Book Review

by Ralph McInerny

Sophia Institute Press

This is a small book, about 160 widely-spaced, wide-margined pages.  I wouldn't be surprised if it was a plumped-up article that Dr. McInerny wrote elsewhere.  I've read it twice, and both times, it blew my socks off.  But small does not mean insignificant, and this is one of the most important books published in the last ten years concerning the condition of the Catholic Church in America.

McInerny has been paying attention, and he has noticed a few things:

Dissent Had Become Institutionalized
In 1968, Humanae Vitae was met with defiance.  After that, since it had encountered few obstacles, defiance became the standard theological response to magisterial documents.  Dissenting theologians could be counted on to question, criticize, and even dismiss papal encyclicals and statements by Vatican officials.* One favorite tactic was simply to predict that a document would be ignored.

The confusion that began in the wake of Humanae Vitae came to characterize the Church.  On every significant question, there came to be two opposed schools:  The liberal and the conservative.  The fact that the so-called conservative side was all but identified with the Pope and the bishops posed little problem for those who saw themselves as a counter-Magisterium and had elevated to the level of doctrine the notion that anything short of a solemn infallible pronouncement could be safely challenged.

For twenty years thereafter, dissent was allowed to continue unabated.  It became institutionalized.  Catholic universities became the usual habitat of dissenting theologians, and many Catholic universities, in Msgr. Kelly's phrase, essentially declared independence from the Catholic Church.  They adopted the view that the teaching Church was an alien, off-campus force, and that to permit it to play any role on campus would be to compromise academic freedom.  Dissenting theologians were offered sanctuary in theology departments of Catholic universities, where, from tenured posts, they dismissed and even scoffed at magisterial pronouncements, even teaching their students to do so, all without interference from the divinely appointed teachers of the Catholic Church.

These universities trained future teachers for universities, colleges, and high schools, they trained directors of religious education.  For years, students of these dissenting theologians continued to fan out into positions in the Church, taking with them the curious notion that they operated in independence of the Magisterium.  They promulgated the doctrines of dissenters, not of the Magisterium.

It's no surprise that American Catholics today have not the slightest notion that anything is wrong in the Church.  Thanks to the inroads these dissenters have made into the teachings of the American Church for the last forty years, is it any wonder that American Catholics are so ill-informed, so poorly-prepared, and simply so lackadasical and unconcerned about the sin in their lives?  The miracle is that any are left who still really believe in the Roman Catholic Church.

This book should be required reading in every parish.  Another quote, one which does not shock me:

Today, it is the rare bishop who is in charge of the bureaucracy that has metastasized around him.  Earlier, Thomas Sheehan had boasted that anti-papal Catholics dominated seminary faculties and university departments of theology:  now they are often in control of chanceries.  Too many bishops are surrounded by bureaucracies that bear the stamp of dissident theology.

To be sure, here and there, one finds a courageous prelate, a good seminary, or a theologian deserving of the name, but in the parishes, all too often there is the mark of the dissenters rather than of the Magisterium.

As the dissenters might have said, "We are legion."

*For instance, the Papal Document, DIRECTIVES ON FORMATION IN RELIGIOUS INSTITUTES, was released in 1961.  It dealt directly with the problem of homosexual priestly candidates, and stated categorically that these people were not allowed to be ordained, lest it become a cause for scandal for the Church, and cause the men involved too great a temptation.

It was never released in America.  That means that for more than forty years, a direct order from the Vatican has not only been ignored, but deliberately hidden, and about 99% of parish priests have never even known it existed.  It was hidden from all American bishops and never released.  It can be found and read in its entirety on the Vatican's website, here.  Needless to say, numerous priests and bishops now have the document in their hands, and finally know the extent of the deceit. 

If you are Catholic and you love your Church, you'd better not waste any time getting and reading this book.