Remnant News Watch

Fr. Gommar A. DePauw, R.I.P.

Traditionalist pioneer Fr. Gommar A. DePauw, founder of the Catholic Traditionalist Movement (CTM), passed away on Friday, May 6, 2005. Born in Belgium in 1918, Gommar Albert DePauw graduated magna cum laude as a Diplomate in Classical Humanities from the College of St. Nicholas. He entered the diocesan seminary of Ghent, Belgium, and fought as a combat medic with the 9th Belgian Infantry Hunters Regiment in the campaigns of Belgium, Holland, and France, where, at the Battle of Dunkirk, he was taken prisoner.

Upon completion of his theological studies he was, by special indult of the Holy See, ordained to the priesthood in 1942, at the age of 23; post-graduate studies followed at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he became a Bachelor in Canon Law and received a triple major Licentiate (Ph.D. in the USA) in Canon Law, Moral Theology and Church History. Fr. De Pauw served for two years as a parish priest in Manhattan and the Bronx and, in 1953, was promoted to Doctor of Canon Law by the Catholic University of America.

Beginning in 1952, he held the chair of Moral Theology and Canon Law at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, where he also served as Professor of Fundamental Dogmatic Theology, Dean of Studies and Associate Professor of Philosophy. In November of 1965, the Holy See placed Fr. DePauw under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Tivoli-Rome, in order to enable him to resume the leadership of the CTM, publicly launched by him the previous March, and to eventually establish the Ave Maria Chapel in Westbury, New York.

Between 1962 and 1965, Fr. De Pauw participated in the Second Vatican Council as an officially recognized “personal expert” and “procurator.” During that Council, the Vatican Secretary of State, Amleto Cardinal Cicognani, personally promoted Fr. De Pauw to Domestic Prelate, with the title of Right Reverend Monsignor. In 2000, Fr. DePauw was honored by the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England, which recognized him as one of the “Men of the Millennium” and one of the “World’s Outstanding Speakers.”

Comment: Fr. Gommar DePauw literally poured out his life into his priestly ministry, and there were times when, with his health failing, it seemed as though he made it through Mass solely by sheer force of will. And, in the middle of all that, he had to deal constantly with the enemies he had made as a Traditionalist priest. One time, local government buffoons accused him of introducing toxic matter into the sewer system. What was the “toxic” matter? It was incense! May this tireless priest now enjoy the fruits of his earthly trials and labors.

Pope Benedict XVI To Meet Head of WCC

Ekklesia reports (May 11, 2005) that Pope Benedict XVI will meet with the General Secretary of the World Council of Churches (WCC), the Rev. Dr. Samuel Kobia, from June 12-14, 2005. The announcement was made in a press conference at the Conference on World Mission and Evangelism in Athens, Greece. The Catholic Church has observer status with the WCC, but participates fully in certain aspects of its work.

The WCC, which is made up of 347 Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican churches across the world, is facing declining finances, and insiders say that its ninth general assembly, scheduled to take place in Porto Alegre, Brazil in February of 2006, will be “crunch time.” While relations between the mainline Protestants who make up the bulk of the WCC’s membership and Orthodox churches around the world have been tense in the post-Cold War period, the WCC is seeking to reach out to the fast-growing Evangelical and Pentecostal churches who mostly sit outside organized ecumenical conversation and cooperation.

In a letter to the newly-elected Pope Benedict, the WCC’s Dr. Kobia emphasized that the ecclesiological vision of the Second Vatican Council has been “open to all ecclesial values present among Christians of other traditions,” and therefore “has prompted, encouraged and strengthened the commitment of the Roman Catholic faithful to the journey towards encountering their sisters and brothers in Christ and experiencing the real, though imperfect, communion with them”.

According to Ekklesia, “the meeting between Dr. Kobia and Pope Benedict will occur at a crossroad point for the world’s historic churches, with the settlements of the long Christendom era seriously in question, but the emergent face of the church still up for grabs.”

Comment: On August 6, 2000, then-Cardinal Josef Ratzinger, Prefect of the Office of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), signed the Declaration, Dominus Iesus: On the Unicity and Salvific Universality of Jesus Christ and the Church. One-time Mel Gibson/Gospel-bashing “Ad Hoc Scholar,” Fr. John T. Pawlikowski, was attending a meeting of the World Council of Churches in Geneva on the weekend after the declaration was issued. In a BeliefNet article entitled, Is “Dominus Iesus” A Shadow Over the New Papacy, Fr. Pawlikowski stated that “the General Secretary of the WCC expressed his anger over the document as a breach of the trust that had been created between Protestants and Catholics after the Second Vatican Council in the early 1960s.”

What was it that so ruffled the WCC’s feathers? Dominus Iesus was, at best, a halfhearted attempt to give some meager pride of place to the Catholic Church in the matter of salvation. It restated the Vatican II teachings (from the Dogmatic Constitution, Lumen gentium) that “there is an historical continuity — rooted in the apostolic succession — between the Church founded by Christ and the Catholic Church,” and that “this Church, constituted and organized as a society in the present world, subsists in the Catholic Church, governed by the Successor of Peter and by the Bishops in communion with him.”

