An Apologia Against The Apologies

The story varies—some ascribe it to the pontificate of Pius IX other to Pius X and a few to Leo XIII, but allegedly a delegation of British Anglicans were admitted to a papal audience and when they asked for the Holy Father’s blessing, the Pope uttered the following prayer which is used for the blessing of the incense at solemn Mass: “ab illo benedicaris in cuius honore cremaberis” (May you be blessed by him in whose honor you shall be burned).  Now those were the days when we knew how to treat heretics.  What happened?  How did we slide down the ladder from our exclusive perch in the heavenly heights of safeguarding the purity of the faith into the ecumenical boondoggle of inclusivity and relativism? 

I suspect the Pandora’s Box of decay and error was opened when Pope John XXIII addressed the world’s cabal of heretics and schismatics (AKA Protestants and Orthodox) as “separated brethren.”  Talk about putting lipstick on a pig, they’re nothing but rebels, murderers, and thieves.   They stole our cathedrals and ancient churches across Europe and the Near East, they cruelly martyred those who stuck to the old faith, they defaced sacred images and scattered the relic of the saints in the dirt of their streets.  Their leaders broke their vows of celibacy and let countless souls to the fires of hell and this Pope calls them “separated brethren?”  Enemies, not brothers, and it was they who chose separation.  And then that pernicious council of Vatican II speaks of “restoring unity.”  The only way back is unconditional surrender.  Truth does not compromise.  Error has no rights! 

But if that weren’t bad enough, the next Pope—even worse than John—Paul VI on December 16 (imagine, in Advent, barely a week before Christmas) 1975 fell on his knees and kissed the foot of the schismatic prelate Metropolitan Meliton of Chalcedon.  What was he thinking?  The Pope bows to no one save God alone.  He is the Vicar of Christ.  Would Christ bow to some schismatic bishop?  The same Pope had ten years earlier lifted the excommunication of the Greek claimant to the Patriarchate of Constantinople imposed over nine centuries before.  How do you undo almost a thousand years of excommunication?  Do the gates of hell open and let the prisoners out?  By what authority can a pope undo the divine judgment?  Divine Mercy only goes so far—once you are dead you have no more claim to it.  It’s too late to change your mind and say, like the Church Lady on the old Saturday Night Life, to God, “never mind.” Once God puts you in the devil’s frying pan you’re there to stay.  But what is even worse, this liberal Pope let the Greek claimant to the Patriarchal throne absolve him of the excommunication.  As if a schismatic had the authority to life an excommunication, much less impose one on a Pope.  I tell you, things were going to hell fast and have been ever since.  But it only get’s worse as time passes. 

It was John Paul II who really compromised the integrity of the papacy however.  He began by apologizing for Galileo.  Honestly, he should just have ignored that old canard—I mean over and done with centuries ago.  What is the point of bringing it up all over again.  And besides, maybe Galileo was right about the earth revolving around the sun, but he was defiant in the face of Church’s authority and refused to back down.  That alone should have been grounds for imprisonment by the Inquisition.  And it wasn’t that he was tortured or burned at the stake.  But that was only the beginning.  John Paul then went on to apologize for the Church’s involvement in the African salve trade.  Really?!?!?!  Like the Pope was selling slaves in Saint Peter’s square.  OK, so there were a few bad apples in the Catholic barrel—the Pope can’t apologize for every Catholic who has ever made a bad choice.  But then he went on to apologize for burning Protestant heretics at the stake and for the Religious Wars of the 16^th and 17^th centuries.  I am sorry but we had an obligation to stop the spread of those pernicious heresies that were causing millions of souls to be lost.  I only think we should have gone at it harder.  In 1995 he apologized to women for the way the Church has treated them through the centuries.  What drugs was he on?  The Church has always been the protector of women.  And it just got worse and worse.  John Paul apologized for the Crusades, for the treatment of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance, for the behavior of European missionaries in China in the 19^th century, for the removal of Australian aboriginal children from their families to Church-run institutions in the late 19^th- and early 20^th centuries, for the 1204 Sack of Constantinople, and for the contempt shown towards the primitive “cultures” of the various savage peoples among whom the Church sent missionaries from the 16^th through the 20^th centuries.  I find this last one particularly hard to understand as we introduced these tribes to music and art and literature; we taught them to read and to write.  We gave them medicines and made scientific technology available to them.   We have been their salvation in the material as well as the spiritual realms.

