Willy Delsaert is a retired railroad employee with dyslexia who practiced intensively before facing the suburban Don Bosco Catholic parish to perform the Sunday Mass rituals he grew up with.
“Who takes this bread and eats,” he murmured, cracking a communion wafer with his wife at his side, “declares a desire for a new world.”
With those words, Mr. Delsaert, 60, and his fellow parishioners are discreetly pioneering a grass-roots movement that defies centuries of Roman Catholic Church doctrine by worshiping and sharing communion without a priest.
Don Bosco is one of about a dozen alternative Catholic churches that have sprouted and grown in the last two years in Dutch-speaking regions of Belgium and the Netherlands. They are an uneasy reaction to a combination of forces: a shortage of priests, the closing of churches, dissatisfaction with Vatican appointments of conservative bishops and, most recently, dismay over cover-ups of sexual abuse by priests.
These folks may have some legitimate complaints, but how does defying Catholic doctrine remedy their situation? Sadly, it appears that their anger and frustration has caused them to marginalize themselves right out of the Church. Perhaps they could join the Anglican Church of Sydney.
They’re just protestants. Why can’t the press get their religious terms right?
I agree that this isn’t the answer to the problem.
Nearly all Protestant traditions require ordination for presiding at the Eucharist.
I agree with #1. This would be fertile territory for conservative Anglicanism to sprout, should there be mission-minded Anglican bishops willing to nurture the seedlings.
I don’t know any legitimate strain of Catholicism or Eastern Orthodoxy (Even most Anglicans) that would remotely consider lay consecration of the Eucharist as legitimate in any way, shape, or form. I hate to tell them, but open rebellion does not a “grass roots movement” make.
Belgium was both the site of the Anglican-Roman Catholic Malines conversations during the 1920s, which, for a short time, raised high hopes for reunion in the high church party of the Church of England (Cardinal Desiree Mercier who presided received a standing ovation when he appeared before the 1919 General Convention in Detroit) and the seedbed of the Joseph Cardijn’s Young Christian Workers – the prototype for interwar and postwar Catholic Action.
Odd, in some ways, that they haven’t looked to the Old Catholics of the Union of Utrecht for assistance.
[url=http://catholicandreformed.blogspot.com]Catholic and Reformed[/url]
I think a lot of people would like to worship God in a Christian community that worships together and looks out for each other, without having to deal with the stupidities, rules and finances of a bunch of church bureaucrats whether they are Protestant or Catholic.
If “every man is a priest” , then there is no reason to go to the trouble of leaving the Catholic church and its ecclesiastical idiots just to kow tow to another set of idiots on the other side of the street. If the Protestant reformers, some of whom were never priested, could simply start up a church and then call and consecrate their own bishops and priests, there is no reason why this cannot be done by the man in the street. After all, it is not like the middle ages or even the Renaissance where the only person who could read the bible WAS the priest. Most layfolk can read pretty well, bible studies are readily available, and once one dispenses with Rome, there is little reason not to dispense with “all of the rest of it”, especially now that the knowledge base is readily available (which it was not, during Protestant reformation).
This is simply the logical end of the protestant reformation. Every man a priest, indeed.
When Roman Catholic friends of mine insist upon saying that they are “cafeteria Catholics”, I keep my lips closed but think: “Then you are NOT Catholic”.
Same with these folks.
I’m not surprised the story is by way of the NY Times. Even some middle-of-the-road observors of that newspaper are starting to call it merely a left-wing propaganda organization rather than a genuine news organization.
I don’t mind the notion of “cafeteria catholics.” After all, the cafeteria has a lot of food, and it’s impossible to eat everything.
The external issue here (outside of the grave canonical crime of simulating a sacrament, c.f. Canon 1378 paragraph 2 no. 1, for which the penalty is a latae senteniae interdict) is the media bestowing the name of “Catholic” onto clearly non-Catholic and INVALID activity. This, of course, serves their ends of sowing discord and confusion (and selling papers or airtime).
The same thing happens with so-called women’s ordination: one reads of headlines such as: “Women ordained as Catholic priests defy Vatican.” Right, just as my proclaiming myself the Marquis of Middleton defies the Crown – er, no, I am just delusional. I might, however, be guilty of a civil crime if I pose as or claim the rights of a Marquis, just as such women who so simulate receiving the sacrament of Order (and the person faux-ordaining them) are guilty of a grave canonical crime whose current penalty is a latae senteniae excommunication.
#9, that’s a bit like saying Hell is toasty and you don’t have to worry about the gas bill
But isn’t Belgium (broadly) the home of the Beguines, the Beghards and the Brethren of the Common Life, lo, those centuries ago? (My memory may be in error.) But maybe there is a “tradition” of the
Brethren that lingers here. And didn’t the Moravians, when driven out elsehwere find a home in Belgium?
Maybe they are not Catholics,psc. but I don’t find their undertaking offensive. I hate like the devil to agree with John Wilkins, but I agree here. (Brace up there John!) Well, the Pope will excommunicate them I suppose, but the hunger for simplicity, for a connection to life as it is lived, sans wealth, sans opulence, sans overpowering hierarchy, sans byzantine elaborate rituals, sans pageantry, will always be there, the knowledge that Christ would know them immediately and would look in horror at RCism and Anglican magnificence – I can understand and sympathize with this.
Larry
Protestants by any other name are still Protestants. Nothing new here. Moving on…
‘Rainbow’ sash/stole and ‘rainbow’ candle in memory/honor of 475 victims of sexual abuse? How strange.
In the US, the rainbow sash is worn by those who commit, defend and promote GBLTQ… (pansexualism, polygamy and what ever other letters of the alphabet hinted at by VGR, including ‘I’ for intergenerational’ sexual activity (formerly known as pedophilia and ephebophilia) which is being promoted as ‘childrens’ sexual rights’ to lawmakers as well as the psychiatry and psychology orgs.
But #14, these aren’t Americans and as fr as I know, the rainbow here has nothing to do with American practice. Now, I may be wrong about this, but I would need to see some evidence that there is a connection.
But maybe not #13. Maybe these aren’t protestants in any of the usual senses. Maybe this is an iteration of the Beghards and Beguines, who desire is simplicity, not reformation. Larry
Re #15
Larry
These people are attempting to say mass using laymen and women without a priest. They can call themselves catholic just as I can call myself Napoleon Bonaparte. In labeling them as Protestants I was being restrained. They are heretics who have completely departed from apostolic Christianity.