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D r a g n e t
TAKING THE CAKE
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This Rock
Volume 5, Number 2
 February 1994 
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Every once in a while we come across an anti-Catholic
publication so gratuitously hateful, so wholly divorced from reality,
so insidiously creative in its lies and errors that we can only marvel
at what sort of person could conceive it.
Such is our reaction on surveying The Protestant,
a 16-page tabloid "independently published and distributed by
dedicated laymen of the Adventist Movement." Translation: A splinter
group of Seventh-Day Adventists has scraped together enough
cash to mail anti-Catholic vitriol into communities across the country.
This publication may already have come into yours.
These Adventists have a hook. They appeal to the reader's patriotism.
Their arguments are based on the premise that America and the Constitution
of the United States are in some sense divinely inspired. The attacks
on the Catholic Church throughout the pages of The Protestant
center in one way or another on how the Church is out to make America
a Catholic state, abolish religious liberty and freedom of conscience,
and establish a Catholic one-world government.
The Jesuits in particular intend to destroy any opposition;
they take an oath which states, "I will . . . wage relentless
war . . . against all heretics, Protestants, and Liberals. . . . I
will hang, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous
heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush
their infants' heads against the wall, in order to annihilate forever
their execrable race."
This oath is nearly identical to the "Knights of Columbus
oath" that was declared a fake in 1913 by a special committee
of Congress. Despite the governmental condemnation, the spurious Knights
oath has been used by anti-Catholics throughout this century. (Maybe
they don't read the Congressional Record.) The Protestant
has resurrected it, changing only its attribution (now it's taken
by the Jesuits) and its focus (from "Protestants and Masons"
to "Protestants and Liberals").
The writers for The Protestant take some creative liberties
in referring to Pope Pius IX's 1864 Syllabus of Errors.
This document lists erroneous ideas of the day. For instance, the
first proposition states that "No supreme, all wise, and all-provident
divine Godhead exists." Pio Nono condemned errors in theology,
philosophy, government, and marriage simply by stating them.
In "quoting" the Syllabus, The Protestant
fudges by taking a negative statement, drawing a (false) conclusion
from it, adding a word here and there, and then printing the result
as though it were a positive statement from the Pope's own hand.
Under the heading "Roman Dogma and Tradition--Freedoms [sic]
Foe!", the Syllabus is quoted as saying, "The Church
has the right to require that the Catholic religion shall be the religion
of the State, to the exclusion of ALL OTHERS"
Aside from the fact that if this really were a quotation from
the Syllabus it would undermine The Protestant's intent
(since everything mentioned in the Syllabus is recognized
as an error), the idea is nowhere found in the Syllabus.
The closest thing we could find was error number 21, which reads,
"The Church does not have the power of defining dogmatically
that the religion of the Catholic Church is the only true religion."
Rephrased positively, this means that the Church can teach its members
that the Catholic faith is the one true religion (something it does
teach--see Vatican II's Dignitatis Humanae 1).
The Protestant takes other liberties with Catholic sources,
quoting obscure nineteenth-century Catholic journals out of context
and gluing scraps of the Catholic Encyclopedia into sentences
contrary to what the writers of that work intended. The Protestant
gets one thing right, though. It is the work of Adventists, after
all, and no Adventist publication would be complete without mentioning
the Church's transferral of corporate worship from Saturday to Sunday.
Here the publication challenges Protestantism and in a rare moment
of perspicacity infers a bold truth: "There is only one authority
for Sunday sacredness and that is the authority of the Roman Catholic
Church. Therefore whoever observes Sunday acknowledges the authority
of the papacy and pays it's [sic] homage to the Roman Church."
This is underscored in an "open letter" to televangelist
Paul Crouch, Jack Chick, who publishes anti-Catholic comic
books. Chick invents a fanciful history in which "[o]ur nation
was founded by those who had fled from persecution at the hands of
the Roman Catholic Institution."
Check your facts, Jack: It was persecution by the Church of England
that sent the Pilgrims fleeing to Plymouth Rock, and the first settlers
in Maryland were Catholics who were seeking the religious freedom
they couldn't find in England at the hands of the Protestant establishment.
(Their religious freedom later was taken away by Protestants.)
In Chick's history books, "Our Constitution, drawn up by our
Protestant forefathers, was carefully written to safeguard against
Rome ever dominating this great land." Wrong again. The safeguard
was against Congress establishing a particular church as the official
church, and the First Amendment was conceived with the persecutions
of the Established Church in England fresh in the minds of the Framers.
In styling the Jesuits as the catalysts and administrators of its
imagined Romish plots, The Protestant says the Jesuits were
responsible for starting the Civil War and assassinating five presidents;
it is the Jesuits who will knock off those opposed to the Catholic
takeover of America or of the "United Catholic States of Europe."
Ironically, this bilge comes from a periodical published in St. Ignatius,
Montana.
In the October 1993 "Dragnet" we
mentioned cartoon tracts published by the Catholic Information
League. CIL received such a response that it is now planning to
make its tracts available to the masses.
On this page and the next is an example of a CIL tract; the title
is "The Resurrection: Hoax or History?" As you can see,
the drawings are clever, and this little tract gives Jack Chick some
competition. Bonus: It and the others incorporate a quirky sense of
humor absent in Fundamentalist literature. CIL tracts have the further
advantage of being true.
