“Apostasy is the total repudiation of the christian faith.” (Code of Canon Law, Canon 751)
“[Father Peter Kennedy] said he had not believed in Jesus for some time, calling the son of God a ‘fable’ and a ‘metaphor’. (The Sydney Morning Herald)
The point has been made a few times on this site. The liberal interpretation of extra ecclesiam nulla salus has it that there is no salvation outside the Church for those who know the Catholic Church to be the true Church and willfully reject it, or for those who, having belonged to it, leave it. This is the liberal version, the watered down reading. While it is true as far as it goes, it allows its proponents to deny Church teaching by what it leaves out. But let’s forget that for now and stick with the true part.
You’ll never hear a liberal actually applying the true part in real life. For liberals, the theory is only good in what it denies, not in what it affirms.
Case in point: Father Peter Kennedy. He’s the Aussie Priest that got himself in trouble in 2009 for his bleeding-edge progressivism. Included in Fr. Kennedy’s rap sheet are the following:
He intentionally collapsed the important distinction between the priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial priesthood. In other words, he became a protestant. He also formally presided over services for actively homosexual couples. He abdicated his call to preach by turning the function over to not only people who were not ordained, but people who did not believe or profess what the Catholic Church teaches.
This misguided cleric questioned fundamental Catholic doctrine. He developed his own version of what passes for Liturgy in his former parish. He promoted explicitly errant doctrines which denied the Trinity, the Divinity of Christ and the Virgin Birth of Our Lord.
Now Father Kennedy has made it known that he does not believe in Jesus. I’m not a canonist (and I don’t even play one on TV), but denying the existence of the central figure of Christianity — the One it’s named after — would strike this old peripatetic as a “total repudiation of the christian faith.” The apostate makes it crystal clear that he does not believe in the Christian God at all anymore: “It’s true I’ve given up on that sort of a God, that sort of a ‘being’ that sits up there in heaven somewhere and intervenes in human affairs.”
Where are the warnings that Father Kennedy and his foolish followers are leaving the Church to their own peril? Who is willing to point out that, far more than being “disobedient,” or “wounding Church unity,” or “leaving full communion,” they’re damning themselves to hell by leaving the Catholic Church, the sole ark of salvation?
Anyone… anyone?
