Blessed Pius IX On “Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus”

Blessed Pius IX’s theology made pasta.

Pope Pius IX had, among his many gifts, the one of expressing himself in a simple, crystal clear terms. His language and way of presenting the Church’s case are beautiful and instructive reading to this day.

Emphases mine:

“Not without sorrow we have learned that another error, no less destructive, has taken possession of some parts of the Catholic world, and has taken up its abode in the souls of many Catholics who think that one should have good hope of the eternal salvation of all those who have never lived in the true Church of Christ. Therefore, they are wont to ask very often what will be the lot and condition of those who have not submitted in any way to the Catholic faith, and, by bringing forward most vain reasons, they make a response favorable to their false opinion. Far be it from Us, Venerable Brethren, to presume on the limits of the divine mercy which is infinite; far from Us, to wish to scrutinize the hidden counsel and “judgements of God” which are “a great abyss” (Ps. 35.7) and cannot be penetrated by human thought. But, as is Our Apostolic Duty, we wish your episcopal solicitude and vigilance to be aroused, so that you will strive as much as you can to drive form the mind of men that impious and equally fatal opinion, namely, that the way of eternal salvation can be found in any religion whatsoever. May you demonstrate with skill and learning in which you excel, to the people entrusted to your care that the dogmas of the Catholic faith are in no wise opposed to divine mercy and justice.
“For, it must be held by faith that outside the Apostolic Roman Church, no one can be saved; that this is the only ark of salvation; that he who shall not have entered therein will perish in the flood; but, on the other hand, it is necessary to hold for certain that they who labor in ignorance of the true religion, if this ignorance is invincible, will not be held guilty of this in the eyes of God. Now, in truth, who would arrogate so much to himself as to mark the limits of such an ignorance, because of the nature and variety of peoples, regions, innate dispositions, and of so many other things? For, in truth, when released from these corporeal chains ‘we shall see God as He is’ (1 John 3.2), we shall understand perfectly by how close and beautiful a bond divine mercy and justice are united; but as long as we are on earth, weighed down by this mortal mass which blunts the soul, let us hold most firmly that, in accordance with Catholic teaching, there is “one God, one faith, one baptism” (Eph. 4.5); it is unlawful to proceed further in inquiry.
“But, just as the way of charity demands, let us pour forth continual prayers that all nations everywhere may be converted to Christ; and let us be devoted to the common salvation of men in proportion to our strength, ‘for the hand of the Lord is not shortened’ (Isa. 9.1) and the gifts of heavenly grace will not be wanting to those who sincerely wish and ask to be refreshed by this light.”

This is one beautiful example of what I am tempted to call “Italian Catholicism” (there is no Italian Catholicism, of course), as the simple, common sense, practical way of seeing at things that to a Protestant (and if I am frank, to many North Europeans) appears not reconcilable or the fruit of hypocrisy.

The line between “in” and “out” of the Church is obviously not such that can be decided by men; but please observe how wisely this great Pope circumscribes the matter, and in just a short number of sentences pours on us many centuries of Catholic truth.

This is like bucatini cacio e pepe. So simple, and so right.

Mundabor

Archbishop Chaput on Humanae Vitae

Archbishop Chaput, every bit as good in 1998 as in 2012.

The Catholic News Agency has an interesting letter written from Archbishop Chaput (then of Denver) concerning Humanae Vitae. The letter was written in 1998 on occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the encyclical letter, but has lost nothing of its beauty. It is very long, but it is easy to read, well argued, and extremely clear in its content at all times. Blessedly, it is also devoid of those continuous  references to V II documents so dear to modern Vaticanese.

Archbishop Chaput repeats (and explains very clearly) the arguments brought by Paul VI against contraception, but he adds a new observation: the rather cold theological character of the encyclical letter did not help its diffusion or acceptance among the Catholic masses. It is true Chaput is able to write with admirable clarity, but I allow myself to see the reason for the failure of Humanae Vitae to stem the tide of contraception in the following elements:

a) weakness from the top. To write is one thing, to bite an altogether different one. Paul VI probably thought it was brave enough to issue the encyclical in the first place. I cannot imagine the idea of aggressively following up on the letter and demanding that it be upheld by his bishop and priests ever entered his mind.

b) On the contrary, Humanae Vitae gave rise to a widespread dissent within the Church.

