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He's Mad as Hell...

Meet the Ultrajectines

The Contrarian's Corner

Just a Little Thing

A Note from the Publisher

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More than thirty-five years before I would  hear of Ultrajectine Catholics, I was one.  And the precise moment in which I became one is so vivid a memory, I can replay it, like a video, and in color.

I'm sitting in Sister Mary Thomas More's middle school religion class, wearing a crisp white blouse with a peter pan collar, and a blue and gray wool plaid skirt.  Sister is decked out in full Franciscan brown habit-brown except for her veil, which is black.  With her arms folded beneath her scapular and her hands tucked inside her sleeves, she negotiates the room like a hovercraft-remarkably lithe for a woman of her size and stature.  She is indoctrinating us, literally, with one or another of the manuals the Roman Catholic Church then used to form lifetime party members.  It is so pre-Vatican II.  

But I'm not waiting for aggiornamento.  I've discovered I have a mind, and I figure that if God gave it to me, He must want me to use it.  So, when Sister comes to the part in the manual where it says that Catholics are not to question Holy Mother Church or the pope, I reason that this is unreasonable.  Not only that, it's wrong.  In my budding little Christian humanist soul, it just felt wrong.  I raise my hand, calling out the requisite "Ster, Ster!"

Ster enters the space above my desk.  She looks down at me through rimless glasses, her eyes two small, dark, hard pebbles.   "Yes?"

"Um, I don't see why we should just, um, accept everything the pope says, because,  um, aren't we supposed to think, huh? and besides, what if he makes a mistake?  He's only human, isn't he?"

What follows is a frenzy of metaphoric feathers flying, screeches, and sharp pecks about my head and shoulders.  Sister's throwing one of the all-time great hissies. And I've caused it simply by suggesting that, when all is said and done, the pope is capable of goofing up, just like the rest of us.  I figure, too, that I must really be on to something for Sister to act so crazy.  So scared.  Maybe I'd just committed the Catholic equivalent of Toto's pulling the curtain back, exposing the truth about the Wizard of Oz. 

Of course.  That must be it.  We can't have people going about doing that, searching for truth, because they might reveal that we've built our lives-our identities-on a deceit.  Better to preserve our illusions.  Better to be safe than free.    

In that moment, I understood the Ultramontane mind, even though I wouldn't hear the word "Ultramontane" for nearly forty years.  It didn't matter.  I'd seen enough of it to know that it was narrow, if not entirely closed; that when confronted with a competing or contradictory reality, it first went into denial, then either attempted diversion or launched an attack.  When those tactics failed and it sensed it was about to lose the argument, it pulled out the big gun, the Holy Father in Rome.  He either "said so" or "said no".  End of discussion.  

End of my being a Roman Catholic.   Beginning of my being an Ultrajectine Catholic.  Only that transformation, too, wouldn't be complete for another nearly forty years.  And not all at once.  It would be a tortuous process in which I would carry on a love-hate relationship with the Roman Church that would, now that I think about it, follow the classic pattern of domestic abuse. 

When I could no longer sacrifice my intellect and conscience to the dictates of Rome, I'd pack them up and leave.  But after awhile, I'd get to missing all that I loved about the Church-and there was much-and I'd return, bags in hand, to try just once more to make it work.  We'd get along beautifully for a time, the Church and I.  But inevitably, it would get on me for my view of some relatively small thing that shouldn't necessarily put me outside relationship with it, or more importantly, with Christ:  birth control, divorce and remarriage, mandatory celibacy for priests.  It was just so controlling, the Church.  So hurtful.  Inevitably, I'd have to leave again, for my mental and spiritual well-being.  During a few of our separations, I tried other churches, alternative spiritualities.  But I was a Catholic, and I couldn't stop being that any more than I could stop being a woman.   Besides, I had the children's souls to think of. 

Then one day, in yet another crystalline moment, I knew we were through, the Roman Catholic Church and I.  For good.  This time, there  would be no going back.  Ever. 

After the divorce, I didn't even bother dating other churches.  I had no hope that the right one existed.  I wasn't happy being "single", but I'd learned that being alone is less painful than being in a bad marriage. 

But as it often happens that it's when you're not looking that the right one comes along, I inadvertently stumbled across an ad for St. Mark's Old Roman Catholic Church.  I checked it out, Old Roman Catholicism, and truly, it was love at first sight.  Oh, the Old Roman Catholic Church in North America doesn't have the flash of the Roman Church-the money, the power, the prestige (though all are now quickly waning, for reasons which preclude every decent human from taking delight, you Catholic bashers).  It can't wine me and dine me through an amazing array of social groups and activities. That's okay.   I know that below this surface clubbiness is a bedrock of omnifarious Ultramontanism. 

