McBrien, Inchoate, Goes Bonkers

In a rhetorical trick utilized by the Left, some priest named "McBrien" attempts to stir up the energy of his 3805 readers. It will be difficult, as most of those readers are now well into their AARP membership-years.

Is there no doctrinal difference, for example, between the Church's current discipline of obligatory celibacy for priests of the Latin rite and the teachings of the ecumenical councils on the divinity of Jesus Christ? Is the belief in angels on the same doctrinal level as belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist?

Are the matters of faith contained in the Creed that is recited at Mass on Sundays and great feasts of no greater doctrinal authority than the Church's current teaching on the ordination of women or the current practice in the Roman Catholic Church regarding the selection of bishops?

And so on and so on he rattles, attacking Bishop Bruskewitz' excommunication of members of the usual heretic-and-tea societies such as Call to Action, Dignity, etc.

This column has no interest in attacking the bishop of Lincoln or Cardinal Re, and it leaves to canon lawyers to decide whether the bishop was on solid canonical grounds when in 1996 he issued his original extrasynodal legislation and decree of automatic excommunication

Umnnnnhh, "Fr. McBrien,"--the question was decided a long time ago. They're OUT.

HT: Cafeteria Is Closed