Time To Re-Think Your Metaphors Cardinals
The latest from La-La Land
Here's some of the article from The California Catholic Daily; (Emphasis mine)Is it our “metaphors” that need changing?
Cardinal Mahony honors 20 years of dissent with gala dinner
Fr. Liam Lawton sang “Danny Boy” (movingly, it was said) in her honor. Paying tribute were Cardinal Roger Mahony, and Megan McKenna, a self-described “writer, theologian, storyteller, missionary.”
All these and about 500 more were gathered Feb. 29 for a Religious Education Congress event, a dinner to honor Religious Sister of Charity Edith Prendergast, director of the Office of Religious Education for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles since 1987. As director, Sister Edith has overseen the archdiocese’s annual Religious Education Congress, a gathering of religious educators and others from California and across the U.S. that has become notorious over the years for its presenters who dissent from Church teachings.
"It has been an extraordinary experience to be associated with you in our local Church," Cardinal Roger Mahony told Sister Edith, according to the March 7 Tidings, the archdiocesan newspaper. Noting Prendergast’s “candor, civility, competence, courage and, most importantly, compassion,” Mahony said, “I cannot be more grateful to our almighty God for the gift of Sister Edith Prendergast."
Prendergast showed some theological candor in September 2002, at a talk sponsored by her office with Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The speaker was Michael Morwood, an Australian theologian whose book, Tomorrow's Catholic: Understanding God and Jesus in a New Millennium, Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne, Australia in 1998 said contained serious doctrinal errors. When Morewood refused to retract the errors, Pell banned him from speaking publicly on the incarnation, the redemption, and the Trinity. Despite this, and Morewood’s subsequent resignation from the priesthood, Prendergast’s office offered those who attended his talk a "certificate of attendance," to go towards earning a "catechist certificate."
After Morwood’s talk, Sister Edith said he had "raised our sights and shaken us up." She said that, during Morwood’s talk, she was thinking “that the time for us involved in religious education is to rethink our story and traditions. So often I think that we are counting on images and metaphors. We have to ask the question: are they relevant to our time? Do they speak to anyone?"
Among the "metaphors" that might not "speak to anyone," Sister Edith mentioned "the metaphors of the incarnation, of the Trinity, redemption -- some of the things that Michael assessed for us tonight. And each of those metaphors, in a way, you might say, is a poetic device, giving an insight into who God is, but also, who God is not. When you say God is Mother, or God is Father, God is not mother or father, either. We have to look at the need to change our metaphors and also the need to re-address them throughout the ages. I ask people, how do we teach, today, the Trinity? How do we teach incarnation? Is it what we were taught twenty or thirty years ago? I don't know. And I think that is one of the areas that Michael is willing to push us to take a look at today and that's in the context of the fact that our cosmos has changed, our social and scientific development of our age.” As my dear old dad use to say... you gotta be shittin' me.
The latest from La-La Land
Here's some of the article from The California Catholic Daily; (Emphasis mine)
Cardinal Mahony honors 20 years of dissent with gala dinner
Fr. Liam Lawton sang “Danny Boy” (movingly, it was said) in her honor. Paying tribute were Cardinal Roger Mahony, and Megan McKenna, a self-described “writer, theologian, storyteller, missionary.”
All these and about 500 more were gathered Feb. 29 for a Religious Education Congress event, a dinner to honor Religious Sister of Charity Edith Prendergast, director of the Office of Religious Education for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles since 1987. As director, Sister Edith has overseen the archdiocese’s annual Religious Education Congress, a gathering of religious educators and others from California and across the U.S. that has become notorious over the years for its presenters who dissent from Church teachings.
"It has been an extraordinary experience to be associated with you in our local Church," Cardinal Roger Mahony told Sister Edith, according to the March 7 Tidings, the archdiocesan newspaper. Noting Prendergast’s “candor, civility, competence, courage and, most importantly, compassion,” Mahony said, “I cannot be more grateful to our almighty God for the gift of Sister Edith Prendergast."
Prendergast showed some theological candor in September 2002, at a talk sponsored by her office with Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. The speaker was Michael Morwood, an Australian theologian whose book, Tomorrow's Catholic: Understanding God and Jesus in a New Millennium, Archbishop George Pell of Melbourne, Australia in 1998 said contained serious doctrinal errors. When Morewood refused to retract the errors, Pell banned him from speaking publicly on the incarnation, the redemption, and the Trinity. Despite this, and Morewood’s subsequent resignation from the priesthood, Prendergast’s office offered those who attended his talk a "certificate of attendance," to go towards earning a "catechist certificate."
After Morwood’s talk, Sister Edith said he had "raised our sights and shaken us up." She said that, during Morwood’s talk, she was thinking “that the time for us involved in religious education is to rethink our story and traditions. So often I think that we are counting on images and metaphors. We have to ask the question: are they relevant to our time? Do they speak to anyone?"
