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| Father in his apartment |
"Benedict XVI has continued the reversal of Vatican II. He is imposing a new English translation of the Sacramentary on a resisting English speaking constituency. This may very well backfire because many priests are not going to implement it. Benedict has received back bishops from the schismatic Society of St Pius X. He has encouraged the Tridentine Mass in Latin. He has reintroduced kneeling for communion on the tongue at his public Masses – all deliberate key pointers to regression from the spirit of Vatican II. To the priests who embraced Vatican II they are iconic insults."
Discuss.
Ugh - a wannabe prophet who missed the cue to retire.
ReplyDeleteOne rant deserves another.
"We changed from being priests called and consecrated by God to being presbyters called and ordained by the Church – the People of God." Welcome to his world of false dichotomies and protestantism.
"In 1968 Humanae Vitae was a shocking disappointment." (No - the disappointment was the weak-kneed priests who failed in their responsibility to base their teaching on a prophetic document.).
"Pius IX bullied Vatican I into institutionalizing such a claim." (One wonders what the writer thinks about Pope Saint Leo's view of the papacy, or Pope St. Hormisdas' Formula that brow beat those pesky Byzantines into submission.).
I love (loathe) how he begins this tirade:
"A newly critical (dissenting) laity questions (dissents from) policy (official doctrine) but receives no answers. (Buy a catechism. I'm pretty sure bishops and priests have a lot to do besides mollycoddling lazy armchair theologians.).
Why can’t women be leaders in the Church? (Uh - abbesses, mothers superior, sisters general; Mary Ann Glendon, President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences; Thérèse of Lisieux, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena - Doctors of the Church).
Why do priests have to be celibate? (Because Christ was celibate and the Latin Church is faithful to the model of Her founder.)
What is wrong with contraception? (Because it’s a deliberate violation of the design God built into the human race, i.e., natural law.).
Why alienate remarried divorcees? (Divorced and remarried couples are obstinately persevering in manifest grave sin. Is the writer asking the Church to condone sinful lifestyles? Think again old-timer!).
Why this salacious preoccupation with sexual mores? (I think the author is confusing the Church with secular society - oh wait! - he's his own pope with his own Spirit-of-Vatican-II scripture on hand,... the Richard McBrien Anthology of Greatest Theological Misses.).
Why are scientific advances always suspected of being bad? (Uh - is the author saying we should offer carte blanche acceptance of technologies that impinge upon the dignity of human beings?).
Why can’t we recognise the reality of homosexual orientation – and the social consequences of that recognition? (Yeeaaah - promote lifestyles which typically exhibit a significantly high degree of violence, disease, sexploitation and high incidence of suicide - riiiight. And, while we're at it, let's promote polygamy and bestiality.).
Have we learnt nothing from the Galileo case – or the treatment of Teilhard de Chardin? (Like how Galileo confused astronomy with theology and wanted to change Scripture to match his world view? or - Teilhard reducing Jesus to fit his gnostic fantasies and the tendency of his writings to at least implicitly deny original sin?).
Can’t we escape the Syllabus of Errors mentality?" (Because we can't with heretics like you pretending to be priests!).
The Pimpernel doesn't want to be too censorious in this discussion, and yeah, the guy says a hell of a lot that is, er, discussable, but Warren he is a priest. Let's just question his ideas. Ad hominen stuff aint our business.
ReplyDeleteIs the "spirit of Vatican II" some sort of preternatural gift? Or is it of the same nature as an urban legend? I have always wondered how this "spirit" got formulated and promulgated. There is certainly the smell of sulfur behind its success. Otherwise, how is it possible that many good people have been lured into thinking and living such silly and dangerous ideas?
ReplyDeleteBoooohoooo!
ReplyDelete--William
As a musician interested in implementing the LETTER of Vatican II... when people start talking about "the spirit of V2", I simply note that Christians are not supposed to invoke spirits.
ReplyDeleteThere is so much wrong with this assessment, I do not even know where to begin. Time heals all things though.
ReplyDeleteI've met priests like him before. I used to despise them, but I came around to having real pity for them. They were once sheep sent to the slaughter, indoctrinated in all this junk by their higher ups in the seminary.
He might blame Paul VI, JPII, and Benedict XVI for their reaction to the "Spirit of Vatican II" but in reality they held the line and not much else if you really look into it. There has been no massive counter-revolution waged against the Church's 1793. The only way the Church (in the human sense) did him dirty was that his generation was not prepared for the possible (and what turned out to be real) time when the human leaders of the Church would be asleep at the wheel, heretical theologians would run amok, and thunderbolts would not issue from the halls of the Holy Office. Men like him grew up in a time when most people had a pollyanna mindset of the Church being "semper idem"-and that this fine situation would always continue. When we get complacent, we get lazy and when we get lazy, there is not much of a limit as to what can go wrong.
His generation was infected not only with modernistic nonsense, but was also high on the dopey optimism of the 1960s and that sense that change was in the air. The "prophets of doom" were dismissed even by the Pope, yet they turned out to be right. The Church was in a pretty unfortunate state in the 1950s-60s but not because it was behind the times or anything like that. It was in this state because of its complacency and the fact that there were too many modernistic 5th Columnists in all ranks.
I place the blame for this way of thinking squarely on the run-up and reaction to Humanae Vitae. During the “Vatican II years” there wasn’t much talk about a ‘Spirit of Vat II’ (that would evolve later). The hot topic – in seminary and outside – was ‘The Pill’ and what the Pope would do about it. The ball was kicked off by Pope John XXIII with his commission to study the issue.
ReplyDeleteThough the commission would not reach a conclusion (two ‘opinions’, actually) until 1966, speculation ran high that a change was in the offing. The Pill would be permitted and all would be right with the world. Then came 1968 and Humanae Vitae. Shock and Awe resulted. Once it was revealed that the ‘Majority Opinion’ was not of the same mind as Pope Paul VI, the stage was set for widespread and sustained dissent – even at the very highest levels of the hierarchy. The horse was out of the barn and there was no going back.
Previously, if one had doubts one kept them to oneself – faith being a tenuous thing stronger in some than others. One had to avoid giving scandal and affecting the faith of others. Now that was all changed. If theologians, bishops and even bishops’ conferences could openly dissent (even to the extent of full-page Ads in the New York Times…), what was a humble curate to do? The Pope was a long way off but the PP lived in the same house…
Thus began the great descent into dissent – and it continues.
Father has good taste in furnishings (though not in his clerical dress, with all due respect). It is sad that he doesn't appreciate the 'ars celebrandi' and the 'theology of beauty' in the liturgy, exemplified in the usus antiquior, which can have a positive influence on the Ordinary Form (and see Saramentum Caritatis - Pope Benedict XVI). Fr. A.M.
ReplyDeleteThe modernists have nothing new and nothing interesting to say.
ReplyDelete