Posted on 10/14/2012 2:03:16 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
........Once the old, routine churchgoers have died off, and now that “None” is the default position for liberal-minded young people, what will the churches of the future look like?
We’re beginning to find out. More to the point, the clapped-out Anglican and Catholic bishops of the English-speaking world are finding out, too–and it’s giving them nightmares.
Those youngsters who once went to church out of obligation are now spending Sunday mornings in the supermarket or the gym (body worship is a flourishing faith). That means that the only young people in the pews are true believers who really want to be there.
If you’re a “go-ahead” bishop, vicar or diocesan bureaucrat, this is a scary development. You’ve spent your career reducing the hard truths of Christ’s teaching – such as the inevitability of the Last Judgment – to carbon-neutral platitudes. Suddenly, the 20-year-olds in your flock are saying: no thanks, we’ll take the hard truths. Eek!
In the Church of England, young evangelicals are embarrassed by the thespian agonising of Rowan Williams, the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury. If there’d been a hand-wringing event at the Olympics, he’d have shattered all records.
In the Roman Catholic Church of England and Wales, the disconnect is even more stark. Young Catholics take their cue from the traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI, rather than from dreary bishops who only occasionally wake from their slumber to mumble something about renewable energy.....
Also – and I can’t tell you how much pleasure it gives me to report this – the Vatican has pulled a fast one by appointing two new diocesan bishops, Mark Davies of Shrewsbury and Philip Egan of Portsmouth, who are in tune with conservative youngsters rather than an English Catholic bureaucracy run by crypto-Marxist megabores trained in the public sector......
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.telegraph.co.uk ...
All the media tell us is how great it is to have a woman and a black man running for president. What those two really believe, where they learned their quasi-religion, where they derive their support, who else they want to raise to power, and what they will do if they get there --- all that doesn't even get discussed. All over the world, Leftist hearts are leaping at Hillarybama. What exciting progress!
........Liberals are upset today because free-market economies are growing too fast, and are therefore polluting an unsullied Mamma Earth. Tens of millions of ordinary people in China and India are doing too well. The elites seem to yearn for the good old days --- the famines in India, the massacres in Russia and China --- and that wonderful sense of being in charge of human progress.
And yet ... in spite of years and years Leftist catastrophes, our organs of propaganda are still tilting drunkenly to the Left. Crypto-Marxism, a barely disguised revival of the old farce, is flourishing in our chattering classes. The prestige that Marxism lost in the real world soon came back in fantasy. Oh, if people only loved one another! Oh, if people only cared! Oh, if we only had real solidarity with the wretched of the earth! That's the feel-good story. But the real yearning is for power: Oh, if only people like us were in charge of everything.
In Britain, under the daily pounding of the Bolshie Beeb, the most admired "philosopher" of all time is now ... blood-dripping old Karl Marx. Freedom is routinely trashed; thieving tyrants like Hugo Chavez are celebrated.
"Crypto Marxism" --- crypto meaning "hidden" --- is a useful word to describe what's happened in the last twenty years. Because as soon as the Soviet Union crumbled, a host of barely disguised post-Marxist ideologies grabbed the microphones: the Green Movement, now furiously peddling global warming fraud; Third Way socialism in Europe, trying to hitch the welfare wagon to free markets; the European Union, a new autocracy of unelected committees, exactly what the USSR used to call "workers' Soviets"; the unbelievably corrupt, bigoted and self-serving United Nations; and all over the academic world, an explosion of anti-Western and anti-democratic fads like Post-Modernism, Multi-Culturalism, Deconstructionism, Feminism, anti-Zionism, Black Liberation Theology and other repackaged Marx imitations. It was a triumph of image-making and marketing......
.....And yet, today the New York Times makes a boutique specialty out of writing loving obits for flaming Old Reds, when they finally sputter out and die. No one on the American Left has ever expressed public sorrow for the estimated 100 million people killed by Marxist murderocracies; after all, they were murdered for "idealistic" reason. The crumbling of the Soviet Empire simply made it possible for the Left to walk away from Darth Vader and the Evil Empire. Soviet Union? Never heard of it. ........."
....Both Obama and Hillary grew up on the Alinsky Left, which only a theologian can tell from orthodox Marxism. Coming out of Yale Law, Hillary joined a crypto Marxist law outfit in Oakland, California. David Horowitz, who was part of that world until he recovered his moral center, has been pretty clear about the real roots and goals of that Greater Berkeley network.