And now Francis thinks we owe gay people an apology.  Will this madness never stop?  What is to be gained by apologizing when we weren’t wrong to begin with?  No, the Church should never admit to be wrong.  We have the Truth and we should uphold it in the face of all these modern heresies that are corrupting our world.  Truth admits for no compromise.   All that this apology stuff does is to open the door to dialogue and reconciliation.  And surely God doesn’t want that, does he?  Stand firm in the Truth and when you pray for your non-Catholic friends and relatives, remember the old prayer ab illo benedicaris in cuius honore cremaberis.

Foundations of the Anglican Church CXXVI

John Henry Newman

Even before John Keble’s famous sermon “National Apostasy” which triggered the Tractarian movement, Newman had immersed himself in the study of the Fathers of the Church and had in 1833 produced his first major work, The Arians of the Fourth Century.  This led, in turn, to a study of the heresy on the other end of the theological spectrum from Arianism, the Monophysites.  But he became deeply troubled as he got further and further into his studies, perceiving similarities between the Monophysites and his Anglican Church when it came to questions of ecclesial authority.  He then came across a quote from Saint Augustine that shook him to his core “'Securus judicat orbis terrarium!”  “The decision of the entire world is definitive.” In other words: When the Church reaches a consensus, the answer is established.  Newman saw that the position claimed by the Church of England to be a via media, a sort of bridge between Catholicism and Protestantism, wasn’t tenable.  You either stood with the Church or outside it.  From this point on his commitment to Anglicanism was in its death throes. 

While he had come to this understanding sometime around 1839, and while he ceased priestly ministry in the Church of England after 1843, it was only in October 1845 that Newman himself made the leap into the Catholic Church.  Several of his Littlemore associates had already preceded him. 

Newman’s choice for Roman Catholicism shocked family and friends alike.  Many of his old associates turned their backs on him.  It was impossible for him to stay at Littlemore since the cottages belonged to the Anglican parish, and he and his associates moved to Oscott, the seminary of Bishop Nicholas Wiseman who was the Vicar Apostolic (Catholic Bishop) of the Midlands district.  (England at the time had no established Catholic hierarchy but was guided by four—and then later eight—regional bishops known as Vicars Apostolic.)  That October, the first anniversary of his being received into the Catholic Church, Newman went to Rome where he was received by Pius IX and ordained a Catholic priest by Cardinal Giacomo Filippo Fransoni.  Pius awarded the Doctorate of Divinity to the distinguished convert. He was hereafter known as “Doctor Newman” even in Protestant circles.  Newman wanted to be a religious priest and looked at several Orders, most notably the Dominicans.  In the end, however, he settled on the Oratorians, who are secular priests (without religious vows) living a collegial life with some common prayer and meals while collaborating in ministry.  It is a life highly suited to the apostle and to the scholar but no so much to the mystic. 

Newman returned to England in late 1847, and after some moving around finally settled at Edgbaston in Birmingham where the magnificent church of the Immaculate Conception and a large and commodious house for the Oratorian community were built.  The Church became famous for its superior music and Newman’s preaching drew a large audience, both Catholic and Anglican. 

Newman wasn’t long in England before the Catholic Church in England had to face a major crisis.  We will have to deal with this in a future posting but in summary in September 1850, Pope Pius IX established a Catholic hierarchy in England.  While the Pope was careful not to give his bishops the titles of the pre-Reformation Sees, titles still held by the Bishops of the Church of England, to give any English title was seen to be an affront to Her Majesty, the Queen.  The Prime Minister, Lord John Russell, was a particularly nasty anti-Catholic and rather than come to some understanding of the situation chose to fan the flames.  The somewhat high and mighty attitude of Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman, the first Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, didn’t help.   Wiseman, like so many hierarchs, was a natural at pontificating and not only at the Liturgy.  The brouhaha reached such a point that Newman was called in to rescue the situation with a series of lectures explaining Catholicism to the public.  Though in the end the arch-Protestants (they had never liked Newman when he was a High Church Anglican) did not accept his explanations, Newman was able to bring an objective understanding of Roman Catholicism into the eye of the English public.  You would think the Catholic party would be appreciative; it never was. 