Therefore, the letter was not vocally defended from the Vatican, and either ignored or outright opposed by the majority of the clergy. With these premises, it would have failed to be a success even if it had been written in the most beautiful and lyrical language.

When we talk about Humanae Vitae, we should not forget the encyclical was and is largely ignored because the Church as a whole failed – with the culpable inaction of Paul VI, who could see very well what was happening but lacked the courage to oppose the trend – to stand for it in the first place.

If the Church now begins to aggressively – and I mean saying it loud and clear, rather than always hiding behind the dratted pastoral sensitivity – defend the message of Humanae Vitae, in a couple of decades much will be done, as the Sixty-Eighters go to meet their maker (or not, as the case may be) and a new generation can be raised with the right values.

Mundabor

SSPX (Williamson) On Homosexuality

Questionable political ideas; but when he talks about Catholicism, hats off…

 

I have said many times by all his human shortcomings Bishop Williamson easily puts into shade (and into shame) every English bishop, bar none, for clarity of message and purpose, let alone orthodoxy and sincere love for the Church and the flock.

In the last days, there have been in the Catholic blogosphere some disturbing discussions about homosexuality.

Well, thinks I, let us see whether at the SSPX someone has some clear exposition on the matter, avoiding yours truly to spend an entire night with the adrenaline over the roof and the persistent suspicion of living in a world so blinded by stupidity not even the worst abominations can be seen anymore.

I have, therefore, looked and have found a letter of said Bishop Williamson which, like many other articles I have read of him (when he talks about Catholicism, that is), is simply exemplary.

The comment section will be closed, because life’s too short.

The letter is here reproduced in its entirety, with emphases and the odd comment mine. The original is here.

——————————————————————————–

Regarding: “Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children”

October 8, 1997

Dear Friends and Benefactors,

The Catholic bishops of the U.S.A., more precisely their Committee on Marriage and Family, have just come out with a “Pastoral Message to Parents of Homosexual Children”, which is a lamentable piece of work. Since this Pastoral Message is liable to make people, already confused, even more confused, let us re-state some Catholic principles, because the question bears directly on Faith and Morals, and on people getting to heaven or falling into hell.

Homosexuality means the misuse between man and man or between woman and woman of those functions and parts of the human body which God designed for use exclusively between a man and a woman within a lawful marriage, for the primary purpose of the reproduction of the human race. The Law of God governing use of the reproductive functions can be broken in a variety of ways even between man and woman, but these sins, e.g. fornication or adultery, are at least natural to the extent that they observe the basic duality of man and woman. On the contrary sins of homosexuality violate even this basic natural structure of the reproductive function, rendering it necessarily and utterly sterile, void of its intrinsic purpose. That is why homosexuality is sometimes called “the sin against nature”.
In fact the sin is so unnatural that Mother Church ranks it alongside murder, defrauding the worker of his just wage, and oppression of the widow or orphan, as one of the four sins “crying to Heaven for vengeance”. However, God did not wait for the founding of the Catholic Church to instill in men the horror of this sin, but he implanted in the human nature of all of us, unless or until we corrupt it, an instinct of violent repugnance for this particular sin, comparable to our instinctive repugnance for other misuses of our human frame, such as coprophagy.

That is why St. Paul in the famous passage on homosexuality in the first chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, verses 24 to 27, lambastes the Gentiles for practising this sin even though they had no revealed religion, and he does so in terms chosen to re-awaken that natural repugnance, e.g. verse 27: “And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense which was due to their error”.

Therefore to speak of homosexuality as an “alternate life-style” is as perverse as equating the violation of nature with its observance. It is as foully corrupt as to make no difference between recognizing God the author of nature, and defying Him.

