but whose church are you?

By Diogenes ( articles ) | Oct 05, 2005

We Are Church wants the Catholic Church to renounce her doctrine on the Eucharist. But if the Catholic Church did that, it would cease to be the Catholic Church. To deny that the Eucharist is Christ's Sacrifice on Calvary, made present in the world today, is to deny the existence of the Catholic Church; it would be doctrinal suicide.

Actually there are many Christians who deny the reality of the Eucharistic Sacrifice. They are called Protestants. What makes We Are Church unique is not the doctrines that the members protest, but the fact that they persist in the illusion that they can deny the most fundamental doctrines of the Church and still somehow remain Catholic.

Just in passing, I have to say that I'm puzzled by the WAC insistence that a) the Mass is just a community service and b) lay people should be allowed to preside. If it's nothing more than a celebration of community, who cares who presides? Why protest the priestly "monopoly" on sacramental ministry, if you deny the reality of the sacraments themselves? But that's a minor point.

The CWN story (link below) helpfully notes that a few years ago, the WAC crowd held a "counter-synod," and about 30 people attended. Thirty people? The Flat Earth Society can get a bigger crowd.

But what the Flat Earth Society can't get is media attention. If I sent out a press release, declaring myself an oracle of Astarte, no sober reporter would touch it. But float out into the St. Lawrence River, declare yourself a Catholic priestess, and the wire services will spread the announcement worldwide.

Why is that? It's the man-bites-dog element: the fact that someone who claims to be Catholic is behaving in a way that even jaded secular reporters recognize as contrary to the Catholic faith.

If a Baptist group showed up in Rome, denouncing "papist idolatry," nobody would blink an eye. When We Are Church does it, it's considered news only because they claim to be Catholic.

So why do they stay in a Church whose very existence they protest? For the publicity.