Home Blog The Catholic Faith News and Politics About This Site
What
is ‘AmChurch’?
The late author Malachi Martin coined ‘AmChurch’ as a contraction of ‘American Catholic
Church’, because dissenters in the US dating back to the ’70s often identified
themselves as ‘American Catholics’, opposing themselves to the Catholic
magisterium, denoting those who follow the latter as ‘Roman Catholics’.
(And conservative Roman Catholics in America have adopted the RC moniker gladly
in this context.) AmChurch doesn’t mean ‘all Roman Catholics in America’.
A sampling of issues
AmChurch dissents from orthodoxy on:
It is for artificial
contraception and in extreme cases even is ‘pro-choice’ on abortion. There
exists a splinter group called ‘Catholics for a Free Choice’, funded in part by
Hugh Hefner of Playboy (that great promoter of chastity and respect for
women), who are good for a media sound bite to stab the Church.
It is pro-women’s
ordination. But because it doesn’t believe in the Sacrifice or Real Presence in
the Eucharist like the Church does, it sees this issue instead as a front in
Marxist-style power/class struggle between the sexes. Ecclesiastical liberals
are the biggest clerical power-trippers who ever lived, and the feminists want
to get themselves some. The orthodox, on the other hand, are not clericalist,
but sacerdotalist.
Regarding the ‘gay lifestyle’ it throws the Bible and natural law/common sense out the window.
It rehashes 19th-century
Protestant and early 20th-century Modernist skepticism about the dogmas of the
faith (Jesus wasn’t really God, He didn’t rise from the dead, He didn’t found a
Church, etc.).
It also copies
Protestantism’s tired ‘social gospel’, deliberately confusing
liberality/charity with liberalism/socialism and proclaiming the No. 1 mission
of the Church is to ‘promote justice and peace’ (never mind all that spiritual
mumbo-jumbo). The now passé flirtation with Communism called ‘liberation
theology’ was part of this. Saying ‘¡Viva la revolución en (El Salvador,
Nicaragua, Guatemala... there was a succession of trendy countries)!
made its proponents seem (com)passionate and charitable, and didn’t hit
suburban North Americans where they live like ‘You can’t kill the unborn
natural results of having sex’ does.
It either disdains Marian
devotion (early-’70s priests ripped rosaries apart from the pulpit) or it
perverts it into New Age goddess worship or Jungian-type symbolism. (The ‘type’
of the virgin mother goddess.)
Liturgically it usually
is militantly anti-high church. It hates Godward traditional communal worship
and turns services into this-worldly pep rallies for ‘community’. Hence the
fanatical insistence that Mass MUST be ‘facing the people’. It favors
liturgical innovation that goes against both 1) all the traditional rites, East
and West, of the Church catholic and apostolic and 2) the rubrics and
regulations issued by Rome regarding the Roman Rite. The unnecessary
proliferation of lay Eucharistic ministers is a common example. Others include
laity standing round the altar like concelebrants, lay ‘ministers’ holding up
the Host or chalice with the priest at the elevations at Mass (such as at ‘This
is the Lamb of God’) and laity walking up to the altar and communing
themselves. (I personally have seen at least two of these.) More extreme, rarer
examples would include (popular in the early ’70s) substituting secular
writings for the biblical readings and using items other than bread and wine at
the service.
It often is iconoclastic
too, disdaining statues and other art in church.
Since 9th September 2002
+ 202 on original counter