The triumph of crypto-Marxism is not just weird, it's dangerous. The Reds haven't changed. They have just metastatized: That is why we are now so vulnerable to the next wave of totalitarianism, the Islamofascist kind. The long struggle of Western civilization against bloody tyranny is being covered up. The very real danger of new totalitarianism is being dismissed. ........ How crypto-Marxism won the Cold War
Caught in a conundrum of their own making.
Trying to be “relevant”, these clerics attempted to fill the pews with younger people by perverting their vows. Remember the guitar Masses, usually set at a different time of day.
Our Archbishop finally put a stop to that nonsense by declaring that the Mass was just that, a Mass of all the people, not divided people.
Of course, the damage has been done. The Episcopalians are a shadow of their former selves and not all the gays in Christendom contribute enough to keep the church going.
Drive off the faithful and you’re left only with the faithless.
Exactly.
...Young Catholics take their cue from the traditionalist Pope Benedict XVI, rather than from dreary bishops who only occasionally wake from their slumber to mumble something about renewable energy.
There are few things more countercultural today than Bible-based evangelicalism or strictly orthodox Catholicism.
countercultural ping
We Catholics need to bring back doctrinally solid catechesis. We need to bring back reverent liturgies, both in the ordinary and extraordinary forms, with decent traditional music, propers and/or traditional hymns. We need to bring back traditional devotions like the rosary, Eucharistic adoration, novenas, way of the cross, processions, pilgrimages, the Angelus, sodalities, etc. We need to bring back traditional Catholic religious orders, nuns (in habits!), monks and friars. The above will go a long way to evangelizing the youth and society at large. I think a lot of progress has been made since the crazy season of the late sixties and seventies, but there is still a lot to do. Let’s keep bailing the Ark of Peter and moving toward a fuller life in Christ in the Church with the successor of Peter, Pope Benedict!
That sums it up nicely.
Boggles my mind that some pray 5 times a day, fast for 30 days, wear outrageous garb & yet we can’t get ours to go to church once a week. Bring back the fire & brimstone & our nuns in traditional habits.
A fantastic article with lines like this: “the total wouldn’t begin to match that of the ecofreak lard bucket who was so nearly elected US President.”
You are right about the music. I attend Catholic Mass when visiting my parents (I went Southern Baptist, and ultraconservative). How did Marty Haugen get into the Catholic Hymnal, when in fact he is a liberal Christian in Name Only (United Church of Christ, 100% apostate by any Christian standard). If the RC’s are going to use non-Catholic sources, Fanny Crosby or Isaac Watts would be more appropriate.
While this is encouraging, I doubt it will go far and the faithful will only end up storming the wrong citadels much like the crusades. Christ rules the kingdom within and one of the great sins of believers is to try and create a sustainable orthodoxy in this physical world. Christ is not to be found in buildings or administrative systems; this is a hard thing to grasp since we are physical beings that interpret the world in ways that seem normal to us.
I think a better way to look at this (probably the way of the future) would be to view the wreckage of historic “churches” as evidence that Christ lives in our hearts and the fellowship of the true Church is found in the suffering for Christ living our our faith in our daily lives and sharing our walk with other believers as we walk in the Way. Given that, the temporal nature of buildings and systems and all things corruptible becomes apparent.
Fact is, most of the rest of the world (as least where Christianity is rising and meaningful) the Church is as it was - small, intimate, local and in many cases home based. The upshot is that the rise of the brick and mortar system we believe to be synonymous with Christ’s body is just a roof where He once dwelt with his disciples. That landlord of this world is taking back his property and evicting the renters.
The really good thing is that our faith in Christ needs no building and has always found its purity in the hearts of submitted believers - something no apostate or heretical powers can conquer.
Off-topic, but if you read through the whole column, you come across this gem by the author (described by his critics as “a blood-crazed ferret”, no less!):
“An inconvenient truth for the EU”
“The European Union meets at least one of the criteria for recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize – vanity. President Jimmy Carter, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Dalai Lama (yes, even him) and Al Gore: what all these men have in common is that they are jolly pleased with themselves. Indeed, if you were to add up the individual smuggery of every employee of the EU, the total wouldn’t begin to match that of the ecofreak lard bucket who was so nearly elected US President. Seriously, imagine if Gore had been inaugurated in 2001. I can see him literally exploding with self-esteem, like Mr Creosote in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.”
Thanks for introducing me to this guy - he’s truly a hoot-and-a-half, and he writes with real panache.
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