Water discovered to be wet, and other extraordinary news

Although Melancholicus has not posted in over a year and doubted he would do so again, he is just so exercised by the smug hypocrisy of Catholic Radio that he absolutely must vent or else burst a blood vessel.

Yesterday evening, en route to the adoration chapel at Holy Cross parish in Tacoma, Melancholicus amused himself by listening to EWTN on AM 1050, which he often finds both edifying and consoling. But occasionally this station strikes a jarring note: at the end of Patrick Madrid’s apologetics programme, there was a three-minute vignette in which the announcer instructed his listeners on how the Second Vatican Council promoted the use of the Latin language in the celebration of the sacred liturgy, liberally quoting from Sacrosanctum Concilium in support of his position.

Yes, really.

The reader might think Melancholicus ought to have been pleased with this promotion of the sacred language of the Church.

He was not. On the contrary, he was absolutely infuriated.

So, Mr. neo-catholic radio announcer, the Church encourages the use of Latin in the liturgy, does she? And your beloved Second Vatican Council actually endorses this position, does it?

This is what Traditionalists have been arguing FOR DECADES, you clueless twit. And for our pains we have been castigated, condemned, harangued, berated, dismissed as ‘schismatic’, ‘disobedient’ among other unflattering epithets—and this by neo-catholics of the same ilk as our smug EWTN radio announcer. So Melancholicus is not amused when these johnny-come-latelys have suddenly discovered, to their own satisfaction, what we have been saying all along. Has it really taken our neo-catholic brethren FORTY YEARS to find out what Sacrosanctum Concilium really teaches about the liturgy? Melancholicus is not impressed. Nor have Traditionalists been given the credit for this belated realization; the breezy confidence of the announcer suggests a different source for this amazing discovery.

So, which source?

Since the 2005 elevation of Benedict XVI to the Throne of Peter, the Holy See has been gently but persistently urging the celebration of the liturgy in a decidedly more traditional direction. The neo-catholics, given their overall whatever-proceeds-from-the-Vatican-is-necessarily-good-and-we-must-do-it attitude are simply following the lead of the hierarchy; nothing more.

We might be pleased that the neo-catholics are finally (and not before time) talking sense where the liturgy is concerned. But here is the cause of Melancholicus’ vexation: they are doing so not from a conviction of truth but because of a political position. Restoration is authority’s policy of the hour. As the attitude of the neo-catholics is essentially to blow along with the prevailing wind, they have obediently fallen into step and are obligingly pushing Latin and even—mirabile dictu—the Traditional Mass. A change of leadership in the Vatican (not beyond the bounds of possibility) could see the policy of restoration abandoned, new life breathed into the culture of conciliar novelties, and we would be back to the 1970s again. The response of the neo-catholics—ever predictable—would be to fall into line with the ‘renewalists’; gone would be the calls to re-examine the sources, gone would be the promotion of Latin, sacred chant and the eastward position, and Traditionalists would be fighting their lonely battles once again as we did in the dark days of the Tabletistas’ reign supreme.

George Weigel on the SSPX

This from Newsweek. H/T to Fr. Zuhlsdorf, who fisked Weigel’s article (somewhat too kindly, in Melancholicus’ opinion). Some further matters bear pointing out in this piece, which is why it is further reproduced here:

Rome’s Reconciliation

Did the Pope heal, or deepen, the Lefebvrist schism?

By George Weigel | Newsweek Web Exclusive
Jan 26, 2009

What do the Cardinal Richelieu and King Louis XVI, the Bastille and the Reign of Terror, the Bourbons and Robespierre, the revolutionary depredations in the Vendée, the Dreyfus Affair, the anti-clericalism of the French Third Republic, and the World War II Vichy regime have to do with the schismatic movement that the late Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre led out of the Roman Catholic Church in 1988—a movement that Pope Benedict XVI is now trying to move toward reconciliation by lifting the excommunications of its four illegally ordained bishops on Jan. 21?

In a word: everything.

There are, of course, many different kinds of people in the Lefebvrist movement; the great majority of them are men and women who find the older forms of Catholic piety—especially the Latin Mass celebrated in the Tridentine form—more spiritually beneficial than the reformed liturgy that followed the Vatican Council II (1962-1965). And it is also true that Archbishop Lefebvre, one of the leaders of the anti-reformist faction at Vatican Council II, was very unhappy with what was done to the Church's liturgy after the council.

