[ninenot]

Chastisement--the Church as the New Israel

[ninenot]

Ping

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Moral beacon to mankind? Hardly.

Try "example of what happens when a society of authority gathering men (many of whom are closeted yet sexually active gays) make the rules for a thousand years". Eventually the culture becomes poisoned.

The conditions during the Reformation must've been 10 times worse than ever represented - the entire structure of the church should be thankful that Europe was largely composed of peasants then - they'd have been crushed and repressed by everyone. If it weren't for all the info available, we'd never know.

[anniegetyourgun]

The same problems exist in most mainline Protestant denominations. Compromise with the world and on the Word of God never can never lead to anything good.

[LadyDoc]

I hate to tell Mr. Buchanan, but Jesus didn't just say "go out and convert all americans". He said "all nations".

For all the hype, American Catholics are still there, although only about one quarter of those listed as "catholics" are still catholics.
And where there is orthodoxy, the church is thriving in the US.

And the Catholic church is thriving in other countries. Luckily, Jesus considers a Filippino peasant or an African coal miner as just as valuable as a rich white yuppie like Buchanan

[oldironsides]

One note on the Catholic schools in this area. True the schools in some areas are struggling but the move to the suburbs brought new schools that fill up quickly. A new Catholic high school in Chester County Pennsylvania needs an addition. The new elementary schools just opening are full with wait lists. The schools are built with less money, individual pledges and no government meddling.

[Mr. Lucky]

This article makes no effort to establish any cause and effect. Everything bad which has occurred subsequent to Vatican II must be the result of Vatican II; by the same logic, wouldn't everything good also be the result of Vatican II? Golly, prior to Vatican II, the Church was illegal in half of Eurpoe; now east Europe is free, ergo Vatican II is responsible for the fall of Communism.

[Alberta's Child]

When Pope John XXIII threw open the windows of the church, all the poisonous vapors of modernity entered, along with the Devil himself.

This statement is incorrect. The only thing that changed since the 1960s is that the church's scandals are all exposed to more intense scrutiny.

As someone pointed out on another thread last week, most of the depraved freaks in the Catholic clergy who are involved in these homosexual scandals were ordained BEFORE Vatican II.

[yendu bwam]

Pat Buchanan is right - the Church is wallowing in its now decades old swampy and morally limp accommodation to the world - now at its nadir (we dare to hope) as we contemplate the homosexual molestation of thousands of teenage boys by Catholic priests. And can it go any lower - after so many members of the Church's hierarchy have forgotten what they stand for to the degree that they have turned against children themselves? And certainly, we can see that so many of our priests do NOT seek to follow the way of Christ - who sought to bring souls to salvation and to persuade mankind to turn from sin - and who was fearless in rejecting the temptations of the world (pride, sexual perversity, arrogance, money, etc. etc.). But perhaps, just perhaps, we are turning the corner. For as the Church wallows in the depths of perversion and child torture, many Catholics are rediscovering their faith, returning to seek knowledge of their Bibles and of Tradition, considering Catholic schools for their children (though many Catholics are unsure, myself included, whether society in general or the people running the Church represent a greater threat to our children), and fighting for a return to orthodoxy and truth and an end to the modernist, sinful gobbledygook that we so often hear from our priests and bishops. This is a common historical cycle, and we are often sad that we were born into a pathetically morally weakened Church. Yet we can be excited that we can be part of the moral renewal of Catholicism, and that we can participate in the fight (and a holy fight it is) to bring our Church back to the way of Christ.

[tm22721]

Declining ?

Not fast enough IMHO.

BUMP

[Salvation]

Bookmarked even though I don't agree with some of the premises in the article.

[kidd]

This article is chock full of logical fallicies:

1. There is no connection between the cause and the effects. I could just as easily blame all of the statistics that were mentioned on the rise of feminism or Johnson's Great Society.

2. Only United States statistics are mentioned. Vatican II wasn't tailored to fit Americans. I could easily provide some rather rosy statistics on the rise of Catholicism in Africa.

