[Desdemona]

The simple answer is YES!

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[Desdemona]

ping

from the article:

In discussion afterwards, it became clear that there was widespread concern at the loss of our sense of Catholic culture — of belonging to a community rich in a heritage of faith stretching back 2,000 years. Many Catholic boys and girls today are more familiar with football rituals than with some of the basic signs and symbols of our Faith. Few would be able to explain confidently, for example, why we genuflect before the Tabernacle or why the priest wears vestments of different colors at various times of the year.

What are we doing? Many young Catholics don't even know we are meant to fast on Ash Wednesday, or attend Mass on various Holy Days. They don't have a liturgical "map" in their heads with landmarks such as Advent, Lent, or Pentecost. Their ideas about Christmas and Easter are formed not by Christians traditions but by commercial ones, and increasingly a paganized Halloween is replacing even the vaguest notions of All Saints Day and All Souls Day and praying for the dead in November.

[Desdemona]

ping

[PayNoAttentionManBehindCurtain]

Good, and truthful article about all churchs today, IMO. This is something people need to be shown. I believe the break down of the family is the main reason for childrens lack of knowledge. Instruction about religious beliefs should come first and foremost and with obvious sincerity from parents. Beliefs should be taught and LIVED in the home.

Becky

[ArrogantBustard]

A friend described to me enthusiastically a visit made with her Catholic women's group to a magnificent Hindu temple — the decorations, the grandeur, the formalities to be observed. They had been careful to dress appropriately and to observe any rituals required of them. They were intrigued by the meanings of the various things they saw.

I can imagine one saying such things of almost any classical style of church, be it Gothic, Renaissance, Byzantine, Mission, etc. Any style except modernist-minimalist-ugly. Most new churches are MMU. It's hard to develop a positive culture, to be shared with the world, around that.

[Desdemona]

I think this is a very important issue at the moment for the church. I've argued these very points until I'm blue in the face. The modernists have tried to deny us our cultural heritage and in so doing so have robbed us of our identity. (was that part of the plan?)

My mother talked this over with one of the sisters at the school where she teaches and mom told sister maybe we should start teaching the culture again. MAYBE? This is vital. How are we supposed to live our faith if no one teaches it to us?

[St.Chuck]

The Rosary. Why don't the kids take the rosary? Much of the faith is right there on the simple string of beads. Have we become that ignorant?

[Maximilian]

Excellent article. And very good point. The Catholic faith should be something we live like the air we breathe.

You see the same problem after every revolution, like the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution. People are left as "cultural orphans." The old culture has been done away with, but the new culture is a synthetic manufactured thing at best, and aggressively evil at worst. Yet it can be difficult if not impossible to return to the old culture. What does a Russian do today -- do they return to the customs of the time of the czars?

[Loyalist]

If you think of the "Spirit of Vatican II" as a form of gnosis through which the true meaning of the Council's documents is to be found, you will better understand why the destruction of Catholic culture took place.

[Pahuanui]

I once passed a Catholic girls' school boasting the slogan "Educating girls for success", which struck me as being a quite horribly inaccurate vision of what such an establishment should be doing!

Hmmm....

Maybe it's because I'm not Catholic (but I doubt it), but I don't see anything particularly wrong with that slogan.

You wouldn't want to see "Preparing girls for failure" or "Instilling in girls our tradition of mediocrity", right?

Or perhaps I've missed your point, in which case, sorry for having done so.

[livius]

Good article, thanks for posting it.

Sometimes I am just overwhelmed to think how much we have lost, and how much modern Catholic young people are missing. My own kids (who are adults and grew up after VatII) have only bits and pieces of the tradition, and have never had the pleasure of living in a society with those shared references and memories.

I always think that the attack upon the Saints was part of this campaign to kill pre-VATII Catholic culture. That is, the attempt to show various saints to have been " non-existent," the complete dropping of the celebration of the feast days of saints, the dropping of the tradition of taking a Saint's name at Confirmation, the ignorance of one's own names day - were very effective in uprooting Catholics and breaking the connection with the past. This was clearly one of the objectives of the "reformers."

[k omalley]

Let's see, what do I remember?

May Crowning of Mary
Blessing oneself when passing a Catholic Church.
Automatically bowing the head at the name of Jesus.
Saying a prayer when you heard an ambulance or firetuck go by.
Saying the prayer "Night is falling Dear Mother" at bedtime.
Monday novenas.
Sunday evening Benediction.
The beautiful mantillas worn to church.
Holy Saturday visitation of other Catholic Churches in the area.
Corpus Christi processions.
And I'm sure I've neglected to mention many traditions of Catholic Culture long forgotten. We have lost so much!

[Chancellor Palpatine]

One word applies here: demographics.

Due to that evil, vicious, capitalist, anti poor, anti minority, environment raping, infrastructure taxing sprawl, people moved out of their ethnic and coreligionist enclaves for places with more room. In the process, they mingled with everyone else, and as a result, don't have the same kind of peer pressure on ethnic and religious traditions - and only those families interested in retaining certain traditions will pass them down to their children.

Absent contraction back to denser population patterns, this will not be changed - the population is too mixed, and people like the convenience of doing things close to home.

[Dajjal]

Bumpus ad summum

[Aquinasfan]

We are creating generations of cultural and spiritual orphans — expecting them to remain Catholics without any links with the past, and without the sense of belonging to a community that has a glorious heritage of which they are a part and to which they can make their own contribution.

This is true. I grew up without Catholic culture. My dad was Catholic (good-hearted but ignorant) and my mother was Protestant. Public school and secular culture made me feel embarassed about Catholic cultural trappings.

My wife and I have made a determind effort to reverse things in our home. We homeschool with a Catholic curriculum that's suffused with the faith. We provide lots of age-appropriate spiritual literature, videos, etc. My girls collect holy cards like other kids collect Pokemon cards. Me, "don't you want to collect them all?" "Yeah!"

Last night when I went upstairs to tuck in the girls, my 8-yr-old showed me the shrine she had set up. She had placed holy cards around the feet of a statue of Mary, draped a rosary around her neck, and put a flower on her head. "Daddy, do you like how I taped the St. Francis picture on the wall?"

"Yes, very nice."

"It's funny how other kids have pictures of Superman on their walls and I have St. Francis."

"Yes, well, St. Francis was real, I mean is real, and Superman is make believe. St. Francis was a real hero."

"Yeah, it's just make believe. It's kind of funny. I might take Frances as my confirmation name. Either that or Therese. I like Therese. Or maybe Veronica. But they don't know very much about Veronica, do they?"

"No, they don't."

The joys of homeschooling and preserving a Catholic culture.