I regularly receive emails from Catholic Culture – an American organisation staffed by neo-Catholics who struggle to find a good word to say about the “pre-conciliar” Church. Since no other Council is ever mentioned these days, they refer, of course, to the Church prior to the Second Vatican Council. The Catholic Culture emails contain links to their various articles, and I have to confess that, more often than not, I fail to read them. However, this article by Christopher Ferrara over at The Remnant - A Reply to the Prophet Mirus - caught my eye and is well worth reading (Jeff Mirus is the Big White Chief at Catholic Culture)
I recommend that you read both the above article by Christopher Ferrara, and the shorter article by Jeff Mirus below – and then tell us if you think anything less than the Consecration of Russia will restore the Faith to these crazy, mixed-up neo-Catholic souls. Mirus, as you will see if you read both articles, insists that we have a duty to live the message of Vatican II, without ever defining that “message”. If you know what he means, please tell the rest of us. He also criticises the Church prior to Vatican II, including this remark: There was an unfortunate lack of deep interiority with Christ and a lack of engagement with the Church as mission (# 3 below). Is he actually saying that, prior to Vatican II, the Church lacked holiness? Really? That’ll be news to the multitude of saints and martyrs in Heaven (whose lives were closely scrutinised before they were canonised) and to the multitudes of faithful husbands and wives who raised large families, took them to Mass, sometimes having to walk long distances to get there, prayed the daily rosary together, etc. Big news. Brace yourself to read Catholic Culture and then tell us how, in your view, this outfit can send out regular appeals for big bucks – and then rake in enough cash to buy bungalows by the dozen in Bearsden, and then some. How come, so many Catholics are willing to fund this baloney?
From Catholic Culture…
Pope Francis recently insisted once again on the importance of implementing the renewal called for by the Second Vatican Council. Unfortunately, every time I insist (with the last five popes) that the Second Vatican Council gave us the program of Catholic renewal that we are supposed to be following, I receive messages which (usually at great length) run something like this: “If the Council was so great, why has the Church suffered so much since that time? I’m tired of hearing about the Council. Clearly we need to go back before the Council to find authentic Catholicism.”
It is really hard for me to accept that the answer to that question is not obvious by now. But to understand the renewal that the Council called for, I am afraid we need to answer this question correctly. Let me break it down into four clear and simple points:
- The popes had been fighting a running battle with Modernism in the universities and seminaries throughout the first half of the twentieth century. (Modernism is essentially a secularizing of Catholicism in accordance with the prevailing ideas in the larger culture.)
- There was an enormous revolution—or dissolution, really—in Western culture beginning in the 1960s. Suddenly it was no longer necessary to maintain an aura of religious respectability. The mainstream culture made its interior abandonment of Christianity formal and public and began praising and lionizing all those within the Church who would take the Church in a less Catholic direction.
- The pre-conciliar Church was in serious need of renewal. She had gradually slipped into what we might call a comfortable institutionalism, with Catholics tending to live the faith prescriptively (“follow the rules, get to heaven”). There was an unfortunate lack of deep interiority with Christ and a lack of engagement with the Church as mission.
- Under these circumstances, the pre-conciliar Church was powerless to protect itself against the cultural shift which occurred. This is why things changed almost overnight in dioceses, parishes and religious orders around the world. Key personnel throughout the Church, who had either been formed by the faulty Catholic intellectual establishment before the Council or had a prescriptive notion of the Faith (“hey, if you can change this rule, you can change ANYTHING”), rushed to embrace a new and culturally-fashionable secularism. They wanted, after all, to appear relevant.
Now please note: Pope John XXIII clearly saw these weaknesses of the pre-conciliar Church, and that is why he called the Council. But the Church did not have time to implement the Council before the storm hit, and the Council was used as an excuse to gut the Church in favor of the ideas emanating from the surrounding culture. Ever since that time, those who care—including every pope—have been fighting a rear guard action to “recover the council” and implement the true renewal for which it called. Read more…
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N O T I C E S . . .
For your information…
To use bold and italics…
When starting the italics, you do this <i> and when finishing, you do this </i>. Bold is exactly the same except a “b” is used instead of “i”. You must use lower case or it won’t work
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