Three Problems in Calvinism

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Three Problems in Calvinism

W. H. Marshner

Suppose God pulls me up by my armpits to make me stand. If my legs stay jelly, does He succeed in making me stand? No. My muscles and sinews must become such that, in real terms, I am standing on them. The same is true when we take ‘stand’ more broadly to refer to our being alive and upright before God spiritually. God lifts me up by His grace to make me alive and upright. If my inner faculties remain dead as doornails, does He succeed in making me alive? If they remain utterly prostrate in sin, does He succeed in making me stand? No. My mind and will must be-come such that, in real terms, I am living-for-God in them. This point Calvinism recognizes (against Luther) and rightly so: in those whom He is saving, God accomplishes a real work of sanctification.

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Cincinnati: Archdiocese On The Brink (Part II)

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Cincinnati: Archdiocese On The Brink

By W. H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
February 27, 1975

Part II

Despite its extraordinary advantages, the Archdiocese of Cincinnati is on the brink of a peculiar kind of trouble. I called it a “crisis of confidence” in the first installment of this report, because it compromises the trust which Cincinnati’s most zealous Catholics have in their Church leadership (which means in the last analysis, their hierarchy).

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Cincinnati: Archdiocese On The Brink

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Cincinnati: Archdiocese On The Brink

By W.H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
February 20, 1975

PART I

A pastor nearing sixty, with a history of heart trouble, is transferred; the bishop assigns a younger man to take his place. An ordinary sort of event, which happens every year in every Catholic diocese, uncontroverted and unnoticed. Thus, too, in early October, 1974, Fr. Francis Flanagan is transferred from St. Bartholomew’s Parish in suburban Cincinnati to a smaller, less taxing place in the rural town of Russia, Ohio.
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Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese (Part III)

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Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
September 19, 1974

PART III

Saginaw, Mich., is a place where pastors, parents, children, even teachers (and maybe even the bishop) have to be “managed” to make them accept an utterly unnatural idea, namely, that the diocesan school system does not exist to teach the Catholic Faith but to inculcate “human values.” This amounts to saying that the diocese’s largest bloc of personnel (429 full-time, salaried teachers — almost four times the number of diocesan priests) is paid every year a giant share of the laity’s total contributions in order to do something at best — at best — tangentially related to the Catholic religion. So outlandish, in fact, is this idea that various disguises have had to be invented for it. Such as:

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Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese (Part II)

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Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
September 12, 1974

PART II

On Aug. 21st, 1968, the Saginaw News, a secular paper, carried a lengthy attack on the encyclical Humanae Vitae. That fact in itself was not remarkable, since newspapers all over America that Summer were pouring out a torrent of contempt for the Roman Catholic Church. What made the Saginaw publication special, rather, was the fact that the attack was endorsed and signed by eighteen priests active in the diocese. Perhaps on account of this treachery, their bishop, Stephen S. Woznicki, suffered a heart attack.

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Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Dioscese

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Saginaw: Portrait Of A Collapsing Diocese

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
September 5, 1974

PART I

In the rich farm country of central and eastern Michigan, graced with a vacationer’s paradise on the shores of Lake Huron, the Holy See erected the Diocese of Saginaw in 1938. Under two bishops — William F. Murphy (1938-50) and Stephen S. Woznicki (1950-68) — the young diocese grew and prospered. Then came a third bishop, Francis F. Reh, followed by ruin.

Catholic laypeople bombarded this reporter with invitations to come to Saginaw, to their living rooms and club basements, to hear the tales of

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Cardinal Danielou On The New Liturgy… A Reform Compromised By Deviant Teachings

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Cardinal Danielou On The New Liturgy … A Reform Compromised By Deviant Teachings

By W.H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
April 18, 1974

Writing in the January-February issue of the prestigious, European theological journal Communio, Jean Cardinal Danielou has called in effect for a counter-revolution in the Vatican Congregation for Divine Worship, which has long been dominated by a titular archbishop named Bugnini. Endorsing Pope Paul VI’s call for return to the use of Latin, at least in certain parts of the Mass, the French Jesuit Cardinal denounces the “radical” tendencies of the Vatican Congregation under Bugnini’s leadership — tendencies which Danielou says have led to “impoverishment” and “cultural debasement.”

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Some Priorities For the National Catechetical Directory (Part III)

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Some Priorities For
The National Catechetical Directory

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
February 21, 1974

Part (III)

The shopping list of things that ought to go into, or be kept out of, the National Catechetical Directory is too long to be contemplated in our short lifetime here below. In happier days, we had religion teachers who could figure out what to do and what not to do, once they had absorbed a few rules. Docility to the tradition of the Church kept them on a sensible path. Today, however, the religion teachers have been convinced that they should “rethink” everything and, while they’re at it, come up with radically new ways of “presenting” what they have “rethought.” The result is a complete chaos in which the teachers cannot be relied upon to respect any tradition, to un- derstand any dogma. or to avoid any idiocy. Hence, you have to tell them everything, like chimpanzees who cannot natively understand that, having put on one shoe, it is wise to put on the other as well.