What this Ultrajectine Church does do is allow me to be both Catholic and myself, openly and honestly.  In fact, it expects me to be both Catholic-in all the richness of the Catholic understanding of "Christ-like"-and  myself, with all my God-given gifts and faculties. Or rather, it wants nothing more than for me to continue to become these ever more fully. And it wants the same for all my brothers and sisters in Christ.  It thinks that that's what it's here to help folks do, and to help folks to help each other to do, because that's "the work of salvation." (It also strikes me as procreation in the greatest sense of the word.) For this reason, there's a very strong sense of "We're all in this together.  Clergy, too." When we talk about "community", we truly mean of believers.  We do not have a bowling league.

I appreciate, too, that this Church treats me like a grown-up. It trusts me to make morally correct decisions and trusts that when I don't, the consequences will find their way to me without its help and without its piling on a few more for good measure. Primacy of conscience is a really big deal to Old Roman Catholics. They talk about it a lot. They think life is hard enough without the Church's forcing people to choose between faith and conscience. 

 Then, there's the sheer Catholic beauty of the liturgy in this Ultrajectine Church.  The way it holds the transcendent and the immanent in that gorgeous state of tension where God and Man meet, and Man is awed to reverence but not cowed. The Roman Church has always had trouble doing that.  For centuries, it was totally the Mystery Hour.  Since Vatican II, it's too often been Howdy Doody Time. 

And now, its Candid Camera. 

But for the media breaking wide open the scandals in the Roman Catholic Church, I wouldn't be writing this particular column.  I wouldn't be reflecting on my near-death experiences with Ultramontanism.  I wouldn't be talking about the harm it did me (and so many others).  I'd "moved on", and left behind the bitterness I'd once harbored. I'd thought the Church had moved on, too.  That most of the old Ultramontane mentality had gone the way of the Edsel.   Oh, I knew there were still a few museum pieces around. 

Like Philip F. Lawler, who back in 1993, when his op-ed "The New Counterculture" appeared in the Wall Street Journal, was editor of Catholic World Report.   In truth, Mr. Lawler had much to say about the harm the sexual revolution had done our culture with which I agreed.  But as is typical of Ultramontanists, he couldn't stop there, with a reaffirmation of the Christian view of human dignity and the grace of marriage.  He had to assert absolutes, beginning with  "Humanae Vitae" and ending with Natural Family Planning, according to which a thermometer is morally superior to a pill, if less-far less-fool-proof.  Indeed, Mr. Lawler conceded that the "ideal" of NFP is "admittedly difficult to achieve, but the results justify the effort." Incredibly, in the next sentence, the result that Mr. Lawler mentions is death:  "(Doctors have told my own wife that another pregnancy might kill her.  They did not tell her-because they probably did not know-how much our mutual forbearance would enrich our marriage.)" Mutual forbearance?  How about mutual reckless endangerment, or conspiracy to commit manslaughter, or to deprive God knows how many living children of their mother for the sake of a child who's just a gleam in his misguided father's eye?  Well, suffice it to say that I wrote a lengthy and scathing letter to the editor in response to Mr. Lawler's op-ed, which the WSJ reprinted in full. I wrote it before I discovered St. Mark's Old Roman Catholic Church and the Ultrajectine tradition, so my scars were still raw and they showed. 

And that is the point of this column.  Old Catholicism heals the wounds so many of us former Roman Catholics bear.  In fact, it does such a good job of healing that you become immune to Ultramontanism.   You figure you've had it, you're over it.  It can't hurt you anymore.  And it can't.  So why bother about it?  Why expend copy on it?

Because I was wrong to think it had lost it's power to hurt people.  The recent scandals have revealed that it's still out there, still covering up until caught, as did the pedophile priests and the prelates who shielded them from justice, thus exposing more innocent children to their predations.  It's still trying to divert, saying that studies show that celibacy does not cause pedophilia.   That may be so.  But, the issue for the Church isn't whether or not celibacy leads priests into pedophilia, but whether mandatory celibacy has driven psychosexually mature heterosexual men from the priesthood or kept them from entering it in such great numbers that that a large percentage of the priesthood has been left to men for whom the forgoing of marriage and a family is not an obstacle-i.e., homosexuals; and men whose formations as priests coincided with the years in which they formed their sexual identities.  In this latter group are priests who, as seminarians, may have become fixated on other adolescent males, or who were themselves targeted by older "problem" priests.  This, or course, is speculation, but of a plausible nature.  Certainly, the anecdotal evidence is there in abundance and has been for years.  Given the current crisis in which the Church finds itself, it's long past time to investigate whatever links may exist among celibacy, sexual deviancy or simple sexual misconduct, and other problems in the priesthood. (Simple sexual misconduct, of course, is never simple. I once interviewed the founder of support group called Women and Priests Involved, but that's yet another story.  I merely meant conduct that is inappropriate but "not deviant".)  And these investigations must be conducted openly,  before God and the laity, with the help of the laity, under peril of permanently alienating vast numbers of them who are  already shaken to within an inch of losing their faith. 

