Posted on 08/12/2003 7:52:00 PM PDT by Land of the Irish
A valid Mass, even poorly offered, is infinitely more pleasing to God than prayers offered at home.
It could be accurate that one's local Parish is an occasion for a perpetual Lent, but, if it is, so be it.
Attend. Pray. Speak with the Pastor. Organise. Protest. Oppose. Petition. Speak with the local Bishop. Go to the Press. But, don't let the enemy keep the keys to the gate of the city.
I am currently reading about this exact truth (no accusations, just the facts, ma'am!) in "The Desolate City" - Revolution in the Catholic Church. It was written by Anne Roche Muggeridge who is not exactly a liberal!
I think if you do a bit of searching around on google, see who recommends the book and see the reviews on it, it will be a must read for you. Unfortunately it is out of print but I did a search on Amazon and was able to get a used copy for about $6.00. It is footnoted and has every bit of information backed up and is not written in an alarmist tone at all, in fact, it is really a history book. And a good one, imo. The most coherent and researched book on this subject that I've read.
I'd posit that the first sentence in the above quote is partly true, in a way. Pius XII was autocratic, especially towards the end of his pontificate when he saw the rampant liberalism simmering beneath the surface of the clergy. He was resented by a lot of cardinals and bishops who felt that Pius kept them from being equals with him as in: "Pius was first among equals." From what I have read, resentment of Pius was particularly true in the Rhine countries.
So here comes John, congenial and simple, wanting to bring the Church up to date - a modernization and simplification of procedures and disciplines in order to sort of "spring clean" the Church's treasures in case anyone stopped by, so to speak. That was his version of ecumenism. He saw, during the first council, how the whole thing was being hijacked by the radicals and liberals and tried to stop the council then and there. But he died.
Paul was orthodox but indecisive it seems to me. But he also was distressed at the abuses but apparently was powerless to stop them.
A disaster? I think the disaster is in us. The documents of the council are not radical at all, imo. But what was loosed during that time were theologians who openly flaunted and published their dissent on matters of dogma, doctrine and Tradition - the full page ad taken out in the NYTimes (sometime in '69), by prominent Catholic theologians, is breathtaking in its dissent and disobedience. And Paul found himself powerless to act immediately. So now we had, in effect, two magisteriums - one in Rome and one in the dissenting theologians. Taking up the cross is much easier when you follow the theologians, and that is what most of us did. And nothing much happened!
With the new open society of free love and self gratification beckoning us with its promise of happiness and freedom, we ran with open arms!
It really is a time of trial and tribulation for orthodox Catholics... the world is really against what we are praying to become. And history repeats itself!
Good suggestion. I've wanted to read that book but have never stumbled across a copy. I'll keep my eyes open.
She also wrote "The gates of hell" and I'd like to get a copy of that.
Way worth reading.
Good story. But the point is that if Pius XII wanted his head on a plate, he would have gotten it. Many theologians were censured during the 1950's. Encyclicals were written (e.g. Mediator Dei) which condemned specific propositions of the liberals. Individuals were forbidden to teach and write.
Then almost without exception, every theologian who had been condemned under Pius XII was made a peritus at Vatican II by John XXIII or Paul VI. What does this tell you about the scope of the plan and whether the popes were helpless victims?
If this is the best that can be said for Pope Paul VI, then that's more like damning with faint praise. Humanae Vitae is NOT orthodox, it is a dramatic departure from the consistent teaching of the Church. Read HV side by side with Casti Connubii, and you will see the difference between the pre-conciliar and post-conciliar Church. HV promotes a new philosophy of "personalism" that had never been seen in the 2000-year history of the Church. Casti Connubii followed the traditional teaching of St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, prior popes and moral theologians.
It's true that HV maintained the distinction between natural and artificial birth control. But that's about it. The rest of the Church's teaching on marriage, family, birth, and children went by the wayside.
