If a politician stood before us and proclaimed, polemically, that his campaign would be entirely without polemics, would we believe him? Or, worse, if he said his campaign would try to avoid politics? Tyranny over language either works or backfires spectacularly in political movements, and each passing instance of it adds urgency to the need for “political” to be rescued from its current status as a slur.
Styled after the Rainbow Sash Movement, People Representing the Sexual Minority is a student group at St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict. Like Rainbow Sash, PRiSM’s favored method of protest is to disrupt Catholic Masses, as they did recently against Archbishop John C. Nienstedt of St. Paul and Minneapolis.
The group expressed frustration after Archbishop John C. Nienstedt withheld the sacrament from them because they wore rainbow buttons and sashes signaling their support for same-sex “marriage” and homosexuality. The archbishop, who was celebrating his first student Mass at St. John’s on September 26, instead gave a blessing to members of the group, which included students from St. John’s University and the College of St. Benedict, as well as three nuns and a priest.
Though the group’s tactic relies upon denial of Communion for effectiveness, members nonetheless chided Archbishop Nienstedt’s withholding of the Sacrament as an “extreme statement.” And then there was the best line of all, from one of the students: “We weren’t the ones who made it political….Once the archbishop denied communion, he made it political.” Immunity from politicking aside, the protesters truly didn’t seem to grasp how thickly they had layered the irony. Plainly, a statement that a protest is not political is itself a political statement. Second, if Nienstedt’s adherence to Church law is a political statement, it was a statement coerced by PRiSM members, which, of course, means it is properly attributed to them alone. An interesting episode, indeed, wherein Nienstedt’s purported political offense—in the eyes of PRiSM activists—almost seems to overshadow the primarily sexual issue at the heart of the activists’ cause.
October 7th, 2010 | 3:36 pm
Although I’m not Catholic, I support the Archbishop’s decision to guard the Communion rail.
He’s doing it for a number of reasons, one of them is that folks should not partake of the Lord’s Supper unworthily. Which these protesters are doing.
So it’s for their spiritual benefit that the Archbishop is guarding the rail.
October 7th, 2010 | 4:08 pm
I’ve always wondered why Catholics who violently disagree with the Church’s fundamental teachings insist they are still “good Catholics” and treat the Eucharist as a right to which they are entitled by their own rectitude. Perhaps it has something to do with Catholicism as a brand (when Gary Wills wrote a self-celebrating book called “Why I am Still a Catholic”, the answer was self-evident: if Wills was a Protestant, nobody would care what he believed), and perhaps it has something with the Church going too far with the “frequent communion” idea.
I don’t know of any Orthodox Christian who, if radically out of sync with the Tradition, would still describe himself as Orthodox, let alone present himself at the Chalice. Moreover, Orthodox bishops (and priests acting as deputed ministers of the Sacrament) are not hesitant about denying the Eucharist to people for a host of reasons, including failure to comply with the ascetic discipline of their particular Church. Nobody blinks an eye at this, and nobody complains. Only Catholics seem to think that a bishop is committing some sort of heinous crime by guarding the Chalice–and this they do not as punishment, but to protect those who approach unworthily, who do so “unto condemnation and death, and not life eternal”.
October 8th, 2010 | 12:13 am
Some relations attend this school. I was told the campus priests were upset about the Bishop.
This is geographically close to where Jacob Weterling disappeared.
October 8th, 2010 | 5:48 am
0Who is Jacob Weterling?
October 8th, 2010 | 12:49 pm
And what does Jacob Wetterling have to do with this?
October 9th, 2010 | 12:09 am
I totally agree with Truth Unites and Divides.. I am a Catholic. But I couldn’t have said it better.
October 16th, 2010 | 1:57 am
I would appreciate it greatly if someone in the archdiocese would continue to monitor both the Catholic and secular press.Jesus taught that if we have un-repented sin in our lives, we need to first get right before God and our fellow man before we can participate in the rituals of the church.
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