant church, then about evangelising Jews, the old Latin Mass, and now the rehabilitiation of a Holocaust denier. I don’t think this is a coincidence. The pope is a highly educated man. He says what’s being thought in the Church.”
(Photo:Charlotte Knobloch, 24 Oct 2006/Arnd Wiegmann)
Investigations into anti-Semitism within the SSPX, such as here on the America magazine blog In All Things or John Allen’s All Things Catholic column.
Rumblings among Catholics who see Benedict as turning the clock back on many Vatican II reforms. Read this comment from Robert Mickens, the Rome correspondent of the London Catholic weekly The Tablet.
Jim Forsyth, our stringer in San Antonio, Texas, reports:
The archbishop also held out the possibility of not holding church services at all if public health officials say gatherings may spread swine flu.
