Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 9,700 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

This event is remarkable for two reasons: a) This will be the first time in over 40 years that a bishop has celebrated a Pontifical High Mass, according to the Missal of 1962, in the State of Florida. b) As a sign of Archbishop Wenski’s efforts to engage and dialogue with the secular world – including academia — the Mass is capstoning a symposium jointly sponsored by both Nova Southeastern University and Church Music Association of America.

In a beautiful illustration of the historically fruitful relationship between scholarship, the arts, and the Catholic liturgy, the symposium is titled “Gregorian Chant and Modern Composition for the Catholic Liturgy: Charles Tournemire’s ‘L’Orgue Mystique’ as Guide ”, and the Mass concluding it will feature the French composer and organist’s compositions for the Feast of the Presentation.

I urge all my readers (from Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe Counties; from throughout Florida; and all throughout the country) to do their best to patronize this event and attend this liturgy, and to be generous with their financial treasure should a collection be taken at this Mass. Our presence and our contributions will be a way we “vote with our feet ” and show our appreciation to His Grace for his attention to liturgical reform, and assure him of our moral and spiritual support (especially in prayer).

For more information about the Symposium, see here.  To signal your intention to attend the Mass, please register your presence at the official Facebook page for the event, here. Finally, I urge all Catholics (and sympathetic non-Catholics), especially those living in South FL, to write Archbishop Wenski and thank him personally, and assure him of your prayers. He may be reached at:

The Most Rev. Thomas Wenski, Archbishop of Miami
9401 Biscayne Boulevard,
Miami Shores, FL 33138

priestsecretary@theadom.org

communications@theadom.org

Stay tuned to this blog for continuing developments and updates.

My latest at RenewAmerica:

A major exposé just penned by sometime sparring partner Brandon K. Thorp has forced me to reconsider a personal resolution I made in June 2010 to cease writing about the sins and travails of the Archdiocese of Miami. Home to about a million Catholic Christians (myself among them), the Church in Miami-Dade, Broward, and Monroe counties was once described by my colleage Matt C. Abbott as “one of the worst — if not the worst — archdiocese in terms of the presence of non-celibate homosexual clergy.” This nomination, sad to say, only scratched the surface of many of the problems that festered under the pontificate of the archbishop emeritus, John C. Favalora. The sad story is accurately and detailingly recounted inGawker’s recent exposé on the subject, and I direct my readers to it as context for the commentary that follows:

“Sin City: The Catholic Church’s Secret Gay Cabal”

This piece is a substantially accurate portrayal of circumstances I’ve only briefly referred to in earlier commentary. While I am not in a position (morally or legally) to publicly (and in writing) confirm every allegation reported byGawker, I will enthusiastically endorse and stand behind the overall picture painted by Mr Thorp, even as I hope to provide more context, and hopefully more reasons for Christian hope.

I wish to start by explaining my motivations for participating in Thorp’s exposé when consenting to being interviewed by him. Thorp rightly notes my initial reluctance to do so: I did not provide him a copy of Miami Vice, and since Archbishop Wenski’s installation have had no desire to satiate the scandal-mongering of the mainstream leftist press by giving it more ammunition with which to shoot down the Church. As far as I was (and substantially still am) concerned, my co-religionists and I who make up Christifidelis achieved what we wanted with Favalora’s early retirement from the episcopacy and his replacement by the likes of Wenski. While leaving readers to draw their own conclusions, Thorp has substantially vindicated our consistent insistence that Favalora’s resignation was compelled by the Holy See and that his successor has been given a clear mandate by the Vatican to clean the Church’s house in South Florida.

I’ve often been asked why, if we’ve obtained what we set out to, I insist on publicizing (if only briefly and modestly) our victories. This was asked me when I penned my editorial on Wenski’s appointment, and again when I reported on the circumstances surrounding the recent resignation of Bishop John Ricard from the See of Pensacola-Tallahassee. As a practicing Catholic with absolutely nothing to gain (materially or reputationally) from reporting these things, my goal has been to show lay Catholics — especially those who consider themselves “conservative” or “traditionalist” — that Rome really does listen to the well-thought-out appeals from the lay faithful, when they are made through the proper channels and with appropriate documentation. Catholic leftists often have recourse to the secularist press when they wish to place public pressure on the Church to conform to the post-modern expectations of contemporary anti-culture, while those who pride themselves in subscribing to magisterial orthodoxy almost never go beyond bitching, moaning, and conspiracizing in chat rooms and on message boards. What I hope to have shown is that the Church does eventually respond to well-reasoned grievances by the lay faithful aired through the proper hierarchical channels . . . even if sometimes she needs to be prodded along with prudent,critical, and charitable exposure in the secular press. I have always tried to maintain this proper balance, only having recourse to the latter when I’ve reasonably exhausted the former.

So, back to Thorp. I agreed to participate in the story only because he had already obtained a copy of Miami Vice from a colleague of his I had given it to three years ago (well before Wenski’s appointment), he seemed determined to pursue the story with or without my assistance, and I believed it was in the Church’s interest that I cooperate, lend a nearly-lone voice sympathetic to her, and make sure the final product was accurate in all particulars for which I have personal knowledge. I am pleased with the final product, and substantially endorse it.