Therefore what is “innate”, or in-born, in human nature concerning homosexuality is a violent repugnance. Therefore to speak of homosexuality, or even just an inclination to it, as being “innate” in certain human beings, of course to excuse them, is to accuse God at least of contradiction, if not also of planting in men the cause of sin, which is implicit if not explicit blasphemy.

The very most that can be innate in a man of, for instance, homosexuality, is the raw material for his temperament which may be sensitive in one man, rough in another, but whether that sensitivity or roughness is molded into the compassion of a saint or the vice of a homosexual depends on a series of good or evil choices made by each individual. Homosexuality is a vice, or sinful habit, created by nothing other than a series of sinful acts, for each of which the individual was responsible. Homosexuality is a moral problem, which is why, fascinatingly, St. Paul in the same passage derives it from idolatry! (No space to quote, look it up!)

“Oh, but Our Lord had chawity, (unlike thumwun we know who wath tho nathty to Pwintheth Di!). Our Lord loved thinnerth, and faggotth, and tho thould we!!” So runs the objection! [this is fantastic!!]

Yes indeed Our Lord loved sinners, but not in their sirs, rather despite their sin, which he hated. When Our Lord protected the unrighteous Mary Magdalene against the righteous Pharisees in a way which can bring tears to our eyes each time we read Luke, Chapter 7, he was protecting not her sin but her repentance. God will, as He has told us in the Gospel, go to almost any lengths to help the sinner who is trying to get out of his sin, but He abominates the sinner who wallows in it, and upon these modern cities that flaunt their perversity in annual homosexual parades, He is preparing such fire and brimstone as may make what fell upon Sodom and Gomorrah look like a fall of dew, because at least those cities never knew the Gospel (cf. Mt. XI, 20-24).

Woe then to the sinner who instead of casting away his sin, hugs it to his bosom, as do a mass of today’s homosexuals, and as the Bishops’ Pastoral virtually encourages them to do. God’s patience is long, but if the sinner insists upon welding his sin to his soul, then one day God’s patience runs out, and He hates sinners with sin, crying out to both, “Depart from me, ye accursed, into everlasting fire”(Mt.XXV,41). Therefore real charity, which wishes everlasting salvation to homosexuals, will, with all due prudence, not put a cushion under their sin, but paint it to them in its true colours to help them to get out of it.

But what does our American Bishops’ Committee on Marriage and Family do? They dangerously down-grade the sin and dangerously up-grade the sinner, putting in effect a cushion beneath the sin.

As for the sin, they do still – to their credit – say that homosexual activity is intrinsically wrong. However, in at least two ways they diminish the wrongness. Firstly, they suggest homosexuality can be innate when they quote a Newchurch document from Rome to the effect that some homosexuals are “definitely such because of some kind of innate instinct”, and when they say that “Generally, homosexual orientation is experienced as a given, not as something freely chosen”, because “a common opinion of experts is that there are multiple factors – genetic, hormonal, psychological – that may give rise to homosexuality”. Of course whatever is innate is not sinful.

Secondly, they make a true but in this respect dangerous distinction between the habit (“orientation”) of homosexuality and the act (“activity”), saying there is nothing wrong with the orientation as long as it does not turn into activity. True, only the act and not the habit is a sin, but since when did habits (especially in this domain) not incline to acts? There may be even much virtue in resisting a bad habit, but am I helped to resist it by being told the habit is not bad? If the orientation is not so bad, why should the activity be so bad?

As for up-grading the sinner, watch how close the Committee come to saying that God loves the sinner with his sin (which is blasphemy). I quote: “… God loves every person as a unique individual. Sexual indentity helps to define the unique persons we are. One component of our sexual indentity is sexual orientation ….Human beings see the appearance, but the Lord looks into the heart (I Sam XVI,7).” How is this quotation to be interpreted other than as saying that God loves the homosexual in and with his orientation to homosexuality?