Among the "metaphors" that might not "speak to anyone," Sister Edith mentioned "the metaphors of the incarnation, of the Trinity, redemption -- some of the things that Michael assessed for us tonight. And each of those metaphors, in a way, you might say, is a poetic device, giving an insight into who God is, but also, who God is not. When you say God is Mother, or God is Father, God is not mother or father, either. We have to look at the need to change our metaphors and also the need to re-address them throughout the ages. I ask people, how do we teach, today, the Trinity? How do we teach incarnation? Is it what we were taught twenty or thirty years ago? I don't know. And I think that is one of the areas that Michael is willing to push us to take a look at today and that's in the context of the fact that our cosmos has changed, our social and scientific development of our age.”
6 Comments:
I know this is a purely rhetorical question but has Ms. We Need to Change Our Metaphors noticed what the Vatican recently said about that re: Baptism?
(Like I said, a purely rhetorical question. She hasn't paid attention to the Vatican, EVER!)
It's an indictment of Rome's moral character and defense of Orthodoxy that such people are made bishops, let alone allowed to remain in the Church.
Isn't this the same Sister Edith who, while a Eucharistic minister, took Holy Communion to a priest in a hospital and fell in love with him? He left the priesthood, they got married - but she refused to leave her religious community. Despite the insistence of the Vatican that she be thrown out of the order the nun-in-charge - abbess? sister superior? provincial? - told the Vatican to stuff it.
Is that this Edith Prendergast, or another?
VSO,
You shouldn't be so critial of Catholicism overall. Especially in light that the KGB did a pretty good job of infiltrating and subsiquently infesting the priesthood of the Russian Orthodox Church, Ukrainian Orthodox Church, Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Romanian Orthodox Church, et al.
And besides... we Catholics have known for years that this garbage was going to take place. Our Lady of Akita has already warned us.
I just re-read Morwood's account of his being called to account by (then) Archbishop (now Cardinal) Pell.
Morwood says that Abp Pell summoned him and handed him a 10-page memorandum setting out his doctrinal errors, and said he would be banned from speaking at a Catholic Education Conference the next week. He gave Morwood a week to set out his defence to the charges, and said that at the end of that week, the Archdiocese would be releasing (by way of press statement) its finding of doctrinal error.
Now, this former MSC has been crying like a little girl for 10 years that Archbishop Pell didn't follow CDF procedures, etc etc etc. He claims that Pell pretty much told him that he didn't care what the pencil-necks in the theology faculties said, Pell was the Archbishop, and he knew error when he saw it!
Like a lot of people, I'm bloody glad His Grace jumped on this quickly. When these people release heretical books, they need to be slapped down by the Magesterium straight away. Farting around with CDF theological "experts" for 10 years, to work out whether a heretic is in fact a heretic, and offer him opportunities to retract etc, is too dangerous to the faith in the age of instant communications.
Morwood says:
"What Pell does is quote the Catechism of the Catholic Church again and again. Proof-text stuff. And full of scriptural and theological literalism. Subsequent events would show Pell’s total inability to move beyond the security of quoting the Catechism [pretty good way of working out whether someone is a heretic, if you ask me]. He demanded absolute, unquestioning assent to what he could quote as "church teaching" [YAY!!] and showed himself incapable of engaging in conversation about events and worldviews that shaped dogmatic thought in the early centuries [I think this means "heresies condemned by the early Church"]."
Archbishop Pell said of Morwood's work "It impugned the divinity of Christ. Behind the affirmation of the existence of God, there's nothing more central to Catholicism than the divinity of Christ, and his redemptive activity. I mean Christ didn't die to give us a good example. Christ died to - so that our sins could be forgiven."
So this guy is teaching Catechists in the US? What the hell (literally!) is Mahony thinking?!?!?
If I remember correctly, Mahony will be able to continue spreading his poison in California until 2011. It just shows the terrible damage that can be done by bad bishops. Good bishops, like Cardinal Pell, are few and far between.
Actually, when Pell was first promoted to Melbourne, one of those femo-marxist-pseudo-Catholic academics said on the far-left-public-broadcaster the ABC "Archbishop Pell is very interesting to a lot of blokes I talk to. They find him interesting I think because he’s a big bloke, he’s having a stoush, they like that sort of thing, that getting above the crowd, knocking down the ratbags, whatever.". She then goes on to say that as a woman, she finds that a "turn off". Well, lady, we need a few thousand more "big blokes knocking down the ratbags" if you ask me.
The feminists and professional fudge packers hate him with a passion. So he must be doing something right.
Yeah, getting a certiicate in Catechesis here in LA is litening to heresy. (Fortunately, I have a very strong heresy filter that I've developed studying the writings of the Saints, Tradition, and the CCC).
"Sister" Edith is the 2nd on the list of most hated people in the Archdiocese of LA in my opinion, we all know who the first is.
Teach actual catechsim and you're kicked out of the local Church for being "too conservative"
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