The "heresy" of Benedict XVI

Jean Jacques Olier, a defender

of Catholic Orthodoxy against

the Jansenists 

So what is the problem with the new translation of the “pro multis” (for many/for all) in the words of consecration?”  Benedict XVI has been very insistent that not only in the English language translations but in all the various language groups the words “pro multis” be translated literally so that the consecratory words over the chalice should say: “…the blood of the new and eternal covenant which is shed for you and for many” rather than “…for you and for all” as had been the custom with most vernacular translations since Vatican II.  (The equivalent translation had been in the Italian, Spanish, and German Missals among other vernacular translations.)  This translation was a sticking point for many who reject the Liturgy of Paul VI even though the official text, i.e. the Latin text, of the Missal says: “pro multis” (for many) rather than “for all.” 

It does make sense that the text should be translated literally if it is to be faithful to the scriptural words beneath and to the faith of the Church—but in this case the contrary is true.  While the Latin says “pro multis” (for many), the Latin itself is a translation from the Greek.  (The New Testament from which the words of consecration are drawn is written originally in Greek.)  And the Greek says “οί πολλοί” which means “the many.”  You see the problem is that Latin has no definite article—“the”—and so what is an inclusive idea in the Greek becomes an exclusive idea in the Latin.  When we say that Christ’s blood is shed for many it means that Christ died for many, not for all.  But the Greek New Testament means that his blood is shed for the many—the multitudes, the crowds, everybody.  (The French, by the way, got around this and translated it quite well: pour la multitude—for the multitude.) 

What further complicates the issue is that in the condemnation of Jansenism with the bull Cum Occasione by Innnocent X in 1653, one of the propositions condemned was the Jansenist claim that it was heretical to say that Christ died for all.  To the contrary—the Catholic Church teaches that Christ died for all.  Jansenism, like its Protestant cousin, Calvinism, held that God had predestined some to salvation and others to damnation and that Christ’s saving death applies only to those who are predestined to salvation.  Unfortunately, Pope Benedict’s insistence on the faulty translation of pro multis as “for many” undercuts the Catholic orthodoxy that makes it clear that the blood of Christ was shed for all.  The Pope, of course, believes in the teaching that Christ died for all, but his lack of pastoral experience leaves him blind to how this faulty translation will be used by those in the Church—and there are many among the neo-traditionalists—who are infected with Jansenism

I was recently talking with a young man who is now a student in a reputable Catholic seminary but whose family had long belonged to the sedevacantist group at Mount Saint Michael’s near Spokane Washington.  (The Sedevacantists reject the Second Vatican Council and believe that the last “true” Pope was Pius XII, the Vatican II era popes being ineligible for the Petrine Office because they have embraced the “heresies” of the Council.)  This gentleman explained to me the phenomenon of Jansenism sheltering among neo-traditionalists both within and separated from the Church. He said what drove him back into full communion with the Church after having been in sedevacantism for over twenty years was that so many of the people he knew in the movement “are just plain nasty.”  Mean-spiritedness is a characteristic of Jansenism as Jansenists tend to be very definite in the judgments about other people’s spiritual state.  This is what Jean Jacques Olier, the founder of the Sulpicians, said of the Jansenists: “They devour the heart of charity by which the Church lives.”  One can see this in many of the neo-traditionalist and Catholic neo-con websites from Michael Voris and his Church Militant TV to Mary Ann Kreitzer of Les Femmes to tantamergo—a blog for Dallas area Catholics and other sites like this that are very quick to tell you who are and who are not “good Catholics” without having any authority to make such evaluations. Jansenism is alive and well today in certain circles and one of the unintended consequences of this translation is that the Liturgy will nourish it as it opens to the door to the idea that there are those whom God loves and those whom God hates.  And what heresy is greater than the idea that God hates anyone, even the most vile sinner?            

Making the Good News Bad News

Jean Jacques Olier (1608-1657) founder
of the Sulpicians, valiant foe of Jansenism

Two stories.  Both sad.

Neil Hope had  been picked up off the streets of Toronto at age 10 to play a character in a television special: The Kids of Digrassi Street.  It turned out to be a pilot for another show—Digrassi Junior High—and its sequel, Digrassi High. Mr. Hope played Derek “Wheels” Wheeler.  It didn’t take much imagination to play the part—“Wheels’” life was not that much different from Neil’s.  Both the character and the actor were children of alcoholic parents.  Both would become alcoholics themselves.  Neither had much of a family life.  Neither was to find a niche in society where they could become the “human person fully alive” that Iranaeus says is God’s Truest Glory.  For Neil Hope, the career in television offered an escape from the pain of his day-to-day real life.  He never really benefitted from it in any way.  His parents drank most of the money he made.  He was never prepared for life after television and a career beyond acting.  When Degrassi High went off the air, Mr. Hope was 19.  He went on to operate a fork-lift, to sell furniture, and to work at a pizza shop.  He did have one final contribution to make—one that hopefully was heard by kids like him—and that was that he had an opportunity to say in a documentary to other children of substance abusers: “It’s nothing to be ashamed of because it’s not your fault.”  I only hope that Mr. Hope believed this himself, but from his life story it seems he was preaching a gospel he could not himself take to heart.  Mr. Hope died November 25, 2007 alone, in a rooming house in Hamilton Ontario.  Friends or family were unknown, his body remained unclaimed and he was buried four months later in a pauper’s grave.  It was only at the end of this past year, four years after his death, that his siblings learned that he had died. 

