On what basis was Fr. O'Leary being considered?
Who knows, Chris. Presumably his publication record, which is theologically as dense as it is dissident and revisionist.
Alarming that he was seriously on the table, but good news that common sense seems to have prevailed.
It is shocking that he was even considered - but it goes to show that the undercurrents of treasonous influences in the Catholic world are extremely strong and almost unbeatable.
Sancte Michael Archangele, defende nos in praelio!
Perhaps he was being considered solely on the grounds of being an Irishman?
Or perhaps solely on the exotic grounds of being an Irishman from Japan?
Well, it just goes to show you. Catholics react to every piece of good news, no matter how trivial, as if it were proof that all the crap that Romano Amerio and Michael Davies chronicled over thirty years was just a bad dream, a wispy interlude now long past.
It isn't. The ecclesial establishment throughout the world -- and certainly in the First World countries -- is dominated by status quo careerists asleep at the switch, when they are not modernist ideologues themselves.
Fr Joe is their Oscar Wilde. His deliciously outrageous bon mots stand in delightful contrast to their own managerial pallor. PP's essays are devastating, and should be passed along to this review board, who plainly don't get out much.
I regard it as a signal achievement that we were able on this blog to occasionally pull off the mask of Wildean cleverness and expose the corruption beneath. Anyone who revisits those months of trench warfare (summer 2005 I think) will be appalled at what this priest is capable of.
God Bless you for shouting so loudly "Here is the wolf", keep shouting.
Such cheer from Ralph is unusual. Wilde died repentant, reconciled to Holy Mother Church. Perhaps there is hope for Fr. O'Leary, too?
As long as there's breath there's hope, but we were speaking of past and present, not future, weren't we?
I remember those days when the priest in question was a regular commenter. He would post not one, but four of five comments in succession, as though acting impulsively to every thought that came out of his head. On the one occasion he posted at MY blog, I laid down a specific set of rules, and I had no problem. But the greatest danger I would see in such a man, is the one to himself. There is a pattern of emotional immaturity that I find common in many parish priests when I'm traveling. The need for adulation, to be the center of attention, to show off their rebellion against authority, to win friends and influence people by so doing. It appeals to the worst tendencies in any man.
One more reason I have grown to hate "Mass facing the people."
O'Leary is a dreadful elitist. In the combox of another blog he accused me of being a bad Dominican, comparing me unfavorably to Timothy Radcliffe and Fergus Kerr. He wondered what these progressively enlightened friars would think of a right-wing dunderhead like me. I told him to call them up and ask since Fergus was a tutor of mine at Oxford, and I lived next door to Timothy for year at Blackfriars. Never heard from him again. HA!
Fr. Philip, OP
never said you were a bad OP, but that I prefer liberal gentlemen like Kerr and Radcliffe to the conservative brand of OP that flourished in Toulouse.
Blosser is in persecutory mood -- shows no respect whatever for academic freedom or the human rights of freedom of opinion and freedom of expression -- the authoritarian personality -- no surprise from one who calls for the canonization of Torquemada.
Why go back to a discredited 50+ year-old theory for ad homimem? Get with the fashion and accuse Dr. Blosser of being a closet homosexual.
ad homiNem.
He's even opposed to choice. I think he's opposed to liturgical experimentation and progress.
His Holiness spoke well enough of what "freedom" really means and in what context alone are we truly free. All other "freedoms" are transient and illusory.
Fr Philip,
If you're still here, could you offer a thumbnail portrait of Fergus Kerr's "liberalism"? Theologically liberal in the sense of transcendental thomism?, or did you have something else altogether in mind?
Seems to me that his tone toward the stampeding "nuptialism" of ressourcement (which Kerr finds permeating Ratzinger, saturating JP2, and which is even detectible in certain aspects of Lonergan & Rahner -- "Twentieth Century Cathoic Theologians") can be stated as: this is what we are heading for -- are we really comfortable with it?
Or am off base?
Ralph,
It wasn't Fr. Philip, OP, who described Fergus Kerr as a "liberal," but Fr. Joseph O'Leary, who has now elevated himself -- with duplicitous pretentions, if not delusions -- from "Spirit of Vatican II" to "Lumen Christi," the very Light of Christ itself.
As always, Fr. O'Leary plays to the predictable knee-jerk responses of readers with his accusations our having an "authoritarian" disposition and not respecting "academic freedom." Our views, however, are entirely unexceptional and submit without reservation to the statements about academic freedom found in the CDF's Instruction "Donum Veritatis: On the Ecclesial Vocation of the Theologian" (1990) or Pope John Paul's Apostolic Constitution On Catholic Universities: "Ex Corde Ecclesiae" (1990), both of which underscore the freedom of the theologian and other scholars to teach the truth. This is a far cry, however, from the notions of academic freedom that prevail in the secular academy today (as well as in Fr. O'Leary's own practice), where "academic freedom" essentially means the freedom to teach whatever one wishes among the regnant ideologies and heresies of the times.
Fr. O'Leary endeavors to tar me with the heavy-handed pejorative associations of the Spanish Inquisition in popular culture, whereas, in truth, what we need now more than ever is precisely a more determined effort on the part of the Church in conducting inquisitions into the lives of renegade priests who build their academic careers in promoting dissent and tearing down magisterial teaching under the guise of academic freedom.
Tomas de Torquemada, ora pro nobis. Viva la Santa Inquisición!
I was only kidding. Let me come back, Philip. I'll be good.
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