For five hundred years, the fall of the Roman Catholic Church has been imminent, right around the corner, because she has been too corrupt & too cruel & too voluptuous & too removed from common life & too ascetic & too effeminate & too masculinist to survive.
Spanish troops sacked Rome to the delight of Luther. who was sure that the reign of the Antichrist that had trained him & fed him & his ancestors was at an end.
French Revolutionaries declared an end to the Church & expelled her from France & instituted a cult of Reason & Nature; Napoleon captured the papal states & Pope Pius VII, and it was certain then that the Church was finished.
Italian Revolutionaries decades later unified Italy under secular rule & Pope Pius IX spent his last years as 'prisoner of the Vatican' & it was certain that the power of the popes had gone with the papal state, and that the Church was at an end.
A German ambassador witnessing the installation of Pius XII, author of the anti-Nazi encyclical condemning the pagan state & its racism & brutality, said 'What a magnificent ceremony -- too bad it's the last one.' At the time, the Thousand Year Reich was already half done its course.
After the war during negotiations, Stalin smirked "The pope? How many divisions has the pope got?" The USSR is gone.
When I was a child, the Church began bleeding vocations as priests & religious left in droves and Catholics abandoned the faith because altars were being smashed & the ritual they had been taught was the most beautiful thing this side of Heaven all but vanished & devotion to the Mother of God had all but disappeared. The pope was irrelevant, the world was going to be new & full of peace & love, and the Roman Church was at an end.
Now I'm nearing my half-century, and the ancient rite of mass is slow growing again & all the forgotten devotions have returned, and again anti-Catholics cry down the Church & allege that all clergy are perverts & the pope a criminal, and once again, the Church is at an end.
Come back in 500 more years, and you'll find again the same story -- scandal, weakness, the Church rocked and wracked with uncertainty & anguish -- and the same prophets and victors crying 'Babylon the great is about to fall! She's going at last!' and the Church of the year 2510 will once more be about to fall.
And why aren't you a Catholic yet?
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Friday, April 2, 2010
Deliver us from evil
In the face of Obama's candidacy and election, the right wing has brought to a boil all the worst passions in supporters and voters, and we've seen them nightly on the news.
Now, however, it's the left wing in the US, which is deliberately bring to boil the worst passions in its supporters and voters, both in America & in Europe, with the oldest of appeals in American culture: hatred of the pope and the Catholic Church.
During the years when the crisis of the misuse of bishops' authority in treating & overlooking the crisis of sexual abuse in the clergy was in the press, I was in a crisis of my own concerning faith; but my own attachment to the Church made me feel the justice of the complaints made against many of her clerical officials. Faithful Catholics had been complaining ever since Vatican II that bishops were not responding to ANY of the concerns that they felt as bishops & theologians told them that they had to update their faith and open up to the World. Paul VI took a laissez-faire approach to all these problems, ignoring the discontent felt with the rite of mass, ignoring the absence of regular confession, ignoring the degree to which seminary teachers & bishops were neglecting priestly education & especially moral theology. He exiled or marginalized all of the critics who suggested that he was failing to uphold the faith, while standing firm only on two positions: the traditional teaching on ethics relating to sex & reproduction, and obedience to the pope only when it came to obedience to his own innovations in liturgical practice.
As Benedict XVI has worked against this problems, first as head of the Congregation of the Faith, for which he was continually scorned & cursed in the press for insisting that Catholic theologians teach Catholic theology, and laterally, as pope, that he & Church teaching in general somehow made possible the horrors committed without redress by Church authorities. Into the memory hole have gone all recollection that any time that the Vatican attempted to exercise more authority over bishops' conferences, bishops jealous of their own power and their allies in the press always attacked Cardinal Ratzinger or John Paul II for trying to exercise a retrograde & pre-Conciliar view of the papacy. Now, of course, the Vatican authorities are at fault for the very failure which heterodox bishops & anti-Catholic writers & media organizations demanded.