No one was impressed. Moreover, to demonstrate just how useless have been the ecumenical initiatives of the past 40 years, Dominus Iesus did little more than anger Protestants, who have no business commenting on Catholic pronouncements anyway, while bringing a yawn to Traditionalists. Well, perhaps some folks were impressed. “Conservative” Catholics, desperate for anything coming from Rome that even resembled a doctrinal stand, thought rather highly of the declaration.

How far down the path of doctrinal impotence has false ecumenism brought us when Ekklesia feels it has to point out, as though it were something truly curious, that the new Pope “is known to be a strong advocate of the primacy of the Petrine office.” Imagine a contemporary Pope thinking such a thing! And what has changed in the ecumenical landscape since 2000 and Dominus Iesus, when the WCC members danced their little jigs of anger over the merest hint that the Catholic Church might consider herself something “special” in the spiritual landscape?

It remains to be seen what comes out of this meeting between Pope Benedict XVI and Dr. Kobia of the WCC. Is the Holy Father merely trying to prove his commitment to John Paul’s vision (whatever that was) of “unity?” We would like to think that the Vicar of Christ – any Vicar of Christ – would meet with the sects comprising the WCC in order to urge their return to the fold. But just how likely is that? In a Zenit article (September 5, 2000) entitled, Are Believers of Other Religions Saved, we read the following:

In speaking of the universal character of the Church’s salvation with a Lutheran, Cardinal Ratzinger said that “we all recognize objectively that the Church should be one, and we should all desire to find ourselves in a renewed Catholic Church on the road toward the future. However, this objective necessity must be distinguished from the state of conscience of persons who learn their faith in their community and are nourished by the world of God in it.” This state of conscience impedes some Christians from understanding the importance and necessity of unicity and the unity of the Church.

And just for good measure, the online Wikipedia encyclopedia states that the WCC has done the following:

- Donated $85,000 to the Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe in 1978, months after the group shot down an airliner, killing 38 of the 56 passengers on board. Terrorists killed 10 survivors.

- Supported revolutionary left wing “liberation movements” in Central America, Africa, and East Asia.

Pope Benedict and the WCC? St. Paul might have a question to ask about this pairing: “What concord hath Christ with Belial?” It is incumbent upon concerned Catholics to offer up prayers for our new Pope every day.

Catholics & Anglicans Issue Joint Document on Mary

In May 16, 2005, a document entitled Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ was officially launched by the “Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission” (ARCIC) at St. James Cathedral in Seattle. The document, sponsored by the Anglican Consultative Council and the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, was five years in the making and was completed in February, 2004. While it has not yet been accepted by either the Vatican or the Archbishop of Canterbury as an authoritative declaration, it has been made public to encourage further study and evaluation.

ARCIC co-chairmen Archbishop Alexander Brunett of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Seattle and Archbishop Peter Carnley, Primate of the Anglican Church of Australia, were present at the celebration at St. James Cathedral. The Anglican co-secretary of ARCIC, the Rev. Canon Gregory Cameron, announced that “It is our hope that all Christians will be helped by this statement to understand why Mary has been a figure of such significance.” The London launch for the document took place at Westminster Abbey on May 19th.

Founded in 1970, the “Anglican Roman Catholic International Commission” (ARCIC) states that’s its aim is “to discover each other’s faith as it is today and to appeal to history only for enlightenment, not as a way of perpetuating past controversy.”

The two noteworthy affirmations contained in Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ are:

Paragraph 58: We can affirm together the teaching that God has taken the Blessed Virgin Mary in the fullness of her person into his glory as consonant with Scripture and that it can, indeed, only be understood in the light of Scripture. Roman Catholics can recognize that this teaching about Mary is contained in the dogma.

Paragraph 59: In view of her vocation to be the mother of the Holy One (Luke 1:35), we can affirm together that Christ’s redeeming work reached back in Mary to the depths of her being, and to her earliest beginnings. This is not contrary to the teaching of Scripture, and can only be understood in the light of Scripture. Roman Catholics can recognize in this what is affirmed by the dogma – namely “preserved from all stain of original sin” and “from the first moment of her conception.”

While the Commission does not resolve the differences between Anglicans and Catholics regarding the two dogmas, the document’s creators believe that, if the arguments laid forth in Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ were accepted by both sides, this “would place the questions about authority which arise from the two [papal Marian] definitions of 1854 and 1950 in a new ecumenical context.”

According to the BBC (“Church Scholars Offer Mary Accord”, May 17, 2005), Anglican Archbishop Carnley said that future discussions would help ease deep-rooted disagreements and, for Anglicans, the old complaint that the dogmas about Mary were not provable by scripture “will disappear.”

Comment: Given the utter futility and destructive nature of modern ecumenism, it’s natural to be skeptical about yet another “joint declaration,” even though, unlike similar ventures between, say, Catholics and Lutherans or Jews, Catholic doctrine is not jettisoned in Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ.

