"Models of Holiness" by Fr Vincent S. Pereira Poisoned Tree, Poison Fruits
© Prakash J. Mascarenhas, Bombay, India. March 2001.
In 1992 – 93, when I had begun to resist the teachings of the New Church from within, as a member of the "Catholics For the Preservation of the Faith" (C.P.F.) which was before I realized that it was not the Catholic Church, but a schismatic and heretical body, a booklet had accidentally come into my hands. Entitled "Models of Holiness" by a Fr. Vincent Pereira, a Goan from Saligao, next to my own village, Sangolda. It was a textbook for novices at the Arch-diocesan Seminary. Reading through it, I found it shot full of heresy, as with most New Church literature. But the implications of its teachings were deadly. It was not merely the teachings of Fr. Vincent Pereira; it was the teaching of the New Church. It was not merely contained to Bombay; it was a general belief of the New Church throughout the world. And what implications!
It provided a key to understanding what was happening in the New Church – a sudden explosion in cases of homosexuality, homosexual rape of boys in "Catholic" Schools throughout the world. Cases of priests and nuns leaving to marry. Cases of priests and nuns having love affairs and sex, getting pregnant, using contraceptives, abortions, births of illegitimate children.
It raised questions also of the trustworthiness of the New Church’s priests and nuns – do we dare trust our children to their care? Not unless they rejected this heresy.
But unfortunately, the C.P.F. failed to take up the issue. They let an opportunity to escape, they allowed an evil situation to continue unchallenged, and they handed over the opportunity to challenge these wrongs to the enemies and detractors of our Lord Jesus Christ.
But it is still not too late to take up this issue. Here below, I provide an extract from the booklet "Models of Holiness."
St. Paul Publications, printed by Mathew Elavunkal at the St. Paul Press Training School, Allahabad and published by St. Paul Publications, Bandra, Bombay. PIN 400 050. © St. Paul Publications, India ISBN 81-7109-084-2
This characteristic of holiness is quite foreign to a person whose spirituality been based completely on the angelic model of holiness. The very popular phrase "Fully human, Fully alive" implies that we give real praise to God when we become fully or wholly what he has made us to be. The Incarnation is a constant reminder to us that we are all right when we are human. Jesus himself "born in the likeness of man" (Phil 2:7f) was one like us in all things except sin and is a model for us of a fully alive person. Trying to be something different from what God intended us to be in our uniqueness is to do violence to the truth: an insult to him and harm to ourselves.
According to Abraham Maslow (A. H. Maslow, Motivation and Personality, 2nd Edition, Harper & Row, Publishers, N.Y. Evanston and London, 1070, Ch. 4.) every person has needs which have to be satisfied and they cannot be disregarded without the paying of a price. He places them under a hierarchy. The first need is physiological. Then come the safety, love and belongingness, and esteem needs. At the highest level is the need for self-actualisation. In the past many were made to feel quite guilty when some of these needs were felt – not to speak of when these needs were satisfied. It is ironical then that many have to re-learn how to become fully human and alive again. The angelic and other models of holiness have impressed themselves so much that people find it hard to believe that to be human is enough. Below are outlined a few areas individuals have discounted and thus ceased to be holy:
CARING FOR THE BODY:
Holy persons respect the body and take care of its need for sufficient, nourishing and tasty food. They are concerned about health, bodily exercise, sports, proper relaxation and rest. And even if one does fast or abstain, these are done for health’s sake and not as a form of self-torture.
TOUCH:
In the past many were trained to refrain from touch because of its supposed threat to the vow of chastity. The so-called Rules of Modesty kept people literally at arms length and from spontaneous forms of human interaction. There is a saying in Transactional Analysis that if the child is not stroked its spinal cord shrivels up. As one grows up the need to be touched and to touch others in human and caring ways does not disappear. Jesus touched the sick (Mt 8:3) and held the little children that came around him (Mk 10:16). The present "Holy" Father does not feel shy of affectionately kissing and embracing other people.
