Posted on 04/28/2015 11:45:01 AM PDT by NYer
If there is one sentiment that baffles me more than any other, it’s this:
The Catholic Church will be changing her teachings, and I only need watch and wait. I am foolish for not seeing the “big picture” of how it’s all going to go down. It’s inevitable. The Church will come around, the Church will conform. It’s just a matter of time.
In response, I question how many millennia have to pass without the Church changing before they’ll concede the point?
Take a look at what a dissenting Catholic named James said to me just the other day, about the foolishness of faithful Catholics (emphases mine):
It’s just as frustrating to me to see an intelligent person walking a rigid black and white line that will waver and shift in the coming centuries. When I taught each of my girls to drive they all exhibited the same myopic habit of looking 6 feet over the hood. My first correction to them was to look waaaay down the road to get the big picture, to see what was coming so as to be aware, while using peripheral vision to sort out any immediate hazards. Their driving improved immediately.
James believes that he has vision far into the future; he sees what’s coming ahead. If only the Catholic Church could see what he sees or could know what he knows.
Well, I agree that somebody is missing the big picture here, but it’s not the Church. The Church isn’t looking “six feet over the hood”, not at all. In fact, she started her engine over two thousand long years ago, and she began her journey looking out toward all of eternity. She was full of confidence in her mission and destiny then (as now), and she knew exactly where she was going. Two millennia later, she sees in her rearview mirror the ruins of every empire she passed along the way, even as she steadily cruises along, undeterred. She has not “wavered and shifted” off of the road and into any ditches, nor is there any credible sign that she ever will.
There is just no sign of it.
Dissenters and heretics and naysayers and ex-Catholics have been predicting “inevitable changes” since the first century of the Church’s existence. Yet, they are the ones who took their eyes off the road. While looking sideways to gawk at shiny distractions, or while looking inward to contemplate the lint in their own navels, they lost the “big picture” and ran themselves into a ditch. Ouch.
But that’s not how the Church rolls.
Let’s walk through it:
The First Century — Enemies of the Church are smugly predicting her fall, brutally persecuting her, violently trying to force the change themselves.
The Second Century — Ditto
The Third Century — Ditto
The Fourth Century — Violence against the Church eases, but how ’bout them heretics! The Church is wrong, they say, and she must and will change. The heretics gain lots of followers but lose Christ. The Church keeps driving straight ahead.
The Fifth Century — The Church still hasn’t changed her teachings, still going strong. Dissenters, heretics, and apostates see only six feet over the hood, and they lose the big picture entirely.
The Sixth Century — The Church still had not changed her teachings. Eyes on the road, driving smoothly forth.
The Seventh Century — The Church continues to outlast her critics, i.e., the ones who confidently predict her inevitable assimilation to the ways of the world or to their own particular heresy. Same story in…
The Eighth Century
The Ninth Century
The Tenth Century
The Eleventh Century
The Twelfth Century
The Thirteenth Century
(Are you still with me?)
The Fourteenth Century
The Fifteenth Century
The Sixteenth Century — Special note here: A bunch of Catholics disillusioned with sinners in the Church decide to jettison the Church entirely and preach brand new (heretical) doctrines; Church teaching still does not change, even as internal corruption is cleaned up. The Church continues to drive on her divinely appointed path while the Protestant Reformers and their followers splinter endlessly off-course in all directions.
The Seventeenth Century
The Eighteenth Century
The Nineteenth Century
The Twentieth Century
The Twenty-first Century
Still no change. Yawn. Just checking my watch here. Nope, we’re good. Still taking the long view and not getting sidetracked.
The spirit and sins of the age in every culture have come and gone a thousand times over, and the Church has not bowed to any of them.
There is not a scintilla of evidence that the Church is about to reverse course.
But still I get, “Oh, it’s just a matter of time now. You’ll see. The house of cards will fall.” And yet, no one ever sees, and the “house of cards” never falls.
My question: How much time must elapse until the critics are convinced?
It’s a serious question, but it’s largely rhetorical, of course. The critics will never be convinced in our own time, even as they weren’t convinced in the First Century, or the Second, or the Fourth, or the Sixteenth, or the Twentieth.
There have been a million Jameses talking of the Church’s inevitable change for centuries on end with not a hint of vindication. Their blinders won’t allow them to see the Church that Christ established, the Church protected and charged with teaching the Truth both in season and out.
My advice to James and the others is to take James’ advice and apply it to themselves: Stop with the myopic habit of looking only six feet over the hood at the fads and fancies of the day. Look waaaay down the road to get the big picture, use the experience of two millennia to understand what is coming so as to be aware, and use your peripheral vision to sort out any immediate hazards and shiny trinkets that would take you off the steady, narrow road and into a ditch. Your driving will improve immediately.
Your path will be stable, reliable, and clear to eternity.
Ping!
Nope.
[[Are You Waiting for the Church to Change Her Teachings?]]
No more so than I am waiting on God to change His Teachings to accommodate sinful people’s desire to sin
No more so than I am waiting on God to change His Teachings to accommodate sinful people’s desire to sin
_________________________________________________
AMEN!
And since God is the author of those ideas, then it would all be fashioned more in a way that suits Him.
I reckon.
I thought you might appreciate this perspective. It applies to Church critics from every direction IMO, not just the “Catholics” that want birth control and/or abortjon.
Answer: No.
Now hear this. The Church is waiting for the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Now heaven is timeless so time can’t be measured. Too bad for those waiting.
There is a mountain of evidence that a "modernist" fifth column is striving to transform doctrine into a dead letter through corrupt praxis.
"...Though they express astonishment themselves, no one can justly be surprised that We number such men among the enemies of the Church, if, leaving out of consideration the internal disposition of soul, of which God alone is the judge, he is acquainted with their tenets, their manner of speech, their conduct. Nor indeed will he err in accounting them the most pernicious of all the adversaries of the Church. For as We have said, they put their designs for her ruin into operation not from without but from within; hence, the danger is present almost in the very veins and heart of the Church, whose injury is the more certain, the more intimate is their knowledge of her. Moreover they lay the axe not to the branches and shoots, but to the very root, that is, to the faith and its deepest fires. And having struck at this root of immortality, they proceed to disseminate poison through the whole tree, so that there is no part of Catholic truth from which they hold their hand, none that they do not strive to corrupt..."
Leila, the author, is delusional here. The Church isn’t going to change.
These same progressivists also strove to change the complexity of the USCCB by recommending their "own". Still Proud Of Bishops He Gave U.S.. The intent clearly was to see them elevated to cardinals while still young in anticipation that one of them would be elevated to pope and convene Vatican Council III at which point they could implement the changes they desired. What they failed to factor in was the workings of the Holy Spirit. John Paul II's papacy extended well beyond their anticipations. Of the bishops appointed, only a small number made it into the College of Cardinals and had no impact on the voting process.
In the 2000 year history of the Church, despite a few bad popes, not one has ever erred in teachings on faith or morals. Not one! No other institution on the face of the earth can match that record, testimony to the working of the Holy Spirit. Our Lord promised that "not even the gates of hell would prevail" against His Church. We are still here, despite all the attempts. Have faith!
No. I’m not waiting for the Church to change its practices or disciplines, either. I joined this church ... not the parish I’m in today, but one very similar. That was God’s will for me.
If I was still at St. Francis of Assisi, Shavano Park, Texas, I’d probably be leading a Spanish choir and teaching bilingual Sacrament preparation, just like I am at St. Luke, Mint Hill, North Carolina.
ph
The dogma of Extra Ecclesiam null salus was thrown out the window.
Yes, Vatican II teaches false ecumenism and religious liberty.
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