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To: ultima ratio; Desdemona; Siobhan; Catholicguy; Bud McDuell; sandyeggo; BlackElk; Loyalist
"A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation."
-Edmund Burke, "Reflections on the Revolution in France," 1790

Even though Burke was talking about the state, I think his words apply to the religious and cultural realms as well. (I may be criticized for quoting Burke because he isn't Catholic, but oh well. Wisdom knows no boundaries.)

I can understand completely where you are coming from, ultima. I grew up in the Novus Ordo era, without ANY knowledge of the Tridentine Mass. However, my parish was rather traditional, so when I was in the parish grade school, all students were required to go to Mass EVERY day during Lent, and we had regular Stations of the Cross and Benediction and Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament on Fridays during Lent. We also celebrated traditions such as Forty Hours and the symbolic coronation of Mary during the month of May. Unfortunately, there isn't as much of an empathesis on this for the current students at my parish (due to a change in the principal and pastor), but all of this had a significant impact on the development of my faith.

As I went on to high school, I received a religious education in an all-male environment with the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales as my primary religious teachers. This reenforced my traditionalist sentiments. More recently, my striving towards a more traditionalist celebration of my faith has been fomented by the fact that the Catholic chapel on my campus is rather "liberal" or "modernist" in character (guitar music during Mass, "inclusionary" language sometimes during the Readings). Out of my own free will, I have looked for alternatives. At the moment, I don't have much free reign to look for them, due to my location and situation in life (full-time college student). But very recently, I've been driven by my new-found devotion to the Divine Mercy, the writings of Thomas Aquinas and G.K. Chesterton, and learning more about the Eastern Rites of Catholicism.

Finally getting to my point, I think that what we have been growing through over the past forty years or so is another period of change within the Church. There are many ways to interpret change, and that (added to human weakness and hardheadedness) has caused many of the problems we are dealing with now. While the beliefs we hold are eternal (they are given to us by God through revelation and God acting through the Church), traditions have been slowly changing over the millenia. The way we celebrate Mass now, or even fifty years ago, is NOT the way Mass was celebrated originally. As the Church has adapted to various situation, times, and places, the traditions have changed. Because of this, debates and conflicts have resulted, as they are now. But the miraculous aspect through all these trials and tribulations is that the Church has SURVIVED all these calamities. This alone can show us that God "has our back." As Burke stated above, if the Church is without any means of change, it is without means of its conservation. The Church was "forced" to change (or in reality adapt) to circumstances that cause much peril. One such time was the Protestant Reformation, when heroes such as St. Charles Borromeo and St. Francis de Sales sprung up to the challenge and preserved the Church. I think we are witnessing another such time right now. We just need to put our entire trust in God and stop relying on our incomplete human perspective. We will get through this time, as we have so many times in the past.

The other big problem in this widening debate, as in the arguments over what "conservatism" is, is that people are claiming that they have the "true" Catholicism. I think in most cases, all sides to this debate have vaild points. It is when we're reduced to name-calling and making claims of exclusivity that we reach crisis point. The frame of our argument is mostly within the "Roman" rite of Catholicism. At the same time, however, we have NUMEROUS other rites of Catholicism that have different traditions and ways of celebrating the Sacraments. They are as much ONE, HOLY, CATHOLIC, and APOSTOLIC as we are. I don't think many people would question that. Also, the Church has held that the Eastern Orthodox have valid lines of apostolic succession, many commonalities with the "Western" church, etc. Are they any less "Christian" than us? I'd say not.

Another thing we need to remember is that people have different ways of expressing their faith, even within the Catholic tradition. Some are more "traditional" than others. Some of us belong to the different rites of the Church. As long as they hold the basic tenets of our faith (there is ONE God, Jesus is His Son and our Redeemer, the Eucharist is actually the Body and Blood of Jesus, there are Seven Sacraments, etc.), they are CATHOLIC. The only people we can validly criticize on all grounds are the "Catholics in name only" and the separatists of the various Protestant faiths. They have been mindnumbed and blinded by half truths. We need to stop nitpicking about everything. The great enemies to our faith are assaulting us at every turn while we fight amongst ourselves. I think the demonstration that even with "decrees" such as Rosarium Virginis Mariae (which was more of a suggestion than anything else), that "old ways" still find a way to continue shows that even though we have a one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, God has given us free will (checked by dogma) to worship and praise Him in our favorite ways.

118 posted on 11/11/2002 12:29:07 PM PST by Pyro7480
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To: Pyro7480
Thank you for pinging me to your excellent post. Your points are well taken, and thank you for sharing about your experiences. God bless you.
120 posted on 11/11/2002 1:20:45 PM PST by Siobhan
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To: Pyro7480
Look, nobody denies gradual change is inevitable. But revolution is out of the question. The Catholic Church emerged from the collapse of the Roman Empire virtually unchanged. Ditto from the French Revolution. Radical change in the world at large should be no pretext for radical change in the life of the Church.

The Protestant Reformation was different. It began as an attempt at revolution from within, but ended up as heresy. The Church rejected the assault from within and reaffirmed its Catholic identity. Now we face a similar assault--a complete seismic shift away from the deposit of faith to a new heretical religion more attuned to the Protestant theological perspective. This is what is totally unacceptable and must once more be rejected.

Notice how the modernists go about it. Not by an open denial of the faith, but by a subtle undermining of basic Catholic doctrines and rituals. No new doctrine has ever been expressly declared, though many outrageous trial balloons have been floated, but the Catholic perspective is still being systematically erased. This is because essential dogmas go untaught to the younger generation. They are being deliberately suppressed and ignored.

Here is one example. The Real Presence is not a dogma that is much mentioned. If modernists truly believed that Christ were present on the altar, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, after the words of Consecration--would they have removed all acknowledgment of the immensity of this fact? Would they have insisted, under one pretext or another, on removing references to this enormous truth in the text or in the rubrics of the New Mass, erasing all but one genuflection by the priest and even now prohibiting kneeling before communion? They do this in violation of Catholic yearnings to express devotion and adoration, and in violation of all Catholic tradition.

This can only be explained by modernist disbelief in the Catholic theological perspective. Loss of faith explains why the focus is on the assemblage and on Christ's virtual presence only in their midst, rather than on Christ's Real Presence offered as a sacrifice to the Father. Disbelief in the Catholic perspective also explains the casualness of communion in the hands and the shunting aside of the tabernacle and so much else. Christ is not actually present to these men, so they show this by what they do and decree.

This change in the way Catholics pray together at the Mass, together with hundreds of other changes, from a newly liberalized moral theology to the ripping-out of communion rails, has created a crisis in the Church and in the Catholic community. Very little now separates Catholics from Protestants. A whole generation of young people no longer believes in many of the doctrines once thought to be what essentially defined a Catholic--which seems not at all to bother the Vatican. It continues to push the envelope and to institute its many radical changes. So this is where we stand today. The new religion, more in keeping with mainline Protestantism, is being gradually imposed and the old faith is being gradually rejected.
122 posted on 11/11/2002 6:03:17 PM PST by ultima ratio
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