3. There is no analysis of what would have happened had Vatican II not been enacted. I suspect that things may have been somewhat worse in the US.

4. And most importantly there is no discussion of the biblical basis for Vatican II - only a dry statistical discussion.

[Desdemona]

The premise of this article is off base. Vatican II didn't cause all this stuff. The orders and other clergy adopting the socialist "social justice" norms, and teaching it when there was and is clear evidence that socialism is NOT fair and does not promote honest work-related justice did as much damage.

And all those ideas and concepts were in the wind long before Vatican II.

As I learn more about it, Vatican II was a convenient excuse to introduce more humanly justified behaviors into God's house. There were people out there itching to do it too. It's not easy being Catholic. In the US, as a Russian friend of mine put it, making things easy is the American Way. I never thought of it in that way before, but when you think about it, she has a point and that mentality did worm its way into religious thinking.

[Loyalist]

PING Should we really mourn the declining numbers of faithful laity and religious, if it means that the liberal and heterodox deadweight is being filtered out, and the faithful remnant left behind?

A smaller but purer Church will be in a better position to re-evangelize the West than one bloated by dissenters.

[GOPJ]

Is there a fool so great as to send their child to a school where child rapists are protected? And yes, I know that few were raped, but the mind of the rapist was making the spiritual calls. The catholic church is reaping what it's sown. Shame on them.

Catholic schools. Almost half of all Catholic high schools in the United States have closed since 1965. The student population has fallen from 700,000 to 386,000. Parochial schools suffered an even greater decline. Some 4,000 have disappeared, and the number of pupils attending has fallen below 2 million – from 4.5 million.

[Zviadist]

Buchanan NAILS it!

[aristeides]

I think the rot goes way back. The following is from an article in yesterday's Washington Post:Little Information Released on Law's Trip to Rome: Agenda May Include Talks With Vatican About Bankruptcy :

The closest historical precedent, Fogarty added, was the Vatican's effort to ease aside Boston's Cardinal William O'Connell in 1932. O'Connell was publicly implicated in protecting his nephew, who remained a priest despite a secret marriage. Yet Vatican archives show the scandal was far worse than the public knew. It involved skimming church funds through an insurance company set up by the nephew, who may have blackmailed his uncle for participating in the embezzlement and for having an affair with a male judge, Fogarty said.

Despite those charges, he noted, O'Connell retained enough influence at the Vatican that he was able to resist the naming of a successor. Instead, he was sent an auxiliary bishop, Francis Spellman, later the cardinal of New York.

[Hermann the Cherusker]

Some other statistics:

1965 Total Seminaries (Diocesean) - 117
1965 Diocesean Seminarians - 17494
1994 Seminaries - 74
1994 Seminarians - 4154

1994 Ratio of Baptisms:First Communion:Confirmation
1,180,707 - 789,538 - 530,924 (half of all Baptized do not grow up Catholic!)

Total Number of Apostates 1965-1992 (Total Catholics-Deaths+Baptism+Converts) - 5,540,618

Oh ... the Church has had ONE area of growth:

1965 American Bishops - 247
1994 American Bishops - 406

[DCPatriot]

Tragic statistics that, even if "cooked" to a certain degree, display a death knell for the Catholic Church in the United States.

This country will not survive another 100 years without "The Opiate of the Masses", IMO.

[TomSmedley]

Through the papacy of Pius XII, the church resisted the clamor to accommodate itself to the world and remained a moral beacon to mankind.

The leading Protestant theologian of my generation, R. J. Rushdoony, described the doctrine of papal infallibility as a firewall against modernism -- a firewall that actually held for several generations, until Vatican II. He spoke of this as an achievement that preserved the integrity of the Catholic faith even while the largest protestant denominations were hijacked by apostates.

[E Rocc]

I'm currently reading John Cardinal Krol & the Cultural Revolution, of which I found a used copy. I'm reading it because Cardinal Krol was my grandfather's cousin, close in age and from the same neighborhood. It's an interesting book and some of you on this thread might find it a good read as well.

-Eric