I saw this yesterday, but it did not sink in until Kevin Tierney pointed it out.
The bishop of Charleston leaves the spiritual equivalent of a flaming bag of crap on the porches of his sheep. Only a contemptible ideologue or equally contemptible company man could try to legislate this.
But it matters not at all which he is. Click on the picture to magnify.
What matters is that the gratuitous cruelty of the law invites disobedience, so here's hoping it is ignored when those members of the faithful seek it anyway.
Salus animarum suprema lex.
"Cruelty" sounds like gaslighting to me. It's hardly that. The sacraments of the dying are Penance (and I'm sure sins are mostly confessed in the vernacular) and Eucharist in the form of viaticum. Anointing can always be done in Latin. That sacrament is done in the mainstream Roman Rite. There is literally no such thing as the modernism of "extreme unction" any longer.
ReplyDeleteBottom line: bishops are in charge. Not priests.
Your accusation of gaslighting is duly noted, and not appreciated.
DeleteDo not repeat it.
I never figured you for someone to tell the dying to get over themselves, but life is full of unpleasant surprises.
ReplyDeleteAs the count of the raped shows, the bishops have done a hell of a job of pissing away their moral authority for, oh, 80 years.
So while they have the law on their side, we'll see how obedient their priests are. The example of the past few generations suggests that such directives from the mitred will be filtered accordingly.
I think your assessment is accurate. But no sound liturgy announces itself by title. Few traditional Catholics have the experience in Latin and the 1962 rite to recognize the difference at the deathbed. The pastoral care rites do provide for considerable adaptation on the part of the clergy, even to the point of providing traditional elements that might be familiar to a person who has been at many deathbeds.
DeleteAll this is why I find the protest on this point to be empty. I wouldn't tell a dying person to get over themselves, but I have no hesitation to suggest protesters are barking up the wrong tree. Unless they can compare and contrast the two forms and give me some specific problems. The truth is that lay people anointed the sick for a much longer period of time than Tridentine extreme unction was the practice. The latter has even less of a traditional pedigree than the TLM.
Also, your noting is noted. Withholding commencing.
The floor of hell is paved with the skulls of bishops. I ignore them since they produce nothing of value.
ReplyDeleteEven I can't go that far. Bishops are built into the concept, and I have enough regard for mine to dread his certainly-bad replacement.
DeleteBut I have no respect or regard for any ecclesiastical figure who acts ultra vires. Part of that is the lawyer talking, but a bigger part is that Catholicism is not a spiritual fuhrerprinzip.
There are definite limits to what clerical power at all levels can do, and the laity needs to remind them of that.
Between Vatican I and the death of counter-balancing Catholic secular leadership, ecclesiastics have gotten a too-big-for-their-britches notion of their awesomeness. Genuine humility would go a long way. But it's clear that it won't come from within the clerical culture as it exists now.