Fr John Trigilio Responds to Commonweal Editorial

Fr Trigilio has issued the following (unedited) response to a recent editorial in Commonweal magazine:

As President of the Confraternity of Catholic Clergy (a 31 year old national association of 700 priests and deacons) and as a pastor and a diocesan priest ordained for more than 18 years, I personally and professionally repudiate the premise contained in your recent editorial (Tomorrow's Priests). I entered the seminary in 1976 after graduating from eighth grade (parochial school) and continued from high school seminary to college seminary to major seminary until ordination in 1988. During those twelve years of seminary, I saw and heard a lot. Likewise, in the subsequent eighteen years of priesthood, mostly in parish ministry with a brief stint in Tribunal and Hospital Chaplaincy ministry, my experience is certainly not insignificant.

First, the assertion that two major groups exist(ed) in the seminary (either doctrinally orthodox to Rome or pastorally open to collaboration with the people) is inaccurate at best and deceptive at worst. During the later years of the pontificate of Pope Paul VI when I entered High School Seminary, there was a general malaise prolific in many minor and major seminaries. Faculty members who had hoped the reforms of Vatican II would have led to further and more revolutionary changes (priestly celibacy, women's ordination, etc.) were hoping that P6's successor would open the doors and not just the windows (as did J23). Faith and morals were considered 'fluid' and 'malleable' in that they could and needed to adapt to the times, or so this group thought. Immutable doctrines and absolute moral laws were relics of the past, they maintained. Many of these theological and liturgical 'hippies' were the ones who ran the seminaries and therefore sought to remake the mold used to form the contemporary priest.

Collaboration with the laity was not their real agenda anymore than was subsidiarity. True, this group was unmistakably prone to dissent from Magisterial teaching (as evidenced by their enthusiastic embrace of Charles Curran and his dissent from Humanae Vitae) and were certainly not concerned or preoccupied with loyalty to Rome. Yet, they were not the populist saviors they purported to be. Recall in Church History when Martin Luther inaugurated the Protestant Reformation in the 16 th century. He convinced Bishops, priests and laity to rebel against Papal authority with the simultaneous rebellion of the kings, princes, and barons against the secular Imperial authority. Once the Pope and the Emperor were out of the way, however, those in power made sure the dominoes stopped falling. The Peasant's Revolt was mercilessly crushed by the aristocracy with the full support and encouragement of Luther and other clerics. The poor peasants only followed logic when they saw the episcopacy revolt against the papacy and saw the aristocracy revolt against the monarchy. They were unaware of the fact that revolutionaries often depose authority so as to replace it with their own brand. Likewise, some of the extreme radicals of the post-Vatican II church sought to sever their doctrinal and disciplinary obedience to Rome but to keep intact their own fascist control over their subordinates.

Prior to the papacy of JP2, the other group in the seminary was indeed loyal to the Magisterium and obedient to the Roman Pontiff. Sarcastically labeled as 'traditionalist' or 'rigid,' those of us who wished to be faithful to the hierarchical structure intended and founded by Christ when He personally established the Church with Saint Peter, were in the minority and had no influence whatsoever....

A clear and lucid repudiation of the revisionists' attempts to obscure the truth. This is really another of the "MUST READ" articles for every faithful Catholic.