Buffet-style faith dilutes pope's sway

This lie is typical of the garbage put forward by the likes of Frances Kissling and 'Catholics for Choice' crowd. The average Catholic in the pews reject these practices and take their Faith and the teaching of the Church seriously.

The average Catholic that I know doesn't know much about what their church believes, nor does he care. He goes because it is his family's custom to go. Half of the average Catholics that I know don't go to church at all. And don't say they are CINO's. That's just a cop out.

So, a couple using artificial birth control with six kids is sinful,

Yes. Birth control is intrinsically evil, it can never be a "good".

while a couple using NFP with two children is not.

It depends. The problem with NFP being so effective these days is that it can be used sinfully, but then you are getting into interior motives which can not be seen by the observer. That would have to be discussed in the confessional, with a faithful, holy priest. Many faithful Catholics reject NFP all together for this reason.

When you seek to deny the primary good of marriage, the purpose, which is procreation of and the education of children, you are not only attempting to say no to God's will, but you are showing a lack of faith in God's divine providence, a lack of trust that you will not be given the necessary graces you need to comply with His will.

According to my mother, I being the youngest of seven, am the best argument against birth control. ;-)

It is simply facetious to tell a couple with six children that they're going to hell because they decide that's all they can have, and NFP doesn't work for them.

Justification for teaching error? The Church knows not who is or is not going to hell -how can one teach an other is going to hell? Much better to teach the truth as the Church provides...

Sex and Property

From G.K. Chesterton's The Well and the Shallows

In the dull, dusty, stale, stiff-jointed and lumbering language, to which most modern discussion is limited, it is necessary to say that there is at this moment the same fashionable fallacy about Sex and about Property. In the older and freer language, in which men could both speak and sing, it is truer to say that the same evil spirit has blasted the two great powers that make the poetry of life; the Love of Woman and the Love of the Land. It is important to observe, to start with, that the two things were closely connected so long as humanity was human, even when it was heathen. Nay, they were still closely connected, even when it was a decadent heathenism. But even the stink of decaying heathenism has not been so bad as the stink of decaying Christianity. The corruption of the best. . . .

For instance, there were throughout antiquity, both in its first stage and its last, modes of idolatry and imagery of which Christian men can hardly speak. "Let them not be so much as named among you." [See Ephesians 5:3] Men wallowed in the mere sexuality of a mythology of sex; they organised prostitution like priesthood, for the service of their temples; they made pornography their only poetry; they paraded emblems that turned even architecture into a sort of cold and colossal exhibitionism. Many learned books have been written of all these phallic cults; and anybody can go to them for the details, for all I care. But what interests me is this:

In one way all this ancient sin was infinitely superior, immeasurably superior, to the modern sin. All those who write of it at least agree on one fact; that it was the cult of Fruitfulness. It was unfortunately too often interwoven, very closely, with the cult of the fruitfulness of the land. It was at least on the side of Nature. It was at least on the side of Life. It has been left to the last Christians, or rather to the first Christians fully committed to blaspheming and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex, which is not even a worship of Life. It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility. The new Paganism literally merits the reproach of Swinburne, when mourning for the old Paganism: "and rears not the bountiful token and spreads not the fatherly feast." The new priests abolish the fatherhood and keep the feast - to themselves. They are worse than Swinburne's Pagans. The priests of Priapus and Cotytto [fertility deities.] go into the kingdom of heaven before them.

Now it is not unnatural that this unnatural separation, between sex and fruitfulness, which even the Pagans would have thought a perversion, has been accompanied with a similar separation and perversion about the nature of the love of the land. In both departments there is precisely the same fallacy; which it is quite possible to state precisely. The reason why our contemporary countrymen do not understand what we mean by Property is that they only think of it in the sense of Money; in the sense of salary; in the sense of something which is immediately consumed, enjoyed and expended; something which gives momentary pleasure and disappears. They do not understand that we mean by Property something that includes that pleasure incidentally; but begins and ends with something far more grand and worthy and creative. The man who makes an orchard where there has been a field, who owns the orchard and decides to whom it shall descend, does also enjoy the taste of apples; and let us hope, also, the taste of cider. But he is doing smething very much grander, and ultimately more gratifying, than merely eating an apple. He is imposing his will upon the world in the manner of the charter given him by the will of God; he is asserting that his soul is his own, and does not belong to the Orchard Survey Department, or the chief Trust in the Apple Trade. But he is also doing something which was implicit in all the most ancient religions of the earth; in those great panoramas of pageantry and ritual that followed the order of the seasons in China or Babylonia; he is worshipping the fruitfulness of the world. Now the notion of narrowing property merely to money is exactly like the notion of narrowing love merely to sex. In both cases an incidental, isolated, servile and even secretive pleasure is substituted for participation in a great creative process; even in the everlasting Creation of the world.