But Lefebvre was also a man formed by the bitter hatreds that defined the battle lines in French society and culture from the French Revolution to the Vichy regime. Thus his deepest animosities at the council were reserved for another of Vatican Council II's reforms: the council's declaration that "the human person has a right to religious freedom," which implied that coercive state power ought not be put behind the truth-claims of the Catholic Church or any other religious body. This, to Lefebvre, bordered on heresy [to be fair to the Archbishop, the Weltanschauung of the council documents is to say the least difficult to reconcile with that of the Church prior to the council. For Vatican II has since been viewed—by all factions within the Church as well as those without her—as an astonishing volte-face with respect to the Church’s approach to the secular world. Did not our present Holy Father once describe Gaudium et Spes as a “counter-syllabus”, in that its orientation ran totally contrary to Pius IX’s syllabus errorum of 1864? Surely the Archbishop is to be commended, not condemned, for questioning the wisdom of embracing the world at precisely the time that the world was energetically casting out what little remained of Christendom in its foundations?]. For it cast into serious question (indeed, for all practical purposes it rejected) the altar-and-throne arrangements Lefebvre believed ought to prevail—as they had in France before being overthrown in 1789, with what Lefebvre regarded as disastrous consequences for both church and society [in other words the Church, through Dignitatis Humanae and Gaudium et Spes had accommodated herself to modernity. This would not have been a problem were ‘modernity’ founded upon the Christian religion, but it is not, for it bases itself philosophically upon secularism, which latter can provide no faith productive unto eternal life, nor any code of morals for human behaviour which is not subject to alteration upon a whim. The social normalisation of aberrations such as homosexual partnerships and abortion are the logical consequences of modernity. In the political sphere, both Nazism and Communism are modernity’s children. She may since have disowned them, but she bore them nonetheless, and who knows what future horrors she will spring upon us?].

Marcel Lefebvre's war, in other words, was not simply, or even primarily, against modern liturgy. It was against modernity, period [this is a perceptive comment, probably Weigel’s most valuable insight in the whole of his article]. For modernity, in Lefebvre's mind, necessarily involved aggressive secularism, anti-clericalism, and the persecution of the church by godless men [not just in Lefebvre’s mind, Mr. Weigel. It is a matter of the historical record]. That was the modernity he knew, or thought he knew (Lefebvre seems not to have read a fellow Frenchman's reflections on a very different kind of modernity, Alexis de Tocqueville's "Democracy in America"); [and how’s that going, eh? Look at what democracy in America has given us—Barack Obama, a holocaust of forty million unborn souls slaughtered since 1973, gay “marriage” and a host of other abominations too numerous to mention] it was certainly the modernity he loathed. And to treat with this modernity—by, for example, affirming the right of religious freedom and the institutional separation of church and state—was to treat with the devil.

The conviction that the Catholic Church had in fact entered into such a devil's bargain by preemptively surrendering to the modern world at Vatican Council II became the ideological keystone of Lefebvre's movement. And the result was dramatic: Lefebvrists came to understand themselves as the beleaguered repository of authentic Catholicism—or, as the movement is wont to put it, the Tradition (always with a capital "T"). For 10 years, Pope John Paul II tried to convince the recalcitrant Archbishop Lefebvre otherwise; he got nowhere [one is not surprised he got nowhere. How did he expect to convince Archbishop Lefebvre while engaging in highly questionable acts like the prayer meeting of religions at Assisi, and kissing the profoundly anti-Christian Qur’an? Actions speak louder than words]. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger then tried to mediate. But at the end of the day, Marcel Lefebvre hated modernity more than he loved Rome [pithy]. So in 1988, rejecting the personal pleas of John Paul II and Ratzinger (men who could hardly be accused, reasonably, of preemptive concessions to modernity) [hmm, this is a matter for debate], an aging Lefebvre ordained four bishops to carry on his work, without the requisite authorization from Rome. Those four bishops (whose orders, while illegally conferred under church law, are nonetheless valid sacraments in the church's eyes) [yes] automatically incurred excommunication by participating in a schismatic act—an act in conscious defiance of church authority that cuts one off from the full communion of the church. It is those excommunications that have now been lifted by Benedict XVI, in an effort to move the Lefebvrist movement toward reconciliation with Rome and toward the restoration of full communion [yes, because we’re not there yet].

