Not exactly my point.
Mere youthfulness is no cure. My point is that men rarely learn anything after a certain age. JPII saw many good priests framed and smeared by the Communists in Poland. For the rest of his life, he rigidly rejected all bad reports about any priest or bishop. He was a complete dupe of the evil Maciel. He did nothing to neutralize the evil Bernardin and the network of Marxists that Bernardin created. He remained convinced that the Second Vatican Council was the beginning of a “springtime” for the Church.
All the recent Popes have been terrified of a formal schism. They have thought the way to avoid it was to let the bishops do pretty much anything. So we have material schism, and the “hidden schism” of tens of millions of people losing the faith and becoming “former Catholics”—now the largest “religious” designation in the U.S.
My point was not that we need modernist young bishops! My point was that there is a trap built into human nature: The men who attain positions of power are doomed to believe the “system” is working—because it has treated them well. And not merely “doomed.”
As M. Scott Peck said in __People_of_the_Lie__: People seek power in order to avoid spiritual growth. The men who are bishops have mostly been the type who have been seeking that position since they were in the seminary—even before.
The only Pope in the last half-century who attempted to get around the “old-boy network” in the U.S. was Benedict.
Unfortunately, all I’m seeing is more excuses for a modernist hierarchy.
Very good. I now see your point and it is well worth making. I’m not sure I agree entirely with your analysis of the motivations of these popes and bishops (JPII included), but I completely accept your premise that the popes and bishops who have accrued power believe that the system is working quite well––because after all, it was the system that selected them as a bishop.
And yes, those who have been appointed to the episcopacy have certainly been seeking that position since their ordination––if not much earlier. Consequently, as they progress through their priesthood they seek to emulate why they believe the “selectors” of bishops are looking for in a future bishop. The result is that we drift further and further away from the true teachings of the Catholic Church, and more and more into the heresy of modernism.
Perhaps I’m not as high on the “new” Benedict as you are, but in comparing him to Francis, et al, he truly does now appear to be more of a believer in the Catholic tradition than he was in the past. But I am still hard-pressed to forget the Ratzinger/Hans Kung team that gave us much of the modernist thinking that is in the Council documents. I recognize that even Pius XII had his marginal moments as he weakened to the modernists of his day, but the popes that followed him were beyond the pale. I will agree that it does appear to be a fact that as Benedict moved further away from modernism and more toward traditional teachings, he struggled with the cliques in Rome that still have a loud voice in running the show. There is little doubt that it was these forces that led to his “resignation”.
But my short view is simply this: if things in the Church and this world are going to change for the better, it will have to be because a single bishop opens his heart and soul to the voice of the Holy Spirit and begins teaching the truth regardless of the consequences. After that, other prelates will probably follow. Very unlikely, of course; and there is no doubt the consequences would be disastrous for such a bishop. Still, with God, all things are possible.