"Something Good is Coming" - Catholic Church

n a fairly regular basis, the Lord makes His people suffer, His church, His Beloved. The present has been such a time, and our own sins have brought on our troubles.

The much acclaimed "Church of Vatican II," the church of "the progressives," energized since 1965 by dissent and rebellion against many traditions and teachings of the Church, and intent upon foisting on the Church a new morality of sex and marriage and birth and priesthood, has made an awful botch of things.

In 1964, I called my first book A New Generation: American and Catholic. Magazines those days were full of stories about "the New Breed" of priests and laity, and how great the "renewed" church would be. Implicitly, how much better than the old.

We certainly showed them. Never has the Catholic Church in America been so shamed, humiliated, and mortified before the whole world. The "new morality" of the New Breed has turned into a disgrace.

Much good, of course, has been done in and through the Church during the last forty years. Many things — ecumenism, for instance — have been made better. (In my opinion, the liturgy in many ways is far worse done than earlier, with far less respect, and far less sense of holiness, dignity, and awe.) Openness and dialogue are much better, even though some have taken "openness" to mean an inner hollowness, without content or character of its own.

The current scandals, alas, have made the name "Catholic" a badge of self-inflicted shame, a shame inflicted by a tiny proportion of the clergy.

If interviews in the press are correct, some of these culprits actually picture themselves as an advance party for a new and better sexual morality than that of the tradition they loathe. They are not in favor of celibacy — and certainly not of chastity, either — but of "self-exploration" and "self-acceptance of one's own body and its pleasures," of "being at home in one's own body," and other such rationalizations.

To some extent, this pattern may be explained by the tsunami of the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies, that earthquake/hurricane/tidal wave which threw millions of souls into confusion about who and what to believe about authentic morality. Many good people, conservative as well as liberal, were thrown off balance in those days. A fairly large proportion of Catholics, like others, may be tempted to rationalize away their own errors of those days, by trying now to "normalize" what in other ages was taken as plainly sinful, or to use the current secular term, "deviant" behavior. Abortion, for instance, adultery, homosexual actions.

But the sexual revolution does not explain the full pride of the "reformers" of Vatican II, who when the ink was not yet dry on the decrees of that council, were already foreseeing Vatican III, and a wholly new church of their imagination.

A utopian church of the progressive dream emerged, always different from the Church dragged down by the weight of the actual Rome of Pope Paul VI (in his day as loathed by progressives as John Paul II is today). In the name of this airy and future church, all sorts of opinions and actions and policies were countenanced as "forward-looking" that in other ages would have been seen as wanderings far from authentic faith.

This was the climate within which the "deviancy" that brought on the current scandals prospered, undetected, undeterred. Note, for instance, that most of the scandals being reported in 2002 actually happened more than ten years ago, in the heyday of those thirty most-progressive years from 1965 until about 1993. About that time, reforms instituted by the bishops began to take effect. Many badly errant seminaries were cleaned out, or shut down. A number of new, more orthodox and traditional seminaries began to bear good fruit and to prosper in vocations.

The life of celibacy can be a very hard one, especially in times of aridity in prayer, and career frustration, and normal loneliness — and when acute temptations arise in situations almost wholly undefended by safeguards and precautions, by ascetical practices, and by a surrounding community of loving fidelity and chastity. Maintaining chastity requires abundant graces. These require silence and prayer for their reception.

A life too long lived apart from intense daily prayer, meditation on the lives of the saints, the devout praying of the daily office of the Church, and a slowly and reflectively enacted sacrifice of the Mass each day, is not a life in which the probabilities of fidelity are enhanced.

On the contrary, the probabilities of chastity decline exponentially, as neglect of the life of the spirit extends its control, like a summer drought spreading its reach across sun-baked fields. Where the love of God withers, the love of this world gains a chokehold.

There is a lesson in the present time: The prayerful, orthodox, and faithful priests and religious of this generation did not bring about the scandals that now humiliate the church.

