Posted on 07/16/2009 3:47:36 PM PDT by NYer
A Christian's most important mission field is the children of his own family. His second most important mission field is the children of his congregation.
Every time a Christian child attends a godless, Marxist, secular humanist government school, his family and his congregation are **FAILING** in their duty.
Only when the immediate children in a person's family and congregation are thoroughly educated and catechized in a thoroughly Christian educational environment ( Christian school or homeschool)...only then, should a Christian be look at foreign missions.
Yes, I think it was hijacked by the liberal clergy
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Marxism!
It was hijacked by Marxist clergy who worshiped, and continue to worship today, Karl Marx instead of God.
I’m with Salvation. Just reading Fr. John Neuhaus, who says, too, that you cannot blame Vat 2 for what came after. Makes me want to re-read the original documents. He names a subgroup within the American bishops as pushing the edge of the envelope as far as they could after Vatican II to get the ‘changes’ they thot necessary through. They are still trying for the big ones, tho — female priests,etc.
The Monseignor where we were RCIA’d was SO disappointed when the current pope was elected/ crushed that his life-long-held dreams were going down in flames.
Something else that happened at the same time (nothing happens in a vacuum) was the invention of the “pill”. Many clergymen were uncertain whether the pill would be accepted as a legal means of birth control by the Vatican. The clergy languished for 6-10 years deciding. By the time they decided that Catholic women should not use the pill, Pandora’s box had been opened.
I could draw the same analogy about Confession. Many parishes introduced group Confession as a substitute for individual Congession. By the time the Bishops layed down the law on that, Catholics had abandoned individual Confession. Now, my Pastor complains that he is lonely on Monday nights.
**He names a subgroup within the American bishops as pushing the edge of the envelope as far as they could after Vatican II to get the ‘changes’ they thot necessary through. They are still trying for the big ones, tho — female priests,etc.**
Definitely.............and it sounds like your priest needs to get a new RCIA director.
**Many parishes introduced group Confession as a substitute for individual Congession. By the time the Bishops layed down the law on that, Catholics had abandoned individual Confession. Now, my Pastor complains that he is lonely on Monday nights.**
I don’t think a Sunday goes by that our priest does not mention forgiveness, penance, confession, the times we have failed to love God and love our neighbor.
Needless to say — our pastor is not lonely during the confessions before Mass or after Mass on Wednesday evening. (He had to add time for Confessions!)
I pray that your parish may do the same kind of turnaround. In fact for the Lenten Reconciliation Service — our Church was absolutely packed.
The seven priests who came to help with Confessions had their jaws hit the floor when they saw the multitude.
Submit a petition to your parish office for the prayers of the faithful. If you go to daily Mass, don’t hesitate to pray for an increase in Confessions or that all parishioners may receive the Eucharist worthily. (I have done both!)
**I’d say Vatican II was used as an excuse to hijack the seminaries. **
Also very true!
But Pope Benedict saw to it that the seminaries were cleaned out.
Now he is after the nuns. (And he’ll clean house there, too.)
My answer is a resounding "No, it was not!"
I believe that this is a better explanation of what happened at Vatican II:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/1942586/posts
Kobler’s Key to the Council
Pastoral advice of an ecumenical council is not protected by the guarantee of infallibility. It may be questioned, re-examined, and, if found wanting, abandoned. We no longer accept the pastoral advice of Lateran IV that non-Catholics should be made to wear distinctive clothing.
That is a very good read - thanks for posting it. If one sees the the purpose of Vatican II replacing all that went then I would have more sympathy with your post - that was never the intention although it may have been the desire of many who have since used VII for their own ends. As and addition or for the purpose of nuance in the Church’s stance on things there is little wrong with the approach you mentioned in your post - Of course when used as a model for replacement then it is more than likely to cause the problems we have seen.
It seems to me that many were looking for a replacement model and so viewed VII through that filter - whether intentionally or innocently they took it and ran with it rather than waiting for clarification from the Holy See. I don’t think one should underestimate the “Spirit of the times” and the effect that had on clergy in their delivery of VII.
Mel
Very interesting post. I think there’s truth in both analyses; the supplantation of Thomism by phenomenological approaches was definitely of major importance, and while there had clearly been some of that going on for some time prior to the Council, it wouldn’t have happened in one fell swoop, as it did, without the Council.
At the same time, I think on a less exalted philosophical level, the perception of many people, including members of the heirarchy, was shaped by journalistic coverage and journalistic “values.” These in turn were shaped by the bizarre spirit of the 1960s (which rejected anything prior to itself as useless, out of date, and basically, its enemy). Thus we had good “progressives” and evil “reactionaries” facing off.
