Newsgroups: bit.listserv.christia
Date:         Tue, 14 Apr 1992 05:21:40 EDT
From:         Marty Helgesen <MNHCC@CUNYVM.BITNET>
Subject:      Changing a Church

Darren,

Your remarks about the Catholic Church contain statements that are
ambiguously worded at best.  No informed Catholic would have consid-
ered the use of Latin a fundamental principle of the Church.  At
first the Church used Aramaic, then Greek and other vernacular lan-
guages.  When Latin was first used it was a vernacular language and
was used for that reason.  Latin was the primary language of worship
for many centuries because the Latin Rite is the largest, but the
Eastern Rites of the Church have always used other languages.  In
some cases they were vernacular languages, such as Ukrainian and
Arabic, but the Ethiopic Rite used Ge'ez, another "dead" language.

At least some of the Eastern Rites of the Catholic Church have always
ordained married men to the priesthood, but the Latin Rite has not.
After the Church law of celibacy became universal in the Latin Rite
married men were not ordained.  (There was at least one case in which
a married man was ordained in the 19th century, but he and his wife
agreed that they would no longer live together as man and wife, and
she entered a convent.)  In the 1950s Pope Pius XII gave special
dispensations from the Church's law to several Scandinavian (I
think), Lutheran ministers who became Catholics so they could be
ordained the to priesthood and continue to live with their wives.
This privilege has been extended to other non-Catholic clergymen who
become Catholics and want to be ordained priests.

Your statement, "For example, married Anglican priest who converted
and remained a priest in the RCC would stay married because the
Vatican does not allow the dissolution of marriage except by death,"
is completely incorrect.  The Catholic Church does not recognize the
validity of Anglican orders, so an Anglican priest is not a priest in
the Catholic sense.  (Some individual Anglican clergymen have been
validly ordained, but that just complicates the matter.)  An Anglican
clergyman, like a Lutheran clergyman, who wanted to be a Catholic
priest would have to be ordained a Catholic priest.  (An Eastern
Orthodox or Old Catholic priest has valid orders and would not have
to be ordained to function as a priest in the Catholic Church.)

Also, it is incorrect to say that the Vatican does not allow the
dissolution of marriage except by death.  It is not a matter of
Church law that can be changed by the Church.  The Catholic Church
teaches that God has made marriage indissoluble.

Incidentally, I agree with Kerry.  There is a difference between
reforming and improving a church and transforming it into something
completely different, and there are people in the Catholic Church (at
least officially in the Church) who are trying to radically transform
it into something completely different.  I thing the principle of
truth in labeling means they should stop calling themselves Catholics
and openly admit that they are liberal Protestants, or Unitarians, or
followers of The Goddess, or whatever. Actually I would prefer that
they return to orthodoxy, but if they insist that their way is better
than the Catholic way, let them openly identify it as a different way
and let those Catholics who agree with them follow them out of the
Church.

Marty Helgesen
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