Newman was part of a flood of converts from Anglicanism to Catholicism.  While his conversion was the occasion that triggered many others to follow, they didn’t convert to the same Catholic Church.  Newman never lost that Anglican reserve that made him uncomfortable with the more exotic flowerings of Latin Catholicism whereas many of the converts—and most especially Henry Edward Manning, the Anglican Archdeacon of Chichester who followed Newman into the Catholic Church in 1851—went full fig into the most outrageous Ultramontane Catholicism.  (Ultramontane refers to those Catholics who were determined not only to be more papal than the Pope, but more I-talian in their enthusiasm for baroque Catholicism and sentimental piety.  It really wasn’t a pretty thing then and it isn’t now as we see in the vagaries of neo-traditionalism and the excesses of the Burke/Cordileone/Morlino burlesque.)  Newman wasn’t trusted by the zealots because he was a strong advocate of using one’s intellectual abilities to define one’s theology rather than blindly getting on the popular bandwagon as it rolled along a road of Italianate extravagances. 

In 1854 the Catholic Bishops in Ireland invited Newman to come to Dublin and establish a Catholic University.  They really didn’t understand his basic philosophy of Education.  Newman believed that the University should be a place free of direct control of the Church where there was sufficient latitude for research, publication and open debate.  His ideas were drawn from the great Medieval universities of Europe where Revelation was cherished and Tradition maintained but also where there was an intellectual freedom to explore questions without being bound to pre-determined answers.  This view did not make the Bishops happy and Newman resigned after four years and returned to the Birmingham Oratory.

Later in life Newman somewhat romanticized his Anglican years as a time of his universal popularity and esteem and his Catholic years as a time of being bitterly misunderstood.  There is some truth to the picture as long as you don’t look too closely at the details—especially in the Anglican phase.  Suffice it to say that the 1860’s and ‘70’s were a time of personal anguish in which he felt he had sacrifice everything for the Truth he found in Catholicism.  Rumors abounded that he had—or soon would—revert to the Church of England.  And in all honesty old Anglican friends, most notably Richard William Church, the Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London, were far more faithful friends than his Catholic co-religionists.

Newman was a particular thorn in the side of Manning who had, by this time, advanced to the position of Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster and (Catholic) Primate of England.  Henry Manning was a particularly stony fellow who met the description often used by a late friend of mine when describing unpleasant people.  “He had a face like a bowl full of sour a**holes.”  Manning was in many respects the polar opposite of Newman.  As Newman stuck to the understated Recusant Catholic Tradition that marked English Catholicism between the Reformation and the establishment of the hierarchy, Manning embraced a Catholicism that would make a Neapolitan blush.  Newman and Manning came to public disagreement over the Declaration of Papal Infallibility in 1870.   Newman professed his belief in the Doctrine but felt that it may not be opportune to define.  Manning supported the definition with an alarming enthusiasm totally divorced from the socio-political realities of the Catholic Church in England.  Newman, of course, was a priest and therefore would not be attending Vatican I, his influence being confined to his writings and talks.  Manning was leading the English Episcopal delegation to the Council.   Manning made sure that Pius IX and the Roman Curia well understood just how liberal Newman was and his intellectual ties to other opponents of the definition. This pushed Newman further and further back into the shadows.

Newman was sustained during this period of neglect by Ambrose Saint John.  Saint John had been part of the Littlemore community and converted to Catholicism about a month before Newman.  He accompanied Newman to Rome and was ordained to the Catholic priesthood there with him.  Together they were received into the Oratory and together they planned and built the Birmingham Oratory.  Other than Newman’s four years in Dublin they lived together in the Birmangham Oratory for the remainder of Saint John’s life.  When Saint John died in May 1875 Newman threw himself on the bed next to the corpse and would not be parted from his friend until the undertakers came for the body the next morning.  Newman said: "I have ever thought no bereavement was equal to that of a husband's or a wife's, but I feel it difficult to believe that any can be greater, or any one's sorrow greater, than mine.”  He called Ambrose Saint John his “life under God for 33 years.”  (This would be from the time Saint John came to Littlemore in 1842 until his death in 1845.)  Newman instructed that he was to buried in the same grave as Ambrose Saint John.  It was a very complex relationship and while there is no reason to suspect that it lacked an integrity, it does reveal the complexities of our psycho-sexual natures. 

