Can Someone Clarify For Me The Difference Between Vaughn Treco And Fr Hunwicke?

I guess the obvious answer is that Vaughn Treco was removed from active ministry as a priest in the US ordinariate, while Fr Hunwicke continues as a priest in good standing in the UK ordinariate. But my question is why.

In January 2019, Treco was removed from his post at the ordinariate Church of St. Bede the Venerable in Minnesota for remarks in a homily that, by this account, criticized the Second Vaican Council and the post-Conciliar popes:

Father showed us a clear picture of the post-conciliar church and the concessions to modernity and the world that the post-conciliar popes have made. He pointed out how this faithlessness is what allowed this rot in the Church to fester for so long and provided several ways for us simple faithful to move forward.

As I observed on the old blog, it isn't entirely clear precisely what statements or other factors were the proximate cause of his removal; he appears to have rubbed people the wrong way in his duties as a hospital chaplain as well. But a video of his homily was published on the web and seems to have drawn the wrong sort of attention from authorities in the local archdiocese, who spoke to Bp Lopes. It does appear highly likely that publishing remarks critical of the Second Council and later popes was a key factor.

Move to Fr Hunwicke. In today's post at his blog, he says

On June 24, I published a piece explaining that the essence of PF's heresy is his claim that, just as Jesus supplanted Moses as Teacher, so he, PF, Voice of the Holy Spirit, is now supplanting Jesus as Teacher. (I first made this point, with copious supporting evidence, at Gardone in 2017, in a lecture now published in Defending the Faith Against Present Heresies, Arouca Press.)

Thanks to Professor Tighe, I have read a fine piece by John Zmirak in The Stream, advancing precisely the same analysis, and pointing out the relevance of the condemnation of the heretic Marcion to the Bergoglianite errors.

So let's pause a moment. If someone says to me the pope is a heretic (PF is Hunwicke's less than respectful designation for the pope), I would expect a detached, serious, and systematic explication, starting not least with the question of how a pope can be a heretic, since this has a specific definition. But I went to Hunwicke's June 24 post, and all I found was

PF claims that those who disagree with his own new dogmas are in a situation analogous to that of those who disagreed with the Lord ... or (in this recent address) disagreed with S Paul.

But this is not only arrogant almost beyond belief. It is also blasphemous. PF is not Jesus. There is to be no Third Age with new teaching. Moses' version of the Law was "fulfilled" by that of Jesus, but PF is not a Third Lawgiver sent to supersede Jesus.

This is nothing but a paraphrase of what Hunwicke thinks "PF" intended to say. If you're going to call the pope -- or Martin Luther, for that matter -- a heretic, don't you need to quote his words and show how they specifically conflict with specific Catholic doctrine? In addition, Hunwicke refers favorably to a piece by John Zmirak, but without a link. This must be the one that he's referring to. In it, Zmirak quotes variously from himself and Life Site News, which again largely paraphrases statements Francis made in last month's general audience about rigid priests:

Drawing from St. Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, the Pope seemed to be accusing conservative and traditionalist Catholics of being in league with the Evil One and of being no different from those who sowed discord and mistrust by demanding that the new Christians in Galatia subject themselves to Mosaic Law.

Zmirak concludes,

Marcion claimed that Jesus came to completely negate the Old Testament. Francis pretends that Vatican II negates parts of the New, and key teachings the Church passed on until he came along. Why else would Francis claim that taking literally Jesus’ own teaching on divorce is pharisaical, worthy only of “doctors of the law”? Especially since the position Francis promotes is exactly … that of the Pharisees whom Christ rebuked.

This is Zmirak's paraphrase and interpretation of Francis's remarks. He quotes only individual words and short phrases of what Francis actually said, and Zmirak is veering pretty close to Treco's pre-Conciliarism. But as Bp Barron has been pointing out, you don't find any higher authority in the Catholic Church than an ecumenical council. We can debate the meaning of council documents and how a pope interprets them, but we also have to acknowledge this is serious business that calls for a dispassionate, reasonable tone and specific references to specific statements.

This isn't what Fr Hunwicke is giviing us, and it's disturbing that he refers us to a hysterical figure like Zmirak. I've got to think both his posts of June 24 and today are getting pretty close to the sort of thing that got Vaughn Treco removed from the priesthood.

