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To: All

My real point all along is that the politics are impossible and we should stop the bickering and share the sacraments.

Let me change the frame of reference.
Today, the novus ordo Catholic Church operates Lourdes.
At Lourdes, there is an international medical committee that has documented 7000 startling medically inexplicable, or very unlikely, cures over the past many decades. 66 of these cures have been designated as outright miracles.

Lourdes exists. It is real. It is a recent development, less than two centuries old. Whatever the merits of whatever happened 14 or 10 or 5 centuries ago, one century ago and since God has opened a fountain of miracles, demonstrating his abiding presence, in a garishly Catholic shrine at a muddy pool in France. Lourdes openly proves that God's grace is upon the Catholic Church. It does not prove that God's grace is NOT with any other Church, only that He remains with the Catholic Church as well, in a startlingly open way.

Since God's grace is demonstrably still with Catholicism in spite of whatever doctrinal errors may or may not have been committed by the Catholics, those of us who love God - Orthodox, Catholic or Protestant - are reminded that what we believe is worse than worthless if we lose sight of the fact that it is all about pleasing God. Adhering to a religious faith is bad if it is not about God, because religious faiths set up doctrines that divide people and make them fight.

For whatever reason, God clearly is still present in the Catholic Church because the miracles and marvels at Lourdes on ongoing, continuing, daily facts, present to us in the here and now, hundreds a year. From Lourdes, we know that whatever WE think is bad, rotten, erroneous, etc., about the Catholic Church, God's grace is still particularly upon the Church. Otherwise He would not grace Lourdes with His manifest presence. Since He does indisputably grace Lourdes with His manifest presence, that means that He remains within the Catholic Church.

And that means that all of us, Catholic or not, have a duty to respect God's choice here. If you are an SSPX Catholic, where is the SSPX Lourdes? Where is it? It does not exist. That does not mean that God is not with the SSPX. But it means that you err if you say that God is not with the novus ordo Catholic Church. Because there is no getting around it: God is visibly present at Lourdes, and God knows what He is doing. Because God is visibly present, at a novus ordo Catholic Shrine, to Mary no less, if you have a beef with Marianology, you need to get over it: God does not oppose the cult of Mary, and religion is about serving God, right?
If you are a Catholic and have a beef with the novus ordo mass, which is what they perform at Lourdes, you need to get over it: if God did not like the novus ordo mass, he would withdraw his grace from Lourdes, wouldn't He? But He doesn't. And there is your answer: YOU may not like the novus ordo mass, but God manifestly does not hate it.

If you are an Orthodox believer and you disagree with all of the Catholic "innovations" since the Seven Ecumenical Councils, you are certainly entitled to your rites and practices and beliefs. But if you believe that the Catholic Church has become heretical, God does not entitle you to that belief. He opened a Shrine at Lourdes in the 19th Century. You certainly do not have to adopt all of these Catholic innovations, but you certainly also cannot claim that God rejects these innovations...because God opened His miraculous fountain of healing at Lourdes in recent times, not at Nicaea or anywhere else.

History is history. In the present, the world is beset by the evil of religious oppression from the jihad on one side, and by the lapse into libertinism by the loss of faith in the secular West on the other. We Catholics and Orthodox, and Protestants too have been bickering about points of doctrine since time immemorial. Nobody is going to climb down on those points. We are not going to resolve them, because we do not have the perfect knowledge to know the right answers. We have our faith and our traditions. But we DO have Lourdes, to remind us ALL that God is REAL, and present, and has an opinion. To degrade the miracles at Lourdes is to spit in the face of God. Call Lourdes "politically incorrect miracles", but miracles they are.

Before Lourdes, we should fall silent and contemplate what it all means. It means that our faith is true: there is God. It means that God did not cease intervening directly and miraculously in human affairs in the first century of the fifth, but does it still in the 21st, in a way that is scientifically unambiguous. And it means that God has favored a Shrine to Mary where the novus ordo mass is practiced as the most obviously, visible fount of his miracles.

Nobody should take that as meaning that, therefore, whoever you are, you must embrace the Novus Ordo mass and modern Roman Catholicism. It does mean that God is telling each of us that he does not object to either of those things. And if HE doesn't object to them, and indeed continues to pour forth open miracles from that place to a degree and on a scale unknown anywhere else in the world, then we need to take a hard look at ourselves and ask who we think WE are for objecting to them. Religion is not about serving what WE want, it is about serving God.

Lourdes does not prove that everybody needs to be a Novus Ordo Roman Catholic. It DOES prove that God does not object to the Novus Ordo Roman Catholics, because He keeps on performing open medical miracles, by the hundreds, in that place and not elsewhere, not like that. He doesn't transfer His grace - certainly he COULD, but He doesn't. And if HE doesn't object, who does any one of us think he is by objecting more strongly than God?

We can't resolve the arguments of the past. We cannot undo the Schism by resolving those issues. We can observe God's presence in the world to day, at Lourdes especially, and focusing on that and not the past, decide that what matters today is that we should share the sacraments in love and charity. Evil is still abroad in the world. And it does not repose in the Curia of the Vatican or in the Eastern Patriarchs. Therefore, let us stop making issues of our divisions that exceed God's express opinion. If the Catholics erred, God forgave them long ago and put Lourdes in the Catholic West as a sign of that forgiveness. We should respect God's choice and forgive each other too.


105 posted on 09/27/2004 9:13:10 AM PDT by Vicomte13
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To: Vicomte13

"But if you believe that the Catholic Church has become heretical, God does not entitle you to that belief."

Did one of us EOs on this thread accuse you RCs of heresy? I must have missed that post. I will say that the Orthodox have fairly regularly been accused of being heretics on these boards, though not on this thread. I thought we had agreed to consider each other schismatics. I think God might agree with that formulation! :)


109 posted on 09/27/2004 1:32:01 PM PDT by Kolokotronis (Nuke the Cube!)
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