With some important qualifications. Like most magazines, Gawker lies squarely in the center-left of the politico-cultural spectrum, and this is reflected in the aforementioned exposé, and even more so in the editorial follow-up. We Catholics do not, of course, “hate penises” or “demonize homosexuals.” We love both of these a heck of a lot more than Thorp or his editors do, which is why we insist on sharing with everyone our utterly humanistic conviction that the natural world is fundamentally rational, that this rationality is reflected in our bodies, that a proper use of our bodies is integral to moral living, and that sexual complementarity and procreativity are not just random and incidental flukes of an orderless cosmos but God-given means by which the human person (as male or as female) is to both understand and realize himself as originating in, and ordered to, life-giving Love.

As you can see, this understanding of sexuality, and both its personal and public implications, does not lend itself easily to sound-bite and catch-phrase, which is why even many Catholics tend to reduce this wisdom to a series of regurgitated thou-shalt-nots: no fornication, no masturbation, no contraception, no adultery, no polygamy, no sodomy, etc. Those Catholics who fantasize about a pre-Vatican II utopia of well-memorized catechetics, beautiful liturgy, and fervent devotionalism would do well to learn that it is precisely this sort of reductionist presentation of the Faith (all-too-common in the past as it is in today’s “traditionalist” circles) that lends itself to caricature and ultimate rejection.

The Gawker piece — and here I suspect the fault lies more with his editors than with Thorp himself — also gives way more “air-time” to its leftist/dissident interviewees than it does to myself or either of the two other Catholics when it comes to assessing what the root causes are to the Archdiocese’s problems. Allowed to go unchallenged are various assertions to the effect that voluntarily assumed commitments to celibacy caused the crisis, that seminary formation intrinsically lends itself to psychological maldevelopment, and that the Church’s solution to its supposed “demographic crisis” is to remake itself in the image of the Protestant Episcopal Church and the Congressional Progressive Caucus of the Democratic Party.

Serious observers, whatever their criticisms of substantive Catholic doctrine, know that each of these leftist nostrums is just so much superstitious nonsense. Try as they might, none of the Church’s detractors can produce a single shred of evidence that voluntary assumptions of sexual abstinence and non-marriage lend themselves to sexual deviancy, much less that Catholic seminary formation does. And however grateful I personally am for the unfortunately-named Peter Fuchs’s willingness to speak with Thorp concerning his experiences at St John Vianney College Seminary, one wonders whether the Catholic Church would be best served heeding psychological advice from a 50-year old “married” “gay,” i.e., a grown man who still has not figured out the basic differences between a man and a woman, and what relationship his having a penis has to this. As to Thorp’s unidentified and cowardly “liberal priest” (of the follow-up, third paragraph from the bottom): I am willing to bet he is himself sexually active, and his rant is just so much projection and rationalization of his own childish inabilities to face up to long-term commitments.

And while Thorp himself is to be commended for his journalistic prowess, his argument that the Church’s survival depends on its taking its cues from the pages of Colin Spencer’s Gay Kama Sutra is belied by both commonsense and what empirical data do exist on this subject. The demographic plummet of the “liberal” Protestant mainline — and especially of America’s Episcopal Church — is both well-documented and undisputed, but for brevity’s sake a comparison of the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami with the Episcopal Diocese of Southeast Florida is rather instructive. Even though the Episcopal Diocese encompasses a broader swath of territory than its Catholic counterpart, the former can count a mere 34,000 or so members while the latter (byconservative estimations) numbers some 860,000. And while the Miami Archdiocese experienced no relative growth whatsoever in church membership in the years Favalora governed it with a laced fist, Catholic numbers did increase absolutely, while in the same time period membership in the Episcopal Diocese shrank both relatively and absolutely.

And these contrary trends are replicated both nationally and internationally. After a short period of demographic stagnation under the late Pope John Paul II, who tolerated much of the theological leftism Thorp and many of his interviewees recommend to us, the Catholic Church seems to be experiencing something of a “Benedict bounce” in her demography. The Church, both in the United States and globally, is growing, both relatively and absolutely, withrecord numbers entering the Church every year, and indeed every day.

And it’s not hard to see why, whatever the ultimate fruits of the Church’s earthly labors, her institutional perdurance does not depend on adopting the latest whims and fads endorsed by the likes of Cosmo or even Gawker. A Christianity that is not radically countercultural is a Christianity not worth believing in, because it is no longer distinctively religious, let alone Christian. Most people intuit this. A Christianity shorn of its dogmatic and moral essentials, and endlessly accommodated to the editorial pages of the New York Times, is radical only in its redundancy. To paraphrase the late Flannery O’Connor, if Catholicism be reduced to pomp and circumstance, bells and smells, and requires of you no moral exertion or self-denial, then fuck it.

