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.