"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.

There is no need for "repentance" as far as serious Catholics are concerned.

I'm not sure I am understanding your statement here.

Catholics believe in the Bible and in John the Baptist who preached about baptism and repentance. So why are you saying that Catholics do not believe in reprentance?

We [Catholics] always have needed and will need repentance because we have and will sin since we are imperfect. Or am I confused here?

Hearing Dominus vobiscum a few times will be good for you! Dust off your old missal

tsk. Now I have to go find it again. I made that search several years ago when my mom passed away and my brother and I were going through her things. I found my missal, my Scapular medal, and my Lives of the Saints book. I use the Saints book with my son (we homeschool), and he was amazed at the number of Saints in the "old" Church. I told him about half of these are Saints no more, and he asked, "Well, where did they go?"
Good question.

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!
Actually, that's lass, but what the heck.
You are right about the Latin. I attended a Real Mass back East this past Christmas, and was surprised at how familiar it sounded, even though it's been close to 30 years.

Imagine a Sunday Mass where you won't have to grit your teeth during Fr. Liberal's left-wing "homily"
LOL. The Priest at the Church nearby used to plague us with closing prayers to "The Great Spirit" (apparently he'd done some work on a reservation, and he went native). It was a struggle to get to Mass every week. I think I was feeling sacrilegious -- I just didn't know it at the time.

Mr. Monaghan may be a humble guy, but he has a very aggressive, assertive side to him (ask anyone who has worked for him) -- you don't build an inner-city pizza shop into one of the largest restaurant chains in the world by being humble and unassuming.

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?

Talk about liberal spin -- Formal study in a seminary (or in any other institution of higher learning) does NOT necessarily make someone more "competent," more "capable," or more "educated." In fact, my experience in private industry has led me to believe that the amount of time a person spends in a high-profile university is inversely proportional to their performance as an employee. In almost any area of public discourse that doesn't involve nuanced theological discussions, you'll generally find that the Catholic clergy has been eclipsed by Catholic lay people. Read the documents published by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops on the subject of economics -- the economic positions taken by the U.S. bishops are so idiotic and childish that they are embarrassing to read, and the "knowledge" contained in these reports pales in comparison to the expertise of lay Catholic economists like Michael Novak, Lawrence Kudlow, etc. Sitting in a classroom studying economics doesn't make one competent, but working in those fields on a daily basis sure does.

The New Testament offers a remarkable lesson for us today -- one that very few people seem to appreciate. John was undoubtedly Christ's favorite disciple -- his love and devotion to Our Lord was unwavering. Christ entrusted His mother to John as He was dying on the cross, and John was the only apostle whose faith was so solid that he didn't have to die a martyr's death.

Peter was a different story. He was a short-tempered man who was apparently willing to use violence when he felt a need to do so. He was a weak, selfish man who would deny Christ three times in Pilate's courtyard. And yet it was PETER, not JOHN, whom Christ selected as the rock upon which He would build His church. This was no accident, and I would venture to guess that the Church's problems today will persist until a few more Peters and a few less Johns are in positions of authority.

This particular individual was someone I met at work. He saw me reading the paper and asked my opinion on the scandal. I told him what I thought and then he went into a tirade about how the Masons were fabricating the whole thing and then he gave me the long list of horrible things he believed the Masons did and then he got into how they killed Mussolini and how he was just this great guy and he should be considered for sainthood. He also said that the church should go back to the Inquisition and that's how "the evil masonic conspiracy" would be stopped. A very disturbed individual.

Thanks for clarifying. I agree that the normal Catholic, active in the parish, has nothing to repent other than his or her own sins.

However, "Forgive me for what I have done and for what I have failed to do," must be ringing in the ears of Bishops, Cardinals, etc. who did not act in a judicious manner in these case.

Do remember, though, that many of the leaders of the church acted upon advice given by psychologists and psychiatrists during the 70s and 80s, when common belief was that a pedophile could be cured. It was around 1987 or so, when the psychiatrists and psychologists began to recognize and treat the tendency to molest children and minors as an addiction -- which it is.

I would much rather have an overbearing priest than one who buggers my son and my neighbors sons.

So would I -- but you act as if these are the only two options available, which is nonsense.

The Church was in far better shape prior to 1965 than post-1965.

While that may have true on the surface, I contend that in reality this was not the case. Many of the issues you mentioned first came to the surface in the 1960s, and people like my grandparents fought with clergy members and lay people in the Church about them all the time. The thing you have to remember is that almost none of these people were younger than them -- they were all their peers. And the overbearing, authoritarian pastor who lorded over his parishioners in the 1950s was the same one who told people like my grandparents to shut up and accept the changes "mandated" by Vatican II without a whimper.

When Christ spoke of the "narrow gate" to eternal life, I'm quite certain He didn't expect the gate to get any wider during certain periods in the Church's history (e.g. during the post-WWII period). The Church was "stronger" prior to Vatican II for one simple reason -- people (Catholic and non-Catholic alike) were stronger in general.

All his work is committed to promoting the Modernist church, the Novus Ordo church---not the Church of tradition, of the saints and the martyrs.

You can make that point if you'd like, but the Novus Ordo is a valid Mass until the Church determines otherwise.

But follow what the saints said and did---do not listen to today's cardinals.

I wrote the hierarchy off when I was in high school 15 years ago. As far as Catholics are concerned, there are only two people in the "clergy" who matter -- a local parish priest, who must be trusted to some extent because he serves as a personal confessor, and the Pope, because he is the Vicar of Christ and is protected from error in Catholic dogma. Anyone in the hierarchy between these two people is an extraneous distraction, if not downright dangerous.

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.

Perhaps they just can't fathom what a life without sex must be like.
They just can't get their brains around it, can they, the very concept of mastery of the body and its passions, which is the whole purpose of celibacy.

Catholicism is not the only religion that practices celibacy; Hindu Swamis in India also swear a vow of poverty and nonattachment to the body and all its passions and pleasures.

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