The two sinister things can be seen side by side in the system of Bolshevist Russia; for Communism is the only complete and logical working model of Capitalism. The sins are there a system which are everywhere else a sort of repeated blunder. From the first, it is admitted, that the whole system was directed towards encouraging or driving the worker to spend his wages; to have nothing left on the next pay day; to enjoy everything and consume everything and efface everything; in short, to shudder at the thought of only one crime; the creative crime of thrift. It was a tame extravagance; a sort of disciplined dissipation; a meek and submissive prodigality. For the moment the slave left off drinking all his wages, the moment he began to hoard or hide any property, he would be saving up something which might ultimately purchase his liberty. He might begin to count for something in the State; that is, he might become less of a slave and more of a citizen. Morally considered, there has been nothing quite so unspeakably mean as this Bolshevist generosity. But it will be noted that exactly the same spirit and tone pervades the manner of dealing with the other matter. Sex also is to come to the slave merely as a pleasure; that it may never be a power. He is to know as little as possible, or at least to think as little as possible, of the pleasure as anything else except a pleasure; to think or know nothing of where it comes from or where it will go to, when once the soiled object has passed through his own hands. He is not to trouble about its origin in the purposes of God or its sequel in the posterity of man. In every department he is not a possessor, but only a consumer; even if it be of the first elements of life and fire in so far as they are consumable; he is to have no notion of the sort of Burning Bush that burns and is not consumed. For that bush only grows on the soil, on the real land where human beings can behold it; and the spot on which they stand is holy ground. Thus there is an exact parallel between the two modern moral, or immoral, ideas of social reform. The world has forgotten simultaneously that the making of a Farm is something much larger than the making of a profit, or even a product, in the sense of liking the taste of beetroot sugar; and that the founding of a Family is something much larger than sex in the limited sense of current literature; which was anticipated in one bleak and blinding flash in a single line of George Meredith; "And eat our pot of honey on the grave."

My parish and diocese are well on the path, already, prior to our Holy Father's passing. And many over the last decade have joined the movement rather than reject it. Our diocese considers itself, or strives to be, at the 'forefront of the movement'. We've spawned Joan Chittester, so ...

U.S. Roman Catholics adored Pope John Paul II but vast numbers of the nation's 67 million parishioners openly disregard the pontiff's core teachings about abortion, divorce, extramarital sex and birth control.

And here, our Holy Father is not so loved by all. Many speak derisively of him, referring to what 'Rome' does or the Bishop of Rome. True enough, but refusing to call John Paul II 'Pope'. Some still love him and speak reverently of him, even from the pulpit, but the line is drawn. This group carefully calls themselves 'American' Catholics. True enough, for we are Americans here, but it is not for purposes of nationality, but rather to distance itself from Rome, to create a 'new' church (their words). As I've mentioned before, when our bishop has acted in direct defiance of Rome, he has admonished and ordered us that our first duty is to be obedient to him, our Bishop in direct disobedience to the Pope, for he considers himself equal to the Pope by virtue of their both being Bishops of their own regions. Examples? We had altar girls before the official proclamation was released, we were ordered under threat of excommunication(!) not to purchase or read the Catechism of the Catholic Church when for the first couple of years that it appeared in print, it would be 'too hard for us to understand', even though the Holy Father wrote it for everyone. Only after the Pope himself admonished our Bishop and called him to Rome for a 'visit', did our bishop rescind that 'rule'. And there are dioceses worse than mine in terms of what seems to be de facto schism.

It is simply facetious to tell a couple with six children that they're going to hell because they decide that's all they can have, and NFP doesn't work for them.