       Another story. Also about a death.  This past Saturday, February 25, a priest, Marcel Guarnizo, the parochial vicar of Saint John Neumann Church in Gaithersburg Maryland denied communion to Barbara Johnson at her mother’s funeral, telling Ms. Johnson: “I cannot give you communion because you live with a woman and that is a sin according to the Church.”  He then left the altar during the eulogy Ms. Johnson gave for her mother.  (How she found the strength to get up and speak after this incident, I cannot imagine.)  He also refused to accompany the funeral to the graveside, pleading ill health.   

     The priest justified his refusal to give communion under canon 915 of the Code of Canon Law of the Roman Catholic Church.  The canon states: "Those who have been excommunicated or interdicted after the imposition or declaration of the penalty and others obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin are not to be admitted to holy communion."  Ms. Johnson is not excommunicate nor interdicted, so she is, in Guarnizo’s opinion “obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin”  She may well be.  I don’t know her.  Granted she “lives with a woman” but there is no sin in sharing a domicile and while I might be inclined to make a judgment, I do not know the particularities of their relationship.  Guarnizo must know the details, to make that call, though he cannot know them in the sacrament of Penance as he would be unable to act on the knowledge if he did.  (A priest can give no outward indication of any knowledge gained in the confessional.)  I don’t think so, but Guarnizo might have been right to act as he did.  That isn’t going to be my point.

      My point is this.  We have some real issues in the world today.  There are a lot of tragic stories about lonely people—people with all sorts of heartbreak, dysfunction, pain.  Christ continues to be crucified in member after member of his Body.  I was touched, no actually disturbed, by the story of Neil Hope.  I know Michael, a guy who comes to my door for food handouts—severely bipolar, becoming schizophrenic, a street person.  His family wouldn’t let him go to his grandmother’s funeral last week because they are embarrassed by him.  Like most street people he doesn’t smell so great.  His clothes are shabby and rarely clean.  Michael would have had a place to live and be cared for before Ronald Reagan closed the mental hospitals back in the ‘80’s, but that is another story.  Michael will end up one day like Neil Hope, an unclaimed and unmourned corpse.    How many people in our world are there who need to receive the “Good News?”  How many are there who are anxious to hear the message that God loves them.  How many are just waiting for that message?  Well, they won’t find it in every Catholic Church, that’s clear thanks to Marcel Guarnizo. 

     But day by day we Catholics seem more and more to be two churches.  You have priests like this guy (you will notice that I just can’t bring myself to call him “Father”) from Gaithersburg who is anxious to discipline and scold.  And you have Catholics who want to bring people to the Church—or bring the Church to people—to hear the message of God’s love.  I am not talking happy-clappy Christianity and clown Masses. I don’t have time for that nonsense.  Nor am I talking cheap love or as Dietrich Bonhoffer called it “cheap Grace”—but real love, hanging on the cross love.  That is the love the Neil Hope needed to have made a difference in his life and he never heard it because we, as Church, were not there to speak it.  That is the love that Barbara Johnson needed to hear at her mother’s funeral, but it is a gospel that some priests just don’t know.  She was unfortunate to get one of the priests who never heard that message himself.  And it is the most famous passage in the New Testament!  God so loved the world, Saint John tells us, that he sent his only Son that whoever believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.  God did not sent his son to condemn the world, but so that the world might be saved through him.  Get with it Catholics. 

     I saw an article by a Father Jerome Magat in The Herald, the Newspaper of the Diocese of Arlington.  Father stated in his article that the central message of Jesus is “Repent.”  Father obviously never had a course in the Gospels during his seminary years.  Yes, “Repent” is a message that Jesus preached occasionally in the Gospels, but it is not his central message.  No scripture scholar would say that.  Jesus’ central message is the Good News (Gospel, in Greek Evangelion—the announcement of a victory) of the Kingdom of God.  Jansenism is alive and well and flourishing among a certain set of clergy today.  Priests like Marcel Guarnizo get cheered on by their local bloggers—Restore DC Catholicism, An Archdiocese of Washington DC Catholic—and will probably be picked up by Michael Voris and other national scene people in the next week.  This style of Catholicism appeals to many.  On the other hand, there are Catholic sources like Father Barron’s Word on Fire that give us a more balanced approach to the faith.  (Listen to his Sermon 581: “Jesus Among the Angels and Beasts.”)  So shall we, as Church, be bearers of the Good News or the Bad News: the Good News of God’s Mercy or the Bad News of condemnation by the pharisees?  When it comes to Marcel Guarnizo and Father Magat and Michael Voris and the various blogs that push this sort of distorted Catholicism, I think only of Jean Jacques Olier’s (1608-1657, the founder of the Sulpicians)  description of such Catholics in his day: “they devour the heart of charity by which the Church lives.”