In 1878 Pius IX died.  The election of Giacomo Pecci as Leo XIII was as much a new broom sweeping away the accumulated rubbish of the previous reign as the election of Pope Francis has proved to be.  And in the very first consistory of Cardinals named in his reign in 1879, Leo named John Henry Newman.   The Duke of Norfolk, the premier peer of the Realm as well as England’s leading Catholic layman, had suggested the idea to the new Pope who was quite enthusiastic about it.  But even here Manning tried to stop it.  The practice was (and still is) that Cardinals who are not residential bishops live in Rome.  Newman, now at the age of 78, was reluctant to give up the comforts and securities of England and said he might accept the Red Hat but only if dispensation were given him to continue to live at the Birmingham oratory.  The correspondence all went through the Primate and Manning did not forward  Newman’s letter but duplicitously wrote Rome saying that Newman had declined as he did not choose to live in Rome.  When Pope Leo expressed his regrets to the Duke of Norfolk, Norfolk immediately cleared up the “misunderstanding” on Newman’s behalf and Newman got his Red Hat.  Punch, the satirical magazine, put it right when it wrote of Newman’s elevation:

"'Tis the good and grey head that would honor the Hat

Not the Hat that would honor the Head."   

 Newman died August 11, 1890 and was interred in Saint John’s grave in Rednal as he had requested. 

When Newman died he was much admired by Anglicans and Catholics alike, especially among the intelligentsia.  A particular correspondent and admiring friend was Liberal Prime Minister William E. Glastone.  Gladstone, like Newman, believed in the supremacy of the individual conscience. 

Ironically Newman has been adopted by several right-wing groups of contemporary Catholics, most notably the “Cardinal Newman Society.”  He is posited as an anti-liberal when in fact he was anything but.  Newman’s opposition was to the “liberalism” of the Enlightenment and its heirs who saw religion only as a natural phenomenon and discounted not only the idea of Absolute Truth(s) but of Divine Revelation itself.  Newman had always seen what a blind alley this rationalism led to but he was no conservative.  His philosophy of Education which had led him into conflict with the Irish Bishops during his years with the National University in Dublin shows his respect for open inquiry, investigation, and discussion. His defense of the supremacy of conscience was decades ahead of its time.   Moreover his essay on the need to consult the laity in matters of doctrine gives lie to his belief in the Magisterium as the sole source of authority in the Church.  Indeed, he had a great confidence in the capabilities of a Catholic laity and was very leery of hierarchical absolutism in the Church.  He is often referred to as “The Father of Vatican II” since the Council realized so many of his dreams for the Church.  We can’t say, of course, what his attitude would be towards the Liturgical Reforms which came about only 75 years after he was in his grave, but an overall familiarity with his writings gives that sense of confidence in modernity that is reflected in the 1970 Missal.  “To live is to change,” he wrote “and to be perfect is to have changed often.”  

Newman’s flight from the Church of England to the Catholic Church gave impetus for many more to follow him but ironically he has always, even in his lifetime, served as an eirenicon of harmonization between the two traditions.  

Introducing the Katholic Krazies 7

Melanie Calvet

Ok, let's put down both the contemporary issues like the Synod and the older stories like the history of the Anglican Church for a while and go back to the krazies.  It will make it easier as we continue to look at the mounting negative campaign against Pope Francis if we look more closely at the kast of karacters.  But before we can go much further with the Katholic Krazies we need to look at the apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to two shepherd children, Melanie Calvet and Maximin Giraud on the evening of September 19, 1846 at the French Village of La Salette.  We need principally not so much as to look at the apparition as to one of the visionaries, the girl, Melanie Calvet. 

According to the children’s account at the time the Blessed Mother, in tears, warned them that unless France repented, and especially repented of the sins of working on Sunday and not honoring the Holy Name of God, great calamities of famine would fall upon France.  Melanie said that in particular Paris and then Marseilles would suffer terribly in the upcoming calamities.  The fact that the vision and its prophecies occurred immediately before much of Europe, and most especially Ireland, were hit with a potato blight that did in fact cause mass starvation won the vision broad attention.  The authenticity of the vision was further strengthened by the fact that several miracles were attributed to “Our Lady of La Salette.”

The local bishop, the Bishop of Grenoble, one Philibert de Bruillard, did a careful investigation of the children and their story and in 1851, after submitting the details of the vision to a commission of distinguished theologians, announced that the children’s stories were most likely true and permitted a cult to Our Lady of La Salette to begin.  He also had the children write the pope, Pius IX.  Meanwhile the Virgin’s call to repentance struck a chord with many of the clergy, most notably the old Saint John Vianney and the young Saint John Bosco.