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Albany Diocese Proclaims A New “Right”

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Albany Diocese Proclaims A New “Right”

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
February 14, 1974

We Americans live in a country where new and unheard-of things are being discovered all the time. This is nowhere more true than in the field of human rights. Thomas Jefferson discovered more rights than most people can remember. In our own century, F. D. Roosevelt discovered the right to be “free from fear.” Then came the Supreme Court, which only a year ago discovered that women have a right, a Constitutional right, to procure abortions. Continue reading “Albany Diocese Proclaims A New “Right””

Some Priorities For the National Catechetical Directory (Part II)

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Some Priorities For The National Catechetical Directory

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
February 7, 1974

(PART II)

Every Catholic priest, parent, and teacher has a special stake in seeing to it that there is a “next generation” of Catholics, by which I mean to suggest that, today, such a generation cannot be taken for granted. Already the decline in Mass attendance (which, admittedly, is only one yardstick, but an informative one) is “catastrophic” by all accounts. Nowhere is it more catastrophic than among young people. You don’t have to be a prophet of doom to see that instead of a “next generation,” we could easily end up with a “remnant.”

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Some Priorities For The National Catechetical Directory (Part I)

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Some Priorities For The
National Catechetical Directory

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
January 31, 1974

(PART I)

The catechetical battle, which has involved more Catholic laypeople in bruising controversy since Vatican II than any other single issue, save the liturgy, is coming to a head. During the next three months, ordinary Catholics across America will have an opportunity such as never existed before to influence the content of a crucial document which will determine the nature of Catholic religious education in this Country for years to come.

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Cardinal O’Boyle Attacks Georgetown Sex Manual

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Cardinal O’Boyle Attacks Georgetown Sex Manual

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

THE WANDERER
December 7, 1972
(Special to the Wanderer)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Six medical students at Georgetown University wrote a 46-page booklet called Human Sexual Response- Ability for the benefit of their fellow students. They were guided by a faculty advisor named Fr. Robert C. Baumiller, S.J., who is an associate professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Fr. Baumiller has already made the pages of the Wanderer (12-2-71) on this little book on sex. They claimed that the booklet was “purely informational” but that line did not wash with their Bishop, Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle. He read the thing and called it “potentially dangerous to spiritual welfare.” He got on the back of the Georgetown administration to have the booklet withdrawn as incompatible with the Catholic character of the University. The only response, however, was from school president, Fr. Robert J. Henle, who said the administration was not responsible. It was a student project and hence, not “official” he said. Nobody here but us chickens.

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Fr. McManus Stunned By Vatican Moves

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Fr. McManus Stunned By Vatican Moves

W. H. Marshner

THE WANDERER
(Special to The Wanderer)
October 26, 1972

DETROIT — Fr. Frederick R. McManus, director of the secretariat of the Bishops Committee on the Liturgy, denounced steps taken by the Holy See in recent months to regulate intercommunion, sacramental absolution, and minor orders as “negative indications of retrenchment and misunderstanding.” McManus made the remarks during a “State Of The Liturgy” address to the national meeting of the Federation of Diocesan Liturgical Commissions, held here October 9th through 13th.

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National Congress on the Word of God: A Two-Edged Sword

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National Congress On The Word Of God: A Two-Edged Sword

By WILLIAM H. MARSHNER

The Wanderer
September 21, 1972

WASHINGTON, D.C. — When Rome was informed that a national effort would be made in Washington this September to produce a renewal in preaching, Cardinal Villot dispatched a letter to Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle expressing the Holy Father’s delight at the idea and his blessing upon the enterprise. One sentence in that letter sums up the advice Rome wanted to give to the American sponsors and participants: “In short, preaching must proceed,” Villot said, “from deep conviction, serious learning, and loving compassion.”

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The Americanization Of J. Christ

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The Americanization Of J. Christ

New Mass for Independence Day

W. H. MARSHNER

Triumph
Vol. VII No. 4
April 1972

It was only a matter of time before we should be given this new Mass for civic occasions, because by now the liturgy club is really interested only in politics. Recall, for example, that the last meeting of the Liturgical Conference was devoted to the topic of revolution, the rationale for which was an elaborate business about liturgy expressing the needs of contemporary men in concrete situations of injustice. But the reason for it, of course, was the simple fact that politics is the ersatz religion of our time, and those who lose supernatural faith most commonly turn to the going ersatz. Continue reading “The Americanization Of J. Christ”