THOUGHT PROBLEM #2

Diogenes submits another exhibit for the readers' reflection:

In front of a group of young seminarians, a veteran instructor and long-time priest hurriedly delivered to an older seminarian a crash-course on the administration of the sacrament of Extreme Unction. In his customary rushed manner, the instructor modeled how and where to apply the oil. When he arrived at the anointment of the feet, he suddenly stopped. Turning to the group of younger seminarians, he asked in grave puzzlement: "Would you do the unction on the soles of the feet? Or on the top of the feet? I'm not sure! What do you think?"

Yes, indeed: What do you think? After many years in the priesthood, the instructor still did not know precisely where to anoint the feet!


You would never tolerate such amateur pedagogy in the training of plumbers, electricians, carpenters, chefs, pilots, physical therapists, veterinarians, dentists, physicians etc. You would never trust a leaky commode or major household repairs or your pet or your health and life to anyone who had received training from instructors with such imperfect professional knowledge.


Why, then, would anyone entrust his immortal soul to men who had received their priestly formation under such instruction?

THOUGHT PROBLEM #1

Diogenes proposes the following problem for contemplation:

You are a young seminarian. You have not only had formal schooling, but you have attended a high school that gave you a world-class education. You sit now in class with some reservations because you have been warned about low standards at the institutiion.

You hear read aloud in class this sentence: "The practice of placing [the corner-stone] near the entrance at the front of the church is not in accord with the implications of the rubrics."

Immediately afterward, the instructor concludes, "so the corner-stone should be near the entrance."

What would your reaction be? Would you have a robust faith in the teacher (or the institution) to deliver more complex material?

IGNORANCE IS BLISS

Like rude Athenian banqueteers, some commenters have tossed Diogenes  their ill-gnawed bones of abuse. The Dog will not drench the rascals as they deserve. Rather, Diogenes will make a stipulation of facts that are not in dispute: He accepts more or less, as the commenters assert, that the "slowness in class" and the educational deficiencies of the CMRI "professors" result, in part, from their zeal for the mission circuit. The Dog allows that the demands of travel make it impossible for the CMRI priests to keep up with the seminarians or to make up for what they never learned in the first place.

Therefore, let Diogenes propose a criterion requiring no special training or extraordinary natural gifts.  Let him measure a CMRI "professor" against an essential standard of the Church. Surely, if the "professor" fails in this respect, the Dog's tormenters will repent themselves of their misguided fervor. Diogenes has sought solely to bring to light the intellectual inadequacy of Mater Dei and its staff. Therefore, the Dog will stay on message by proposing the Church's position on intellectualism as the standard of comparison. Everybody will agree that one need not be an intellectual to reflect the orthodox viewpoint, which is Thomistic-Aristotelian philosophy. That discipline should be a habit in any Catholic teacher's mind regardless of his academic preparation.

The Church affirms the primacy of the intellect and upholds the rôle of reason, illumined by faith, in both the natural and supernatural orders. Were this not the case, the formulæ of dogmatic definitions would be of no value. Theology, a true science, derives a body of truths from the undisputed data of divine revelation by making use of the process discursive reasoning. Dogmatic definitions and theological conclusions are, then, intelligible.

Diogenes now asks the viewer to read the following brief anecdote about a CMRI "professor":

In Dogmatic Theology, [the farmer priest] would quite frequently use such phrases as: "Don't understand it  -- believe it" and "it is a mystery". When asked questions, he would often shrug and answer, "I guess...I don´t know". 

This is not faith seeking understanding.  Did Diogenes not know the CMRI priests to be pious ignoramuses of the first order, he would say that their anti-intellectualism was of the same class as that condemned in Pascendi. Understand this: The CMRI ethos is fundamentally alien to Catholic thought. Their teachers are far removed from the days when professors of dogmatic theology at the humblest diocesan seminary always had a crisp and reliable Catholic answer for every seminarian's question. CMRI Catholicism is but a crude cartoon, as representative of the Church as The Simpsons is of family life.

