TUALATIN, Oregon (LifeSiteNews) — Tibetan Buddhist monks instructed Catholics in their religious practices and led them in non-Christian chants at a Catholic church in Oregon.
On June 26, 2024, five Buddhist monks were invited to Resurrection Catholic Parish in Tualatin, Oregon. According to the parish pastor, Father Bill Moisant, the monks, whom he does not name, came from the Gaden Shartse Monastery in southern India and are followers of the Dalai Lama. Photographs show that two of them gave a small group of primarily elderly Catholics a presentation on Buddhist “meditation” and led a prayer session in the nave of the church.
Resurrection #Catholic Parish in Tualatin, #Oregon, recently hosted #Buddhist monks leading meditation in the #church, right in front of the sanctuary and the tabernacle. Faithful #Catholics are rightly scandalized by this gross insult to Our Lord and His Church. pic.twitter.com/8lS2OswRnG
— LifeSiteNews (@LifeSite) July 5, 2024
A concerned parishioner who attended the event and provided LifeSiteNews with photographs and video footage decried that the Buddhist monks carried out their instruction, chants, and prayers in the sanctuary before the altar and near the tabernacle. He also lamented the false characterization of Christ expressed in the course of the event and an apparent disrespect for the sufferings of Christ.
“Our Lord was compared to Buddha as a great teacher, a theologically inaccurate and offensive statement,” he told LifeSiteNews via email.
“The presentation emphasized Buddhist meditation techniques to escape suffering, seemingly ignoring Christ’s suffering and death on the Cross.”
READ: Catholic church in Portland hosts Tibetan Buddhist monks for talk on non-Christian meditation
The witness reported that parishioners engaged with the monks without expressing concerns about conflicts between Buddhist practices and the Catholic faith. He was similarly concerned that that session ended with a Buddhist prayer and offering of intentions, which he felt was a “further blurring” of “the lines between Catholic and Buddhist practices.”
“This was much more than an interfaith dialogue, this was a non-Catholic prayer session in a Catholic Church,” the parishioner continued. “It’s a matter of both location and substance.”
“When the Q&A sessions came, parishioners were asking more questions on how to conduct this in their daily lives.”
Fr. Moisant highlighted the event in the parish newsletter, saying that the monks had come “to familiarize us with their faith and to teach various forms of meditation.”
“Through meditation and a vigorous way of life, the monks are striving to attain a sense of peace, compassion, humility, joy and love with all people and to live in harmony with the environment,” he continued. “These are qualities which are familiar to Catholics, since that is what Jesus teaches us in the Gospel.”
“I pray for the continued fruitfulness of their teaching,” he concluded.
However, contrary to Fr. Moisant’s remarks, Jesus does not merely teach His disciples “to attain a sense of peace, compassion, humility, joy and love with all people and to live in harmony with the environment” but came to redeem mankind from sin and reconcile us to God through Himself, calling everyone “to that conversion without which one cannot enter the kingdom” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 545).
Canon law expressly forbids the use of Catholic churches for “anything not consonant with the holiness of the place” (Cans. 1210), which necessarily includes hosting Buddhists to instruct Catholics in non-Christian practices.
Traditional Catholic meditational practices flourished before the liturgical revolution that followed the Second Vatican Council, and the Most Holy Rosary is still widely used by Catholics to meditate upon the Life, Passion, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ. Reciting or singing litanies, such as the Litany of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also has rich meditational properties. In recent decades, Catholic laypeople have been invited to return to Lectio Divina, a practice common to monastics, which is the contemplative and prayerful reading of Scripture.
In his essay “Comparing Christianity & Buddhism,” Peter Kreeft shows how the detached Buddhist conception of compassion is utterly unlike the warm and personal Christian concept of brotherly love. Meanwhile, suffering, for the Buddhist, is something unredeemable that must be escaped, whereas Christians can find meaning in suffering, thanks to the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross.
According to its online schedule, Resurrection Catholic Parish also hosts “Gentle Yoga for Everyone” classes, despite yoga’s incompatibility with Catholicism.