This writer has been accused by the National "Catholic" Reporter of being a schismatic.That's rich coming from a newspaper that has been ordered by more than one Bishop to remove the word "Catholic" from it's title.
Phyllis Zagano recently lectured at St. Michael's College in Toronto; a lecture promoting the cause of so-called "women deacons." The attention given to her thesis also ended up in the Archdiocesan owned Catholic Register. The conference was also attended by the Judicial Vicar for the Archdiocese of Toronto. Did he rebuke her? That College is a Baslian institution, the same Congregation to which Thomas J. Rosica belongs.
Who are the schismatics?
Yet, Phyllis Zagano has the uncharitable and unmitigated gall to label this blogger, a schismatic. She, who is travelling around to diocese after diocese as a dissenter promoting the idea that there were women deacons who had a liturgical purpose and should again. That, is not Catholic. That, is a schismatic attitude.
While she refers to bloggers in general, she highlights the vexatious and frivolous threat of a lawsuit by Thomas J. Rosica, CSB of the ever failing and irrelevant Salt + Light and sometimes Vatican "volunteer" spokesperson, which may change under the new lay director, Greg Burke. Yet, she states it in such a way that his idiotic and stupid action had any effect other than to raise the readers of this blog by 2,000,000! Pretty smart move, Tom.
You can read it below without clicking there.
I follow the faith of my mother and father. Do they?
I worship in the manner that my Lebanese grandparents did when they came to Canada. Do Phyllis or Tom worship in the manner of their Italian ancestors?
I believe everything that my parents were taught by the faith. That men marry women, that adultery is a grievous sin, that sodomy is one of the four sins crying out to heaven for justice and that there is no mercy without truth and justice. Do they?
I married my wife in the same ceremony that her parents were married in Capetown and mine in Toronto. Does that make me a schismatic?
I accept that Jorge Bergoglio is the Bishop of Rome because the priests of that Diocese accept him as such and as such, he is the Pope, for better or worse. Mostly worse and that does not make me a schismatic. Though I really think he should contact Gammarelli about his mitre.
Tom Rosica has frequently said that "doctrine changes when pastoral contexts shift and new insights emerge." Is that Catholic truth?I believe all that the historical magisterium of the Catholic Church teaches and She teaches what I believe. Do they?
Who then, are the schismatics?
Listen Phyllis, you've lost. This screed from you and Tom and many others proves it.
Your FrancisChurch is going to come crashing down.
Very soon.
THE NEXT SCHISM IS ALREADY HERE
Phyllis Zagano
July 13, 2016
The next schism isn't down the road somewhere. It is already here. The proponents are lined up in a serious face-off, their team shirts emblazoned "Pre-Vatican II" and "Post-Vatican II."
The "Pre" folks are the all Latin, all the time minority, solemnly preferring Bach during liturgy. The "Post" people comprise the rest of us, dutifully singing St. Louis Jesuits' songs and even (gasp!) exchanging handshakes at the kiss of peace.
The fissure is getting worse, as more and more younger people come along yearning for the good old days (before they were born) when everything was orderly, everything had its place, and the rules were followed.
Meanwhile, older church professionals who adjusted to vernacular liturgies and who incorporate mercy into their understandings of justice are retiring daily. They are being replaced, where they are replaced, by people whose theological education is complemented by self-appointed Internet theo-bloggers whose opinions grow from the conviction that anything that happened since 1965 is anathema.
That is probably why Fr. Thomas Rosica, a Canadian priest and CEO of Salt and Light Catholic Media Foundation took on the so-called Catholic blogosphere several weeks ago, as he delivered the keynote address at the Brooklyn, N.Y., diocesan World Communications Day events. Rosica reported that many people say to him that "we 'Catholics' have turned the internet into a cesspool of hatred, venom and vitriol, all in the name of defending the faith!"
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It is true. The internet, as Rosica said in Brooklyn, "can be an international weapon of mass destruction, crossing time zones, borders, and space."
Rosica, whose attorneys sent a "cease and desist" letter to a Canadian blogger who attacked him with a combination of character assassination and misinformation, charitably reported that "Often times the obsessed, scrupulous, self-appointed, nostalgia-hankering virtual guardians of the faith or of liturgical practices are very disturbed, broken and angry individuals, who never found a platform or pulpit in real life and so resort to the internet and become trolling pontiffs and holy executioners!"
I agree. Because they never did or at least no longer do find space in legitimate media, the self-appointed pontiffs build internet and other social media followings for their unfiltered personal attacks on anyone who strays beyond the boundaries of the church of their imaginings. In unedited postings, they freely criticize anyone -- from the pope on -- who carries and/or lives the Gospel in the "wrong" way.
I hope my own experience with these type persons is atypical. While Rosica's attorneys demanded his attacker stop assassinating the priest's character, my own university actually banned a nasty blogger from campus and any online activities some years ago, when he tried to disrupt one of my online seminars. The idea was to keep him away from me. Aside from denigrating my scholarship and defending his personal version of the faith, my attacker also brags about carrying a gun.
That is where the schism is now. It is no longer butchers and bakers having street fights over Real Presence, or any other theological issue. It is shoot-from-the-hip typists whose access to bandwidth lets them threaten your livelihood and, implicitly at least, your life. What they say is true because they say it, no matter their lack of credentials or, possibly, sanity.