If, after so many futile and failed attempts, today’s nonbelievers still wish to see the demise of l’infâme, they’re gonna need to challenge and discredit the Church for who she is, has been, and always will be. The accommodation urged upon her by those most committed to her eventual destruction would be both demographically suicidal and philosophically dishonest. I respect Thorp’s full-throated enthusiasm for the former, but can’t believe a man of his acuity could possibly hope for the latter.

All of which is not to deny the obvious: while institutionalized voluntary celibacy does not per se result in a culture of sexual deviancy, the institution certainly can attract deviants who lack the tools and support needed to come to terms with their psycho-sexual deficiencies, and the Church must be assiduous in sifting between sincere religious vocations and faux-pious exercises in psychological escapism. To my knowledge, no evidence exists illustrating that Catholic priests are less faithful to celibacy than married persons are to monogamy, and it’s no coincidence that both vocations — priesthood and matrimony — have experienced their crises in recent decades, and in many places still are. The crisis in contemporary Christendom is that of all developed peoples: a crisis of personal commitment and self-sacrifice. The Gawker exposé is in many places refreshingly honest about the underlying assumptions of its editors, and a culture committed to the idea that “[w]anton hedonistic . . . sex is of course unobjectionable — even encouraged” cannot begin to diagnose, let alone prescribe a solution to, what ails the Catholic Church.

Finally, Thorp’s exposé highlights an important piece to the historical puzzle, but happily not the final one. The Archdiocese does seem to be on the rebound after its Favaloran slump. As I’ve reported previously, since the Apostolic Visitation of Spring 2006, the reform of St John Vianney College Seminary has proceeded apace: I know from several sources that sexual impropriety is no longer tolerated, fidelity to Catholic orthodoxy is the enforced norm (but not without critical reflection on the articles of faith and the Western metaphysical tradition), and seminary enrollment is thriving, even in record numbers. The Pope Benedictine liturgical reform of the reform is proceeding slowly and steadily, and new attention given to every field of ministry, from practical charity to college campuses. Most dramatically, and as Thorp aptly documents, the Archdiocese’s “lavender mob” is shaking in its boots and Wenski is working to sift out the wheat from the chaff, if not fast or furious enough for my tastes and many of my fellows in Christifidelis.

However reluctant my initial participation in it, perhaps the story published byGawker is one that needed to be told, and needs to be learned from. Brandon Thorp and his editors were singularly equipped to tell that story, but as we have seen, woefully handicapped in directing us to a happier ending.

The economy being what it is, I beg (and trust in) my readers’ indulgence as I engage in what follows: a shameless exercise in self-promotion.

As is apparent from both the content of my columns and the “author’s credit” which appends most of them, I am presently and proudly enrolled at Florida State University College of Law, one of the top law schools in the country. In just a few short weeks I will be graduating with a Juris Doctorate, and plan to sit for the Florida Bar in late July.

Naturally, I hope to be employed in the near-future, even though the economy and the market are taking their toll on lawyers and on other professionals. A student of life and a Christian humanist, I am not necessarily committed to working in the legal field. I simply want to enjoy whatever it is I do and make enough money to put food on my table and have a little fun over the weekends. I’d love to work in a public-interest firm, a legal-aid, for a political candidate, for a state or federal government, for a newspaper, for a diocese, and even within a classroom. I’m a fast learner, and will take to anything I put my mind and heart to. I am more than willing to relocate anywhere in the country, or the world for that matter

I am in the process of submitting resumes, references, and writing samples to several public-interest law firms, but thought I would supplement my efforts with this column, where I am likely to reach those already interested in my work. To that end, I thought I’d share a little more of myself with readers (some of whom will hopefully be prospective employers!).

I have spent my entire law school career (i.e., the past three years) using every opportunity to involve myself in advocacy for the sanctity of life, the integrity of the natural family, and religious freedom. To this end I have interned for staunch social and fiscal conservatives in both the Florida House and the Florida Senate, and embraced my position as Federalist Society chapter president (2009-2010) to lead the conservative/libertarian “resistance” on campus. In the Fall of 2010, I interned full-time at the Washington, DC offices of the Alliance Defense Fund.

Academically speaking, I have not concentrated in any one field of law, rather engaging diverse disciplines and electing to take those classes that would best prepare me to sit for the Florida Bar. To the extent I have concentrated, it has been in the area of public policy, spending my internships at the Florida Capitol assisting in speech-writing, drafting letters to constituents, contributing to the formation of legislation, researching (for which I have an uncannyknack), and handling constituent queries.

I spent the Summer of 2009 studying international and comparative law at the University of Oxford’s St Edmund Hall, and the Fall of 2010 (simultaneous with my externship at ADF) studying executive agency rulemaking and legislative advocacy, in Washington, DC, under the aegis of Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law. Among my work at ADF, I performed research for the case Arizona Christian School Tuition Organization v. Winn, and drafted a motion for preliminary injunction on behalf of a Young Americans for Freedom chapter, whose free speech rights were being violated by school officials at Palm Beach State College.

In my spare time, I have taken up political and religious commentary, debuting in the pages of RenewAmerica in May 2009, and since then having written for Human Events,LifeSiteNews, and FrontPage Magazine. My commentary has received international attention, being cited by the UK Daily Telegraph the New York Times, Politics Daily, and the New Times Broward-Palm Beach, among others. I maintain a well-read blog, which is viewed regularly by pundits, journalists, columnists, and even bishops.

