As a member of the magical fraternity my eyes were immediately drawn to this piece of news. It's not uncommon for people to tell me how doing 'magic' is against God's word and how by doing it in church I am bringing in the devil and like a great many people out there, information or knowledge doesn't help them move forward with that view. And so it was, with interest that I began reading, only to find that the 'magic circle' is in fact the:
"Back-slapping, foot-dragging liberals of the (Roman Catholic) Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales (BCEW)."
This is the view of the conservative Catholic magazine, 'Catholic World Report' (CWR), a magazine which is a favourite read of benedict himself!
The article, by Dominic Scarborough, slags the 'circle' off big style as a bunch of 'lazy and sneakily disloyal prelates' and explains how the BCWE is a rigid bureaucratic structure centered on the idea of the central committee, employing a 'plethora' of professional lay and clerical sub-committees, all paid for by the ordinary Catholics it claims to represent. The irony is that the pursuit of this agenda has been to the detriment of halting the decline of the very working-class, “grass-roots” Catholicism that once gave the bishops a legitimate voice on issues of real social concern.
Forget Bennie's visit or being obedient, the BCEW devotes more time to frustrating the initiatives of Benedict XVI than to implementing them! The Ordinariate and the grim spectre it brings of 'large numbers of Anglo-Catholic clergy becoming a semi-autonomous part of the Catholic Church in England' does not find favour with the BCEW (which, says the article, "Has greeted every development in the progress toward the first English ordinariate with sighs and fear."
For those thinking they're heading to the promised land, I suggest this is an essential read:
Outside the Magic Circle
Seems all is perhaps not rosy on the banks of the Thames or the Tiber!
1 comment:
Although the Church or England's refugees see themselves as Catholics in that they bring pre-Vatican 2 attitudes they also bring a liberality and a 'self-importance' that denies submission and is potentially as damaging to stone as women are to the Church of England.
The article you refer to is an accurate assessment.
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