Monday, August 13, 2012

Hermitage for Heresy in Collegeville


Edit: How is this not religious indifferentism? An alleged monk from Collegeville is going on a hermitage to look for new ways to violate the Catholic religion. This is from their website at St. John's Abbey.
The Nada Hermitages of the Spiritual Life Institute (the name of the Carmelite complex) thus became my base of operations as I visited most of the twenty-two religious and spiritual organizations and networks that are now part of the "Refuge for World Truths" in this area outside Crestone. Several lineages of Tibetan Buddhists, two Zen Buddhist centers, a Hindu ashram, a Neo-Shinto international Japanese organization, in addition to the Carmelite hermitages, are a few of the representative groups now in place. Nada was one of the religious organizations that had been offered land to build a retreat center here. A visionary couple who bought up an old Spanish land grant in the region decided, on the basis of prophetic inspiration, to offer free tracts of land to diverse religious and spiritual groups to settle in this restricted geographical area. Their hope was that this collection of spiritual diversity would promote the notion, so sorely needed in our day and age, that peoples with very different systems of belief and practice could live and thrive in harmony together.

He's actually attempting to justify his "hermitage" by essentially vitiating and contradicting one of the principles of the Catholic religion. It's certainly uppermost in the life of a Monk. Rather than converting the heathen, he's attempting to "discover ways to live in harmony" with the heathen.

Isn't that sort of pointless? When was the last time there was any kind of tension between Catholics and Buddhists? Except when the Buddhists murdered Jesuits in Tibet, I can't think of any, at least not recently. Catholic Encyclopedia defines indifferentism like this:
The term given, in general, to all those theories, which, for one reason or another, deny that it is the duty of man to worship God by believing and practicing the one true religion. This religious Indifferentism is to be distinguished from political indifferentism, which is applied to the policy of a state that treats all the religions within its borders as being on an equal footing before the law of the country. Indifferentism is not to be confounded with religious indifference. The former is primarily a theory disparaging the value of religion; the latter term designates the conduct of those who, whether they do or do not believe in the necessity and utility of religion, do in fact neglect to fulfil its duties.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whaaat? No muslims??? That is about the only religion on earth that needs to learn to play nice with the other kiddies.

I don't know why this monk is being singled out. John Paul II did it first. Benedict XVI does it now.

In many languages "nada" means "nothing." At least the hermitage is appropriately named.

Tancred said...

As scandalous as John Paul II's appearances were, they didn't constitute the flagrant rejection of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus this does.

Elizabeth D said...

One of St John's more recent vocations was Fr John Meoska, who was first a diocesan priest who then decided years ago he had a vocation to the Spiritual Life Institute (which according to Fr Meoska is a secular institute of diocesan right), then after a shakeup in SLI following (apparently) the laicization of their founder Fr William McNamara OCD he decided to join St John's Abbey and is currently in temporary vows. SLI indeed has a considerable history of religious indifferentism, doctrinal problems, misrepresenting the nature of their group as "religious life", a "monastery" with an "abbess" etc. Since it is a secular hermit group that includes both men and women, these misrepresentations are somewhat serious. However it should be said, sending a monk on sabbatical to SLI is not as grave as sending a St John's brother on sabbatical to the basically interdicted formerly Catholic Holy Wisdom Monastery of "Benedictine nuns" in Wisconsin that has a lay led "Eucharist"--which happened recently.

Tancred said...

Yes, that was Brother Paul Richards who until a few years back, headed their boys choir.