As an intern for the Florida Senate President last year, I co-authored a “Balanced Budget Amendment FAQ.” The esteemed Dr Randy Barnett, a long-time advocate of just such a constitutional amendment, called it “excellent,” and “the best explanation [he had] seen” of the nature and procedure of an Article V Amendments Convention.

I drafted a letter on behalf of a FL representative, pledging support of a resolution which would have censured Turkey’s increasingly-Islamist government for its persecution of Orthodox Christians and other religious minorities. I’m told my draft served as a model for other legislators.

I’m prudent when I have to be, but am not afraid to ruffle the right feathers. In these verypages, I respectfully rebuked the FL GOP establishment for its support of a culture-of-death, welfare-state leftist in a state district primary over and against rising conservative political star Ann Yarko (and lost quite a few friends in doing so). A Federalist Society lecture I orchestrated on Islamic jurisprudence, featuring the esteemed Robert Spencer,provoked the ire of both colleagues and faculty. And for these and other efforts, I have been nominated “America’s Worst Law Student™, Class of 2011″ by the partisans of the leftist European blog, “Sadly No.”

So if you work at or direct a think tank, a public-interest firm, a political action committee, an NGO, a charity, a college or a university; if you are an editor of a newspaper or a magazine; if you work at or direct a Diocese or a legal-aid: you want to interview Eric Giunta. And even if you are none of these things and have nothing whatsoever to do with the legal profession or politics, but are an employer who wants to know whom everyone is talking about — whom Robert Spencer refers to as “the indefatigable,” whom the UK Telegraph calls“a leading blogger,” and whom even the Left acknowledges to be “noted Catholic pundit” — you want to get into contact with Eric Giunta. I am willing to work anywhere in the country, and indeed anywhere in the world.

A complete resume, references, and writing samples will be made available, immediately upon request, to any serious inquirer. I may be reached at sanctusericus@yahoo.com.

For those readers not hiring, your prayers are most seriously appreciated!

“. . . the well-known Catholic blogger the Liberal Traditionalist . . . a leading Florida Catholic blogger . . .” — Dr Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph (UK)

“. . . noted Catholic pundit Eric Giunta . . .” — Mr Brandon K. Thorp, New Times Broward-Palm Beach

“Eric Giunta? I read your blog!” — Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami

“America’s Worst Law Student™, Class of 2011″ — nomination on some leftist European blog

It’s good to be reminded every once in a while that I could have done worse with my life than squander tens of thousands of dollars over the past three years on a silly piece of paper that may or may not land me a job after graduation. But for the grace of God, I could have ended up majoring in journalism and landing a job at the New Times Broward-Palm Beach. Sure, it’d be a paycheck, but at what cost? For what doth it profit a man to land a job at some leftist rag, but lose his intellectual sanity? Man does not live on bread alone . . . !
My homage to Providence is occasioned by an unexpected screed published yesterday in the aforementioned yellow-sheet. Maybe I’m being too harsh: every literate person in South Florida knows the New Times isn’t exactly a bastion of investigative journalism and literary accomplishment. When I was an undergrad, the principal use most of us had for the paper was doubling-it-up for a toilet seat cover when the local fast food joints that distributed it failed to provide accordingly. Most of its readership consists of the lonely and confused who peruse the paper’s extensive classified section, where a disproportionate number of advertisers are paid escorts, seemingly most of whom sell themselves by trumpeting their “special parts” that distinguish them from those of us in the conservative extreme who continue to identify ourselves as men and women. These ads were always good for a laugh, but I forget how long it was before I realized that “M2F,” “MTF,” and “M to F” did notmean “Monday thru Friday” . . .

No, what surprised me was the piece’s author, one Mr Brandon Thorp. I can’t claim to know the man particularly well, but Mr Thorp and I have corresponded over some of the . . . more unsavory goings-on in the Miami Archdiocesewhich, at least up until very recently, were business-as-usual in South FL Catholicism. No collaboration ever came of our correspondence (which he initiated), and this was probably for the best, but I left our conversation with a respectful impression of Mr Thorp. He’s much more cultured and well-read — and articulate — than he lets on in his latest hit piece.

That piece is a rhetorical (but not intellectual) sodomization of an editorial published by Miami’s Archbishop Thomas Wenski in the pages of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. The editorial was not an exercise in Catholic apologetics but a plea for public civility and that intellectual sanity that is not exactly a staple of contemporary leftist (especially homosexualist) discourse. Thorp seizes on this apologetical deficit (presumably the good archbishop left this heavy-work to others), and caricatures Wenski as some sort of superstitious dogmatist ready to oppress the psycho-sexually dysfunctioned at a moment’s notice. Like any ideological primitive unable to distinguish between objects or concepts that share only the most superficial characteristics, Thorp is apparently unable to distinguish between a Catholic prelate and an Iranian ayatollah. He claims that the Catholic Church as an institution desires the criminalization of private, consensual sodomy, but can’t provide a shred of evidence for it.