The sins that have brought us low were abetted by a culture of rebellion, pride, and moral superiority, among those who thought themselves more intelligent, more able, more in tune with human progress, open, experimental, and brave. They despised the merely traditional, observant, and orthodox, whom they considered closed-minded, rigid, and intransigent. They turned away from the tried and true asceticism and paths of holiness of the past.

The sins that have disgraced us are the sins of those who promised "renewal" and "progress" down "new" paths.

"But we did not mean child-abuse," the progressives will say in self-defense. "We didn't mean the abuse of teenagers."

But, hey, a climate in which it was regarded as "rigid" to say that sex outside of marriage was sinful, was not a climate in which playground sand long held lines drawn in it. Young people in pre-marital coupling, older couples "experimenting" beyond the marriage bond, and same-sex coupling were in that climate not regarded as "disordered" but as "healthy experimentation."

"When is the Catholic Church ever going to get over its Victorian moral qualms, and get up to date with contemporary sex science?" was the subject of many a dinner-party interlude. Remember those days?

The "progressive" vision of the human being embodies a profound error of anthropology. It imagines human beings to be "persons," whose bodies are somehow separable from these genderless "persons," and malleable for deployment in any of a number of culturally and personally preferential ways, so long as the person of the other is "respected" and, in its fashion, "loved."

Progressivism, in short, is a form of gnosticism. Its systematic separation of body and person (soul) is a very ancient heresy. The moral dissoluteness to which it gradually leads has been witnessed in many earlier cycles of human history.

For the curing of this disease, the greatest kindness is strict adherence to a more demanding regimen: respect for a more accurate anthropology of the embodied person, the spirited body, the incarnate person, the flesh-and-blood human being fashioned by the Creator for His own inhabitation. This is the regimen of the oneness and wholeness of God's transcendent love, diffused by understanding, reflection, and loving choice through every organ, member, and fiber of human tissue. It is the regimen of that chastity of the heart which is, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, to will one love.

The current humiliation of the Catholic Church will, I feel sure, lead to the great grace of remembrance — remembrance of our true and most precious inheritance, trust in the Word of God bequeathed to us by the ancient Church, and by the Sacred Scripture to whose canonical status it attests. "He is no Catholic who is not united in sacra doctrina with the Bishop of Rome," Stanislaus Hosius says, on a tablet memorialized on the walls of S. Maria in Trastevere in Rome, the titular church of the great Cardinal Gibbons.

There is coming an awakening of a great love for orthodoxy, for fidelity, for clinging to the whole truth as it was handed down to us. There is also arising, justifiably, a certain hard-won contempt for the learned doctors whose pride led them to try to sell us a bill of goods for, lo, so many decades now. To what a miserable state have they reduced their lower regions of the church.

The good and solid things of the Tradition have proved more reliable than they. By far.

These are the notes I look to hear from Rome, more sweetly said, during the coming weeks and months — and maybe days.

— Michael Novak, the George F. Jewett scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Novak is the author, most recently, of On Two Wings: Humble Faith and Common Sense at the American Founding.

"It is not a sin to be tempted. It is a sin to succumb to it."

Yep. This is why God told Cain he MUST master sin. We do not HAVE to sin. Even though we are susceptible to sin because of the fall of Adam and Eve, we are not HELPLESS before it. We have the Grace of God to help us stand up to it, and we have Confession to help us deal with it.

I wonder if I still remember my Latin (probably not . . .)

I think you'll be pleasantly surprised how much you DO remember. We learned it so young, and even though I was 13 or so when the changes came, I still remembered it when I sang a High Mass with a choir in NJ about 14 yrs. ago. That's the last High Mass I attended. I haven't searched one out, because I've found Parishes which for the most part have still had some reverence in the Liturgy, and when they went too far away from that in my opinion, complained mightily!