That one of the Lefebvrist bishops, Richard Williamson, is a Holocaust denier and a promoter of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" has drawn considerable attention and commentary, particularly from Jewish scholars and religious leaders who have made large investments in Jewish-Catholic dialogue since Vatican Council II. Their concern is entirely understandable, although it has to be said that the lifting of Williamson's excommunication in no way constitutes a papal endorsement of Williamson's lunatic view of history [a very important point], or a retraction of John Paul II's 1998 statement deploring the Holocaust, or a revocation of Vatican Council II's teaching on the sin of anti-Semitism. At the same time, it ought to be recognized that Williamson's Holocaust denial and his embrace of a crude anti-Semitic canard like the "Protocols" is not all that surprising, given that Lefebvrist political ideology grew out of the same French fever swamps that produced the anti-Dreyfusards. (Even as it ought to be recognized that the hypersecularists of the Third French Republic hated Catholics as much as some anti-Dreyfusards hated Jews.) [I’m sure Williamson has some grasp of these matters, but he is not himself French, was not born in France, did not grow up there, and is hardly likely to share the keen penetration of these politico-religious questions the late Archbishop shows in They Have Uncrowned Him. Williamson has long engaged in fruit-and-nuttery, but his holocaust denial—at least at this present time—is more likely to proceed from a desire to forestall the reconciliation of the SSPX than from adherence to the Archbishop’s politics.]

Williamson's inanities, while deplorable and disgusting, are something of a sideshow, however [correct]. For the highest stakes in this drama hove into view when Bishop Bernard Fellay, the current head of the Lefebvrist movement, issued a Jan. 24 letter on the lifting of the excommunications to the movement's faithful. It is an astonishing document, declaring as it does that "Catholic Tradition is no longer excommunicated" and that the Lefebvrists constitute those "Catholics attached to Tradition throughout the world." [if Weigel has reported Fellay accurately here, the latter has made a sweeping statement of breathtaking arrogance, as though there were no Catholic Tradition at all outside the ranks of the SSPX]. The letter goes on to affirm "all the councils up to the Second Vatican Council about which we express some reservations." And it implies that the talks that will now commence between the Vatican and the Lefebvrists, now that the excommunications have been lifted, will focus on those "reservations." [it is perfectly legitimate for the SSPX to seek dialogue with the Holy See about their reservations. How many times must I say that it is fruitless to require of them a blanket submission to the teachings of Vatican II, when no-one seems to be able to define authoritatively what those teachings are? Who shall interpret the council for us? George Weigel?]

Responsible canon lawyers have raised questions about whether this arrogance on the part of Bishop Fellay does not cast into question his fulfillment of the canonical requirements for a lawful lifting of his excommunication. In any event, non-canonists will read his letter as Fellay's unilateral declaration of victory: the Lefebrvists have been right all along; the Holy See has finally recognized the error of its ways; the only things left to discuss are the terms of surrender. Ironically, but hardly coincidentally, the Catholic left (which has been clever enough to avoid formal schism while living in intellectual and psychological schism since Pope Paul VI's 1968 encyclical on family planning, Humanae Vitae) has welcomed Benedict XVI's canonical rescue of the Lefebvrist bishops, with numerous left-leaning Catholic dissidents now saying, in effect, "Where's my bailout?" [pithy. But to whom is Mr. Weigel here referring? How many of his “left-leaning Catholic dissidents” have, like the bishops of the SSPX, been excommunicated, or suffered any real punishment at all? The only such that Melancholicus can think of is the crack-potted handful of womynprysts who from time to time simulate the reception of sacred orders in synagogues or on riverboats. These can never be reconciled unless they retract their error and abjure their pretended “orders”. They are not in a situation even remotely comparable to that of the Lefebvrist bishops.]

Benedict XVI undoubtedly intended this lifting of excommunications as a step toward healing a wound in the church. Bishop Fellay's letter, in response to the pope's gesture, suggests that the healing has not taken place. Moreover, Fellay's letter raises the stakes for everyone, and to the highest level. For what is at issue, now, is the integrity of the Church's self-understanding, which must include the authenticity of the teaching of Vatican Council II [the teaching of the council and its continuity with sacred tradition MUST be clarified as a matter of urgency, not merely to satisfy the Lefebvrists but for the good of the whole Church. It is not sufficient to declare the teaching of Vatican II “authentic” and to leave it at that, when no two individuals can agree on what precisely that teaching is.]