Archbishop Wenski’s editorial is an exercise in mainstream commonsense. The homosexualist movement has nothing whatsoever to do with securing equal protection under the law, but is all about imposing one set of religious values upon the American people. And that’s fine. Leftist mythology notwithstanding, the Constitution does not prohibit state governments from imposing moral and religious values on citizens: it simply carves out certain protections for religious minorities, promising that their own free exercise will never be abridged. The Constitution protects the rights of homosexualists to advocate, in the public square, for their superstitious understandings of gender androgyny and the essential irrationality of the human body; and Catholics, Protestants, Jews, and other more conventional religionists have the same right to argue for the intellectual and moral superiority of their anthropology, and to advocate its reflection in civil law and jurisprudence.

Thorp’s facile comparison of Archbishop Wenski (and by extension, every person not an ideological homosexualist) to the proponents of Jim Crow and apartheid goes to show he knows his argument is lost before he starts it. His comparison of sexual behavior to race is categorically fallacious, failing as it does to distinguish between unwilled characteristics like skin-color which have no inherent moral implications whatsoever, and behaviors which clearly do. A black man is just as human as a white man; but potentially life-giving marital coitus is a fundamentally different exercise of the sexual faculty than infertile and potentially life-destroying sodomy. Whether and to what extent the state has any interest in reflecting such distinctions in its laws is an entirely legitimate question, but Thorp is disingenuous when he pretends that such fundamental distinctions do not exist. And I believe he is a bright enough man that he should know better.

The rest of Thorp’s piece is a lively illustration of the principle that leftist polemic makes for poor historiography. He cannot produce a single Biblical citation from the Pauline corpus to illustrate the Apostle’s supposed loathing of the sacrament of matrimony because he knows darn well (though he relies on a corresponding ignorance on the part of his general readership, who are not exactly South Florida’s literati) the difference between extolling a greatergood (e.g., consecrated sexual abstinence) over a lesser good (e.g., marriage), and loathing the latter. We can’t all be expert in everything, but if Thorp is going to take it upon himself to deride the intellectual acumen of the Archbishop of Miami and play Patristics-scholar, he’d better know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t. He cites some words of Saint Cyprian (an early bishop of Carthage whose biography I am morally certain Thorp is completely ignorant of, else he wouldn’t have placed the sainted pontiff, who was martyred in 258, a century too early), then tells his readers that Cyprian regards marriage as merely “okay.”

After three years of law school (and so three years of what Archbishop Wenski rightly calls“the sophistry that so often today passes as jurisprudence”) I’m used to this. Thorp does with Cyrprian’s writings what leftists do every day with the Constitution: tell you it says something it doesn’t. As I’ve noted, leftism is a superstitious religious system, imposing on its votaries the belief that every document, when read by a leftist, contains magic “penumbras” that fill in whatever convenient dogmas from the leftist hierarchy-of-truths that are missing. And so the U.S. Constitution protects a right to abortion-on-demand and gay marriage and imposes atheism and/or secularism as the state religion, Islam is a “religion of peace,” the American Founding Fathers were liberated lesbians, and the early Christians loathedmarriage, because . . . these claims fit the leftist paradigm, whatever the real facts of the matter.

So, what did Saint Cyprian of Carthage really think about marriage? Let his words speak for themselves:

But chastity maintains the first rank in virgins, the second in those who are continent, the third in the case of wedlock. Yet in all it is glorious, with all its degrees. For even to maintain the marriage-faith is a matter of praise in the midst of so many bodily strifes . . . {Source; emphasis added}

In other words, Mr Thorp, marriage is glorious and praiseworthy.

I needn’t address the rest in any detail. Suffice it to say that Mr Thorp is in bad need of some serious schooling in matters of both Catholic dogma and Church history. His penchant insinuations of Church complicity in genocide and “gendercide” are not documented or hyperlinked because he knows that serious historians do not back up these regurgitated tropes — he also knows his leftist and culturally illiterate readership won’t bother to fact-check either. He and his readers don’t know, and probably don’t care to know, that the Catholic Church has always considered laymen and laywomen themselves to be the divinely-ordained ministers of their own celebration of Matrimony, and so “the Church” (in the persons of her betrothed laity) was performing marriages long before ecclesiastical law required the betrothed to have their weddings blessed in special church ceremonies presided over by ministerial clergy.

Brandon, baby: this piece was beneath you; sit down before you hurt yourself. Submit your apology to Archbishop Wenski; ask him to offer you some Catholic instruction; pray a novena to Oscar Wilde; and hit me up after I’ve taken the Bar if you ever wanna enjoy reruns of Brideshead Revisited over some mimosas.

Pope Benedict XVI’s reform of the Catholic Church entered a new phase Tuesday as the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Office of Media Relations prematurely announced the Pope’s acceptance of the resignation of The Most Rev. John Ricard from the bishopric of Pensaolca-Tallahassee.
This author is in possession of an email by the Diocese’s chancellor, Msgr Michael Reed, alerting several priests of the prematurity of the announcement, and claiming that the Pope has not in fact officially received the resignation.