This is a great Novak column! He is so right in what he's saying about how it is the 'modernist' priests who have been caught doing this stuff, not the faithful orthodox priests. And I had wondered about the fact that most of these cases were from 10 yrs. ago, and that there didn't seem to be many (if any) from more recently, except by those who had done it before. I had heard from my brother in law (who is one of those prayerful, faithful priests) several years ago that some of the Bishops had done some cleaning out of the Seminaries, so I guess that did bear some fruit in the quality of the men being ordained. And he also mentioned that some of the men who were ordained around the same time as those 'modernist' priests in the late 60s and early 70s, but who had remained orthodox and were appalled at what they saw happening around them, were now coming into positions of influence and power. From there, they will be able to effect some REAL change back to the more prayerful practices of Catholicism. There will be pain for a while, but we'll have to carry that Cross for awhile to renew God's Church.

He is so right in what he's saying about how it is the 'modernist' priests who have been caught doing this stuff, not the faithful orthodox priests.

That's my reply to my Methodist friends who insist that celibacy is the root of all our problems.

They get tongue-tied when I ask them if the problem of celibacy should be solved by having an affair if one's spouse is away for an extended period of time (say, a military deployment for 12 months -- that one always gets my retired army pal).

People outside the Church seem much more troubled by the celibacy of our Priests than we are. I'm not sure why it offends them so, but it does.

Much good, of course, has been done in and through the Church during the last forty years. Many things — ecumenism, for instance — have been made better.

Here we get the Neo-Catholic stock-in-trade: we don't like the parts of Vatican II that embarass us, but we wholeheartedly support the spirit of VatII that informed the Council. This is a FALSE argument. It is intellectually dishonest. You all know the drill: 70 percent of those who call themselves "Catholic" have voted with their feet and no longer attend the new "Mass" that Novak and his Neo-Cath buddies still think is the best thing since sliced bread. To use an old cliche, they ignore the elephant in the living room.

No thanks, Michael, you and yours have done enough damage already.

They have no reason to repent in this case -- in fact, history will remember that they were the ones who knew all along that post-Vatican II Catholicism was largely a fraud.

Amen. Sing it, brother.

But Michael Novak and his Neo-Cath buddies want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to preserve the 90 percent of VatII that have led us to this terrible situation and get rid of the 10 percent that embarasses them. They are not capable of pointing out the obvious: the "reforms" of VatII have destroyed the Church. Compare 2,000 years of Church history to the past 40 years. Enough said.

Ironically, many of the "reforms" of Vatican II will end up saving the Church. I've heard countless stories from grandparents, etc. about the problems they had with authoritarian, overbearing priests who lorded over their parishioners.

The latter half of the 20th Century was probably the first time in history that the Church laity was more competent, more capable, and more educated than the clergy. While there are potential pitfalls, this presents a marvelous opportunity for the Church.

I predict that the diocesan structure of the Church will slowly disappear, and will be replaced by something similar to what Tom Monaghan (founder of Domino's Pizza) has done in Michigan. He built his own church, built his own schools (including a Catholic law school), and brought in an order of priests and nuns to staff the facilities.

When the local bishop called him to complain that Monaghan had no authority to do this things without the bishop's permission, Monaghan asked the bishop who the f#ck he thought he was, told him to f#ck himself and everyone else who worked in his chancery office, and told him that people like him (the bishop) were irrelevant fools and that the real faith was being preserved (and spread) by people who really matter.

Case closed. Monaghan's chuch and schools are still standing, and the local bishop is sitting around wondering how many assets his diocese will still have left after all the sex abuse lawsuits are adjudicated.

Monaghan asked the bishop who the f#ck he thought he was, told him to f#ck himself and everyone else who worked in his chancery office, and told him that people like him (the bishop) were irrelevant fools and that the real faith was being preserved (and spread) by people who really matter.

If you can say this to a bishop in America, you can say it to a pope in Rome. I sure hope this story isn't true.

The latter half of the 20th Century was probably the first time in history that the Church laity was more competent, more capable, and more educated than the clergy.

Good points, especially the above. The laity have certainly taken the lead in the traditional movement. Even in organized movements like the SSPX the laity play a central role. They have seen what can be taken away from them if they are not vigilent, so they are now finally willing to stand up and say, as you put it later in your post, "keep your f#*king hands off our Faith."

