UPDATE: After a commenter's objections, I have clipped a line or three to make this entry clearer. The point of this entry was never to discuss the Catholic view of conscience, and the lines regrettably sent some readers in the wrong direction. The clipped lines are marked with a [...] and turned out to be unnecessary to the piece. IndustrialBlog regrets the confusion, and realizes this is not the first time this has happened. Have a nice day.
My friend TWS
has a post that surprised me this morning.
Here's the news event he links to.
The news is:
WEST NEW YORK, New Jersey — An excommunicated Roman Catholic archbishop continued his defiance of the Vatican when he ordained two married men as priests.
In front of a congregation that included nearly two dozen members of the media at the Trinity Reformed Church, Raymond A. Grosswirth of Rochester, New York and Dominic Riccio, of Newark, were installed by Zambian Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo.
TWS says:
I am also struck by the intentional, measured ignorance, hm, perhaps mendacity, of Rome, excommincating Milingo, and then holding a summit to confirm their hateful stand....
What's with all the excommunication? PB16 seems to have a real thing for tossing out bishops and priests. (He also excommunicated those Bps who ordained women, if you recall) Apparently it's not enough to forbid them from celebrating or acting as an ordained person, he's got to declare the communion they take void.
I don't think that anyone, not Popes, Powers, Principalities or People, can take that away.
And I think that they shouldn't try, one, because it sounds like evil, an evil I had hoped even the RC church had grown out of, two, lest the excommunicators find themselves judged and excluded in the same way in the hereafter, three, because it wounds the body of Christ (Who can separate out those Christ has included?), and four, because excluding married priests insults, lessens and rejects our most ancient and sacred human institution -marriage.
Many of the Apostles were married and had families, as were many luminaries in the early church -but in the world of PB16, apparently, they were not only inadequate ministers, but should be separated from Christ's Church for their pains. Perhaps PB16 should get started on excommunicating them too... ...there are quite a few of them... He'd better get busy.
Well, yes and no. The Roman Catholic Church makes claims for itself that you either accept or reject. And any church reserves the right to order its ecclesial affairs according to its own beliefs and internal laws.
In the RCC, priests must exercise their ministry within canon law. If you disagree with canon law, you discuss it internally. If you really really disagree and decide to break it, you incur various degrees of discipline. If you ignore the discipline, you incur a more severe discipline, a suspension of sorts, called excommunication.
All the pope is doing is exercising his authority to keep the ecclesial order in his church. Now, what happens if he didn't?
Some bishops would ordain married men. A few would ordain divorced men. A couple would ordain women. And one or two would ordain divorced, practicing homosexuals. Canon law would go out the window, and the magisterium (the official teaching of the RC Church) would follow.
[...]
In other words, the RCC would become Protestant. (And look an awful like the Anglican Communion, btw.) It ain't. [...] [...]
As far as the argument itself about married priests, that's fair enough. But in the RCC, you go through channels. The church itself admits priestly celibacy is something that can be changed, as there was a thousand-year tradition of married priests with the Roman Church. But if and when it's changed, the change will come within the church's own institutional structures.
NOTE: TWS is a seminarian in the Episcopal Church. He's a friend. Be cordial in the comments.