It may not be easy to live the faith, but I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. By the way, He didn't promise a rose garden if you followed Him, He promised a cross.

Our Lord will not only give the necessary graces needed to accept the struggles and sacrifices that He requires of anyone throughout life, but these same sacrifices when embraced, will be jewels in the crown of glory that Our Lord Himself will reward that person with in heaven, upon final perseverance.

Many AmChurch types view "collegiality" as the final loophole for whatever wholesale changes their modern imaginations can conjur. Pope Donald I is just such a figure.

I'm afraid you're right, from a "Latino" standpoint (BTW, you can always tell when an article is liberally slanted by its use of the word "Latino" rather than the more conservative word "Hispanic"), although there are several very young Hispanic couples I know who are returning to their Catholic Faith with a capital C and then some. Most of these couples are younger than me (I'm mid 30's), and their parents are boomers who left the church altogether or did "buffet-style" Catholicism. Several of these couples have had the marriage sacrament performed in the church after having first married a few years ago in Vegas, etc., and LOTS of them are doing natural family planning.
Is it time for me to return to the Catholic Church? I don't know, but I have this feeling that I just can't shake about it. I've posted my experience before, but I'll post again both so that maybe I can get some guidance and advice and also for anyone's information.

Mr. HR and I met and married in a non-Catholic church, although I was raised Catholic. I wish my Catholic experience had been different, and that I could have been better educated on the "whys" of Catholicism and the actual "meaning" of what I was practicing as a child/youth. We were never taught anything about the Pope or Catholicism on a greater scale than our local Parish.
I felt like questions were discouraged and frowned upon. When I was older and in High School, I also was disallusioned by the openly homosexual deacon at my church and why he was even allowed to be one. He's still openly homosexual and still a deacon at a Catholic church elsewhere today, by the way.

I went to a predominately hispanic Catholic Church, and there were lots of single teenage moms, welfare dependency, etc., that I felt like our priest could have/should have addressed strongly if at all.

When I was really impressionable (I was very small so this would have been the early to mid '70s) the CYO kids did this barefoot "expressive dance" thing up the aisle while singing "All we are saying, is give peace a chance...." It sounds really bizarre now that I know more about Catholicism and have come to know the good conservative Catholics on FR, but back then it just seemed like my Catholic Church was a haven for liberals, hippies and welfare queens. I think the priest might even have been "liberal," if that's possible.

When I went to college, I started tagging along with my roommate to her church (Protestant), and I finally felt like I was actually being taught and finally hearing messages that were actually healing my soul and pointing out the "rights" and "wrongs", rather than just hearing readings during a Mass that weren't put into any context of what that meant to my soul and my life. It was the first time that I saw a church as a "hospital for ailing souls" or a "gym to keep my healthy soul in shape". I learned finally how to connect the teachings of Jesus Christ with life's everyday spiritual challenges and drudgery. I met Mr. HR at this church, and we were married there. However, worship at that particular church (and most Protestant churches in this town) has since become a Contemporary Worship, with "praise music" including drums, electric guitars, etc., and we're more the traditional worship types. It just "feels" like the conservative values Mr. HR and I believe in are more present among the Catholics we know today.

No, the Church doesn't have a problem. Eighty-five percent of Church-going "catholics" who don't observe church teaching have a problem. And that problem concerns their salvation.

I agree. The church has been very clear. Any hierarchical problems come more from the bishops refusing to obey their superiors and teaching their faithful to do the same. It can be summed up thusly - 'I will not serve'. Anyone who works in parish ministries in parishes laden with cafeteria Catholics can surely see the 'I won't serve' attitude in action.

Don't like what the church teaches, go find a church that does. Don't change the church to betray the faithful in favor of those who don't believe. The only thing that a church has to bank on is its values, when those are gone, everything else follows.

Excellent point! This really sums it up. The change crowd is hell-bent on change for the sake of change, or as we hear 'to make it easier'.

cafeteria Catholics

That's kind of a nutshell term, isn't it? I won't rehash what I wrote above, but if Catholicism in my youth was a cafeteria, it wasn't that the serving line had things I didn't want, it was that it was missing key things that my soul craved but that that my local Parish wasn't putting out for me even though it was available from the "central warehouse," and I was too young to know those things were missing from the buffet. Running your metaphor into the ground further, it's as if I was a little kid in a public school cafeteria and the cafeteria manager only put out bread and candy for us, when my body was craving and requiring meat, vegetables and whole grain as well as the recipes and explanations of why my body needed those nutritious foods.

