The Church of the “New Gaze”

Monsignor Arthur Holquin is a retired priest of the Diocese of Orange, California, who has a very active Substack where he sometimes goes hell-for-leather against those he does not particularly like, Cardinal Burke and President Trump among them.

In his latest column, he opens up about his mother and father, now deceased, and what he called his mother’s “long fast” from receiving the Holy Eucharist. The issue that kept her from receiving the Eucharist for 30 years is that her husband, Arthur’s father, required the use of artificial contraception in their marriage. It appears he was the one who forced this issue on her. But Holquin implies that their agreed-upon “plan” was to have only two children, which they did: Holquin’s sister and, “much later,” Arthur.

The result was that she felt she violated Church teaching and therefore could not present herself. One wonders what she said in confession all those years or whether she even went to confession at all. Holquin is silent on this.

One suspects Holquin wrote this about his mother to discourage any criticism of the positions he takes. “How dare you criticize my dear mother,” you can hear him say. But he used his mother’s situation to make points about Church teaching, so the door is open.

And one thing we do understand is that the use of artificial contraception to avoid pregnancy is against long-standing Church teaching, something that Arthur’s mother and father obviously knew. Holquin said his father viewed it as a “rule without a reason.” So, Arthur’s mother and father chose to reject Church teaching. He says his mother was devout. Perhaps she was, maybe just not on this one—important?—thing.

Holquin writes:

For my mother this was no small thing. She loved her husband dearly, and she loved her Church and its teaching with equal devotion. Caught between the two, she made a decision that shaped the interior life of our home for over a quarter-century: she refrained from Holy Communion. Week after week, feast after feast, she remained in the pew while others went forward.

She loved her husband and her Church with equal devotion and recognized, correctly, that there was a division here, and you can see what appears to be a painful choice to buckle under to her husband and reject the teachings of the Church.

And then along came Vatican II, and young seminarians’ hearts were all aflutter about what this portended for the hidebound Church—even, and maybe especially, for the teaching on contraception. And then, wham, John XXIII dies, Paul VI takes contraception off the table, takes the decision out of the hands of the “experts” on a commission, kept the decision to himself, and issued Humanae Vitae, the teaching that shook the withers of young leftists like Holquin.

Still, Arthur’s mom struggled on until roughly 1974, when she met a “wise and compassionate confessor” and was “able to resolve her dilemma in conscience [italics added].” (I am guessing at the year here. Holquin says the dilemma started in World War II and lasted for thirty years. This would place this wise and compassionate confessor in the wise and compassionate ’70s.) Lest you think he was the wise confessor, he makes it clear this was years before his own ordination, although it appears he was ordained in 1973.

And then the spirit of Vatican II arose with the elevation of Cardinal Bergoglio to the papacy and a new day dawned. The meat of Holquin’s piece is his happiness with the document Amoris Laetitia, especially the magical phrase “to accompany, to discern, to integrate” people who may be shacking up-errrrrrrr—living in irregular situations and who want to take Communion.

Holquin writes,

Many years as a confessor have persuaded me that Francis discerned something true and pastorally indispensable: we do not serve moral categories; we serve persons, each of them at a different point along the moral journey, and each of them to be met where he or she actually is. This has been the quiet grammar of my own priesthood—to listen first, and only then to administer, in the sacrament of Penance, the medicine of compassion: to heal, and not to wound.

Understand that Francis did not change any teaching on marriage. No. Holquin says, “He did not change the Church’s doctrine on marriage. What he changed—and it was no small change—was the tone, the gaze, the pastoral posture from which the Church approaches families in all their fragility.”

Ah, the gaze. He merely changed the gaze and the tone.

Let us talk of this Church of the New Gaze. It is not a new thing. It long predates Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitia. Holquin was ordained in 1973, when the Diocese of Orange did not exist. It was carved out of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles three years later.

We have heard for years about the frustrations of orthodox pew sitters in Southern California. From 1980 onward, the Catholic population of the diocese has exploded from 300,000 and change to 1.3 million. In all that time, the number of priests has flatlined at 250-270, and they are only ever ordaining one or two a year.

Compare this to the Diocese of Arlington, where I live with my family. Our diocese was founded in 1974. There are 400,000 Catholics in this diocese. We have roughly the same number of priests as the Diocese of Orange and upward of 40 men studying for the priesthood.

What is the difference? I suspect it is the gaze. Catholics can go to practically any church in our diocese and hear the real Faith not the New Gaze. Monsignor’s Church of the New Gaze failed long ago, yet New Gazers are still plugging along, leading people astray. One wonders how many penitents Msgr. Holquin has led astray with this New Gaze on contraception and God knows what else.

The story of Msgr. Holquin’s mother is truly sad. What she likely needed was not a “wise and compassionate confessor” of the New Gaze but a true shepherd of the Faith. May she rest in peace.