Cardinal’s statement that Council of Trent still “fully valid” in Netherlands casts poo-poo on unity week

It’s “the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity” in the Netherlands, but a bad old Cardinal, a card-carrying member of the Roman Magisterium, has cast a poo-poo on all of that by reminding everyone that the anathemas of the Council of Trent are still valid.

An official “Church spokesperson” “expressed shock” and dismissed the Cardinal’s words as “merely theoretical”.

“Does she, or doesn’t she?” **



Dutch cardinal’s defence of Council of Trent casts shadow over Unity week:

Cardinal Eijk, Archbishop of Utrecht and head of the Dutch bishops’ conference, told the Protestant daily Reformatorisch Dagblad that the Council’s condemnations of Martin Luther’s teachings, for example on the Eucharist, still justified excluding Protestants from receiving communion in the Catholic Church.

The Council was “a sign of the self-cleansing power” of the Church because it corrected abuses that had developed in its ranks, he said.

The Protestant response was cool.

“It is not biblical to say the Church is always right,” said Gerrit de Fijter, chairman of the Protestant National Synod.

Bas Plaisier, former head of the Protestant Church in the Netherlands, said he “didn't understand what [Eijk] is doing.”

A Catholic theologian, Marcel Poorthuis from Tilburg University, said Eijk was being more negative than Pope Benedict XVI about Protestants.

Church spokeswoman Anna Kruse expressed shock at the reactions and noted that Eijk had called the Trent condemnations “mainly a theoretical issue” and did not intend to offend Protestants.

** I’ve broken my own unwritten rule here in referring to the Roman Catholic Church as “she” for the sake of fitting in a pithy saying describing Rome’s internal “blueprint for anarchy”, while enabling myself to use a cool old commercial. In reality, I almost always refer to the Roman Catholic Church as “it”, thinking it to be something more like a Hydra monster than anything.