I, for one, am not sure that the Church is yet aware of just how deep this fissure in the walls of its foundation is.  In the past, it could rely on the pope's hand-picked men-the bishops and archbishops and cardinals-to circle the wagons and fend off an attack.  It could take for granted that conservative organs like Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic Family and Crisis Magazine would spout the Ultramontane line.  It could capitalize on the popularity of the pope, especially of John Paul II, even among non-Catholics.  But this scandal is too big, too outrageous, too unconscionable.  When people like Larry Cirignano, president of CatholicVote.com, state on national TV that the celibacy rules can't be changed, or even examined, "because the pope says 'No!'", not just Catholics,  but the general public as well understands that he's enunciating the official Roman Catholic position, which, given the monstrous nature of this particular scandal, strikes many as a scandal in itself.  I expect that many perceive statements like Mr. Cirignano's as cruel affronts to every child victim of a pedophiliac priest, and to their own humanity.  I may be over-reacting, or even wishful thinking, but I believe that the weight of the Ultramontanism is reaching critical mass, and that the Church will soon have to choose between it and viability.

Of course, there are those who vehemently disagree that the Church is seriously endangered.  People like journalist Phil Brennan, who in a March 20 NewsMax.com piece, argued that the "paganistic" media have concocted the lie that the Catholics are "reeling" and "in trauma" and "fleeing the Church in disillusionment." Why have the media done this?  Because they are "dominated by homosexuals, pro-abortion fanatics, atheists and disciples of Karl Marx", all of whom "despise the Roman Catholic Church and all it stands for." In reality, he says, the Church "in the pews" is "rock solid".  Indeed, history shows that the Church is "never stronger than when it's under attack." Oh, he admits that bishops are to blame for having "turned them [pedophile priests] loose among the sheep." But that's because they allowed a coven of radical feminists to occupy positions that gave them the right to accept or reject candidates for entry into some seminaries-a practice so abused that homosexuals were actually given preference..."  But if you're not buying any of this, if you're one of those "few who [will] abandon the Church in the face of the scandal", then good riddance.  All along, you were "merely looking for an excuse to flee a discipline [you] couldn't accept.  Without [your] diluting presence, the Church will be stronger."

Recovered your breath yet?  While you're doing that, let me say that I believe that the likes of Mr. Brennan and Mr. Cirignano are good, well-meaning Catholics.  But I want nothing more than for them to stop what they're doing.  Now.   Mr. Brennan and company, the Church is not "under attack" from some Mongol horde.  This crisis was spawned from  within, the result of centuries-old systemic failure.  It wasn't a "coven of radical feminists" who created this problem in the priesthood because, as I said, the problem existed long before Sister Jeannine Gramick and her cohorts ever stormed the priesthood's locker room.  As far as the mainstream media goes, undoubtedly many of them do betray an anti-Catholic bias.  But you can't say the same of William F. Buckley and  William Bennett and a number of other staunch Catholics who are calling the Church to task for its crimes and cover-ups,  offering no excuses nor passing the blame.  As Mr. Bennett wrote in a March 18 WSJ op-ed:

"Sadly, these stories [of pedophilia] are not the rare exceptions that I and other Catholics would like them to be. . . As Catholics, we believe that redemption is always possible.  But we also know that before redemption must come contrition and a full accounting of one's failings . . .Candor and full disclosure are a must if the reputation of the church is to be protected."

Lastly, Mr. Brennan, the Church can no longer afford to cop out by copping an attitude.  It's wrong to tell Catholics that if they don't like the way the Church operates, they can just leave. These are your brothers and sisters in Christ you're so cavalierly jettisoning.  When they do leave, in pain or even anger, out of conscience or out of disgust, it's wrong to portray them as having abandoned their Church in its time of need.  They believe, not without good reason, that the Church has abandoned them. Lastly, it's wrong-and pathetic-to assume a moral superiority you don't possess by dismissing those who leave as not having been Catholic enough to accept the Church’s disciplines.  There’s nothing morally inferior about true conscientious objection, or superior about blind obedience. Think about it, Mr. Brennan.  For God's sake.  And for the Church's.  

I care about the Roman Catholic Church, I really do.  Whatever hurts one part of the Body of Christ hurts the entire Body.  We are still one, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, though at the moment, some of us aren’t so Holy.

And many of us are experiencing "dark nights of the soul". 

My heart aches for them.  I pray that those who remain in the Roman Church will work to change it.  I pray that those who leave will find peace and healing.  I pray that as many of these as we Old Catholics can reach will find peace and healing, as I did, in the Ultrajectine Catholic tradition.

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