However, trusted sources very close to the chancery have informed this author that Bishop Ricard’s letter of resignationhas been accepted, that it in fact wascompelled by the Pope, and that its acceptance will be announced within a few or several days. The Tallahassee Democrat is reporting on the resignation, but has deleted from its blog a notice that Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami has been appointed administrator of the Pensacola-Tallahassee Diocese until a permanent replacement is named by the Pope. This wasn’t supposed to be announced either, but this author is in a position to confirm the veracity of the initial reportage. Wenski’s appointment reflects a vote of no-confidence on the part of the Holy See for the Diocese’s curial establishment. Under normal circumstances, a diocese’s vicar-general or some other high-ranking diocesan cleric, and not its metropolitan archbishop, would be expected to assume the role of administrator in an interregnum.

According to the same trusted sources, Bishop Ricard will probably resign under the pretext of ill-health. Ricard suffered a stroke in December 2009, and although he has been recuperating he is reported to be “not fully himself,” and to have relinquished all substantive governance of the Diocese to curial bureaucrats. However, these same sources insist that Ricard (who at 69 years of age is a good five to six years away from the mandatory and typical retirement age) did not wish to resign, and desired to hold the reins of ecclesiastical power for as long as he could; Pope Benedict had demandedhis resignation in response to several disturbing matters relating to episcopal maladministration that have come to the Vatican’s attention.

The way the Catholic liturgy is celebrated in the Diocese reportedly leaves much to be desired, with nearly all of the clergy (Ricard included) strongly opposed to any and all manifestations of traditional liturgical expression, and overtly hostile to the Catholic liturgical “reform of the reform” promoted by the current Pope, including the revival of the traditional Latin (i.e., “Tridentine”) Mass and the reform of the normative Mass (the so-called “Novus Ordo”) in a way that brings it closer, in appearance and in ambiance, to the way Catholics have historically worshipped. (Liturgical abuse and banality are the norm: in one widely-publicized incident, a pastor in Dentin interrupted the Mass to promote his favorite brand of dog shampoo, while during the liturgy he left his pet canine free to roam the nave, and presumably the sanctuary.)

The Diocese (unlike others in Florida) is not particularly distinguished for theological heterodoxy; it’s last two vocations directors are unimpeachably orthodox, but many of the older priests who do not openly dissent from official Church teaching are said to resent the dynamic orthodoxy of the seminarian recruits and ordinands that have made Pensacola-Tallahassee a veritable model for other dioceses when it comes to recruiting priestly vocations. These seminarians and ordinands, however, have reportedly been discouraged by both Bishop Ricard and curial officials from subscribing to a liturgical conservatism that aligns with that of the present Pope.

Una Voce Tallahassee, a lay association of Catholic faithful, has been writing the Diocese and the Holy See for nearly two years, petitioning for the establishment of a weekly Latin Mass in the Diocese’s Eastern Deanery. Bishop Ricard and curial officials have repeatedly refused to establish one, despite the fact that they are required to do so under Church laws promulgated by Pope Benedict in 2007. Una Voce Tallahassee officially represents about 100 signatories of a petition to both Bishop Ricard and the Holy See, and has been in regular contact with both the Vatican and other high-ranking clergy close to the Pope, delivering regular documented correspondence of Bishop Ricard’s clear dissent from Church law in this regard. [1] Una Voce chapter co-founder and president Stephen Mozier, a cradle Catholic who several years ago reverted to the Church from Anglicanism and is a former candidate for the Diocese’s deacon formation program, could not say whether this correspondence has informed the Holy See’s displeasure with Bishop Ricard, but he is sure it could not have worked in the bishop’s favor. Mr Mozier was dismissed from the deacon program after his formators voiced concerns over his having spear-headed the celebration of five Latin Masses (all with very reluctant approval from Bishop Ricard, despite an average congregational attendance of 210 faithful) and over his academic interests in Anglican-Catholic ecumenism. He and others in the diocese hope the new bishop will be more obedient to the teaching and discipline of the Church, and that so-called “traditionalists” will no longer have to stay in the liturgical “closet” for fear of being blacklisted as troublemaking reactionaries.

By all accounts, Bishop Ricard is in fact a pious man who sincerely believes and professes the Catholic Christian religion, but he also has a reputation for being a “do-nothing bishop.” According to published statistics, the Pensacola-Tallahassee Diocese has seen no growth in the relative number of Catholics since Ricard began his episcopacy in 1997. It is hoped that his successor will better cultivate evangelization, beginning with those pockets of dynamic orthodoxy that already exist in some places, e.g., St Stephen’s church in Pensacola (the only parish in the Diocese on board with the papal liturgical reform of the reform) and the youth ministry by the Brotherhood of Hope at Tallahassee’s Co-Cathedral of St Thomas More. (Unfortunately, the “charismatic” Brotherhood is also implacably opposed to traditional Catholic worship, the Pope Benedictine liturgical reform, and the establishment of a “Latin Mass ministry” at the Co-Cathedral.)

