"Small Band of Rebel Freedom Fighters Fights Evil
“Who takes this bread and eats,” he murmured, cracking a communion wafer with his wife at his side, “declares a desire for a new world.”
With those words, Mr. Delsaert, 60, and his fellow parishioners are discreetly pioneering a grass-roots movement that defies centuries of Roman Catholic Church doctrine by worshiping and sharing communion without a priest.
Don Bosco is one of about a dozen alternative Catholic churches that have sprouted and grown in the last two years in Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium and the Netherlands. They are an uneasy reaction to a combination of forces: a shortage of priests, the closing of churches, dissatisfaction with Vatican appointments of conservative bishops and, most recently, dismay over cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests.
Ok guys. Let me explain how it works.
When you decide you don't want to be in the Catholic Church any more and you go out and start your own garage church, you don't get to hang the "Catholic" sign in front of the door.
Think of it like a corporate logo. Pepsi doesn't go around calling itself Coke.
"The churches are called ecclesias..."
Actually, they're called "Protestant".
Trust us, we've seen this sort of thing before.
~
If a bunch of punters started to produce a newspaper they photocopied in the garage and called it "The New York Times" the NYT lawyers would shut it down before you could say "injunction"
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of a recent Time magazine article about a Catholic bishop ordaining women priests.
ReplyDeleteNOTE TO TIME: Catholic bishops who ordain women are about as Catholic as the Old Catholics of Utrecht (that is, not Catholic at all). Not every bloke (or lass, as it may well be) who wears funny clothes at Sunday and serves holy bread and holy wine is Catholic.
Some of them are Orthodox.
Yes Hilary, we've seen this sort of renegade before; the rebels who defected over the old Latin Mass, and got their way. When the rebellion catches on, Rome absorbs the rebels and pretends there never were any differences; when it doesn't, they are cast as rebels.
ReplyDeleteIngemar: the Old Catholics and the Anglo-Catholics are Catholics, but not Roman Catholics, nor do they want to be.
Alexander
Alex,
ReplyDeleteconfused much?