But leaving even that aside, Hunwicke is a convert, having joined the Catholic Church only a year or two ahead of me. I believe that at the time, there was some type of hesitancy over his ordiniation, which in hindsight strikes me as justified. It is simply not a good look for any Catholic convert to come into the Church and announce that the Church has it all wrong. But why did he come in if the Council and the Holy Father are just a big mistake that he has to fix? Is he maybe the next Jesus after all?

I debated first sending Msgr Newton, the UK Ordinary, a version of this in an e-mail, but ordinaries are likely not to respond to people like me. No doubt this will reach him in due course.

This Isn't Cardinal Bernardin's Catholic Church

Somehow I ran into a piece in the National Review on the Catholic bishops' vote to draft a teaching document on eucharistic coherence, generally assumed to define the eligibility to receive communion for politicians who support policies that go against Church teaching. I had only time to scan it before a popup arrived to tell me I had to subscribe to read more.

Like the Wall Street Journal, NR now wants me to pay for nothing. The last time I spent much time at that site was around 1998, when they still ran Mark Steyn, and Jonah Goldberg had a sense of humor. Anyhow, the point of the piece they wanted me to pay for was that the USCCB did nothing but debate and talk, and we couldn't expect much from the Catholic bishops. I can't quote from it, because they won't let me go back to the piece.

NR is generslly locked in a time warp. Under Buckley, it was a nominally Catholic publication, though as I reflect on things, Buckley himself was a Catholic for the 1960s, which is to say he was as much a Kennedy Catholic, a Bernardin Catholic, as anything else, just as he was a big-government, CIA Republican. But that kind of Catholic is a fading period piece, and NR isn't really even that kind of Catholic any longer. Of Cardinal Bernardin and the UISCCB, George Weigel wrote in 2011,

For the Bernardin Era and the style of governance characteristic of Bernardin Machine bishops were deeply influenced by the Roman-brokered “Truce of 1968,” an ill-fated attempt to settle the disciplinary situation in the Archdiocese of Washington, where dissent from Humanae Vitae was widespread and public. Whatever the Vatican’s intentions vis-a-vis the difficult situation in Washington, what was learned from the truce were two lessons that would shape an entire era of U.S. Catholic history. The first lesson was that the Holy See would retreat from rigorously enforcing doctrinal discipline if it could be persuaded of the danger of schism. The second lesson was that American bishops were ill advised to go out on a public limb in defense of Catholic teaching (as Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle of Washington had done by disciplining priests who had publicly rejected Humanae Vitae), for that could result in the Holy See sawing off the limb and leaving the bishop in question in a bad way.

Bernardin, as Weigel sees him, was an intensely political animal who was focused on making Catholics politically appealing in a post-Kennedy environment. But the US bishops of 2021 are no less political, as indeed is Abp Gómez, who now occupies Bernardin's one time position as head of the USCCB. But times, and politics, have changed. Last week I quoted from Abp Cordileone's preface to his challenge to the Catholic Democrats, with its strong implication that the Democrats have moved away from Catholics. Only days later, Bp Barron, who by the way works for Abp Gómez and is now the most prominent Catholic spokesman in the US, wrote in the New York Post,

I’m the son of a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago Catholic Democrat. My father, whose family was very involved in city politics, would sooner have become a Lutheran than vote Republican. But my trouble with modern Democrats, I explained, has to do with abortion policy, where the party has lately staked out an especially extreme position.

The Church must operate, as it always must, in a political environment, something Cdl Bernardin clearly recognized. But the trouble is that politics have changed, something the US bishops are waking up to. The Catholic Church is on the side of the poor and vulnerable, which is where the US Democrats used to be, at least through the Kennedys and Lyndon Johnson, and even arguably Bill Clinton. But more recently, the Democrats have lost workers and legal immigrants, and their politics now reflect an alliance between wealthy elites and the Lumpenproletariat, which includes the criminal class that preys almost exclusively on the poor.

Indeed, our own pastor in yesterday's homily that dwelt in part on the meaning of the Fourth, was careful to avoid conventional political alignment, but behind his remarks was a clear concern that leftist California policies toward the homeless were, whatever their expressed object, not working on behalf of either the homeless or the poor.

I think there's a real shift in alignment taking place in the Catholic Church, just as there's a shift taking place among Republicans. I'm not sure Cdl Bernardin would necessarily object on the Catholic side.