And if God loves the sinner with his sins how must men love him! From start to finish the Pastoral Message drips with honeyed words to prescribe how we must behave towards homosexuals. Let me reconstruct the general idea: (my own words in the quotation marks)

“With supportive love we must accept the homosexual persons challenged by the hurtful humour and offensive discrimination directed against their kind. We must reach out with honesty and commitment to help in the overcoming of their painful tensions. We must not be exclusive or judgmental but by significant communication as caring persons we must enable them to take a fresh and healing look at their dignity as human persons so they can learn to cope with their feelings. Sensitive to their authentic needs, and unconditionally supportive of their tender self-awareness, we must reach out and embrace them in intimate community” – oops! – it’s dangerous to get in the honeyed groove!

And this stuff goes on for eight pages uninterruptedly! What other purpose or effect can such words have than to dismantle the individual’s and society’s instinctive defence mechanism against a sin stinking to high Heaven that wrecks them both? And all this in the name of the Catholic Church??

Such a false love blurring sin and sinner has nothing to do with Catholicism! As St. Paul traced homosexuality back to idolatry, i. e. the breaking of the First Commandment, so the true remedy of the sin is for those practising it to return to the true worship and love of the true God. But what chance do they have of being led back to it by churchmen who virtually promote such corruption as in this Pastoral Message? Almost none.

“Pray”, said Padre Pio, who died in 1968, “there is nothing else left”. But prayer, said the Cure of Ars, “is the powerlessness of the All-powerful, the all-powerfulness of the powerless”.

November will be the month to enlist the prayerful aid of the Holy Souls in Purgatory. A card is enclosed for you to return if you wish by November 1st to the Seminary, where it will go on the altar once a month for a sung Requiem Mass for all souls inscribed. But please send any stipends for Masses separately from the cards.

And please be supportive and compassionate towards the sensitive feelings of the Seminary’s cash-box, presently hurt by a painful sense of rejection and emptiness, always in need of fulfillment! So do let yourselves be challenged to nurture it and fill it full with a healing flow of greenbacks, and it will not stop thanking you for your co-operation.

Dear readers, forgive me, the Bishops’ Committee’s language is getting to me! On the contrary, may the Lord God sustain every one of us in the real religion!

Most sincerely yours in the month of the Holy Rosary,

Padre Pio And The Mass

an instructing  video.

Please always remember: some saints (mostly women, with the exception of St. Francis) had the stigmata.

Some saints had the “odour of sanctity” (emitted a scent recognised by others, though generally not by themselves).

Some could read other people’s mind.

Some could foresee future events.

Some could miraculously bilocate.

Some could be the vehicle for God’s miracle.

Only one could ever do, and be, all these things.

Mundabor

Quo Primum

Pope St. Pius V.

On occasion of the Feast of St. Pius V, you may want to feast your eyes on Quo Primum, the Apostolic Constitution with which the great, great, great Pope Saint Pius V promulgated his Missal in 1570 and established its ambit of application.

We specifically command each and every patriarch, administrator, and all other persons or whatever ecclesiastical dignity they may be, be they even cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, or possessed of any other rank or pre-eminence, and We order them in virtue of holy obedience to chant or to read the Mass according to the rite and manner and norm herewith laid down by Us and, hereafter, to discontinue and completely discard all other rubrics and rites of other missals, however ancient, which they have customarily followed; and they must not in celebrating Mass presume to introduce any ceremonies or recite any prayers other than those contained in this Missal.

Pope Saint Pius V apparently didn’t do “encouragement” much. He doesn’t suggest, he commands. The language is brutally frank: the priest “must not presume”, other rubrics and rites are to be “completely discarded”.

We grant and concede in perpetuity that, for the chanting or reading of the Mass in any church whatsoever, this Missal is hereafter to be followed absolutely, without any scruple of conscience or fear of incurring any penalty, judgment, or censure, and may freely and lawfully be used. Nor are superiors, administrators, canons, chaplains, and other secular priests, or religious, of whatever title designated, obliged to celebrate the Mass otherwise than as enjoined by Us. We likewise declare and ordain that no one whosoever is forced or coerced to alter this Missal, and that this present document cannot be revoked or modified, but remain always valid and retain its full force notwithstanding the previous constitutions and decrees of the Holy See, as well as any general or special constitutions or edicts of provincial or synodal councils, and notwithstanding the practice and custom of the aforesaid churches, established by long and immemorial prescription – except, however, if more than two hundred years’ standing.