WHERE IN THE WORLD IS...ČESKÉ BUDĚJOVICE?

From the spirited comments Diogenes has received, the defenders of Mater Dei and the CMRI are outraged, for the truth hurts. Let the shameless Dog then continue exposing the fatal ignorance of Mater Dei's faculty with yet another first-hand account of instructional incompetence:

The ["farmer priest,"] who acts as geography teacher in Mater Dei Academy, often shows his complete ignorance of this very subject he is teaching. Once he confused the Balkans with the Baltic, and when...told... that Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia no longer existed, he excused himself by saying: "I still think of the map we had in school in the 70s."

The superior general should buy this man an updated atlas  -- and then send him off to an assignment where he can do no harm to young Catholic intellects. Such men, no matter how well intentioned, cannot be stewards of the education of impressionable youth, whether in grammar school or the "seminary." 

THE REV. RIP VAN WINKLE

All right, you may say, the CMRI "professor" may not be the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but he's a valid priest who can administer the sacraments. He's been a priest for 20 years.


Perhaps.


But, then, tell Diogenes what you make of this tale out of school, printed verbatim from an eye witness account:

While translating the Rituale in Latin class, [the Mater Dei "professor"] was wondering if "imponit manum super caput infantis...et postea manum extensam tenens dicit..." means that one should hold the hand over the head of the baptizand or one should actually touch it. 

Infant baptism is not rocket science, and in 20 years he should have gotten it right. Any priest with a year's experience (except perhaps for a certain one we have heard of in Michigan) knows the answer. Why not the seminary "professor"? The man needs his walking papers immediately, but not before undergoing a remedial course in the administration of the sacraments.


Can there be any doubt why another Mater Dei seminarian has just decided to leave this den of mediocrity?

DOWNRIGHT DISGRACEFUL

Sympathetic readers taxed Diogenes with nit-picking when he exposed a simpleminded CMRI priest's ignorance of the meaning of pace. The reason is simple: the Roman Catholic Church, in the good old days, sweated the "small stuff." It is a characteristic of the Roman mind. Whether She was predicating the properties of both natures of the one Person Jesus Christ or precisely explaining the post-partum perpetual virginity of our Lady, the Church was a stickler for the minutest of details. Getting it right, down to the smallest point, used to be the hallmark of Catholic scholarship and liturgical praxis. Anyone who attended a pre-Vatican II Catholic university or seminary will attest to the high standards of accuracy demanded of both the professoriate and the students.

Therefore, in today's post we offer another small (but really immense) example of the unfitness of Mater Dei and its staff to train priests. This anecdote comes to us from Europe:

On the evening before a seminary candidate boarded his flight to Omaha, a European Catholic with first-hand knowledge of Mater Dei called to warn him about the seminary's severe deficiencies as a Catholic institution of learning. Among the caller's many specific complaints was: "They don't even know how to spell Philosophy!"

Notwithstanding the friendly caution, the young man flew to Omaha. A few days after his arrival, he received the workbook for his philosophy class. Inscribed on the title page, in dark, bold-face print, the new seminarian, to his great dismay, read this disgrace to American traditional Catholicism:

P H Y L O S O P H Y

Not only is the faculty beyond remediation, the Mater Dei word-processor's spell check must be permanently disabled. Mater Dei is disgraceful. Bp. Pivarunas must step down as rector, the faculty removed to country chapels, and the institution rebuilt afresh.

ALMOST TOO SAD FOR WORDS

In the past week, Diogenes has heard any number of arguments urging him to leave the CMRI and Mater Dei Seminary in peace. The majority of the objections run along these lines:

If Bp. Pivarunas and the Mater Dei faculty are pathetic but not malicious or avaricious, why, then, should their failings be made public? After all, the subtleties of dogmatic and moral theology are incomprehensible to the CMRI majority, who are at heart plain, simple folk. They merely want valid sacraments and a caring pastor to guide them to salvation. Whether Bp. Pivarunas and his priests have their feet planted firmly on the intellectual ground of the faith is of no concern to the faithful. As long as the bishop and his men embrace and defend the essential tenets of the faith, why shouldn't they be excused for some technical errors or their ignorance of the finer points of academic discourse?

