Richard McBrien's Field of Blood

Father Z has taken everyone's favorite heretic Richard McBrien to task.

Richard has penned "alternate thoughts for the year of the priest" that is proof positive his entire life's work is circling the drain.

Richard's comments are in black Father Z's comments follow in red.

But there is a more realistic dimension to this Year for Priests, [So, let’s get this straight. Pope Benedict designates the parameters of the Year for Priests and its official celebrations but McBrien has better ideas.] and it is one that never sees the light of day in most of the diocesan papers in the United States and Canada because bishops will not permit any discordant opinions to be expressed. [Two things. I think it is not an exaggeration to suggest that most of the nation’s diocesan papers for the last few decades have entirely open to "discordant opinions", particularly with those out of harmony with the Church’s teachings. Second, now that a new generation of bishops are cleaning up their diocesan newspapers, discordant Catholics are whining about unfair treatment.]

There is a growing rift between so-called "Vatican II priests" and so-called "John Paul II priests," which is painfully evident in some dioceses when priests gather for the Eucharist at retreats and other diocesan events. [It is interesting to find on one side younger priests together with those priests, now much older, who were active for sometime before the Council and then, on the other hand, those who were formed especially during the late 60’s through around the late 80’s.]

My personal favorite:

5. There is a concomitant return to clericalism in the priesthood, involving not only a fascination with cassocks and birettas and a preference for antiquated vestments and devotions, [Remember: McBrien thinks that Eucharistic Adoration is an antiquated devotion which does harm to people. And he has been teaching for a very long time at Notre Dame. Think about that.] but also a negative, censorious tone to preaching and a cavalier dismissal of consultative structures that are supposed to be in place in every parish.

Richard was the author of the sexual abuse crisis in America. He organized a renegade group of priests here in Boston, suggested they come up with a scandal and coordinate it with a lay group (out of which "voice of the faithful" was born), they rounded up the Boston Globe and some attorneys - put up a website to recruit "victims" about a year before it broke -- and voila - - the hysteria has eaten the vocation of many an innocent priest and driven hoards out of the Catholic Church.

7. There has been a substantial attrition of Catholics—women, gays and lesbians, divorced people, critics of official teachings on sexuality and reproduction—from active membership in the church, to the point where fully one-tenth of the U.S. population now consists of ex-Catholics. What is being done about it? [I suppose we are simply waving goodbye. If people don’t like the teaching of the Church and won’t accept it, what are we supposed to do? Change the teaching? Soften the teaching?

Yes - that's exactly what McBrien and the group of Boston Benedict Arnolds were hoping for -- overthrowing the Roman Catholic Church and shoring up the Woodstock False Church he and his Jesuit colleagues have spent the last three decades constructing out of lies. They felt stifled and oppressed.


Though the vineyard has been devastated, McBrien's plan backfired. Out of the ashes cassocks, birettas, rosary, Adoration are rising.

Father Z says it best:

I have the impression that McBrien isn’t happy as a priest.

He trashed Eucharist Adoration and all the people who venerate the Blessed Sacrament.

Now he trashes the Year for Priests… and by implication those who have embraced this special Year.

It must be very difficult, despite his present position, to watch everything he has worked towards for decades crumbling and slipping between his fingers.

Once so revered, so powerful….

He is now less and less relevant to… well.. any discussion.

It must be very hard.

Father Z on the Problems with Toning Down the Rhetoric

...and why we probably won't do it.

Some of my Catholic friends have been urging me and others on the Catholic right to tone down the rhetoric when it comes to discussing issues related to the Notre Dame scandal, or Notre Shame as time is showing it to have been. They want us to tone down our "harsh rhetoric" on issues such as abortion, President Obama and other Catholics who support him. These friends insist that they respect my right to my point of view, and they assure me that they, too, oppose abortion. However, they argue that many tactics of the Catholic pro-life movement are “negative” (e.g. showing pictures of aborted fetuses) and therefore counter-productive. They argue further that these tactics – which include protesting Notre Dame’s bestowing an honorary doctorate of law on President Obama – actually exacerbate tensions and divisions within the Catholic Church and within society at large. Finally, they charge that such tactics are spiteful and otherwise uncharitable. We on the right would say “sinful,” but these friends of mine don’t use that language.

I am not impervious to these criticisms. I don’t like being thought of in these terms, though I confess I sometimes accept their judgment with a touch of mischievous relish. I don’t know anyone on the Catholic or Christian right who wants to be thought of as using language that is counter-productive, divisive and spiteful.

Okay, maybe Ann Coulter, bless her.

But when it comes to their suggestion to tone down the rhetoric, I think we shouldn’t, and I doubt we will.

Father Z, by the way, came in first in every category of the 2009 media blog awards - blowing away all other nominees.

First of all, there’s history. No matter how earnestly these Catholic friends of mine insist that they oppose abortion, when I think about what they want us not to do, I am forced to conclude that they just don’t see the symmetry between the abortion issue and other moral tragedies in recent history, such as the Holocaust and racial segregation. Would my Catholic friends today not applaud those German, Austrian and Italian Catholics who risked their lives to speak out in the strongest terms against the racial policies of Hitler and Mussolini, even though in doing so they used language that their friends thought was counter-productive, divisive and spiteful?...

Is it me, or is the outrage of these Catholic friends of mine over the recent murder of the abortionist George Tiller, and the blame they hurl at the “extreme rhetoric” of pro-lifers for his death, not analogous to the anger of those white Catholics in the 60’s who blamed civil rights activists for instigating the Watts and Detroit riots?

Did Dead Man Walking incite increase lethal injections?

Do war protesters cause war?

My third reason for not wanting us to tone down the rhetoric is a sense I have, a feeling not easy to pin down.

I am sensing a kind of Zeitgeist in the air which censures the use of “harsh rhetoric.”

Oddly enough, when you scratch the surface of these folks running around trying to pretend they are Mother Teresa reincarnate and Mr. Congeniality, they are caustic, uncharitable, absentee to their families, friends, colleagues. Thou dost protest too much. They're writings are stilted, what comes out of their mouths in public and behind closed doors are two completely different personalities. These nice folks are sophomoric and acerbic and backstabbing under the radar.

The phoniness takes your breath away


Perhaps somewhere, there is a person out there in life who is telling people to tone down the rhetoric and be 'charitable' that actually acts that way in their real relationships. I've yet to come across one in my eighteen years of activism, but it could happen. If any of these people actually had the persona to have liberal friends, love them, have relationships with them - they'd be able to acknowledge that liberals use harsh language about us, they laugh at it. We know that people who are normal on both sides do it. We don't have to swing into some stoic person when a liberal enters our peripheral vision nor do they.

But the net effect of this unrelenting censorship from the left is that the pro-life (yes, read: anti-abortion) message is ground down, silenced under the rubric of “it’s all right that we agree to disagree about this issue.”

Homosexual activists have a saying, "silence equals death." What they know, what the Catholic left doesn’t, is that all rhetoric aimed at effecting social and political change must, above all, be heard.

In the meantime, how many progressivist Catholic media shills will complain next week that this week’s G8 summit in L’Aquila, Italy, was disrupted by protesters advocating on behalf of the global poor or the environment?

You see, it’s not all acerbic rhetoric that merits labeling as counter-productive, divisive and uncharitable. It’s just pro-life rhetoric.

And that, in the end, is why we probably won’t tone it down.

Amen brother.