CIL has five other titles: "Joe Hardhat: The Quintessential Catholic,"
in which a construction worker defends the papacy during his lunch
break; "The Bible," which refutes sola scriptura;
"The Aftermath," written to show that Vatican II didn't
change the essence of the Church; "My Formative Years,"
a Catholic version of a typical "repent and be saved" Fundamentalist
tract; and "The Class Struggle," which depicts in a humorous
light the current anti-Christian fancies in higher education. Other
comic-style tracts are being prepared.
For information, or to order a sample six-pack for $2.00, contact
the Catholic Information League, P.O. Box 5162, Warren, Michigan 48090,
(313) 545-0485.
Call to Action, an organization bent
on Church "renewal" (read: married and women priests, democratic
Church government, acceptance of contraception and abortion) had its
annual "We Are the Church" conference a few months back,
drawing 2,300 Catholics to Chicago. Among the themes for the weekend
were "spirituality, social justice, feminism, concern for the
earth, as well as the politics of reforming church structures."
Talks were given and workshops conducted by the usual host of ex-nuns,
married former priests, and dynamic lay speakers with M.A. degrees
in Theological Studies.
Also on hand as a speaker was Edwina Gateley, a self-described
"independent Catholic minister" from Grand Rapids, Michigan.
When it came time for Saturday's "Eucharistic Celebration"
(at which communicants received our Lord while seated at tables covered
with conference papers and folders), Gateley donned a stole and concelebrated--"served
as co-presider of"--the service with Sacred Heart Father
Bob Bossie, whom she first vested.
This action piqued the interest of the Archdiocese of Detroit,
which had scheduled Gateley to give two workshops. After viewing photographs
in the National Catholic Reporter (which referred to Call
to Action as "the strongest engine of U.S. Catholic renewal")
of Gateley raising the chalice, the Archdiocese's Office of Parish
Life canceled a talk she was scheduled to give. This prompted her
to respond, "Ah, well, the journey continues."
NCR gave Gateley space in its February 25 "Opinions"
section to explain her actions. "When Call to Action asked me
whether I would concelebrate [sic] the eucharistic liturgy
last November, I did not hesitate," she began. "It did not
occur to me that my participation in the Eucharist would give cause
for any retaliatory protest or condemnation. . . . The words I spoke
also were spoken by more than 2,000 others present--including
more than 200 ordained priests. . . .
"The institution [the Catholic Church] does not permit me as
a woman to use my preaching gift in the Church at the appropriate
and given time. But I learned perforce (since my first `homily' at
age 24) to be creative and find other avenues and ways to share my
calling. I am aware that we are a sinful, therefore unjust, church.
Nevertheless, I have always loved my church and faithfully served
it, recognizing that the relationship has not been mutual. . . . I
have never considered myself a spectator at Eucharist but always a
concelebrant. As I am totally involved in ministry, so must I be totally
involved in celebration, otherwise I really wouldn't know why I was
there at all. . . . The only difference on this occasion was that
I wore a Hessian stole and stood on a platform. It was certainly
not the first time I wore a stole. Nor will it be the last. . . .
We must celebrate together. Stole or no stole."
Is Edwina Gateley clever or just mistaken? On the one hand, she may
not understand that there are other ways to preach, worship, and proclaim
the Gospel than by presiding at Mass. It may never have occurred to
her that the Archdiocese of Detroit's canceling her workshops was
not a "retaliatory protest" of an unfashionable action,
but the recognition that the Archdiocese must uphold the teachings
of the Catholic Church and that she has broken them in action and
opposes them in spirit.
Perhaps she doesn't realize that she hasn't "faithfully
served" the Church, even as she accuses the Church of not having
faithfully served her. Perhaps she honestly thinks Mass to be "the
appropriate and given time" for her to preach.
But there is another possibility. Gateley may know exactly what she
is doing, and these gross misconceptions about the Church and worship
may not be honest errors, but duplicitous equivocations. "Where
the Church has closed doors for me, I have slipped through holes and
windows."
Gateley claims she wants to serve the Church, but on her terms.
She uses the words "celebrate," "proclaim," "worship,"
and "eucharist" interchangeably. Does this betray ignorance
or an agenda? Could it be that Edwina Gateley perceives the difference
between "stole or no stole" and, unwilling to live with
this distinction, has set out to eradicate it?
Reporting on a recent meeting of former Protestant
ministers who are now Catholics, Fr. Benjamin Luther, himself
a convert from the Church of Christ (but never a minister in that
denomination), has written, "What I came away with from the meeting
was the most distinct impression that generally we could all agree
on one point, among many others, and that point was the achievement
of fulfillment on the part of former ministers, and priests, and their
wives, in the Catholic Church. The phrase from Karl Adam's outstanding
work The Spirit of Catholicism kept coming to my mind: `We
repose in Catholic fullness.' In other words . . . all converged
on one central focus: We are home, we have come home to our Father's
house."
If you know a minister-convert who may be struggling over his role
in the Catholic Church, please give him the address and phone number
of The Network, which bills itself as "a fellowship for
converts called to ministry": P.O. Box 4100, Steubenville, OH
43952-9980; (614) 283-6517. The director is Marcus C. Grodi.
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