There was a reason that went beyond mere sociological considerations for the “Oxford Movement” of the 19th-century. It was, indeed, a response to rationalism and liberalism, but it was also driven by hunger. Unlike most Protestants, many Anglicans seem to be aware, at least on some level, that their sect has been basically “playing Catholic” since its inception, what with its vestments, cathedrals and pomp-and-circumstance liturgies. Considering the novelty of a female clergy and an increasingly aggressive assault by the homosexual agenda from within, is it any wonder that many Anglicans, like their Oxford Movement forerunners, would desire a return to apostolic roots and perennial doctrine?

It would be foolish to imagine a sudden mass conversion of Anglicans to the Church of their forefathers. However, some small inroads may be made regarding “true” ecumenism, if our Catholic leaders can keep their heads, for some Anglican leaders are not hostile to the Church of Rome. For instance, an ARCIC document titled Authority in the Church (1977) states: “Yet the primacy, rightly understood, implies that the Bishop of Rome exercises his oversight in order to guard and promote the faithfulness of all the churches to Christ and one another. Communion with him is intended as a safeguard of the catholicity of each local church, and as a sign of the communion of all the churches.” Compare this to the statement made by the drafters of Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ to the effect that an agreement on Marian doctrine “would place the questions about authority which arise from the two [papal Marian] definitions of 1854 and 1950 in a new ecumenical context.”

Granted, there are still more than enough Anglican churchmen who have no use at all for the Pope and the Church of Rome. But who better to melt hearts than the Immaculata? If influential Anglicans can bring themselves to accept the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Assumption, perhaps they can then ponder over the Real Presence. And the Papacy. It would be a short step from that to a sober evaluation of history, an evaluation which would show up the “Reformation” for the noxious blight on the world that it was.

The onus, of course, will be on the Catholic members of ARCIC. If they do not crown their labors by inviting their non-Catholic colleagues into the Catholic Church, if they do not bring the matter around to the “nitty-gritty” – salvation – then their labors can bear no fruit, for such labors would be lacking in charity. Unfortunately, our Catholic churchmen don’t think like this any more, so we can only hope that some Anglicans will be able to “read between the lines.”

Of course, this is all wishful thinking. But everything in the Traditional Catholic world doesn’t always have to be doom and gloom. Perhaps some, perhaps even a very, very few, Anglicans will come to realize that, in the Church of Rome, you can, indeed, “go home again.” After all, it is definitely not about numbers: “What man of you that hath a hundred sheep, and if he shall lose one of them, doth he not leave the ninety-nine in the desert and go after that which was lost, until he find it?”

“Shoeless Jonah Jackson”

According to the Associated Press (May 10, 2005), archaeologists in Great Britain have discovered a 2,000-year-old shoe hidden in a hollow tree used to construct an ancient well near Wellington in southwest England. It was found when the owners of Whitehall Quarry began working in the area, where a Bronze Age iron-smelting site had been discovered in 1989. Nearby, researchers found two water troughs, along with two timber-lined wells, preserved by waterlogging and probably dating from the early part of the Iron Age (700 BC to AD 43).

One of the wells had been constructed over a spring using a hollowed tree trunk set into the ground. The shoe was discovered when the trunk was removed from the site so that its contents could be excavated under laboratory conditions. The shoe was the first of its kind found in Britain, while those found to date throughout Europe numbers only “in the tens.” The length of the shoe, twelve inches in length, suggests that its owner was male.

“As far as we know, this is the oldest shoe ever found in the United Kingdom,” said Stephen Reed, head of the team from Exeter Archaeology which discovered the artifact on the site of a modern day quarry. “It is reasonably well-preserved, with stitch and lace holes still visible in the leather.” The shoe is now being studied by conservationists in Salisbury, southwest England, and is expected to be displayed at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter.

Comment: Back in the late 1970’s, I had the pleasure of attending two exhibits in New York City. One was the King Tut Exhibit; the other was the Pompeii exhibit. The Tut exhibit was full of finery, precious objects and the remnants of ancient Egyptian royalty. The Pompeii exhibit contained everyday artifacts found at the sight of Pompeii, destroyed by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. I went to see the Pompeii exhibit twice, and it impressed me far more than the Tut display ever could. I was fascinated by the everyday things that had once been used by the people of ancient Italy, intrigued simply because of the humble history of the artifacts. These things had been in people’s homes and shops, all those centuries ago. There was a cheese-strainer, a gizmo for heating wine and, my favorite, a cave canem (“beware of dog”) sign, along with mosaics and household implements.

The world is so full of bad news, really bad news. And, then, every so often comes a story like this one about a very old shoe, a story which causes us to stop, look back and imagine how people lived in a different time. It is a true “human interest” story, on a grand scale, and it is likewise a genuine pleasure to see people getting so excited over the discovery of an ancient shoe! Would that everyone had the imagination to appreciate this find. The world would be a more enjoyable place for it.