The crude and inaccurate terminology Diogenes pointed out last week can surely be explained as the unfortunate verbal miscue of an honest but uneducated man trying his best. These priests don't intend to spread error. Their intentions are fundamentally good. They are concerned with the good of souls. So, then, why shame them before the savagely judgmental world of traditional Catholicism? We need valid priests;  Mater Dei consistently produces hard workers who serve the faithful. Who cares how much Latin or theology they know or how many hairs they can split? The ability to administer the sacraments, even if not up to the standards of the pre-Vatican II past, is more than enough in these years of crisis.

These objections have much to recommend them. In principle, there is nothing against the faith by ordaining what is sometimes called a simplex priest, a man who has just enough training to administer the sacraments, and that's it. Such men were common in mission countries, where the Church needed a native clergy quickly. Many Catholics have cogently argued that the current crisis has brought on conditions very much like those found in mission lands of old, so ancient remedies are in order.

Diogenes is almost persuaded...but not quite.

Bp. Pivarunas, you see, represents Mater Dei as a Roman Catholic seminary; he also condemns priests who have not had the advantage of a seminary formation. Yet neither he nor his faculty can live up to the high academic standards of a Roman Catholic seminary. In fairness, nobody can nowadays, except perhaps the institutions operated by the SSPX. Nevertheless, other traditionalist institutions, even weak ones, may at least lay claim to some linear connection with pre-Vatican II standards and culture, mostly as a result of their founders' association with Arbp. Lefebvre and Ecône. The CMRI categorically does not enjoy that kind of direct continuity with Catholic intellectual tradition, and Mater Dei's amateur faculty does not possess what's needed to make up for that crippling deficit.

But concrete examples are better than abstract assertions, and apparently minor examples are the best kind, for they reveal the fault lines and vulnerabilities of troubled organizations. This week's illustration of the ineptitude of the Mater Dei faculty, when considered carefully, argues strongly for the thorough reorganization of the CMRI Seminary.

But first, a little bit of background information so that everybody can understand, and then the anecdote:

In academic argumentation, scholars register polite disagreement with another's opinion by placing the Latin word pace before the name of the writer with whom they disagree. It means "with all due deference to," "by leave of," or "with the permission of." Essentially, pace is a courteous, formulaic apology (occasionally dripping with irony) for a difference of opinion or a contradiction. Often, owing to the nature of the expression, pace is the first word of a sentence, and hence capitalized.

In the Molinistic textbook used in a Mater Dei class, there appeared the phrase "Pace, Cardinal Cajetan" (the brilliant Thomist Tommaso de Vio, author of the classical commentary on the Summa Theologica). According to eye witnesses, the "professor," upon encountering the unfamiliar word in class, pondered its possible meaning for a long while before deciding that "Pace" (in italics!) must have been Cardinal Cajetan's first name.

If the stakes were not so high, Diogenes would take pity and shine his bright lamp elsewhere. Diogenes' humanity tells him that there is no helping such a man so destitute of learning. He is irremediable. Worse, his instincts are all wrong. Diogenes also suspects that this "professor" had not prepared for his lecture beforehand, otherwise he would not have been caught off his guard in front of seminarians, for whom he must be a model of learning. Had he prepared the evening before, notwithstanding the absence of a good dictionary, at least he could have looked up Cajetan on the web to learn the cardinal's full name. His indolence exposed him and Mater Dei to contempt, not Diogenes.

This sad, little anecdote tells us as much about the state of pedagogy at Mater Dei as it does of the caliber of the instructors.


Thoroughgoing reform is the sole cure.