During a September meeting with a group of Brazilian bishops, Pope John Paul II warned against the tendency to “clericalize the laity,” which he said has resulted from erroneous interpretations of the Second Vatican Council.
“Among the objectives of the liturgical reform established by Vatican Council II was the need to have all the faithful participate in liturgical ceremonies,” the Holy Father said. “However, in practice, in the years following the council, in order to fulfill this desire, the confusion of functions in regard to the priestly ministry and role of the laity was arbitrarily extended.”
Symptoms of this confusion are “the indiscriminate and common recitation of the Eucharistic Prayer,” “homilies given by lay people,” and the “distribution of Communion by the laity.” The Pope called these “grave abuses” and said they often originated in “doctrinal errors, especially in regard to the nature of the liturgy, of the common priesthood of Christians, of the vocation and mission of the laity, but also in regard to the ordained ministry of priests.”
John Paul II pointed out that lay people may “carry out some tasks and functions of cooperation in pastoral service” only “when they are expressly appointed by their respective consecrated pastors, in keeping with prescriptions of the law.” Bottom line: “Not everyone has the same function, because not everyone participates in the same way in the priesthood of Christ.”
The Vatican’s attempts in recent years to pull in the rein on the overuse of extraordinary ministers of the Eucharist have for the most part gone unheeded.
Moon Madness
Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo says that Rev. Sun Myung Moon planned to create a schism in the Catholic Church, beginning in Africa. The revelations of Archbishop Milingo, the former archbishop of Lusaka, Zambia, appear in a book interview titled Fished Out of the Mud. The archbishop had been on a yearlong spiritual retreat after his Moon-managed “marriage” and subsequent reconciliation with the Church.
Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith-which is handling the case at the request of John Paul II-confirmed the schism plan. “Unfortunately, a schism is always possible when a bishop separates from the Church,” the said.
After many hours of conversation with Archbishop Milingo, Archbishop Bertone believes that Moon’s religious sect took advantage of the Zambian’s generous spirit. “He is a simple man, of noble spirit, a man of prayer and charity,” Archbishop Bertone said. “He would give everything to help someone who is desperate; this impetus of charity sometimes leads him to transgress the norms of the Church.” Archbishop Milingo’s staged marriage to Korean acupuncturist Maria Sung “was only a way to make himself thoroughly accepted [by Moon’s sect] to try to evangelize it.”
Reverend Moon allocated $5 million through his Unification Church to the abortive schism plan.
U.S. Sees More, Younger Seminarians
The U.S. bishops’ conference released a report that states more than 3,400 men are studying for the diocesan priesthood in the United States this academic year. This includes students in college-level seminaries and postgraduate studies but does not include men studying for religious congregations, which account for almost a third of the priests in the country.
Many dioceses note an increasing number of men studying for the priesthood. After a recent history of older seminarians, the average age of those entering now appears to be younger. The total number studying for the priesthood in the United States, including religious, was estimated at 5,109, according to an August report by the Zenit news agency.
India leads the world with 10,537 diocesan and religious students of philosophy and theology.
Russian Blacklist of Catholic Priests?
According to the Catholic bishop of western Siberia, Russia has compiled a blacklist of Catholic priests it intends to expel in the near future.
Bishop Werth, whose comments were published by the Vidimus Dominum news service, said the police blacklist includes about a dozen names of foreign Catholic priests who will soon be expelled. To date, Bishop Jerzy Mazur of St. Joseph in Irkutsk, eastern Siberia, as well as four priests of Italian, Polish, and Slovak nationality have been expelled.
Bishop Werth said that Russia needs a “spiritual rebirth, because people want to experience a real inner conviction.” (Recent polls show that only one percent of those who consider themselves Russian Orthodox attend church.) According to the bishop, representatives of the Orthodox hierarchy support the hostility against the Catholic community, but “at the popular level, the faithful don’t hate the Catholic minority.”
He pointed out that last April, about 2,000 Orthodox organized anti-Catholic demonstrations in a dozen cities, but, despite calls from Orthodox parishes, people did not come out en masse.
Pray for Souls in Purgatory
Pope John Paul II recently exhorted the faithful to pray for the souls in purgatory, stressing the special need that the deceased have. In particular, the papal message published in September stressed “‘suffrage’ for the souls in purgatory.” The message was addressed to the Minim Sisters of Our Lady of Suffrage, a congregation whose religious consists in remembering the profound communion between the living and the dead.
“The first and highest form of charity for brothers is the ardent desire for their eternal salvation,” the Pope wrote. “Christian love knows no boundaries and goes beyond the limits of space and time, enabling us to love those who have already left this earth.”
The Catechism of the Catholic Church says, in part, “All who die in God’s grace and friendship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification, so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven. The Church gives the name purgatory to this final purification of the elect” (CCC 1030, 1031).
Vatican Official: Homosexuals Should Not Be Priests
Msgr. Andrew Baker, a Pennsylvania priest who is now on the staff of the Congregation for Bishops, wrote in America magazine that a man with homosexual impulses, even if he remains chaste, “should not be admitted to Holy Orders, and his presence in the seminary would only give him false hope.”
The article, which appeared in the influential publication of the Jesuit order, may provide insight into the thinking of Vatican officials at a time when the American bishops are awaiting a decision from Rome on the “Dallas policy” on sex abuse cases that was approved by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. The Dallas policy requires approval from several Roman congregations, including the Congregation for Bishops.
In September, Pope John Paul II told a group of Brazilian bishops that young men with “disordered affections” should not be admitted to seminaries there. The Vatican has consistently urged American bishops to recognize homosexual influence as a problem that must be resolved in the U.S. seminaries and in the conduct of priestly life
The Pope Is Healthier
According to recent reports, Pope John Paul II appeared to be healthier on his return to the Vatican from his summer at the papal residence of Castel Gandolfo, south of Rome.
The Pope, who celebrated the twenty-forth anniversary of his pontificate on October 16 (now the fifth longest in history), seems in good humor and has overcome the problems of pronunciation he had in recent months. This summer, John Paul II turned his traditional Sunday meetings with pilgrims into veritable audiences. After praying the Angelus, the Pope lingered, personally greeting many of those present.
On May 26, at the end of his visit to Azerbaijan and Bulgaria, some journalists who traveled with him wrote that that might well be his last international trip, implying he might cancel his trip to Mexico and Guatemala. Yet he went to Canada, Mexico, and Guatemala from July 23 to August 1, and then made an enormously successful pastoral visit to his native Poland August 16-19.
File this under “Those Wacky French”: The sale of regenerating pills based on tropical fruits, which French pioneer AIDS researcher Luc Montagnier gave to John Paul II, has skyrocketed in France-despite the fact that the Holy Father is not taking the pills.