Note here how the Pope protects not only the Liturgy from bad priests, but the priests from bad bishops: No one can be forced or coerced to alter the missal. Also note the extremely strong words: this present document cannot be revoked or modified. Don’t ask me what I think this great Pope would think of the liturgical reforms of the Sixties…

We decree that, after We publish this constitution and the edition of the Missal, the priests of the Roman Curia are, after thirty days, obliged to chant or read the Mass according to it; all others south of the Alps, after three months; and those beyond the Alps either within six months or whenever the Missal is available for sale. Wherefore, in order that the Missal be preserved incorrupt throughout the whole world and kept free of flaws and errors, the penalty for nonobservance for printers, whether mediately or immediately subject to Our dominion, and that of the Holy Roman Church, will be the forfeiting of their books and a fine of one hundred gold ducats, payable ipso facto to the Apostolic Treasury

Splendid again: a very short time for the implementation of the new Missal, after it has become available. Similarly, the immediate threat of hefty fines for the transgressors.

Spot the differences with Summorum Pontificum…

Mundabor

Merci, Monseigneur…

Feed the Hungry?

Three Cheers For Bishop Jenky

Where the President has put himself.

Can’t remember last time I read such beautiful words from a Bishop.

The first part, about Christ’s resurrection, is beautiful enough. But this part, I had read and heard already.

What I was not prepared for, is the barrage of the most orthodox, and most uncompromising Catholic cannons against the evil forces of our time, led by “Mr. Change” himself.

If I think that only some months ago many US bishops were timorous of speaking about matters which might have construed as “political” (that is: pretty much everything besides the need of being nice to the neighbour’s dog), the shift in attitude is nothing less than astonishing.  May it be that Bishop Jenky was rather blunt in times past, this is still a sign of things to come.

Bishop Jenky is saying very plainly that the Church is now at war with the Obama administration and the enemies of Christ, and every good Catholic must be part of this war.

Truly, Obama is in trouble. Six months of this will tear him to pieces if he doesn’t backpedal, sharpish.

If you don’t believe me, try this (hat tip to Father Z):

For 2,000 years the enemies of Christ have certainly tried their best. But think about it. The Church survived and even flourished during centuries of terrible persecution, during the days of the Roman Empire.

The Church survived barbarian invasions. The Church survived wave after wave of Jihads. The Church survived the age of revolution. The Church survived Nazism and Communism.

And in the power of the resurrection, the Church will survive the hatred of Hollywood, the malice of the media, and the mendacious wickedness of the abortion industry.

The Church will survive the entrenched corruption and sheer incompetence of our Illinois state government, and even the calculated disdain of the President of the United States, his appointed bureaucrats in HHS, and of the current majority of the federal Senate.

May God have mercy on the souls of those politicians who pretend to be Catholic in church, but in their public lives, rather like Judas Iscariot, betray Jesus Christ by how they vote and how they willingly cooperate with intrinsic evil.

As Christians we must love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, but as Christians we must also stand up for what we believe and always be ready to fight for the Faith. The days in which we live now require heroic Catholicism, not casual Catholicism. We can no longer be Catholics by accident, but instead be Catholics by conviction.

In our own families, in our parishes, where we live and where we work – like that very first apostolic generation – we must be bold witnesses to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We must be a fearless army of Catholic men, ready to give everything we have for the Lord, who gave everything for our salvation.

Remember that in past history other governments have tried to force Christians to huddle and hide only within the confines of their churches like the first disciples locked up in the Upper Room.

In the late 19th century, Bismark waged his “Kulturkampf,” a Culture War, against the Roman Catholic Church, closing down every Catholic school and hospital, convent and monastery in Imperial Germany.