Just to get you fired up:
The Desolate City: The Catholic Church in Ruins, by Anne Roche Muggeridge
Reviewed by Michael Gilchrist
Those already familiar with an earlier work by Malcolm Muggeridge's courageous, Canadian-born daughter-in-law, titled The Gates of Hell, will know what to expect from this latest study of the post-Vatican II Catholic Church. (The American edition is, more accurately, subtitled Revolution in the Catholic Church.)
Despite a succession of devastating accounts of spiritual corruption and decline in sections of the Catholic Church in the Western world by the likes of James Hitchcock, Michael Davies, Msgr George Kelly and Christopher Derrick, the silent majority of Church-attending Catholics seems still blissfully unaware of any serious crisis of faith.
If Anne Roche Muggeridge's latest book fails to arouse more of the Catholic electorate - or of that minority which still reads religious literature - it seems nothing ever will.
The contents of The Desolate City are mostly familiar - liturgical decadence, rebellion over Humanae Vitae, scriptural and doctrinal adventurism, collapse of religious life and rabid feminism - but the author's finely chiselled thesis on "revolution" and her passionate style and devastating wit and satire make Anne Roche Muggeridge possibly the most effective of the Church's counter-revolutionary writers.
Revolution
The author documents and analyses most convincingly her thesis that the Church in the West - although she is unspecific about whether her account applies equally outside North America and Western Europe - has experienced the classic phases of revolution: an aggrieved class (theologians and religious), a climate conducive to radical change (the cultural and moral upheaval of the 1960s), a weakened government (Paul Vl and certain national hierarchies), a triggering incident (Humanae Vitae and the organised opposition), moderate and radical phases and finally consolidation and institutionalisation of the revolution. The last phase is evident in the numerous, powerful newchurch bureaucracies.
The flavour of an arrogant, strutting revolution is brilliantly captured in numerous quotable vignettes. We read that "the age of the orange clerical turtleneck dawned" and that Fr Gregory Baum, formerly a peritus for the Canadian Bishops at Vatican II, who then left the priesthood and married without being laicised, was now helping to form future priests in Toronto. Hans Kung, one of the few revolutionaries even to have "his wrists slapped", continues to offer anti-Papal diatribes before admiring crowds at Catholic venues, to draw media applause and to receive high fees and embraces from Notre Dame's Richard McBrien."
Anne Roche Muggeridge demonstrates most forcibly what many of us have begun, belatedly, to realise, that a full-scale revolution has been completed within the Church, a new Reformation institutionalised, involving a sweeping takeover of Catholic structures with a "liberal consensus" created, and dissent made orthodoxy. At the same time, non-revolutionised Catholics have "begun to behave like exiles".
Dismissive labels
Interestingly, the author points out that whereas the expressions "liberal" and "conservative" Catholic had some meaning at the time of Vatican II, they are now weapons of the revolutionary new church. Yesterday's liberals, who wished for a more participative liturgy, less oppressive Curia and some reform of religious life, are now dismissed by today's so-called liberals as right-wingers or extreme conservatives. Terms such as "liberal", "radical", or "progressive" Catholic are today little more than euphemisms for agnosticism and secular humanism.
Official teaching on the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, the virginity of Mary, miracles, the founding of the Church by Jesus or the Resurrection may still be on the books and taught forcefully and unambiguously by the Pope, but the actual teaching is radically different. Nevertheless, local bishops continue to speak and act as if this situation did not exist. The author observes dryly: "Lonely counter-revolutionaries are the only safe targets left for bishops to shoot at."
Anne Roche Muggeridge sets the present post-Vatican II revolution in the context of the 16th century Protestant "revolution" and the turn of the century modernist crisis, themselves with roots in Genesis. She sees the new humanistic liturgy as the most potent vehicle for implanting the new revolution, for here the horizontal has crowded out the vertical. She argues further that the effect of such liturgical revolution has been to make it easier for Catholics to accept the secular community's "libertine values".
Nevertheless, Anne Roche Muggeridge sees hope for the future despite her devastating and convincing analysis of the Church in ruins. There is not only the wider perspective of history, but the advent of a remarkable new Pope.
The Desolate City has to be required reading for all would-be informed Catholics. The Church definitely needs more of its members to be inspired by the example of this brave and remarkable woman.
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