Most Catholics I've talked to will at best condemn the abuse while at the same time make excuses for the heirarchy and at worst scream to the top of their lungs that the allegations are all a fraud(this one man I know says that it's a masonic conspiracy to destroy the church, he also says that the Spanish Inquisition was a great thing and that Mussolini was the defender of Christian Civilization. He even has a portrait of Mussolini in his den next to his picture of the Virgin Mary.)

Let me point out some of the liberal spin in your post.

First of all, Tom Monaghan would never say to his bishop: who the f#ck he thought he was, [or] told him to f#ck himself and everyone else who worked in his chancery office.
In your wishful thinking description he sounds like flaming power-hungry liberal. Tom Monaghan is a devout Catholic and a very humble man. There was a PBS program about him last year. This guy was so humble that he even considered driving a luxury car to be a sinful indulgence.
And here is a quote from Monaghan,

I am grateful that I have been given the faith to accept what the Church teaches. If the Church is for something, I am for it; if the Church is against something, I am against it. To support Church teaching, I don’t have to be able to win a debate. I simply begin with the assumption that the Church is right. Then I try to find projects to spread the faith and to strengthen the Church wherever I can.

>If half of what I've heard about Monaghan is true (good and bad), then the story is probably true.

Half-truths are also known as LIES.

>Church laity was more competent, more capable, and more educated than the clergy...

Another example of liberal wishful thinking. The "clergy" do not come from outer space, they are "laity" before they become clergy.
How do they become clergy?
By studying for many years and, finally, being ordained upon graduation. How then, could someone without that painstaking preparation suddenly become more competent, more capable, and more educated, huh?

Finally, a piece of advice, if you post something "revolutionary," check your sources first or at least use common sense.

Most Catholics I've talked to will at best condemn the abuse while at the same time make excuses for the hierarchy and at worst scream to the top of their lungs that the allegations are all a fraud

I'm saddened by the abuse, but the blame lies with the abuser, not with the Church. The hierarchy handle the matter in the way they feel appropriate -- sometimes in a manner I do not agree with. I know if my Priest got hold of one of these &%$# imposters, there wouldn't be much left to prosecute.

The progressives who got themselves all sideways on this ("Celibacy is the problem! We need women priests!") will never admit that they caused, and continue to support, the problem. They view my Priest as old-fashioned and out of touch. But the Church I attend has doubled its congregation in the time I've gone there -- no small feat for a small Church in a small town in the middle of nowhere. I'm not the only one driving 60 miles a week to attend Mass (of course, this does make volunteering for the 6:00 AM breakfasts an act worthy of Lent).

The Catholics who attend my Church would no more tolerate a child molester than they would tolerate a woman priest. We have no written rules regarding such things -- nowhere does it say, "You can't bugger kids and women can't serve Mass." We just know it's not done. Individuals inclined toward those beliefs are very uncomfortable there and don't last more than a month.

Hearing Dominus vobiscum a few times will be good for you! Dust off your old missal, and the English--the properly translated English--in your preconciliar missal will suffice. Reading the English will show you how much in err the trash ICEL translation of the NO is.

I had never been to a Mass in the Old Rite until I was nearly thirty, and learned the Mass pretty quickly. With a good missal in hand, you should be able to follow along quite well. After a few Masses you will be able to chant along, and Domine non sum dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum: sed tanto dic verbo, et sanabitur anima mea will roll off your tongue like when you were a lad!

When you visit St. John Cantius, you will know why people spend a couple hours in the car each Sunday! Imagine a Sunday Mass where you won't have to grit your teeth during Fr. Liberal's left-wing "homily" or be bombarded w/ ego-worship in the "Prayer of the [un]Faithful"... Light a candle for us poor souls who don't have access to the Latin Mass. I recently moved to Dixie, and there isn't even an SSPX chapel w/in a four-hr drive of my house.

Dominus te cum et Deo vindice!

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