SEXUALITY:
Till recently celibacy was considered to be a way of life superior to that of marriage. This opinion is now scarcely held by any theologian and the Second Vatican Council has affirmed that the love of married people, "merging the human with the divine" is "uniquely expressed and perfected through the marital act". (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, No. 49.) It is also seen now-a days that in religious who have taken a vow of chastity, one’s sexuality is not something to be denied and repressed but to be accepted, loved and integrated. This is done in ways that respect sound principles of bodily, mental and spiritual well-being. It is unhealthy for a religious to ruthlessly try to stamp out every sexual fantasy or to deny that one is drawn to people of the other sex. Strong heterosexual attractions and even the experience of "falling in love" are normal. And to accept all these is part of being human and a normal one at that.
FEELINGS:
Feelings have often been severely discounted. In one’s prayer for example one was not suppose to pay attention to one’s feelings. Also, some feelings were categorised as good and some as bad. But feelings are neither good nor bad and all feelings are legitimate. Feelings just are. If one would only pay attention to them, they would supply a lot of information. They would point out to who and what one is and to the value systems that one holds.
Fr. Pereira rightly counterposes the teachings of the Catholic Church and of the New Church, trashing the former to make way for the latter. The opposition is real and absolute. In this particular matter, the Catholic Church has always taught, following our Lord, that we must, if we desire to attain to His Kingdom, conquer ourselves, putting to death the Old Man of our carnal Adamic nature, that the New Man of our spiritual Christic nature be born. In other words, "Pick up your crosses and follow me." His way is, is obviously, not the easy garden path, but the hard and narrow path. St Paul tells us, " I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should be disqualified." To illustrate further, let us go to St Bernard of Clairvaux, who said that this body is like a wild wolf that we must domesticate.
To achieve this the saints took to various stratagems. Some wore hairshirts – clothing made of prickly hair. Others wore tight ropes or chains, such as St Francis Xavier. St Simon Stylites stood for long years on the top of a pillar. St. Joseph Naik-Vaz, of Sancoale in Shasti, the famed apostle of Ceylon, scrupulously avoided TASTY FOOD, CONTACTS WITH HIS FAMILY MEMBERS, even when they were on their death-beds, or he was leaving for Ceylon, and wore a hair shirt. St John Bush (Giovanni Bosco) once drew attention to the fashionable and immodest dress of some visitors by pointing out to their small child that such immodest exposure, even by a small child, would earn damnation. His visitors got the point. ("Don Bosco with a smile") I could go on and on. Nothing, of course, will convince those who are determined on their damnation – the apostles of iniquity.
I recently found another article which corroborates my understanding of the above book. It is Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel's Priestly & Religious Celibacy: Is It Dead, or Should It Be?
Let me quote the relevant text:
Celibacy, traditionally and properly understood, requires sexual abstinence - i.e., the avoidance of all voluntary genital pleasure and all other behavior that is likely to lead to it. Celibacy also requires that personal friendships be so organized that they do not lead into genital expression, which obviously includes a lot of things that are not genital. Since most human behavior has some defensive aspects to it, one should not expect all celibates to be so perfectly balanced that they would not use a little "repression" to get by.
Thirty years ago celibacy was seriously undermined by the naive notion that certain expressions of affection would not lead to genital activity. In an effort to be completely unrepressed, whole groups of naive celibates moved toward another defense, namely, regression. When I was an intern at the Psychiatric Institute in New York, one of my fellow students, a down-to-earth Jewish psychiatrist, asked me if I had ever read the popular book The Genius of the Apostolate by Eugene Kennedy and Paul D'Arcy.
This was the great manifesto of the "third way," the notion that celibates could engage in warm, close, emotionally expressive behavior with members of the opposite sex and nothing would happen.
My earthy friend was shocked when I told him that the authors were deadly serious about their proposition. He thought the book was satire, and walked away shaking his head saying, "You people are going to have a lot of trouble." He was right!