Bishop John Ricard is the second Florida bishop in less than a year to be forced into early retirement by Pope Benedict XVI. The state iswidely known to be a hot-bed for clerical homosexualism, theological dissent, and liturgical abuse, but the tide has turned in recent years thanks to some key appointments by Pope Benedict. Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami, Bishop Frank Joseph Dewane of Venice, and Bishop John Gerard Noonan of Orlando are all Benedict appointees; each is a staunch defender of Catholic orthodoxy and clerical reform and are joined in these regards by Wenski’s auxiliary, Bishop Felipe de Jesús Estévez. It is not known who will succeed Ricard, but it is believed his successor will be cut from the same mold; at which point, four out of Florida’s seven dioceses will be governed by staunch conservatives, and these conservatives will dominate the Florida Catholic Conference of Bishops by a ratio of 5 to 3.

Recent events in Florida demonstrate not only the present Pope’s active commitment to Catholic reform, but the willingness of the Holy See to act on the careful instigation of the lay faithful who petition her for redress of their grievances. Let us hope that the state’s ecclesiastical renewal, combined with the conservative political reforms ushered in by the voters in the last election, will bear fruit in mutual springtimes for both church and civil society in the Sunshine State.

NOTES:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 20,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 4 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 15 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 57 posts. There was 1 picture uploaded, taking a total of 25kb.

The busiest day of the year was November 1st with 823 views. The most popular post that day was Non-Partisan Conservative Endorsements for 2010 Broward County (FL) General Election.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were renewamerica.com, blogs.telegraph.co.uk, facebook.com, digg.com, and search.aol.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for eric giunta, archbishop favalora, father anibal morales, broward county court judge group 1, and ann yarko.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

Non-Partisan Conservative Endorsements for 2010 Broward County (FL) General Election October 2010
17 comments

Non-Partisan Conservative Endorsements for Broward County (FL) Primary August 2010
8 comments

UPDATED: Why Favalora Must Resign September 2009
1 comment

When Contraception Isn’t a Sin November 2010
48 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

Archbishop Favalora of Miami MUST Resign September 2009
7 comments

[See UPDATE at end of article.]

The ignoramuses at the mainstream media are at it again. Pope Benedict XVI, we are told by the UK Telegraph, will soon “end the Catholic Church’s absolute ban on the use of condoms,” this after “decades of fierce opposition to the use of all contraception.” “Until now,” according to the folks at the AFP, “the Vatican had prohibited the use of any form of contraception — other than abstinence — even as a guard against sexually transmitted disease.”

I call these people ignoramuses not because they are ignorant of Catholic theology, but because their ignorance is willful. Any one of the journalists employed by the aforementioned media outlets could have consulted with any Catholic theologian, and been provided with the information and the documentation I’m about to present to the readers of this column, to wit: Notwithstanding consistent misrepresentation by mainstream media outlets, and even some sectors of the Catholic right, it has never been the position of the Catholic magisterium, nor Catholic theologians generally, that the use of contraception is intrinsically immoral.

No, yours truly is not “coming out” as a leftist dissenter from two millennia of orthodox Christian teaching on the general immorality of contraception. Again contrary to the paradigms presupposed by the secular press, Catholic Christian teaching on artificial birth control is not “the Vatican’s position” on the subject, as if Catholics believed that the Pope of Rome was a privileged recipient of divine revelation, receiving new doctrines and communicating them accordingly. Believing as we do that divine revelation ended with the death of Christ’s Apostles, Catholicism is an inherently conservative religious system. Any new doctrine that contradicts established teaching is heretical ipso facto, no matter how creative a contrary doctrine one can derive from any and all manner of rationalization and Biblical kama sutra. Apart from the obvious natural law arguments, Catholics believe contraception to be immoral because their Jewish predecessors believed God’s Word precluded it, and this was a doctrine presupposed and reaffirmed by every serious Christian (even Protestants) before 1930, when the Anglican Communion kicked-off Christianity’s sexual revolution by its “discovery” that perverting the sexual faculty was Biblical after all. Catholics oppose contraception because they believe it to be contrary to God’s Word (i.e., Scripture in Tradition), not because this is “Vatican policy.”

This having been said, what exactly do I mean when I say contraception is not always and everywhere sinful? Did not Pope Paul VI solemnly teach, in his encyclical Humane Vitae: On the Regulation of Birth, that

[T]he direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse [coniugale commercium], is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. {Humane Vitae 14}

Of course he did. But any theologian worth his two cents will tell you that the expression commonly translated “sexual intercourse” from the Latin coniugale commercium never refers to a sexual relationship between fornicators, but always and everywhere to relations between married persons. Don’t believe me? Look up the word “conjugal” for yourselves in a dictionary.

This is precisely what every pronouncement by the Catholic magisterium on this subject presupposes, and it is also the rationale behind the Church’s traditional approval for consecrated nuns and sisters to avail themselves of birth control pills in mission territories where persecutory rape is a real danger, and more recent approvals by the Catholic hierarchy for rape victims to avail themselves of “morning after” medications when this can be taken in a manner that is non-abortificient.