When the children wrote the Pope, Melanie embroidered her account with several new details.  This would become a pattern as time went on, but initially the additions to her account were simple.  The Pope would be persecuted—he would even be shot at.  There would be a persecution of the Church.  But then, a king would be restored to the Throne of France and Catholicism restored as the State Religion.  Europe would thrive but the prosperity would cause many, including among the priests and religious, to lose the faith.  Finally in this collapse of the faith, a nun would give birth to a child who would be the anti-Christ and while many would believe in him, hell would reign on earth.  All this would happen within the span of a century.

Ok, Melanie’s story is getting to be a little more of a stretch here.  Pius IX could relate to the persecution thing and hatred for the Pope.  It was the time of Garibaldi and his anti-clerical red-shirts.  Pius had been driven from Rome by the mobs clamoring for a republic and sought refuge in Gaeta until French troops arrived to restore him to power.  The stories from LaSalette seemed to vindicate his plight.  But in fact the French Throne has never again been filled.  Yes, the famines were to come about, or rather, by this time famines had come about, and Paris has suffered the commune of 1871, Marseilles, however stood unscathed. There had been no general apostasy of clergy or religious--indeed there was a surplus of vocations.  And as to the anti-Christ, he had yet to appear.  It is a mixed bag.  Of nuts, as I think we shall see.

Pope Pius IX never gave approval to the vision or its message.  Instead, Cardinal Luigi Lambruschini, the Prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Rites, approved a declaration of the Bishop of Grenoble saying:

We judge that the apparition of the Holy Virgin to the two shepherds, September 19, 1846 ... in the parish of La Salette ... carries within it all the characteristics of truth, and that the faithful have reason to believe it indubitable and certain.

The Bishop made it clear, however, that approbation was being given only to the original message the children claimed to have received in 1846 and no subsequent message;  this would prove a crucial distinction as Melanie Calvet over the years would issue a stream of messages that she purported to be from the Virgin Mary.   It is important to note that the above statement by the Bishop of Grenoble was limited to the original message and is the only approbation the Church has ever given to the revelations of Melanie Calvet.

After the 1846 vision, Melanie was packed off to live with the Sisters of Providence and as soon as she was of legal age, she was received as a postulant in the community.  But Melanie spent all her convent time enthralling people with her stories about the Blessed Virgin instead of learning nun-craft.  She was not approved for profession of vows at the end of her novitiate for “lack of spiritual maturity.”  It is not an easily done thing to turn down a visionary in her claim for a vocation but the Sisters of Providence took that step.  So she went to the Sisters of Charity, a community known for hard work among the poorest of the poor.  Melanie lasted three weeks.  What to do next? Her Royalist views and prophecies made her a political “hot potato” and so the Bishop sent her to the cloistered Carmelites in Darlington, England to help her to move beyond her past and focus on the interior life of prayer.  In Carmel Melanie was permitted to take temporary vows but after a few years was asked to leave because of her stories and “prophecies” which did not suit the contemplative spirituality of Carmel.  That is the polite version of why she left. In fact, she was totally unsuited for a life of prayer and manual labor.  She next entered the Sisters of Compassion at Marseilles.  Then she transferred to the Carmel of Marseilles. When that didn’t work out, she came back to the Sisters of the Compassion on condition she kept her identity as a former visionary secret.  She couldn’t.   She returned to the lay state.  What we are dealing with here is a very troubled soul.  That is not to say that the original vision may not have been authentic, though I have my doubts.  Were I presented with a similar case today, I would suspect that I was dealing with a hysteric.  Melanie, at least as far as stories are told, does not display the qualities of mystic but of a person with some severe personality disorders. 

And throughout the years her “revelations” expanded—and expanded and expanded.  They foretell a great apostasy.   And an anti-Christ who will be the son of a bishop and a nun of Jewish blood.  Rome will lose faith and become the seat of the anti-Christ.  Priests and nuns will lose the faith and fall into disreputable lives.  There will be natural disasters of all sorts.  Lucifer and his angels will be loosed from hell to wreak their evils on earth.  It goes on and on in no particular order but an apocalyptic torrent of horrors.  Her “messages” take on a tone of great anger towards the clergy and a Church who will not accord her the place due her as one who has seen the Mother of God and received revelations from her. She betrays the royalist an anti-Semitic biases of the French political right, the same extreme that will a generation later shape the thought and destiny of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.  Melanie is very different from Bernadette Soubirous or Lucia dos Santos, the visionaries of Lourdes and Fatima, both of whom sought anonymity.