Clemenceau, nicknamed “the priest eater,” tried the same thing in France in the first decade of the 20th Century.

Hitler and Stalin, at their better moments, would just barely tolerate some churches remaining open, but would not tolerate any competition with the state in education, social services, and health care.

In clear violation of our First Amendment rights, Barack Obama – with his radical, pro abortion and extreme secularist agenda, now seems intent on following a similar path.

Now things have come to such a pass in America that this is a battle that we could lose, but before the awesome judgement seat of Almighty God this is not a war where any believing Catholic may remain neutral.

This fall, every practicing Catholic must vote, and must vote their Catholic consciences, or by the following fall our Catholic schools, our Catholic hospitals, our Catholic Newman Centers, all our public ministries — only excepting our church buildings – could easily be shut down. Because no Catholic institution, under any circumstance, can ever cooperate with the intrinsic evil of killing innocent human life in the womb.

What shall I say more. Bishop Jenky said it all, so beautifully.

Mundabor

SSPX on “Religious Freedom”

That's what you end up with.....

An interesting fruit of the battle about HHS mandate is the fact it forces the Church in the US to progressively clean herself from the influences of a not-so-glorious past; but in doing so, she runs the risk of her message not being properly understood, or being altogether wrong.

The issue here is religious liberty. There is no doubt in the US:

a) there has historically been a great measure of religious liberty, and

b) this religious liberty is now endangered by the HHS mandate and the Obama troops.

It seems wrong to me to deny that, from the factual point of view, religious liberty has served the Church in the US well. A country originally colonised by hard-line Protestants now has some 70 million Catholics, and I doubt this would have been the case if religious liberty had not been – though nothing is perfect on this earth – a distinctive trait of American society.

Up to here, I think we all agree, even the SSPX: what American faithful now have (=religious liberty)  is worth fighting for, because what will happen otherwise is a country where Christianity – and most directly, Catholicism – is discriminated against or even, in extreme cases, forced to go underground.

In addition, the issue of religious freedom is what allows – and rightly so – to obtain the mobilisation of Protestants, Jews & Co against the HHS mandate, undoubtedly an attack on religious freedom. If the Church in the US would say “religious freedom is endangered, but we don;t care because we are against religious freedom in the first place” this would not be terribly useful, or intelligent.

Where the problems begins is – as the SSPX rightly observed – when the US Church interprets religious freedom as something intrinsically right, or intrinsically Catholic. This is very V II, and very wrong. Read these words:

From well before Cardinal Gibbons, Catholics in America have been advocates for religious liberty, and the landmark teaching of the Second Vatican Council on religious liberty was influenced by the American experience. It is among the proudest boasts of the Church on these shores. We have been staunch defenders of religious liberty in the past. We have a solemn duty to discharge that duty today.

As the Gipper would say, “there you go again”. Again the usual V II soup, and again the defence of an error as the result of the “American experience”.

Far more to the points are the words of the SSPX:

 Certainly we must fight for the liberty of the Catholic Church – that is, the ability for her to fulfill her divine mission to save souls, promote the faith (particularly in society) and enact the corporal acts of mercy. However, this is a much different thing than defending religious liberty, a false notion that originated with the Protestants and condemned as an error under the generic title of “Liberalism”.

Note the SSPX doesn’t say the Church in the US must not fight against the HHS mandate, or for her ability to work as freely as she can. But when religious liberty is smuggled for a Catholic value, we are clearly in heresy territory. It can’t be said that error is entitled to the same degree of freedom as Truth, and that a country in which error and truth are allowed the same rights is doing things the Catholic way. Jesus did not die on the cross so that people may be Muslims, of Hindus, or whatever. He did not say “I am one of the ways”. 

Therefore, religious liberty is emphatically not a Catholic value, even if it was 

“the vision of our founding [?] and our Constitution, which guarantees citizens of all religious faiths the right to contribute to our common life together”

and this is the first time I see Catholic bishops approving non-Catholic religious principles from a largely Protestant body, and taking their Protestant ideas as an example of good Catholic thinking. This must have been V II, no doubt.