In 2004, the UK Tablet, a leftist Catholic publication beloved by Catholic dissidents, proved that even a broken clock is right twice-a-day when it published two articles (one an editorial) challenging continued misrepresentation by some Catholic conservatives of their Church’s teaching. Both are worth a serious read. Contrary to popular belief, the Church does not teach that a rapist compounds his immorality by wearing a condom while he abuses his victim; for the Catholic, rape and fornication are already per se unnatural, because they are immoral exercises of the sexual faculty outside the one institution that is best conducive to the procreation and rearing of children: the natural family built upon the conjugal (i.e., marital) union.

When it comes to combatting AIDS, the Church does not oppose any and all incorporation of condom-promotion into an otherwise comprehensive approach to addressing the epidemic. This is another myth promoted by both the leftist press and certain zealots on the Catholic right overreacting to a culture of sexual license. What the Church opposes are AIDS prevention programs that are condom-centric. The very same conservatives who rightfully highlight the singular success of Uganda in alleviating the AIDS epidemic by the employment of Church-endorsed programs focusing on sexual abstinence and marital fidelity tend to forget, rather conveniently, that these are just the first two, albeit the most emphasized, prongs of a three-tier strategy, called ABC: “abstinence, be faithful, and use condoms.” The use of contraceptives by the infected married and by extra-marital fornicators is not the chief focus of Uganda’s successful program, but it is a factor.

And this leads to another myth that needs shattering: that the Church teaches that AIDS-afflicted married couples have no moral choice but to abstain from conjugal relations indefinitely, or risk passing the fatal disease in the course of unprotected marital lovemaking. Many Catholics are shocked to hear this, but perfectly orthodox moral theologians are heavily divided on this question, and the Church has never pronounced on this contentious issue. There is a perfectly valid argument to be made that an AIDS victim who makes love to his wife while wearing a prophylactic is morally justified in doing so by virtue of the principle of double effect: the morally laudable object of employing the prophylactic is to block the transmission of the AIDS virus between spouses; contraception is an unintended side effect, the gravity of which is met or outweighed by the equally serious good of maintaining an important means of maintaining marital intimacy and relieving the sexual impulse. (The principle of double-effect, it should be remembered, is also the means by which the Church herself even justifies the carrying out of an indirect abortion to save the endangered life of a pregnant mother.)

To be sure, not every theologian subscribes to this moral logic. Some argue that a condom is intrinsically and not incidentally contraceptive, that the unintended contraceptive effect in any case outweighs in gravity the other two ends of marital relations, and that even with condoms the risk (no matter how small) of transmitting the deadly virus to one’s spouse is enough to render the act morally reckless.

A Catholic may fall on whichever side he wishes to in this debate; what he may not do (as far as his Church is concerned) is assert his opinion dogmatically and unlawfully burden the consciences of fellow Catholics who disagree with him. The Pope himself for years has maintained a prudent silence on the question personally, and his personal thoughts on the matter, soon to be published in a book-length interview by Peter Seewald, are perfectly in line with the findings of a 200-page study conducted in 2006 by the Pontifical Council for Health Care Ministry, which “included ‘an enormous rainbow’ of theological and moral positions, from theologians who expressed ‘very rigorous’ opinions against condom use even when used as a disease-preventing measure to those who held a ‘very understanding’ perspective.” According to the official new service of the United States Catholic Bishops,

after looking more closely at the question, the church experts decided it was premature for the Vatican to make a comprehensive statement on the theological and pastoral aspects of condom use, in part because there was not unanimity of opinion, and in part because many believed that discussion of the theological nuances would only invite confusion in the media and among Catholics.

Today these concerns have been vindicated, and the Catholic right and the pro-life movement have much to answer for such confusion. For years, my sometime-editors at a very prominent pro-life news service have castigated bishops and theologians who publicized these nuances, and accused them of being leftist heretics.

What is ironic is that over the last several years, it is the otherwise-dissident Catholic left that has more accurately represented Catholic orthodoxy on these very difficult questions, while the self-styled vanguard of conservative orthodoxy continues to distort the Church’s official teaching, subject her to much unnecessary ridicule, and offended against Christian charity by causing scandal to untold numbers of Catholic couples who find themselves in difficult conjugal situations.

We should continue to urge the mainstream media to get its reporting right in these matters. If they were writing on any religion other than Catholicism, they would surely seek the counsel of religious specialists and peruse appropriate documentation. That they won’t extend the same courtesies toward Catholics and other Christians is both patronizing and bigoted. But before we can expect them to clean up their act, the Catholic right needs to get its theological house in order, repent of its past misrepresentations, and do so publicly. If after the Pope’s own informal articulation of these nuances these misstatements continue to be made, the pro-life and conservative cause will have ceased to retain the orthodox high ground.

UPDATE:

America magazine has published three blog entries that further document the fact that the long-held theological consensus is not what the mainstream press and some of my fellow conservatives has let on. See:

“Pope on Condoms and AIDS: The Background”

“The Pope and Martin Rhonheimer”

“The Pope and Martin Rhonheimer, Part II”

And this article by L’espresso:

“‘Light of the World’: A Papal First”