Monday we reported on the upcoming speech in Ireland by Robert Blair Kaiser, reporter on the Second Vatican Council for Time magazine. The speech was last night. Here is one report on it. Here is another. Not exactly a moderate or balanced talk – but it probably wasn’t inteded to be, either. Probably any from-the-bottom-up revolution will be tamer. But who knows? awr
Robert Blair Kaiser’s Irish speech
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8 responses to “Robert Blair Kaiser’s Irish speech”
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Fr. Anthony – here is a link to the actual speech:
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We already have the Church he calls for in Ireland – it is the Church of Ireland (Anglican). They claim apostolic succession, see themselves as the successor to the Celtic Church before the Roman rites and calendar were imposed on it (although they also followed the latter) and have women priests.
How very unecumenical of him to say for disillusioned Irish Catholics to become Protestants would be like Bernard Shaw saying he has lost his faith, not his mind.
So why call for something that is already there? One interesting and healthy development in Ireland is that the Church if Ireland is growing largely with disaffected Catholics who join it rather than lose all religion. I know some of them and in their view all they are losing is the Pope and unaccountable Hierarchy.
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The talk is part a re-presentation of his 2007 talk to Call to Action in the US and part recommendation to adopt the ecclesiastical governing organization found in the (Protestant) Church of Ireland. His analysis includes the observation that “(Maronites & Chaldeans) have their own priests “some ordained, some not ordained.”
I’m not certain that the Maronites or Chaldeans would agree that any of their priests lack ordination.
It is important to recognize that Kaiser appears to reject today’s hierarchical Church and, while doing so, V2’s Lumen gentium which teaches assent of heart and mind to the hierarchical Church (25). It is significant that he would also appear to reject the hierarchical Church’s authority to regulate & reform the liturgy as she did in the 1960’s. Strange that while he clearly dismisses the teachings in Lumen gentium he accuses the contemporary Church’s leadership of not implementing the council that he appears to reject. Irony. -
Robert Blair Kaiser wants a Church that is more Irish (or American, or whatever) and less Roman.
I’ll stand with St. Patrick instead: “Ut Christiani, ita et Romani sitis!”
Kaiser’s grasp of history is amusingly slippery:
Until the Copernican revolution, monarchs exercised absolute control over their subjects by divine right. But when the peoples of the world, informed by a new cosmology, put the divine right of kings into history’s dustbin, they forgot to toss the divine right of popes into the garbage, too.
Of course, the divine right of kings isn’t a pre-Copernican idea, it’s a reaction to the overthrow of the medieval Church/State/Papacy order. Compare the dates of Copernicus (1473 – 1543) with those of the main “Divine Right of Kings” figures like Louis XIV (1638 – 1715) and James I (1566-1625). The Protestant James I, a leading proponent of the theory, certainly wasn’t carrying water for the Pope when he gave the royal assent to the Popish Recusants Act of 1605 following the Gunpowder Plot.
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Yes, the divine right theory & royal absolutism was the first step to nationalism and contrary to the ideal of Christendom.
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Now I know the definition of “spam!” It’s not a weird meat product, but this speech. To bad it wasn’t permanently deleted because it can sure give you the runs. 🙂
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Yes, that’s true. The so-called Divine Right was a means of exerting control of the Church.
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I thought Kaiser came across as wallowing in stereotypes about the Irish, and I suppose he will be dismissed as the stereotypical transatlantic blow-in. His crass and juvenile novel on Cardinal Mahoney put me off him totally and makes me doubt in retrospect the veracity of his memoir about Malachi Martin and Courtney Murray’s role in his marital troubles.
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