Vatican fires warning shot across Jesuits' bow

The scuttlebut says that the Vatican has just fired a warning shot across the Jesuits' bow. Under pressure from the CDF (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith), Thomas J. Reese, S.J., Editor in Chief of the Jesuit English language publication, America magazine, has apparently just been asked to step down. The magazine has long been under pressure from the Vatican for it's regular publication of articles attacking Vatican policy and Church teaching on controversial issues. You may expect to see the usual hue and cry in the pages of the National (Anti-)Catholic Reporter about "repression" and "Inquisition." Others will welcome voices that call a spade a spade, insisting that those who call themselves Catholic should be Catholic, and that those who call themselves Jesuits should write and behave like Jesuits. Partisans of the contemporary dictatorship of relativism won't understand why words and names ought to have any sort of stability as to essential meaning. In far away China, Confucius clearly understood this, as witnessed by his great principle of the Rectification of Names, according to which language must be used "in accordance with the truth of things," and names ought to be "spoken appropriately." In other words, if a journal or a religious order claims to be Jesuit, it ought to adhere to the values and mission of order's founder. And everyone knows that St. Ignatius Loyola [pictured right], the founder of the Society of Jesus, was anything but a insubordinate dissident, rankled by the authority of Rome. Freedom of thought and expression is not compromised by the demand for intellectual and moral integrity, which insists that those who represent themselves as Catholic should submit to the obedience expected of all Catholics, which is nothing less that a submission to truth. "The truth shall set you free," said Jesus. Intellectual slaves subject to the dictatorship of relativism, of course, cannot be expected to understand such freedom, which they will invariably construe as mindless servitude. How little they see or understand.