Father Federico Lombardi, SJ, the pope's spokesman, emphasized to reporters on Jan. 24 that the lifting of the excommunications did not mean that "full communion" had been restored with the Lefebvrists [this is true. The four bishops, as well as all the clergy in communion with them, are still suspended a divinis, and lack the faculties required to absolve penitents and solemnize marriages]. The terms of such reconciliation are, presumably, the subject of the "talks" to which Bishop Fellay referred in his letter. Those talks should be interesting indeed. For it is not easy to see how the unity of the Catholic Church will be advanced if the Lefebvrist faction does not publicly and unambiguously affirm Vatican Council II's teaching on the nature of the church, on religious freedom, and on the sin of anti-Semitism [what, precisely, is “Vatican Council II’s teaching on the nature of the church” [sic] or, indeed, on any other matter? Mr. Weigel cannot say. Nor can Melancholicus, and nor can anyone else, save the Holy Father speaking ex cathedra. Let us not expect theological miracles from the leaders of the SSPX when the holy Catholic Church herself has not authoritatively defined what that teaching is]. Absent such an affirmation, pick-and-choose cafeteria Catholicism will be reborn on the far fringes of the Catholic right, just when it was fading into insignificance on the dwindling Catholic left, its longtime home [this closing remark is neo-catholicism at its very ripest, all the more so since it has absolutely no correspondence with the facts on the ground. It also betrays the cocksure smugness of the neo-catholic position, confident that he alone holds the key to the Catholic faith against the heretics and schismatics on either side of him, and blind to his own mediocrity. Since when does the political position of the Lefebvrists—however much one may disagree with it—contradict defined dogma? It is not sufficient for Mr. Weigel to argue that their political stance contradicts what Vatican II seems to say, for a case can be made that Vatican II itself seems to contradict the socio-political teachings of the Roman pontiffs from the age of the Enlightenment down to 1960. Let the teachings of Vatican II be clarified and defined with the precision of earlier Magisterial decrees before we begin accusing those who are not neo-catholics of “pick-and-choose cafeteria Catholicism”. Furthermore, since when is this pick-and-choose attitude “fading into insignificance” on the left? In Melancholicus’ personal experience, both in Ireland and the United States, this attitude is as robust as ever. The ranks of the left may gradually be thinning, but those who remain still cling to their cherished ideology as resolutely as when they were forty years younger, and they are plenty capable of doing severe damage to what remains of Catholicism in many countries before departing into that good night. They have not gone away simply because the last conclave elected Benedict XVI.]

Not a bad article overall, and quite perceptive in many respects, but Mr. Weigel exhibits two of the most frustrating traits commonly found in the neo-catholic mind. The first is this notion of the “authenticity of the teachings of Vatican II”, the acceptance of which all neo-catholics demand as a sine qua non—but none of them ever takes the trouble to explain to us what that means. Perhaps to them it is self-evident, but they cannot expect us to agree. We can affirm with them that Vatican II was an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church, validly convoked by lawful authority, whose documents were lawfully promulgated and which taught no formal heresy. But what, precisely, did Vatican II teach? The council defined no new doctrine binding upon the faithful. It proposed a plethora of policy changes and new orientations, to be sure, but these things are not de fide after the manner of doctrines of faith or morals. What does Vatican II require us—under pain of sin—to believe that we were not required to believe before 1965? Nothing! What does Vatican II require us—again under pain of sin—to do that we were not required to do before 1965? Again, nothing!

The second is Mr. Weigel’s notion that Archbishop Lefebvre’s hatred of modernity was somehow misplaced and that, with the importuning of John Paul II, he and his followers ought to have ‘gotten with the programme’, so to speak. On the contrary, there needs to be a debate at the highest levels of the hierarchy up to and including the Holy See about the opening of the Church towards the world set in motion by Vatican II. This will—and should—involve revisiting the council documents and at the level of the Magisterium clarifying the copious ambiguity therein. The post-1789 world is NOT something intrinsically good, from which the Church has nothing to fear. In his book They Have Uncrowned Him, the Archbishop traced the pedigree of this modernity: conceived at the Renaissance, brought to birth at the reformation, through adolescence in the age of Enlightenment to a ghastly maturity in the blood-soaked twentieth century and then seemingly embraced uncritically and with open arms by the Catholic Church at Vatican II, on her knees and seeking the world’s approval—on the world’s own terms!