If I were an American citizen, my take on the matter would be that whilst I can be a good Catholic and a good American, I will never allow my patriotism to come before my God, and therefore in matter of religious freedom I will acknowledge religious freedom as a component of American political life, whilst wishing and professing the Catholic view on the matter, namely: that error can never have the same rights as Truth.

I do not think this is too much to ask of a Catholic in the US, because it is not too much to ask of a Catholic everywhere else. On the contrary, when the US bishops make of religious liberty a religious value, they are mixing Catholicism with US politics, and giving right to those who say V II, wrongly interpreted – as on this occasion – only produces confusion and heresy. I understand they are fighting a good fight against secular oppression, but they are sending signals that whilst politically acceptable are very wrong if taken as religious principles.

The President’s good servant, but God’s first.

Mundabor

Why Father Guarnizo Is Right

R.I.P.

To a simple mind like mine, Father Guarnizo is right because he has done what every good priest, in every age of the Church, would  have done in his place.

Alas, it would seem that just because Canon 915 was written in order to achieve exactly the aim the Church wanted to achieve without Canon 915 for almost two thousand years, it is now allowed or even mandatory to examine whether really, really, really all conditions called for by Canon 915 to refuse communion were present.

I truly wonder. It is as if in front of a canonical text people would say “let us stop thinking for a moment, and let us examine the dispositions of the Canon as if they existed in a purely theoretical  vacuum”. The fact is, they don’t. They exist in the real world, and they exist to express a need that was there before Canon 915 was written, and because of which it was written in the first place. When in presence of a lesbian who openly declares her homosexual relationship to a priest before a ceremony consisting of, among others, a couple of dozen of her relatives there are still doubts whether said priest should protect the Host from desecration, I truly wonder what has become of us. 

 Still, in case you are not satisfied with what the basic common sense and the Christian logic of the last two thousand years should have suggested you, and want to spend some time reading a very detailed, extremely well argued and, most importantly, adherent to common sense and common Catholic feeling explanation of canon 915, you have to do nothing more than to click the following links:

Father Anonymous’ canonical defence of father Guarnizo,

and

The reply of “Fr Anonymous” to the objection to his intervention

Both text are absolutely impressive not only in the rigorous logic and spotless foundation of every steps he takes, but in the exemplary clarity of the language used. Whoever he is, this Fr Anonymous is a cannon.

The arguments used as clarification in the second post are, in my eyes, clear enough already from the reading of the first post, so that you may skip the second post without detriment to the clarity of Fr Anonymous’ argument. For example, in my eyes the idea a woman would live in a lesbian relationship with another woman at the point of bringing her “lover” to her mother’s funeral, but without her lesbian concubinage being known among her siblings and relatives – at the latest at the funerals, and applying basic common sense a long time before – is completely preposterous. Beside the fact we do not exactly have to do with a shy wallflower here, when things have come to such a point of brazenness if you would pretend with me the relatives didn’t know and – even in this absurd case – wouldn’t know at the funeral at the latest I would seriously ask you what’s wrong with you. From the beginning, it seems to me that basic common sense was the first victim of this controversy. 

Still, the two posts give a clear, detailed explanation of why Father Guarnizo acted in conformity of Canon 915 (which is as to say: why Canon 915 does nothing else than translate in a canonical norm elementary Christian rules of behaviour concerning the Most Blessed Sacrament).  You will find the reading extremely interesting not only because so well written, but because so intrinsically sound.

Fr Anonymous raises a second question, the conformity to Canon law of the measures taken against Fr Guarnizo. I have not dealt about it here, but the argument in favour of Father Guarnizo is not less cogent than in the matter of his denying communion to the lesbian female.

Once again, this squabble reminded me of one of Father Corapi’s most lovable quotes (also to be found in my “quotable Catholic”):

 My grandmother, who had only an eighth grade education, knew more than many theologians because she knew the truth.

Mundabor