I think the fear of nuclear annihilation did contribute to some of the thought of VatII and also enabled it to give a sense of urgency to its changes that made them faster and much harder for rational minds to resist. As with Obama’s changes to the US structure, speed was key; Vatican II hit with such stunning rapidity that even good people were caught off guard and didn’t react until too late.
Finally, I think there is an aspect that has never been fully analyzed, namely, the influence of Marxism. It is well known that the Communists boasted of having infiltrated seminaries in the US, and I would assume they did so elsewhere as well, making sure that young Catholic clergy were increasingly exposed to left-wing social values to the point of making them believe that these were actually Catholic values. These included the emphasis on collective behavior, the “preferential option for the poor” as a class rather than individuals, the contempt for art and culture, and the contempt for the past, none of them traditionally Catholic but all of them features of Marxist thought that were accepted by Vatican II and imposed as the thinking of the new, true Catholic Church.
I did not mean that my current church practiced group confession and group forgiveness, but I once belonged to a parish in another state that did.
However, my current parish does have a group reconciliation at Easter with individual confessions afterwards. That is packed, but many parishioners leave it right there.
I think that many Catholics miss the anonymity of the old time Confessional. We don’t even have one at our parish, and you always know your confessor — there’s no chance of confessing to a stranger any more, with the shortage of priests that we currently have.
Extra prayers for Pope Benedict XVI this morning. He underwent surgery for a broken arm this morning after a fall.
While the council was still in session, it occurred to some that it was less important what that body actually said and did than what people thought it said and did. Thus as early as the first session, in 1962, there was an orchestrated propaganda campaign to present the deliberations and define the issues in particular ways and to enlist the sympathies of the public on behalf of a particular agenda. Certain key journalists became "participant-observers," meaning that they reported the events and at the same time sought to influence them -- the chief practitioners being "Xavier Rynne" (the pen name of the Redemptorist historian Francis X. Murphy), who wrote "Letter from Vatican City" for the New Yorker magazine, and Robert Blair Kaiser, who reported for Time.
Such reports were written for a largely non-Catholic audience, many of whom were unsympathetic to the Faith, and the thrust of the reporting was to assure such readers that the Church was at long last admitting its many errors and coming to terms with secular culture. Most Catholics probably relied on these same sources for their understanding of the council and so received the same message.
I'm sure that all aspects of the aftermath have not been explored thoroughly as yet. We're still within the first 50 years and history tells us that upheaval for 50 years after a council is normal. What I find find intriguing and to an extent ironic is the notion that VII was an attempt to end the Cold War - which, according to my sources in the military, is on the back burner, not over contrary to 20 years worth of journalism that got tired of pretending to be on the right side. The people who foment such wars and conflicts aren't real likely to let it go.
In the end, it looks more like VII was used to help bring down the Church and destroy Her credibility among Her own faithful. It wasn't meant to be that way, I'm sure, but that's what happened.
I think it actually was meant to be that way - by some people. But the important thing is that not all of them meant it that way and many of them were swept up in the "excitement" of the moment, which, as you and Hitchcock point out, was manipulated by the press.
Some of the reporters were probably ideologically motivated, but more likely, most were uncomprehending. They may have been doing this primarily to get what they thought was a good story (heroic right-thinking liberals against evil retrograde conservatives), but it still had a terrible effect and set the tone for thinking about VatII for years.
And this before Woodward and Bernstein Syndrome had a name.
I meant Woodward and Bernstein envy syndrome. See what happens when the weather turns nice on my day off? My brain goes to mush.
My mother said it best in it's early days and all her life. Vatican II in practice, as hijacked by the left, represents a loss of the sense of the sacred, the holy, the mystery is gone. And the loss of devotions over time clearly correlates to the loss (or watering down) of faith for so many.
Yes, I think it was hijacked by the liberal clergy which resulted in a lot of liturgical and other changes that really were’t specifically endorsed by Vatican II.
I agree. My area, western PA, and areas near me seems to excel at this. And the fruits are too evident. Many of the original supporters and implementers of Vat II are still in charge in many places and eager to see the 'fulfillment of what we begun so many years ago' (this from a recent blurb in the diocesan bulletin). They feel the 'threat' of the 'dissent'. They resist any reasonable attempt to discuss recent literature that suggests Vat II may have been misinterpreted at the start. That some would suggest it, is called 'disobedience' to our leader in faith, the bishop (not Pope).
My understanding is that Karol Wojtyla contributed a meaningful amount of wise and sound doctrine to V II but that the Council was spun into never never land; I've been told that reading the material is very rewarding.
And frankly, everything I've seen in my lifetime regarding the Church, the media, and the radical activists in each supports this thesis.
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