Horizon

I'd say that the Church has a perfect right to remove people from its hierarchy if they don't conform to the basic beliefs of the Church. If they have any right at all, they must have the right to sanction their officers if they misbehave (subject of course to some due process).

Is it the continued existence of canon law courts that's surprising to you, or the concept of heresy itself?

It would be one thing if a religious body chose to exclude one of its members: any organization can continue only by defining what it is and isn't. It also makes sense to hold a hearing about whether to exclude a member accused of acting inconsistently with the organization's principles.

But that's not all of what's going on here. As one commenter notes above, this priest has already left. So the question isn't whether to exclude him from membership. The Catholic Church here is actually claiming the right to judge this man in a spiritual sense in order to impose or withhold his eternal damnation. It is doing so by the same mechanism that condemned Galileo to life imprisonment.

That shouldn't raise a few eyebrows?

The Catholic Church here is actually claiming the right to judge this man in a spiritual sense in order to impose or withhold his eternal damnation.

Erm, it's always done that, although in this case the automatic excommunication he incurred a few ywars ago was sufficient for that -- the trial would be wholly redundant for such a purpose.

The question is why the Church is holding such a public trial. For the last few decades, there have been a lot of problems with non-Roman Catholic groups setting up churches that look and feel Catholic, and attracting members who think they're attending a Roman Catholic church. This has been most successful in Florida, where Pentecostal denominations are setting up "Iglesias Catolicas" to attract recent immigrants, complete with a pentecostal preacher in vestments and statues of Our Lady of Guadelupe. It's also been successful among schismatic Traditionalist groups of the Mel Gibson's dad's sort.

In cases like this, it's entirely reasonable for the church to publicly distance itself from individual non-RC churches, movements and indivuals. I don't know if that's what's going on here — there was a thead on the heresy trial over at Amy Welborn's a couple of days ago, but I didn't read any of the comments. The ex-priest's statements ("I am not Roman Catholic") don't seem to fit that pattern, and the heresy trial isn't how the Florida cases were handled.

What happened to Alan's comment?

Just skimmed the comments over at Amy Welborn's post on the subject. In addition to a few predictable arguments over press coverage and Gallileo, there are a few comments by local people familiar with the situation.

See especially the comments "Posted by: janey at Dec 14, 2005 1:03:52 PM", "Posted by: Stephen at Dec 13, 2005 11:02:08 PM", and "Posted by: Old Zhou at Dec 13, 2005 1:44:16 PM". Consensus seems to be that the whole thing could have been handled better with a press conference.

What happened to Alan's comment?

Sorry, I think I accidentally deleted it.

I didn't delete it so I think the spam algorithms must have done it. For the record, Alan began the discussion in comments with the following:

"Since the defend[a]nt isn't attending the court, doesn't care if he is found guilty and won't have his life altered in any way even if he is, it's not really clear to me what he's whining about."

The Catholic Church here is actually claiming the right to judge this man in a spiritual sense.

Well, erm, yes. The Catholic Church is a religion. I was under the impression that that was the very business they were in.

(The missing starter comment is a mystery to me).

I suspect the missing comment was the first collateral damage in Alan Hogue's War Against Spam.

Incidentally, it looks like Alan Allport's comment was incorrect: to the extent that potential attendees of the defendant's retreat centers would be swayed by the trial and its attendant publicity, he may be harmed by the heresy trial — either by damage to his reputation or to his livelihood.

It is doing so by the same mechanism that condemned Galileo to life imprisonment.

Also, a word about this is in order. As Koestler pointed out in The Sleepwalkers, Galileo's punishment sounds a whole lot worse in retrospect than it actually was.

"The Dialogue was prohibited; Galileo was to abjure the Copernican opinion, was sentenced to 'formal prison during the Holy Office's pleasure'; and for three years to come was to repeat once a week the seven penitential psalms. He was then presented with the formula of abjuration, which he read out. And that was the end of it. The 'formal prison' took the form of a sojourn at the Grand Duke's villa at Trinita del Monte, followed by a sojourn in the palace of Archbishop Piccolomino in Siena, where, according to a French visitor, Galileo worked 'in an apartment covered in silk and mostly richly furnished'. Then he returned to his farm at Arcetri, and later to his house in Florence, where he spent the remaining years of his life. The recital of the penitential psalms was delegated, with ecclesiastical consent, to his daughter, Sister Marie Celeste, a Carmelite nun."

Even though, as Koestler points out, Galileo's conviction was "from a purely legal point of view a miscarriage of justice", the residue of the Black Legend should not blind us to the fact that in the 17th Century you were far more likely to get a fair trial and a humane punishment from the Inquisition than you were from the civil authorities.

Incidentally, it looks like Alan Allport's comment was incorrect: to the extent that potential attendees of the defendant's retreat centers would be swayed by the trial and its attendant publicity, he may be harmed by the heresy trial — either by damage to his reputation or to his livelihood.

OK, but only insofar as they may have thought that he still held the imprimatur of the Catholic Church - in other words, any benefit he may lose was acquired under false pretences in the first place.