Replies

I"m going to break one of my hard and fast rules and actually directly respond...

Change is fine if it is evolution, not revolution.

EVERY evolutionary change begins with some sort of revolt.

The change in the rosary is significant only because it is still another break with tradition.

As the Rosary evolved before now, there were breaks with tradition. All religious/social/political evolution requires breaks with tradition. This is just more of the same.

This is a papacy, remember, that has rejected the Church's own past in favor of every conceivable novelty.

I think you attack because you had high hopes and they were dashed. No, there's been much more return to tradition than not, much to many people's dismay, at least in MY circles. It's just been very quiet and slow, which usually ensures more success than loud, flashy and public.

The result has been apostasies at the highest levels and systemic corruption.

The corruption existed long before this pope ever took office - and will exist long after him. It's the nature of power, whether we like it or not. None of us has any control over it, either. And rooting it out, is never easy, in fact, it's usually downright impossible. These people are only human.

You are wrong on so many levels it's difficult to know where to begin.

1. Evolution does not begin with a revolt as you suggest. The old Mass evolved under divine guidance, according to the teachings of the Church itself. There were minor changes in rubrics, a slight alteration of some prayers over the centuries, but the Canon of the old Mass of the Roman Rite was fixed by the fifth century. Changes were minor and never radical. What has happened since the Council is radical change which has always been antithetical to Catholicism and from which the Church has always instinctively recoiled. Why should this be so? Because it is the duty of the Church above all else to protect its deposit of faith. That is why the Church herself exists--to protect the faith and administer the sacraments. That is what the Pope takes a solemn oath to defend under pain of excommunication: he must guard and protect the traditions which have been handed-down to him. That is his major function.

2. The rosary is not the question. That it has already been changed in minor ways is true. What alarms traditionalists is not the change itself but the clear intention by modernists to leave nothing of the old Church untouched and free from reformulation. The addition of a decade of aves is not in itself a big deal. But it goes along with radical changes in the Mass and reformulated sacraments, along with the new interpretations of essential Catholic doctrines--all of which directly threaten the deposit of faith. As novelties they need to be viewed with suspicion as extraneous and alien to the innately conservative spirit of the Catholicism. That they are not, but are dismissed as inconsequential by masses of Catholics who blindly follow this Pope in his headlong revolution, is troubling. Vatican I warned: "For the Holy Spirit was not promised to the Successors of Peter that they might disclose new doctrine, but that by His help they might guard the revelation transmitted through the apostles and the deposit of faith, and might faithfully set it forth." It is the papacy's primary function to be conservative of tradition, not to invent new beliefs or to participate in the suppression of the old ones.

3. It is nonsense we can't do anything about the corruption. The first requirement for reform is to recognize the problem, to be honest about it, which people on this site who defend the Pope have a hard time doing. It must be said frankly: he has known for decades the seminaries were corrupt and has ignored their corruption. Yet they were not always so. Just fifty years ago the seminaries and novitiates were bursting with chaste and orthodox and straight young men. Within ten years of the Council the theology of formation changed accompanied by a liberalized moral theology that encouraged sexual acting-out, even by seminarians. This was when the gay culture made its inroads in diocese after diocese. It is well-known there simultaneously sprang up a homosexual network of bishops who promoted their own and groomed as their successors the priests they had affairs with. The result has been an entrenched gay culture which has led to scandal after scandal, blighting the lives of many children. All of this is recent, i.e., since the close of the Council. But this Pope--who is Supreme Pontiff--has done nothing about it.