And some of us have seen the fun they've had with that, change for the sake of change. Self-proclaimed Pope Donald is one example, he likens each Bishop to be 'Pope' of their own diocese, he has said this. Unfortunately, he uses it as an excuse to do his own thing whenever that disagrees with his superior, the Holy Father in Rome.

"Does "go and sin no more" ring any bells to you? It should, because Christ was perfectly willing to reject those who went and continued to sin."

Yes, I agree. However, sin, to be serious, must be committed with the understanding that the sinner willfully sins, despite knowing the full truth of the Gospel. For example, there are those who think, in good faith, that one doesn't have to worry about eating meat on Fridays outside of Lent. This is FALSE!!! The Church still requires us to refrain from meat on ALL Fridays - however, after Vatican 2, the Church allowed one to do some other form of penitential practice in place of the abstinence - although the abstinence is the preferred method. All of this stems from lack of education of the laity. I could continue on about the Theology of the Body. How many Catholics really know the teachings of the late John Paul 2?

That is the point that I am making; not that sin is to be ignored - quite the opposite. The Heirarchy should be preaching what IS sin and not this gushy drool that if we are "good", we are a shoo-in to enter heaven. I have already referred to Matthew 25 and the Parable of the Talents. The guy sent to hell isn't "bad". He is loveless. Look also to the very next parable, the sheep and the goats. Those sent to hell are not evil people - they are the loveless.

With this being said, how complicit is the sinner in our cases? Are we to then reject the person, to excommunicate them, because they were ignorant? I will now ask you to consider the parable of the Wheat and the Cockles (weeds). Cockles and Wheat look EXACTLY alike until they are harvested. Who are you, now, to determine who is wheat and who is cockle? Be careful on how quickly you want to expel people from the Church. Jesus did not give up on the Pharisees until they were given many chances, with full knowledge of what they were rejecting.

Ask yourself, "Do these cafeteria Catholics really know what they are rejecting"? If you are convinced they are willfully rejecting the teachings of Christ, then, as Matthew 18 tells us, we are to take other members of the church and try to convince them, then take it to the Church. Then, only, are we to reject them.

I hope that clarifies my point.

Regards

"Many have lost their faith, they themselves have been mislead into error by heretical teachers in the seminaries, and some may have never had the faith to begin with."

Agreed. Is this the laity's fault? Again, it is the heirarchy that is not doing their jobs. First, with trying to win public opinion polls, rather than teach the Gospel, what have they done? Second of all, where are they in monitoring what is taught in the seminary? Third, what about the bishops who didn't get rid of the homosexual priests who desired to act out their fantasies? I think we have a problem with the heirarchy. The US bishops, as a group, are not doing their jobs as well as they should be.

I totally agree, we should support our orthodox priests and bishops. This means, especially, at the collection plates and in ministerings.

Regards

"The average Catholic that I know doesn't know much about what their church believes, nor does he care"

Sadly, you are probably right. It is difficult to make Christ relevant to people who focus on materialism and the false belief that going to Mass on Sunday is enough to get them to heaven. So how do we educate the masses better?

Regards

I just had a good friend who goes to an E-Free church at my desk an hour ago asking the very same question. How do you stir up other people's faith? How do you get them to read their bibles as if they were really the Word of God? My thought was that his effort were to broad and general and maybe we serve best when we serve individually to the single next person to whom we can minister.

"My thought was that his effort were to broad and general and maybe we serve best when we serve individually to the single next person to whom we can minister."

Yes, being the light of the world is what we are called to become. I have faith that God will send people to us and that we, with His help, can plant the seed that later, perhaps another can build on. Rome wasn't built in a day (sorry for the cliche!). Your advice is probably the most effective for "normal" people who don't have access to mass evangelization or outreach to others. I have discovered, though, that belonging to various ministries has helped with one's exposure to others. Perhaps that is another way of spreading the Gospel more effectively for us.

Thanks and regards