False Teaching Sabotages Aspiring Priests

False Teaching Sabotages Aspiring Priests

Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Saturday, April 6, 2002

Editor's note: See part one of this series, Anti-Catholic 'Experts' Fuel Church's Scandals, and part two, Homosexual Culture Undercuts Priesthood.

Second only to the scandal of homosexual domination of many U.S. seminaries is the watering down, and in some cases outright abandonment, of the tenets of the Roman Catholic faith.

In Chapter 5 of "Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood," Michael S. Rose examines the destructive effect of what he terms heterodoxy on seminarians struggling to absorb and adhere to the ancient doctrines of the church, handed down from the Apostles for 2,000 years.

"Many faculty members are adverse to teaching what the Church teaches, and some even find it onerous to hide their disdain for Catholicism," Rose wrote.

"The seminarian who arrives on campus expecting to find faculty and staff who love the Catholic faith and teach what the Church teaches can be sadly disappointed."

Among the students' obstacles to learning the authentic tenets of their faith, Rose reveals, are being forced to read textbooks written by "noted dissenters from Catholic teachings" such as theologians Richard McBrien, Edward Schillebeeckx, Hans Kung and Charles Curran, who "parrot the dogmas of Catholic dissent."

Tossing out the Bible

They are taught that the Bible is not to be taken seriously because it is "culture bound," that one religion is as good as the next, that the pope is not infallible, that the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist is just an old pre-Vatican II myth, that Christ wasn't divine, that God is a woman, that Mass is nothing more than a meal, that women should be ordained priests, that homosexuality is normal and that contraception is morally acceptable.

Though many outside the Catholic Church might agree with some if not all of these heretical doctrines, for Catholics, accepting them means simply that they are no longer Catholics. For many seminarians seeking admission to the priesthood, they sound the death knell of their vocations. Why, after all, should they give their lives to what they have been taught contradicts everything they believed the church stood for?

Yet, Rose reveals that for more than 30 years, this nonsense has been standard fare in many of the courses taught to priests.

Rot From Within

Many of the ideas being taught in seminaries today, Rose wrote, "go way beyond the scope of even these 'mainstream' errors of Modernist doctrine. Aggressive feminist theories often put forth by religious sisters devoted to liberation theology and various incarnations of Jungian psychology make it clear that some faculty members who are entrusted with the formation of future priests do not support the Catholic priesthood as the Church defines it. In fact they do not support the Church, her hierarchy, her Eucharist, or her liturgy."

Tragically, throughout the U.S. today, men taught these heretical doctrines are spreading error, distorting the liturgy, sowing doctrinal confusion and changing the faith of countless Catholics.

On page after page Rose documents instances of deliberate distortion of church doctrines - lapses most often defended not only by seminary officials, but also by the bishops of the dioceses they serve. Most of the abuses are simply mind-boggling.

Feminist Fanaticism

For 17 years Sister Barbara Fiand, a sister of Notre Dame de Namur, was allowed to teach the most outrageous heresies at the Athenium of Ohio's seminary in Cincinnati before she was finally given the heave-ho. Fiand's books denigrated the Apostle's Creed and the seven sacraments, and defined God as androgynous - neither male nor female.

She preached ordination of women, questioned church interpretation of Scripture and tradition, and proposed that the "personal embrace of one’s inner core,” whatever that means, supplant the authority of the church.

Dr. Aaron Milavec, a former Marianist brother and professor of church history, got away with preaching against church doctrine for a dozen years before leaving the Athenium after a seminarian threatened to sue the seminary for falsely claiming to be imparting Catholic theology.

In just five pages of his book, "Exploring Scriptural Sources," Milavec "ridicules everything from the Church Fathers to the Baltimore Catechism, denies the Catholic doctrine of Original sin, and disparages the tradition of the fallen angels . ..."

Pornography Required

A book that could only be defined as absolute pornography as a result of the explicit descriptions and illustrations of deviant and normal sex acts, "Our Sexuality," by Robert Crooks and Karla Baur, was vigorously defended by the school's rector and the bishop, and remained required reading for seminarians until its presence in the curriculum was revealed in the Wanderer.

The book was used by Dr. Robert Torres, the staff psychologist who taught a human sexuality course at Mount Angel Seminary in St. Benedict, Ore. The content of the book is so extreme Rose is forced to warn readers of the explicitness of its descriptions of sex acts.

"A lot of the seminarians were just struck dumb by this book," recalled Father John Lewandowski. "They were confused. They didn't know what to say. You expect to see this stuff out in the world, but in a seminary it's shocking."

Too shocking, in fact, to be described here.

"I asked the rector that I be released from this course on the grounds that it was against my conscience to participate in a course of study that took a blatant and directly immoral stand against Church teaching," Lewandowski recalled.

The rector, Father Patrick Brennan, turned him down and said he'd need permission from the bishop to be released from the course. The bishop of Portland, then Archbishop William J. Levada, now archbishop of San Francisco, took no action. Only after the Wanderer story appeared did the bishop ban the use of the book.

Rose quotes Wisconsin priest Father Charles Fiore, a vigorous critic of seminary abuses and the heresy of Modernism afflicting the church:

'Faulty Parts'

"If an engineer working for the space program were discovered to have deliberately used faulty parts, is it likely that he would be retained by that program?" he asked.

"Then why are men and women who clearly do not understand and apparently do not believe the teachings of the Church allowed to educate, form and train seminarians who will be entrusted with the souls of the faithful?

"Whatever can rectors and bishops who permit the use of alien texts and alienated professors be thinking? No wonder good and faithful pastors are discouraged from sending young men to study for the priesthood when too often [the seminarians] are subverted in their faith and perverted in their morals.

"If the bishops and rectors don't know this kind of rot is eating away at the innards of the Church, at its future vitality, that's misfeasance. If they do know but do nothing to stop it, that's malfeasance. And the faithful should demand top-to-bottom house cleanings where such situations exist! Certainly, they are not morally obliged to financially support this ecclesiastical incompetence."

Amen!

Michael Rose has written a book that should serve as a call to arms to every faithful Roman Catholic, and "Goodbye! Good Men" should be required reading for any Catholic priest or layman seeking to understand the forces at work within the church that seem bent on destroying it.

Pope Paul VI is said to have remarked that the "smoke of Satan" was permeating the sanctuary of Holy Mother Church. Michael Rose has sounded the fire alarm.

Get "Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood" at a discount.

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