The Zuhlsdorf Problem

I'm a convert to Roman Catholicism in late adulthood. This means I have no practical memory of the pre-Conciliar Church. I came in after 20 years or so in various Anglo-Catholic environments, and I was led to believe, especially under the apostolic constitution Anglicanorum coetibus, that the transition would be minimal -- at worst, a few months of catechetical touchup on Sunday afternoons before we'd be received justlikethat. The people who proposed this, including Jeffrey Steenson, were unfortunately deluded, and the sad disappointment of the North American ordinariate reflects this.

I had no choice but to become a convert to the post-Conciliar, diocesan Roman Catholic Church once the process envisioned by Steenson and others failed in the case of our Anglcan parish. On that basis, one must assume I saw merit in becoming Catholic outside any special provision for Anglicans. And if I saw enough merit in post-Conciliar Roman Catholiicism, and had no practical memory of any sort of life as a pre-Conciliar Catholic, for me to take a position that the Catholic Church of the past several generations has it all wrong would be absurd.

So the recent controversy over what appears to be Fr John Zuhlsdorf's loss of priestly faculties in the Diocese of Madison, WI doesn't really affect me. Zuhlsdorf is a media priest in what is something of a Catholic tradition, including Fr Coughlin. However, unlike Coughlin and other figures like Ven Fulton Sheen or Fr Dwight Longenecker, he has no direct pastoral responsibilities within the Church organizaion and supports himself via indepedent fundraising and speaking tours.

He had a patron and protector in Bishop of Madison, WI Robert Morlino, until Morlino's sudden passing at age 71 in 2018. By that time, I'd become increasingly skeptical of Zuhlsdorf, and I simply wondered how he might eventually fare under a new bishop not predisposed in his favor. According to Wikipedia,

In January 2021, Zuhlsdorf became involved in a public dispute over his execution of a live-streamed exorcism against participants in the 2021 United States Electoral College vote count. He said he had received the permission of his local ordinary, Bishop Donald J. Hying, the bishop of the Diocese of Madison, to celebrate the exorcism as it related to the election. However, Hying disputed that statement, saying he had granted permission to Zuhlsdorf to pray the exorcism against the COVID-19 pandemic, and not for political activity.

As a lay convert to Catholicism, my impression nevertheless is that bishops grant priestly faculties within their dioceses to priests from outside the diocese, as is the case with Fr Zuhlsdorf, but they can withdraw those faculties at any time, which makes such priests no longer able to give the sacraments within that diocese. As far as I can tell, this is a path of least reistance for any bishop confronted with controversy over a priest who has faculties within the diocese but is not incardinated there.

For instance, Cdl Cupich of Chicago, faced with two "extern" priests from Latin America who'd been ministering in his diocese but were arrested for lewd conduct in Miami in 2018, simply withdrew their faculties and rid himself of the problem, just by sending them home. Although Bp Hying, Morlino's successor in Madison, had nice things to say about Zuhlsdorf, this is simply what he was doing as well, as far as I can tell.

For a priest to become involved in a contoversy over an unpopular political matter and expect the support of a fairly new bishop is at best imprudent. I suspect Zuhlsdorf already had reservations over what his status would be in Madison under Hying and was perhaps unconsciously forcing a resolution by livestreaming an exorcism. He certainly had to be aware that this sort of thing would inevitably place Hying under pressure -- indeed, it would probably do the same with Morlino had he lived to that point.

What I've learned about the Church since becoming Catholic is that the Church is an organic whole, and a great deal of its function is based on various kinds of authority. Zuhlsdorf, as far as I can see, is promoting a view that doesn't encourage Church unity, and his most recent actions seem almost deliberately intended to provoke authority. The link to the National Catholic Reporter above quotes him:

"The near future right now looks pretty grim, in the secular realm and in the Church. The battle is coming. Trotsky said that you might not be interested in war, but war is interested in you," he wrote on Jan. 15.

But I'm not sure what he and his story bring to the current crisis, which has little to do with Latin masses and much more to do with the nature and limits of secular, not religious, authority.