Now the only message the Church every approved was the original message calling for repentance and keeping the Lord’s Day and honoring the Sacred Name, but for many who become excited by these things, the later revelations not only foretell some dire prophecies, but are in fact prophecies fulfilled in the Church after the Second Vatican Council, a Church which they see as an apostate Church.  Melanie’s later writings are, even by 19^th century standards, riddled with heresies regarding human nature, grace, soteriology, and ecclesiology, and were, in her own lifetime, put on the Index of Forbidden Books.   They are obviously the products, not of a supernatural revelation, but of a disturbed mind.  Melanie spent the last 37 years of her life living as a laywoman in the south of France and in various places in Italy.  She never ceased talking about her “messages.” 

Among those who pick up on Melanie’s “messages” is the author of the Blog “Pope Francis the Destroyer.”  (http://popefrancisthedestroyer.blogspot.com/)  Other than an occasional whine about having “to drive an hour to Latin Mass because of Pope Francis & the New Evangelization,” the author of this blog says very little, usually reprinting either Melanie’s later “revelations” about how Rome has become the seat of the anti-Christ or quoting William of Ockham on the punishment of heretics and especially a Pope who has become a heretic.  This wing-nut is not a sedevacantist.  He (I am presuming that this wing-nut is a man) doesn’t claim that Francis (or his predecessors) have lost the papacy due to their “heresies,” but he does allege that Pope Francis is a heretic.  Like Melanie, the author seems to be somewhat obsessive/compulsive and to have lost any sense of historical or theological perspective. 

What motivates people like this?  I think the more basic question is what is the appeal of those who, like Melanie Calvet, develop a view of God as angry and anxious to visit his wrath on an unappreciative world?   Apocalypticism is certainly a biblical theme.  You find minor doses of it some of the Prophets—usually referring to the collapse of Jerusalem at the time of the Babylonian threat and subsequent exile.   It becomes a major theme in the Book of Daniel and, in the New Testament, in the Book of Revelation.  There are traces of it in the gospels and the letters of Saint Paul, though nothing like the extreme “prophecies” uttered by Melanie Calvet.  In the Gospels, for example, there are warnings about the stars falling from the skies and a message of a new heaven and a new earth, implying of course that this earth and its heavens (skies) will in some way be refashioned.  Jesus warns his disciples that they will suffer tribulation and persecution.  Over all, however, the gospel message is a set of simple axioms and moral principles by which Jesus shows his disciples how to live faithfully in a world where the Kingdom is not yet a reality.  There is a message of the forgiveness of sins more than of their punishment.  

That for some the Gospel takes a back seat to the “messages” of seers like Melanie Calvet is probably more a matter of psychology than of faith.  If you remember, some months back I did a posting on moral development and the theories of Lawrence Kohlberg.  The initial stage of moral development is fear of punishment.  There are those whose own psychological limitations do not permit them to mature morally and get stuck at this phase.  They project the anger of parents and other key figures onto God.  Perhaps, too, for some it is their own anger they project onto God—I think that was Melanie’s issue—but it necessitates a God who is primarily a punisher and will take out his anger on others whom they perceive as unfaithful. 

This is an extreme form of a neurotic piety that projects God to be totally Other and needing to be pleased by rigid compliance and is easily displeased by our not measuring up to his complex rules and regulations.  This is a deity whose divine mind has become a computer tracking our every thought, word, and deed and weighing it in a balance so as to be able to justly impose punishment in due measure.  This is a God who demands ongoing atonement.  This is the God for whom one cannot talk in Church—even before Mass—or forget one’s prayers or not wash one’s hands after using the bathroom.  This is the God of walking on eggshells. It is not the God whom Jesus reveals in the Gospels. 

At some point we really should look at the different ways in which people experience God—or create a god to meet their expectations.  It is a fascinating matter how we use a word like “God” and at times mean some very different things.  That is why a good spiritual director is important to help us clarify our experience in a way that is consistent with the faith of the Church.  It is too bad that Melanie Calvet didn’t have a John of the Cross or Ignatius Loyola for her spiritual director—her bizarre “revelations” would have been identified for the products of a troubled soul and not for authentic manifestations of Divine Grace.