Of course, this 'naivity' is not real, but deliberately feigned, by this sect and its adept-leaders, just as much Roncalli 'junked' (selectively) disciplinary authority, though individuals may have been sincerely misled.
From Pope Michael's website, I found this interesting piece of information on the same topic:
With the continuing scandals in the Vatican II Church, which claims the name of Catholic, clarification of the laws of the Catholic Church should be made.
Canon 2359, pararaph 2 of the 1917 Code of Canon Law, states:
This is from the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which is in place in the Catholic Church. The Vatican II Church, however, replaced this law for itself with it's 1983 Code of Canon Law.
Canon 1395, paragraph 2 of this Code states:
Let us compare the two Codes:
The big difference is that the pædophile may be kept in the priesthood, as has happened in the Vatican II Church, whereas in the Catholic Church he must be removed from the priesthood, no questions asked.
Why did John Paul II remove this sanction from the Code of Canon Law? It certainly is not for the good of the Faithful to allow pædophiles to be retained in the priesthood, which is exactly what the 1983 Code of Canon Law permits. John Paul II only orders punishment with just penalties, whatever that may mean. Obviously the penalties were not sufficient to prevent recidivism!
And what is the cause of this problem in the '60's to now? Quite simply, priests violated their Oath Against the Errors of Modernism, and as they slid into heresy, sins against the Sixth Commandment, including pædophilia became easy for them.
If one is not zealous about holding to the doctrines of the Faith, why should one worry about keeping his pants on and his hands to himself?
Here below is a news report showing the consequence of the New Ideology:
Vatican Nails Priests For Sexual Abuse
Report In Rome Daily Cites Cases In 23 Countries Including The U.S. and India
By Steve Pagani, Vatican City, March 21.
News report in the Indian Express (and Asian Age), Bombay Edition, 22nd March 2001.
The Vatican acknowledged on Tuesday a damning report that some priests and missionaries were forcing nuns to have sex with them, and were in some cases committing rape and forcing the victims to have abortions.
Some nuns were forced to take the contraceptive pill, the report cited in the Rome daily La Repubblica said.
The Vatican said the issue was restricted to a certain geographical area, but the report cited cases in 23 countries, including the United States, Brazil, the Philippines, India, Ireland and Italy.
"The stories are horrifying and disturbing to say the least," said Bill Ryan, spokesperson for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
However, he added that he was not aware of anything similar in the United States. "The National Catholic Reporter... offered no documentation for that. I don’t know how you would investigate something like that unless you had specifics or a charge," he added.
The charges first appeared in the Kansas city-based National Catholic Reporter weekly on March 16 and in a small Italian religious news agency Adista, which also publishes a weekly.
Missionary news agency MISNA condemned the abuse while recalling that missionaries often worked "at the limit of human endurance". It urged the media to remember the good deeds of missionaries around the world as well as their failings.
Chief Vatican spokesperson Joaquin Navarro-Valls had the following announcement: "The problem is known about and is restricted to a certain geographical area.
"The Holy See is dealing with the issue in collaboration with bishops, the Union of Superiors General (grouping of heads of male religious orders) and the International Union of Superiors General (heads of female religious orders)."
While the Vatican did not name the geographical area, the report said most incidents of sexual abuse against nuns occurred in Africa where the nuns were identified as "safe" following the onset of the HIV and AIDS virus devastating the continent.
Charges made in the report, signed with names and surnames, were made known to Church authorities on several occasions throughout the 1990s, the article by La Repubblica’s respected Vatican correspondent Marco Politi said.
The author of the report was nun and physician Maura O’Donohue, who presented it to the head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Holy Orders, Cardinal Martinez Somalo, in February 1995. He ordered a working group from the Congregation to study the problem with O’Donohue, who was AIDS co-ordinator for Cafod, the London based Roman Catholic Fund for Overseas Development.