Talking Down To Catholics

A visitor responded to the excerpt from the St James Jacksonville parish newsletter that I covered in Saturday's post:

Fr. Mayer makes mention of correspondence between Bp Lopes and priests:

Bishop Lopes recently wrote to us priests that he has been intending to revisit this issue, but that the Vatican beat him to the punch when Cardinal Robert Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship, wrote to the presidents of the Bishops’ Conferences to remind them of the urgency of encouraging the faithful to return to in-person Mass.

On an issue as important as this it would seem that direct communication with the entire People of God would be appropriate. And why the Cardinal Sarah reference?

If you are not in this vulnerable group and you do not have some other grave reason to miss Mass, you have an obligation of holy obedience to your bishop and as a member of the Ordinariate to return to Mass and the Sacraments

Do you read this as talking down to the reader?

If you are not in this vulnerable group and you do not have some other grave reason to miss Mass, you have an obligation of holy obedience to your bishop and as a member of the Ordinariate to return to Mass and the Sacraments.

So Bishop communicates with his priests and this information gets filtered out - in less than perfect ways it seems.

Be that as it may, the pastor could have easily listed one or two of the reasons why Catholics should attend Mass, easily available on the internet or Catechism. Those reasons would include a benefit for the attender as well.

But he chooses obedience to your bishop as first, and membership in the Ordinariate as second.

Yes, the first puzzling thing is that we don't see the original text of the bishop's letter at all (although my guess is that the actual text in question is an e-mail from the bishop's secretary in any case). So wwhat we get is Fr Mayer's interpretation of J Henry's interpretation of what the bishop may have wanted to say.

Contrast this with, just as a random example, the Diocexe of Madison, WI, where the bishop's letter lifting the dispensation is fully published.

I ran the visitor's note by my regular correspondent, who said,

Cardinal Sarah, like Pope Benedict, very big in Ordinariate circles. Mrs Gyapong, a big fan, posted recently that she had stopped using the Daily Office app prepared by St Gregory the Great, Chestnut Hill member John Covert because Cardinal Sarah was quoted (in 2017) as saying that praying the Daily Office with an electronic device “is not worthy: it descralizes prayer.” (Glad he wasn’t around when the printing press was invented, is all I can say.)

She then went on to say that learning how to “juggle a bunch of different books” was part of the Anglican Patrimony. I was happy to see that a number of commenters pointed out that Cranmer’s program in revising Morning and Evening Prayer was the exact opposite: to rectify the situation where “to turn the Book only was so hard and intricate a matter, that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.” But Mrs G’s acquaintance with Anglicanism is, of course, passing.

More to the point with Bp Lopes, why October 1 and not the first Sunday in October?

The question I have is why, if it was so important that Bp Lopes conform so quickly to Cdl Sarah's exxhortation, his brother bishops in the USCCB amd the CCCB seem to have approached the question with greater prudence and reserve. If you think about it, even the Evangelical pastors who've reopened their churches to in-person services have clearly implied that in-person attendance is optional, and not just for those in exempted health categories. Livestreams are available, and social-distancing options are also available on site.

I can only cnoclude that Bp Lopes's response to Cdl Sarah was not very carefully thought through, and I would guess that even the most junior diocesan bishop could provide a cogent explanation for why a diocese outsude Alaska, South Dakota, or Wisconsin would be slower to lift the dispensation.

Unfortunately, this suggests to me that Bp Lopes's judgment is impaired, and this may be a possible reason for why a full text of his letter is not available, as it doesn't exist. If this reading is correct, J Henry and Fr Perkins are the sort of marginal figures that impaired leaders select to cover for themselves. Even if the bishop were to say, "I'm short of time to do this, could you draft a letter lifting the dispensation for my review and approval?" neither would be capable of doing anything like this.

I've got to ask why any ordinariate members do not decamp and go into diocesan parishes with all deliberate speed, given these likely conditions in the chancery.