On July 14th, the Catholic Register reported that Canadian Prime Minister Stephen "Call me Steve" Harper has blamed the controversy of his recent sacrilegious reception of Holy Communion on “people who want to cause embarrassment in religion and drive a wedge between Protestants and Catholics.”
There are 14 million Canadians who call themselves "Catholic". Mr. Harper is not one of them. He is a "born-again" -- an evangelical Protestant. But he evidently doesn't understand the differences between what he believes and what Catholics believe.
Harper criticized the media for showing a video of him of pocketing the Communion Host while attending the funeral mass for former Canadian Governor-General Romeo LeBlanc on July 3rd. “Somebody running an unsubstantiated [sic] story that I would stick communion bread in my pocket is really absurd and I think it's a real, frankly, a low point,” he said, according to Canwest News.
"Unsubstantiated"? What about the video?! Anyway, the point is that what Steve put in his pocket (and later transferred to his mouth, if you believe him) is not "bread". Catholics true to the dogmas of their Faith believe that the Host is nothing less than the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ. It's not to be put in pockets or taken home for a souvenir. In fact, traditional Catholics believe the Host should not even be touched, except by a priest, and therefore reject receiving Holy Communion in the hand.
As for the "wedge" which Harper says is being driven between Catholics and non-Catholics, that division was caused in the 15th and 16th centuries by a chap named Martin Luther and other heretics. Since Vatican II the Church has tried to paper over the cracks in Christianity, to the point where many now believe that it doesn't make any difference which church you go to or what you believe. That is the heresy of relativism.
Here's what Harper said on that point. "While I’m not theologically a Catholic, in my judgment, the Catholic Church is a critical bulwark of worldwide Christianity.... The Pope is an important moral and spiritual leader generally and for Christians generally, even though I’m not a Catholic."
That's very nice of him, but Walt wonders if Steve has heard the Bible-thumpers who preach from the pulpits of churches like the one he attends. Even today they inveigh against the Church, accuse the Pope of being the anti-Christ, etc etc. And we find their anti-Catholic rants printed virtually every day in blogs and letters to the editor and other forums.
No, Mr. Harper. We traditional Catholics -- the ones who were upset by your disrespect for our beliefs -- are not the ones driving the wedge between ourselves and the rest of the world. It is people like YOU, who have no understanding or appreciation of the core principles of true Christianity.
For an excellent article on relativism, see "Can we talk about heresy?" , by Thomas C. Oden. (Christian Century, April 12, 1995)
No comments:
Post a Comment