Maybe it’s just me, but how any synod of bishops can get together less than twenty years after the most horrifying human carnage the world had ever seen and draft a document proclaiming in fulsome and ebullient terms the wondrous virtues of modern man truly beggars belief. And how could the Holy Father of the day really believe, after everything he had seen in his own lifetime and with his own eyes, that error would correct itself as though automatically, with no intervention from the Church or other external coercion?

Well, Nazism corrected itself, didn’t it? So... it wasn’t necessary for the Allies to resist Hitler, then?

And in the religious sphere, it has been nearly five hundred years now and we all know how Protestantism corrected itself in the meantime...

They've improved it worse

The Catholic World News website was down the other day while the good people thereat made ready their “liturgical changes” for unveiling this week.

Today the site is back up again. But Melancholicus is shocked and dismayed. It is not the same site at all. They have even changed its name. It is now Catholic Culture, and although the news features and headlines are listed on this page, there seems to be no sign of the news archive—though this, possibly, may be due to the fact that they haven’t moved the archive to their new site yet... we shall wait and see.

But, being a Traditionalist, Melancholicus does not like change, and he especially disapproves of the same when websites he frequently visits are re-arranged by their owners in an attempt to make the site more user-friendly and accessible. For these changes, however well intended they may be, confront the visitor with something new and foreign when he is expecting the old and familiar. It is an unsettling experience, whereat the visitor quickly becomes lost, finds he cannot navigate the site or find what he’s looking for, becomes disheartened, finally leaves and then doesn’t come back but goes elsewhere to find what he sought at his once-familiar port of call but can find no longer.

Sounds rather like the conciliar church, doesn’t it?

Indeed. The good people over at the now defunct CWNews.com have done something really, really bad. They have taken down their traditional website and replaced it with a novus ordo version of the same. Perhaps visitors will become accustomed to the novelty in time—if they persevere; perhaps, disheartened by the abruptness and extent of the reforms, they will go elsewhere for their Catholic world news. Since about thirty to forty percent of the posts on Infelix Ego are based on CWN stories, Melancholicus finds himself vexed not a little by the change, and also finds himself facing the task of having to adjust his links accordingly.

There are some comforts, though. Diogenes is still online—if you can find him. Although he disparages the new website as novus, Melancholicus at least stayed long enough on it to see what other kind of fare it offered. While doing so he stumbled upon this obnoxious feature, namely a catalogue of site reviews wherein a private person (or persons) has taken it upon himself/themselves to judge the Catholicity or otherwise of external websites. There is a link through which the visitor can view the (in the compiler’s private opinion) “Top-rated sites”. More interestingly, there is also a “Danger list” which, as we shall see, contains some strange bedfellows. The websites on the “Danger list” are those which the compiler—in his private opinion—has judged in some undefined way not entirely consonant with Catholicism, or at least with Catholicism as he understands it.

Websites are reviewed by our self-appointed inquisitor according to the criterea of “Fidelity”, “Resources” and “Useability”. Assessment of the two latter is somewhat a matter of subjective opinion, and Melancholicus shall say no more about that, for it is the reviewer’s approach to “Fidelity” that he finds most interesting, and not a little irritating. “Fidelity” is nowhere defined, and in practical terms seems to mean no more than the degree to which a given website conforms to the reviewer’s own position on ecclesiastical politics. So let us now take a gander through his “Danger list” to see what may be afoot.

To be fair to our reviewer, the greater share of the websites on his “Danger list” deserve to be there, and would be on the blacklist of any orthodox Catholic, were he minded to compile such. Our reviewer tells us that “these sites receive the lowest grade in the Fidelity category”. Some of the sites he lists are those of obvious dissenting groups such as Call To Action and We Are Church, flaky religious orders, dodgy educational institutes, pro-homosexual ministry and the supporters of the wymynprysts movement. So far so good. On the other side of the divide he lists the websites of sedevacantist groups, as well as the well-known and notorious sites Traditio and Novus Ordo Watch. Melancholicus cannot quarrel with any of that. A lot of these sites are nothing if not absolutely barmy. But the reviewer also includes some websites on this “Danger list” whose ‘dissent’—if such it be—is not anywhere near as clear-cut and which has not been satisfactorily established according to properly-defined criterea, in effect tarring them with the same brush as the modernists and the sedes.