The author of this confusion is the fallen angel and his allies: first they sow sin, and then they blame the ones bringing the medicine for their lack of fidelity. And so for two decades, Catholics were told by the culture not to worry about sexual deviancy, and then when sexual deviants were ultimately exposed through the press, the prince of lies suggested that the sin was the consequence of the structure of the Body of Christ, not of the subversion of the authority of the Church from within.
What so many Catholics saw in the French revolution, during the oppression launched in Germany during the chancellorship of Bismarck during the Second Reich and continuing through the Third Reich, in France during the closing years of the 19th & the start of the 20th centuries, in Mexico and Spain in '10s, 20s and '30s, we now begin to see here in the US. Like the Catholics at that time who might have been active in implement the Church's teaching on social justice, but who fell victim of those who hated the Church because she was carrying out Christ's mission, so Catholics who've been critical of the failings of bishops & Vatican officials in recent years will likewise not be spared the fury of those who now feel wholly licensed to assault Catholics of all kinds, except those who deny the office of the Holy Father or the teaching of the Church.
The malice of sin is being unveiled for this generation just as Benedict XVI has been reviving the faithful to the mission of divine charity & redemption. The malice of sin is the very sign that his pastorship is having its effect: if it were not, the devils would be slumbering & those over whom the devils have power would not be indulging in the orgy of reproach, mockery, hatred, and incitement to violence that they are in these past few weeks.
The falsehoods of the headlines & the twisting of facts in order to make the fury justified carry the scent of sulphur, the longing for blood. It was the very longing for blood that Fr. Cantalamessa was decrying in his Good Friday homily -- which was immediately turned by the media into a new occasion for slandering the Holy Father & raising the accusations that this pope, whose family lived through the ordeals that German Catholics faced during the Nazi regime, is really just a neo-Nazi. Never mind that the laws of Hitler's Germany required the sterlization & murder of those judged unfit, that abortion was a means of weeding out the impure and the weak among the internal enemies of the state; never mind that two popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, were the objects of all the propaganda and deceit that Hitler's minions could muster. The contemporary world has adopted as its the lies produced, not just by Hitler, but by Stalin's and his successor's agents following the war; a saintly pope who protected all those it was in his power to protect or save from the agents of evil is now smeared as one of those conniving with it; and the man who was only 17 when the Nazi regime fell is condemned as a fellow-conspirator.
While Obama is cursed as the anti-Christ by vigilantes possessed by hatred, while he's in fact engaged Catholics on many levels (while not accepting the Church teaching as his own), so now the Church is once more cursed as the enemy of morality & as the guardian of depravity & cruelty, not by people who are truly concerned that justice be done, but those who believe that they aren't subject to God's judgment, that God does not exist, and that the holy faith is merely a means of keeping them from indulging all their own appetites and perversion. They assert that the popes & the Church as a whole are guilty, because they seek to follow Christ, and they reject as prejudice St. Paul's chastening words about the practices which bar the soul from the redemption of Christ & entrance into the kingdom of Heaven. For years, they have sought to slowly uncover those practices in the name of true ideals; and now that they've blunted & blinded many to the innate evil of those practices, and have won the approval of many for doing so, they look to take the next steps, to deafen souls to the appeal of Christ & to drag those who formerly would have renounced sin into temporal & eternal pits of misery & loss.
We've seen how readily dry souls respond to incitements to violence; the kindling among anti-Catholics is even drier, and the eagerness for violence, even among those who profess to be wanting peace, is greater.
The final part of the Lord's Prayer has never been as applicable in my lifetime as it is now: "Lead us not in the time of testing, and deliver us from evil."
Now, however, it's the left wing in the US, which is deliberately bring to boil the worst passions in its supporters and voters, both in America & in Europe, with the oldest of appeals in American culture: hatred of the pope and the Catholic Church.
