Exkommunicering av helgon i förnyelsetider

Läste en artikel om Fr. Roy - som övergår i en intressant redogörelse för hur katolska kyrkan genom alla tider har stått emot förnyelse - men sedan accepterat den. Det är tyvärr en sant katolsk tradition! Vi lever även nu i en särskilt tydlig brytningstid...

"Excommunicated saints dot the history of the church with far too much regularity: Mary Ward, whose sin was the founding a religious life for women that did not require cloister; Mary McKillop whose sin was opening Catholic centers without the permission of the bishop; the Beguines, a community of non-cloistered women in Belgium, whose sin was walking the streets and ministering in homes; Teilhard de Chardin whose sin was the acceptance of the theory of evolution; Fr. Tissa Balasuriya, OMI whose sin was to seek new ways to transmit the doctrine of original sin in an Asian culture. All were precursors of momentous social change whose concerns were not only ignored by the church but punished.

When the dust settled, however, nobody remembered who excommunicated the saints who were pioneering a new church but everybody remembers the saints. And everybody came to believe what the saints had attempted to teach.

Reformers who centuries ago called for discussion of the sale of relics, the use of the vernacular in the liturgy, the review of a theology that divided people according to ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ vocations were also excommunicated. Wars were fought and people died by the thousands on both sides in the attempt to impose Catholic orthodoxy. Nations were divided to maintain Catholicism. Women were burned at the stake in behalf of Catholic doctrine. And, in Germany, for instance, one woman was executed simply for owning a bible in German. And all those things were done in the name of God.

But with what success? The effects are painfully clear to this very day.
Nobody remembers the “sins” of the reformers. Everybody remembers the sin of a church that refused to listen to their concerns and is still 400 years late repenting it. And the things the reformers argued for are now, finally, part and parcel of Catholicism itself.

Were all the lives lost, all the excommunications worth it? Do we never learn?

In fact, who in our own time does not know of pre-Vatican II church laws that excommunicated Catholics for marrying Protestants, or of “sins” committed and confessed by families who attended those weddings? Or, for the sake of family, worshipped with them in those churches despite the bans? Or, prodded by even more demanding consciences, suffered through brutal marriages that finally ended in brutal divorces and then, for their trouble, were denied the sacraments? Who now will defend such things in the name of either fidelity or obedience?

The most painful question of all, however, is has anything really changed, however much Pope John XXIII might have hoped otherwise?

In our own time, church by fear and intimidation is clearly on the brink of becoming the norm again."

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