Sep
30
Heretics
September 30, 2006 |
Probably the craziest religion-oriented website I’ve ever seen is that of the self-styled “Most Holy Family Monastery” of Fillmore, NY. To hear these folks tell it, they are the only genuine Catholics left on the planet: literally everyone else has fallen into heresy. Some of us have fallen into particularly grave heresies, such as wanting to be friendly to non-Catholics. They have a rather amusing item they refer to as “Heresy of the Week” (”changed on Fridays”!), and this week’s “major heresy” consists in the fact that our Holy Father prayed Vespers with some Protestants.
In short, these folks don’t even know what a heresy is, let alone who might be guilty of one. The irony, which is most assuredly unintentional, is quite delicious, since these folks are among the arch-heretics of our time.
There is probably no better example of the intellectual resources of this group than this:
In addition to the aberrations and sacrileges that are commonplace at the New Mass, the words declared by the Church to be necessary for a valid consecration have been changed.Words of Consecration – Traditional Mass:
For this is my Body. For this is the Chalice of my Blood, of the new and eternal testament: the mystery of faith, which shall be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins.
Words of Consecration – New Mass:
For this is my body. For this is the chalice of my blood, of the new and eternal testament: which shall be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven.
These folks are confusing the ICEL translation of the Mass with the normative Latin text. In the Latin, of course, the text of the so-called “new” Mass is identical to the text they are calling the “traditional” Mass in reading “pro multis” in the text of the Canon. Rather embarrassing for them, but then people like this have neither pride nor shame, so they constitute a rather special sort of group. They go on to complain about the “omission” of the words “the mystery of faith”, but I note they have nothing to say about the omission of the word “unto” and the obviously abusive change of “remission of sins” unto the laxitudinarian formula “so that sins may be forgiven”. O tempora! O mores! (That was Latin, for all you heretics out there who have never read Cicero in the language in which Almighty God demands that he be read. Of course, he was only a pagan, so if you read him in any language at all that makes you even more of a heretic than you already are.)
I suppose it is not very charitable to poke fun at people like these–it’s rather like laughing at a child having a temper tantrum. It’s possible, for example, that these people are actually serious about all of this, and that the things they complain about are genuinely upsetting to them. We don’t ridicule people who suffer from Alzheimer’s, so how on earth can we justify laughing at this kind of nonsense?
The difference, I think, lies in the nature of the kvetching. Someone who is genuinely a lunatic is suffering from mental dysfunction, but these folks are guilty of that knowing obstinacy and lack of humility that characterizes the true heretic who persists in his own private way in the face of overwhelming evidence and magisterial authority to the contrary. It is sometimes difficult to pray for such people–but I suppose we must pray for them as earnestly as we pray for the Richard Dawkinses and Daniel Dennetts of the world. It is a work of mercy, after all.
