Hey, Lad, while I see +Fenton's point (to a degree) he has as much authority as Fr Wathen or Fr Hesse (a canon lawyer), whom you brush aside as not part of the magisterium. If you're going to be consistent, then don't hold up +Fenton as some inerrant authority. His opinion is not gospel.
The Point - May 1953"...Of these doctrinal dictators, the three outstanding are Father Francis J. Connell, C. Ss. R., Monsignor Joseph C. Fenton, and Monsignor Matthew Smith. These three priests
have emerged from nowhere to set themselves up as the official and unquestioned American theologians. Not even the Pope is able to speak to American Catholics without their mediation. His pronouncements require their interpretations, which infallibly follow, in order to make them clear and to show what he was really trying to say.
The opinions and interpretations of Fathers Connell, Fenton, and Smith are disseminated by means of one journal, one university, and many newspapers. These are, respectively, The American Ecclesiastical Review, of which Fenton is the editor and Connell the associate editor; the Catholic University of America, at which Fenton was, and Connell is, Dean of the School of Theology; and the newspapers that print articles issued by the National Catholic Welfare Conference, of which Connell is the star performer, together with the Denver Register, of which Smith is the editor and featured columnist.
Properly speaking, Monsignor Smith is not a professional theologian at all, but only a journalist with a flair for theological dabbling. Connell and Fenton are really the original thinkers, issuing their proclamations from the nation’s capital. Smith is merely their parrot, the voice out of the West. His job is to see to it, by means of his newspaper, that American Catholics are informed of the opinions Connell and Fenton have decided they ought to have. However, he does his job so faithfully and so well — besides which he often adds bright touches and anecdotes of his own — that he deserves to rank with the other two.
Father Connell specializes in giving the “Catholic position” on the latest newspaper headlines. There is not a single curiosity or scandal that he fails to notice and to comment on for the edification of American Catholics. Typical of his unholy interests and faithless comments is the article he wrote last year during the “flying saucer” ruckus. Asking himself the question, how could men on other planets be redeemed, he casually elaborated a scheme of multiple Incarnations and reincarnations of the Persons of the Blessed Trinity, a scheme which turns Our Lady from Virgo Singularis into just one of the mothers of one of the Divine Persons who became man.
Monsignor Fenton likes to make it appear that he is terribly strong and intransigent on the matter of dogma, and that he is persecuted on account of this by those with more liberal ideas. However, as is plainly evident to any long-term reader of Fenton’s Ecclesiastical Review, there is no lasting difference between him and the liberals; he merely says what they say two years later.
In his interpretations of the doctrine “no salvation outside the Church,” his prize interpretations, Fenton lays down conditions for non-Catholic salvation that are so rigid and far-fetched that practically no one can meet them. (This is to show his “terrible strength.”) However, it does not bother him that those who want to go all out for getting non-Catholics into Heaven, do so using his reasons and his authority. All the liberals need is one little loophole, which Fenton gives. Through that loophole, the liberals are able, in their need, to squeeze every Protestant and Jєω in America.
The Faith is meant to be something clear and simple, which the Holy Father can teach us in innocent terms, and every man can and must know for his salvation and his happiness. But as long as Fathers Fenton, Connell and Smith are running the show, the Faith is going to be presented as something obscure and esoteric — something that can be known by no one but these priests, and those to whom it shall please them to reveal it.
BY FATHER FEENEY"
Topic: Bergolio says that there are many American Catholics who won’t accept Vatican II (Read 21763 times)