1968, HUMANAE VITAE, VIET NAM, RIOTS, PROTEST, SIT-INS AND DISSENT--THE GLORY DAYS OF THOSE PRIESTS AND SEMINARIANS NOW IN THEIR 60'S AND OLDER!

My First Comments: (my second ones at the end)Cardinal James F. Stafford was the auxiliary bishop of Baltimore when I was in the seminary at St. Mary's, Roland Park (1976-80). The events he describes below happened in Baltimore in 1968, only eight years prior to my arriving there to begin seminary training. Many of the priests that he describes as dissenters where sons of St. Mary Seminary, the Cadillac of seminaries in this country and the oldest seminary of any religion in this country. It is said that the Naval Academy in Annapolis borrowed some of its structure and discipline for their students from St. Mary Seminary prior to 1968. 1968 was a pivotal year not only for Baltimore but also for St. Mary Seminary and for the rest of the Church throughout the world. We have yet to recover from the worst of its effect. We still have aging priests and laity who remember 1968 with great fondness and associate it with the euphemism "spirit of Vatican II."

Pope Benedict XVI, who during the council and afterward would have been considered a progressive priest and bishop disavowed much of what was being touted as the "spirit of Vatican II" progressiveness after he experience student riots against the Church around 1968 as well. Thus we now have two camps from that period of time who are still living. Pope Benedict and Cardinal Stafford represent one camp who was awakened to the disaster of Vatican II's "spirit" fomented by angry dissent and others like Frs. Hans Kung and Charles Curran and their admirers who still carry that 1968 torch of church politics of slash and burn! This divided Catholicism is at war with each other, a spiritual war, for the life and soul of the Catholic Church. But Jesus is victorious and the forces of dissent from the truth were doomed from the very beginning. History repeats itself and the outcome is always the same. Orthodoxy, (right belief) and Orthopraxis (right practice) always wins.


YOU CAN READ CARDINAL STAFFORD'S COMPLETE ARTICLE BY PRESSING THIS SENTENCE. The following is an excerpt:

English historian Paul Johnson dubs 1968 as the year of “America’s Suicide Attempt.” It included the Tet offensive in Vietnam with its tsunami-like effects in American life and politics, the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee; the tumult in American cities on Palm Sunday weekend; and the June assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in Southern California. It was also the year in which Pope Paul VI issued his encyclical letter on transmitting human life, Humanae Vitae (HV). He met immediate, premeditated, and unprecedented opposition from some American theologians and pastors. By any measure, 1968 was a bitter cup….

The summer of 1968 is a record of God’s hottest hour. The memories are not forgotten; they are painful. They remain vivid like a tornado in the plains of Colorado. They inhabit the whirlwind where God’s wrath dwells. In 1968, something terrible happened in the Church. Within the ministerial priesthood, ruptures developed everywhere among friends which never healed. And the wounds continue to affect the whole Church. The dissent, together with the leaders’ manipulation of the anger they fomented, became a supreme test. It changed fundamental relationships within the Church. It was a Peirasmòs [i.e. a trial, a test of faith] for many.

During the height of the 1968 Baltimore riots following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I had made an emergency call to [an] inner-city pastor…He described the view from the rectory while speaking on the phone…his parish was becoming a raging inferno. He said, “From here I see nothing but fire burning everywhere. Everything has been set ablaze. The Church and rectory are untouched thus far.” He did not wish to leave or be evacuated. His voice betrayed disillusionment and fear. Later we learned that the parish buildings survived.

Memories of the physical violence in the city in April 1968 [following the king Assassination] helped me to name what had happened in August 1968 [in the explosion of dissent against Humanae Vitae]. Ecclesial dissent can become a kind of spiritual violence in its form and content.

What do I mean? Look at the results of the two events. After the violent 1968 Palm Sunday weekend, civil dialogue in metropolitan Baltimore broke down and came to a stop. It took a back seat to open anger and recriminations between whites and blacks. The…priests’ August gathering [against Humane Vitae] gave rise to its own ferocious acrimony. Conversations among the clergy…became contaminated with fear. Suspicions among priests were chronic. Fears abounded. And they continue. The Archdiocesan priesthood lost something of the fraternal whole which Baltimore priests had known for generations. 1968 marked the hiatus of the generational communio….Priests’ fraternity had been wounded. Pastoral dissent had attacked the Eucharistic foundation of the Church. Its nuptial significance had been denied. Some priests saw bishops as nothing more than Roman mannequins.

Cardinal Shehan later reported that on Monday morning, August 5, he “was startled to read in the Baltimore Sun that seventy-two priests of the Baltimore area had signed the Statement of Dissent.” What he later called “the years of crisis” began for him during that hot… August evening in 1968….Its unhinging consequences continue. Abusive, coercive dissent has become a reality in the Church and subjects her to violent, debilitating, unproductive, chronic controversies.

The violence of the initial disobedience was only a prelude to further and more pervasive violence. …Contempt for the truth, whether aggressive or passive, has become common in Church life. Dissenting priests, theologians and laypeople have continued their coercive techniques. From the beginning, the press has used them to further its own serpentine agenda.

My final comments: Cardinal Stafford's last three paragraphs above shows where we are with liberal-progressives in the Church and right-wing neo-conservatives. These two groups although on opposite ends of the spectrum were born of the theology of dissent and contempt for the Magisterium of the Church that reached its birthing in 1968 (it was in the womb during the Council and until about 1968.)

Neo-conservatives say they hold to the true teachings of the Church in the areas of faith and morals, but they undermine the bishops of the Church too, who don't agree with their agenda, such as those in the SSXP movement and their admirers. But what I contend is you can't have a faithful Catholicism without the living Magisterium of the Church, the Pope and bishops in union with him. You can't have orthodoxy but only heterodoxy with out them even when there is only tacit acknowledgment of their role in the Church. These neo-conservatives fall short of heresy but are heterodox nonetheless.

The same is true of the progressive heterodox. Although they tend toward heresy, often they fall short of actual heresy by their heterodox maneuvering. They dispise the the pope and bishops as do the neo-conservatives but for different reasons

Both heterdox groups tend toward schism although the neo-conservatives are more organized, unified and passionate in the heterodoxy and thus pose a greater threat to actual schism than do progressives who are disorganized, far from united and lack viable leadership.

Both heterdox groups were born in the 1960's! Need I say more?

Heterodoxy in the Roman Catholic Church refers to views that differ from strictly orthodox views, but retain sufficient faithfulness to the original doctrine to avoid heresy. Many Roman Catholics profess some heterodox views, either on doctrinal or social issues.[3] For example, the orthodox Catholic position on unbaptized infants is that their fate is uncertain, and "the Church can only entrust them to the mercy of God" (Catechism of the Catholic Church 1261). A heterodox Catholic might profess the belief that unbaptized infants are offered the option to accept or deny salvation by God at their judgment. The belief is not orthodox, as the Church does not profess a belief as to what happens to unbaptized infants; however, it is also not heresy, as the Church accepts that such a scenario might be possible. By contrast, a denial of the doctrine of "Original Sin" (thereby negating the necessity of baptism for children) or Papal Infallibility would be labeled heretical because such ideas contradict the dogmas of the Roman church.