In his March 2013 MHT Newsletter, the rector labeled the current Sacred College of Cardinals as "an extraordinary collection of losers." While it may be true that the college is no longer Catholic, its members are far better educated than the insult-spitting rector who's only allowed admission to the déclassé Traddie peanut gallery. As we've seen before, despite all his posturing, he simply can't get his ecclesiastical terminology correct. His turgid rant against the pupurati Patres contains two serious, though seemingly minor, errors, both of which lay bare his terminal amateurism: He's manifestly lost in alien, unfamiliar terrain where he can't quite get his bearings.
We stepped on the first of the gut-churning, steaming-hot errors where he writes of the "cardinalatial losers." Oh, for sure, cardinalatial rolls unctuously, even luxuriantly off the tongue, like the even-running cadence of the cursus planus -- DUM didi DUM di -- and the malapropism rhymes with palatial, a descriptor dear to the sordidly aspirational sede big dogs. Also, it sounds impressive: a polysyllabic adjective, very technical looking, very elegant, the kind of word a real Roman churchman would use. Yes, indeedy doo-doo, we can imagine how the Traddie Trash reacted when the newsletter arrived at their trailers:
"Car-dinn-uh-laayy-shul! Yee-haw! That ol' rector's the jen-you-wine article, ain't 'ee, Ma? Let's us raid the youngins' milk money 'n' make a another dough-naayy-shun!"
Trouble is ... like "One-Hand" and the Blunderer... he isn't the real thing, and his spelling of the word is sooo wrong. The right form is cardinalitial, with an i, not an a.* What's funny is that the right spelling retains (for the unschooled) all the meretricious attractions of the wrong. That means the rector could've gotten it right and still been able to show off for the spellbound riff-raff. (Maybe that's why the word rhymes with artificial.) Instead, he chose to count on his own very imperfect knowledge...and thereby embarrassed himself once again, as usual.
His foul smelling, groaning number 2 error, a bilious slurry of ignorance, is even more gross. Take a deep breath and look closely (if you've got the stomach) at what he rector wrote!
"As the Novus Ordo Cardinal of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio tried to persuade..."
As educated Catholics remember it, there is no such animal as the cardinal of Buenos Aires (or of any other city for that matter): there's only an archbishop of Buenos Aires. Informally the incumbent may be called the "cardinal-archbishop" of Buenos Aires (if he's got a "red hat"), but never the cardinal of Buenos Aires. Except for the cardinal-bishops of the suburbicarian dioceses, the other cardinals -- the cardinal-priests and the cardinal-deacons -- strictly belong to the diocese of Rome, albeit many of them are also the supreme ecclesiastical rulers of dioceses located away from Rome. (Cardinals who were not ordinaries were bound to reside in Rome.) Hence, Bergoglio as archbishop belonged to the metropolitan see of Buenos Aires as its ordinary, a diocesan bishop with authority over other bishops. When he was first installed there in 1998, he was only a bishop; after his creation as cardinal in 2001, he was the bishop of Buenos Aires and the cardinal-priest of San Roberto Bellarmino in the diocese of Rome, where in the latter capacity he had the duty to serve as a counselor to the pope and to elect his successor.
This is elementary. It should be reflex knowledge** in any Catholic clergyman (but sadly not in Traddielandia). The foul error is just more evidence that the rector and his running buddies are far from being the real McCoy. Let hard-shell, nose-picking, cultie misfits think the rector and his sidekicks are erudite. The rest of us know better. The cult masters' compass direction differs significantly from the true Catholic heading: there's simply too much variation and deviation error to rely on their broken instrument to land-navigate without losing one's way the treacherous geography of the prolonged crisis in the Church.
If attending the cult's Masses is convenient for you, then by all means do it. However, when the rector and/or his down-market, Toon-Town, clown-posse speak, just blissfully turn a deaf ear.
You won't miss a thing, and you surely won't get lost.
* Like the rector, many other undereducated writers, having in mind the word cardinalate, guess in their incapacitating ignorance that the adjective form of the word cardinal is "cardinalatial." However, a good American unabridged dictionary or the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary will supply the correct form, at least for anyone motivated enough to look it up. Naturally, people who actually can and do read papal and curial documents in the original Latin have often come across the phrase dignitas cardinalitia, which serves as a corrective to the regularly seen vulgar error of uninformed English-speakers. Additionally, educated people who understand Latin word-formation realize that the suffix is added to the stem cardinal-, not to cardinalat- (the -ate of "cardinalate" is itself the suffix of office -ātu). But the rector doesn't know these things, hence the nasty, hot mess.
** He made this stinker of an error a second time in the same newsletter mailing: "Available on the Internet for all to watch is a video of a children's Mass in Buenos Aires when he was Cardinal" (read archbishop or, informally, cardinal-archbishop, if the event occurred after his elevation).
Interesting. One could probably get a different impression in regards to the Roman suburbican Sees, titular Churches and Deaconries when one considers the very modern practise of not granting Roman Churches to Patriarchs of the non-Latin world. If I remember correctly, their Patriarchal See becomes a quasi-titualar Church pro hac vice.
ReplyDeleteIt is doubtful, therefore, that these oriental Cardinals can be called part of the Roman clergy or suffragans of the Bishop of Rome properly speaking.
But whether it is fitting to call them the Cardinal of their non-Roman See - which their titular Church would indicate - I cannot say, as their cardinalitial rank and function has nothing to do with their capacity as Ordinary of their See but only serves the Roman Pontiff or the election of the same.
But of course, in the case of Bergoglio, no doubt remains.
In his 1965 motu proprio "Ad purpuratorum Patrum," Montini attached the eastern-rite patriarchs to the episcopal order of cardinals but excluded them from holding a suburbicarian title and from membership in the Roman clergy ("nullius dioecesis suburbicariae titulo augebuntur nec ad clerum Urbis pertinebunt"). These decisions have been incorporated in the new Code (350).
DeleteIn spite of all the protocol changes wrought by the leveling Monitini, we cannot imagine that even today the Maronite primate, for instance, whose title is his see, would ever be officially called "the Cardinal of Antioch and all the East." No see, no matter how prestigious, possesses the right to the cardinalate.