Cathars, Jansenists, and Today's Submariner Heretics

The Palace of the Popes, Avignon, built by Jacques
de Fournier as Benedict XII

Jacques de Fournier was named bishop of Pamiers in 1317 and he undertook a campaign to root out Catharism from his diocese.  Fournier had studied at Paris while a Cistercian monk and then had been abbot of Fontfroide—an important abbey on what is today the border between Spain and France.  This was an area, the Hautes-Pyrenees, where the Cathars had remained strong.  It is not far from the modern pilgrimage center of Lourdes.   Named Bishop of Pamiers, Fournier determined to do something about the survival of Catharism in his diocese.  The Inquisition—not the Spanish Inquisition, just the local diocesan process—interviewed hundreds of people in an attempt to discover and uncover this heresy among a population that for the most part seemed outwardly to conform to the Church.  Fortunately for historians—and to the relief of the local population—Fournier was elected Pope in 1334 and he took up residence in Avignon (then the papal court) with the regnal name of Benedict XII.  He brought all his records with him, but being Pope is a full time job (well, at least for the serious ones and this fellow was serious) and the records just more or less sat around until they eventually ended up in the archives where a historian, Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie (born 1929), discovered them and wrote a fascinating study: Montaillou, village occitan.  This book is a detailed and fascinating look into life in the fourteenth-century village of Montaillou, a hamlet of 250 people, outwardly  Catholic but secretly given to Cathar belief and practice.  Even the village priest,  Pierre Clergue, was a secret Cathar.  We see that Catharism was not something always distinct from Catholicism but, like many heresies, could infect outwardly faithful Catholics and remain almost undetected.   Montaillou is a very important book historically as it shifted historians from big-picture history to micro-histories which are far more nuanced and give us fascinating details.  You don’t have to be a historian to read it—it is an interesting read on its own.   But the point I want to make is how heresies survive beneath the cover of orthodoxy.  Let me give you an interesting example.         

      Today in the United States we implement the new translation of the missal.  The monastery where I often attend mass has been using it for over a month now and I am getting used to it.  There are features that I like, and there are features with which I am not impressed.  Ok, that is one man’s experience and I don’t expect the world to revolve to my preferences.  But I do see two curious things.

       One is a strong distinction between the sacred and the secular in language—the use of a language that is not the language of us mere mortals.  We don’t speak of “the dewfall,”  ineffable is a word that my electronic thesaurus doesn’t recognize, and I am a bit taken aback to hear a carpenter’s cup called “a chalice.”  And then there is the entire matter of “and with your spirit.”  Why is there a need for sacred/secular—body/soul dichotomies?  I am all in favor of elegant language and graceful vocabulary but I am suspicious of dichotomies that undermine the mystery of the Incarnation in which the Divine enters fully into our human experience.  There is always something of the Gnostic in everyday Catholicism that suspects the world and denigrates human experience.  It is subtle but this dichotomizing ultimately undermines the mystery of the Incarnation.     

      Equally problematic is the issue of he “for all” and “for many.”  I have written on this before but it is hugely problematic as our Catholic faith condemns as heretical any idea that Christ did not die for all.  He did not die for some, nor even for many, but for all.  The Jansenist heresy taught that Christ only died for those who would ultimately be saved.  Like Catharism at Montaillou, Jansenism is alive and well beneath a veneer of orthodox Catholicism among many American Catholics.  This was not the time to put into the liturgy that Christ died “for many.”  It will be used to reinforce the unhealthy piety of those who have deceived themselves into believing they are the “elect” culled from a world that stands outside salvation.    Just check out some of the (supposedly) ultra-Catholic websites and blogs and you will see a Catholicism riddled with Jansenism and other very uncatholic ideas.   There are other heresies alive and well beneath the veneer of pious and traditional Catholicism—Quietism is one, illuminism another—but Jansenism is the one that scares me most because, as Jean Jacques Olier said about four centuries ago—Jansenism eats charity out of the heart of the Church.  I see that today in figures such as Michael Voris and his “Real Catholic TV” who promote a Catholicism of anger and self-righteousness.  I see it too in the “vigilante” Catholicism represented by self-appointed arbiters of the faith such as the “Catholic Media Coalition” or “Tradition in Action,” or Trinity Communications/Catholic Culture.  Henri Bremond wrote of the Jansenists of his days as “Before penetrating into the depth of the mind Jansenism ruins the peace, condition of all true religion.  Before making converts it makes partisans, sectarians, whom it fatally severs from the mystical currents of their time.” As it was in the past it is now too.