The Spirit of the Liturgy

"Catholics are not taught this doctrine because is because their priests are modernists like their bishops" should read "Catholics are not taught this doctrine because their priests are modernists like their bishops."

The teaching has not been that formal heresy you have been talking about but as the offical doctrinre with reservations. Sort of like the Democrats' approval of the use of force against Iraq.

Are you referring to the doctrine of the Real Presence? My point was that these so-called "spiritual shepherds" do not believe in a major doctrine of the Catholic Church and they choose for their seminaries men who are just as faithless. They don't come right out and admit this, but they persecute those who believe, and they remain silent about their own disbelief. The Vatican is uninterested in their deficiencies--which, in itself, is interesting. It should be moving heaven and earth to protect the deposit of faith. Instead it shrugs and moves on.

Well, there are those who treat the following as though these were lines of poetry rather than an article of faith.

On the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium Et Spes) The Church strives to be that spotless bride to be presented at the "wedding feast of the Lamb" The Eucharist help us to become holy, "The Lord left behind a pledge of this hope and strength for life's journey in that sacrament of faith where natural elements refined by man are gloriously changed into His Body and Blood, providing a meal of brotherly solidarity and a foretaste of the heavenly banquet." (Chapter III: Man's Activity Throughout the World)

Read what I said again. The dialectic is a process that has nothing to do with liturgical development and very little to do with doctrinal development which begins and ends with revelation.

Either you know nothing of doctrinal and liturgical development or you are trying to avoid answering the problem you posed, which is: "What is the nature/process of organic change in liturgy?"

What you deny, vehemently I might add, is that Vatican II had to happen. It had to happen for the same reason the Novus Ordo had to happen. The process, which you cannot describe, was thwarted by the centralization of ecclesial innovation and change in Rome. This centralization ended with stasis. And the institution of a museum piece of liturgy, the Tridentine. The attempt to overthrow that stasis at its foundation is inherent in Vatican II and its documents as it is in the Novus Ordo and the intentional opportunities it creates for innovation in the mass.

At one time the mass could evolve. There was room for adding and taking away. Which is how we got so many wonderful rites. But as the stasis and centralization completed itself. Catholicism's practices became a beautiful, but stagnant thing.

You're right that innovation begins and ends with revelation, but you're wrong that dialectic isn't the key to change. Dialectic is the means for conveying revelations exigencies. Go read St. Thomas, St. Augustine, et. al. and tell me that the doctrines of the church aren't arrived at through dialectic. Liturgical innovation is a smaller form of the same process.

Unfortunately Ultima, you're swimming against the stream. The irony of your position is that you want to preserve the fruit of Rome's centralization while at the same moment trying to deny her capacity to overthrow herself! Lol.

1. If the Church is "overthowing itself" as you say--and I have to agree it certainly is trying to do this ever since Vatican II--then why should we believe in it as an institution? By denouncing its own past, which it had claimed was guided by the Holy Spirit, it only makes a mockery of its present claims to divine assistance and thereby destroys its own legitimacy. Who can believe in a Church that says it was wrong for 1500 years, but that it has finally got it right? What makes its present leadership so much wiser and smarter and holier than that of the past? Is modern always better? Then where are the fruits of modernist wisdom and holiness? Why should the faithful follow such leaders and abandon all the popes and councils of the past when all the modernists have to show for post-conciliar innovations are institutional decline and moral degeneracy?

2. If what went before was so wrong, then what's going on now is a neo-Protestant revolution. But to attempt to do this--to actually lay a new foundation for faith itself--is by definition heretical. Yet this is what is happening. Rome has been instituting a new religion ever since the Council and while it may call this new entity by the same name, it's clearly not Catholicism and it can no more claim the guidance of the Holy Spirit than any other heresy can. What it actually is is a stew--a concoction comprised of Diana-fied religious sentimentality, ad hoc Protestant political correctness, a splattering of social activism, seasoned with a dash of papolotry. What it isn't is Catholicism.

3. And if this is what's going on, as you admit, then why hasn't Rome been honest and up front about it with the people? Why does it pretend nothing has changed essentially and that the thousand and one changes since Vatican II are a mere "updating", that the Mass itself has merely been accidentally altered and is not really the Protestant Lord's Supper which Trent had condemned? Why aren't the modernist bishops and cardinals and theologians honest enough to say they are scrapping doctrines such as the Real Presence, Hell and Purgatory, the Divinity of Christ, the Virgin birth, and the Resurrection? Why not admit the new religion is not unlike the agenda of the Democratic Party--a stew of feminism, gay rights, social justice, humanism, anti-capitalism--with a touch of Pope-worship thrown in, combined with a taste for auto-destruction and a distaste for the sacred?

4. Finally, following your logic, why should anyone follow such claptrap? The people who push this new "revelation" are proven pedophiles, gay activists, apostates. Their innovations have spawned crisis after crisis and scandal after scandal. There has been no springtime of ecclesial rejuvenation, but instead a long winter of discontent. So either it's ALL been a lie--or the Traditional Church was the true Church all along and this post-conciliar "overthrow" is just another heresy. There is no middle ground.