For instance, Melancholicus was interested to see what our reviewer would make of Fisheaters, since he links to Fisheaters himself from Infelix Ego. Although conceding that Fisheaters contains “many good resources”, the reviewer complains that these are “seriously marred by the webmaster’s ultra-traditionalist views”. Furthermore, “the language consistently implicitly and explicitly rejects the New Mass as well as the authority of [the] Second Vatican Council”.

Melancholicus has grown tired of hearing this vague, undefined charge—which is little more than a bromide—levelled at those who have the temerity to consider the new liturgy inferior to the old, or who believe that The Greatest Council Of All Time^TM was not in fact the greatest council of all time. This is a standard charge that recurs again and again in our inquisitor’s reviews of traditionalist websites. Nowhere does he explain what precisely “rejecting” either the New Mass or “the authority of Vatican II” means, or why, indeed, such should be considered a crime. On the basis of an ambiguous charge left unexplained, websites such as Fisheaters are found to be in violation of “Fidelity”, and are consigned to the trash heap alongside the likes of America magazine, Maryknoll, Voice of the Faithful, and Catholics For A Free Choice.

Fisheaters commits another crime against “Fidelity” insofar as “all of the material and resources offered are pre-Vatican II”. If our reviewer could explain to Melancholicus how this could be considered in itself a crime, he would be interested in hearing it.

Then there is Fisheaters’ Dictionary of Dissent, which really exercises our pious reviewer. He complains that the Dictionary contains sarcastic remarks about the new liturgy and the post-conciliar church. But so what? Depending on one’s personal taste, some may find the Dictionary of Dissent darkly amusing, others may find it obnoxious. But where on this page does there occur the denial of some doctrine of faith or morals one might expect if the webmaster is to be found in violation of “Fidelity”?

Another “weakness” of the Fisheaters website identified by our reviewer is its “unorthodox Catholic links”. Among these allegedly “unorthodox” links are Christian Order, Una Voce (!) and the (now unfortunately defunct) Diocese Report. By what criterion does our reviewer take it upon himself to judge these sites “unorthodox”? In any case, they are all—together with Seattle Catholic—guilty of a most serious breach of “Fidelity”. Fidelity to what, precisely? Ah, but there’s the rub. The sense in which this term is used by our reviewer can hardly be as restrictive as adherence merely to the teachings of the Church, for the aforementioned Traditionalist websites he has consigned to his “Danger list” contain no heresy. No, for our reviewer, the meaning of “Fidelity” has been expanded to include adherence not only to the teachings of the Church but to the policies and decisions of churchmen, as well as an exaggerated sense of the respect owed to those in sacred orders. All Traditionalist websites promote the old religion at the expense of the new; that is the distinguishing feature of Traditionalism, for they wouldn’t be Traditionalists if they didn’t. Why, in the opinion of our reviewer, should criticism of the liturgical dross that has been imposed upon the Church for the last forty years be considered grounds for such extreme censure? We find Christian Order roundly upbraided for the egregious crime of being sharply critical of the bishops of England and Wales. But it is a matter of the historical record that these bishops comprise one of the most corrupt and modernist hierarchies in the world. If our reviewer considers such men above criticism, he cannot know very much about them. Although Diocese Report is no longer functioning, Melancholicus used to read it regularly before he entered seminary in 2002, and he remembers it as a news source that never held back from reporting on the perfidy and malfeasance of corrupt bishops. There have been many examples of bad bishops in the history of holy Church, and bad bishops abound in every age. Why is it apparently so hard for our reviewer to believe that there are bad bishops installed in Sees today, all across the world? For what is most disturbing about our reviewer’s criterea in evaluating the ‘orthodoxy’ of websites is that he seems to be more scandalised by Traditionalist criticism of ecclesiastical turpitude than by the turpitude itself. If such be the case, he’d want to get his priorities right.

Perhaps when he says “Fidelity”, what he really means is “Party loyalty”, which is a different matter entirely.

Melancholicus is amazed and disgusted at the extent to which some will take it upon themselves to write their fellow Catholics out of the Church, even though the victims of these arrogant judgements have incurred no ecclesiastical censure.

And that is the end of today’s rant.