During the years when the crisis of the misuse of bishops' authority in treating & overlooking the crisis of sexual abuse in the clergy was in the press, I was in a crisis of my own concerning faith; but my own attachment to the Church made me feel the justice of the complaints made against many of her clerical officials. Faithful Catholics had been complaining ever since Vatican II that bishops were not responding to ANY of the concerns that they felt as bishops & theologians told them that they had to update their faith and open up to the World. Paul VI took a laissez-faire approach to all these problems, ignoring the discontent felt with the rite of mass, ignoring the absence of regular confession, ignoring the degree to which seminary teachers & bishops were neglecting priestly education & especially moral theology. He exiled or marginalized all of the critics who suggested that he was failing to uphold the faith, while standing firm only on two positions: the traditional teaching on ethics relating to sex & reproduction, and obedience to the pope only when it came to obedience to his own innovations in liturgical practice.
As Benedict XVI has worked against this problems, first as head of the Congregation of the Faith, for which he was continually scorned & cursed in the press for insisting that Catholic theologians teach Catholic theology, and laterally, as pope, that he & Church teaching in general somehow made possible the horrors committed without redress by Church authorities. Into the memory hole have gone all recollection that any time that the Vatican attempted to exercise more authority over bishops' conferences, bishops jealous of their own power and their allies in the press always attacked Cardinal Ratzinger or John Paul II for trying to exercise a retrograde & pre-Conciliar view of the papacy. Now, of course, the Vatican authorities are at fault for the very failure which heterodox bishops & anti-Catholic writers & media organizations demanded.
The author of this confusion is the fallen angel and his allies: first they sow sin, and then they blame the ones bringing the medicine for their lack of fidelity. And so for two decades, Catholics were told by the culture not to worry about sexual deviancy, and then when sexual deviants were ultimately exposed through the press, the prince of lies suggested that the sin was the consequence of the structure of the Body of Christ, not of the subversion of the authority of the Church from within.
What so many Catholics saw in the French revolution, during the oppression launched in Germany during the chancellorship of Bismarck during the Second Reich and continuing through the Third Reich, in France during the closing years of the 19th & the start of the 20th centuries, in Mexico and Spain in '10s, 20s and '30s, we now begin to see here in the US. Like the Catholics at that time who might have been active in implement the Church's teaching on social justice, but who fell victim of those who hated the Church because she was carrying out Christ's mission, so Catholics who've been critical of the failings of bishops & Vatican officials in recent years will likewise not be spared the fury of those who now feel wholly licensed to assault Catholics of all kinds, except those who deny the office of the Holy Father or the teaching of the Church.
The malice of sin is being unveiled for this generation just as Benedict XVI has been reviving the faithful to the mission of divine charity & redemption. The malice of sin is the very sign that his pastorship is having its effect: if it were not, the devils would be slumbering & those over whom the devils have power would not be indulging in the orgy of reproach, mockery, hatred, and incitement to violence that they are in these past few weeks.
The falsehoods of the headlines & the twisting of facts in order to make the fury justified carry the scent of sulphur, the longing for blood. It was the very longing for blood that Fr. Cantalamessa was decrying in his Good Friday homily -- which was immediately turned by the media into a new occasion for slandering the Holy Father & raising the accusations that this pope, whose family lived through the ordeals that German Catholics faced during the Nazi regime, is really just a neo-Nazi. Never mind that the laws of Hitler's Germany required the sterlization & murder of those judged unfit, that abortion was a means of weeding out the impure and the weak among the internal enemies of the state; never mind that two popes, Pius XI and Pius XII, were the objects of all the propaganda and deceit that Hitler's minions could muster. The contemporary world has adopted as its the lies produced, not just by Hitler, but by Stalin's and his successor's agents following the war; a saintly pope who protected all those it was in his power to protect or save from the agents of evil is now smeared as one of those conniving with it; and the man who was only 17 when the Nazi regime fell is condemned as a fellow-conspirator.
While Obama is cursed as the anti-Christ by vigilantes possessed by hatred, while he's in fact engaged Catholics on many levels (while not accepting the Church teaching as his own), so now the Church is once more cursed as the enemy of morality & as the guardian of depravity & cruelty, not by people who are truly concerned that justice be done, but those who believe that they aren't subject to God's judgment, that God does not exist, and that the holy faith is merely a means of keeping them from indulging all their own appetites and perversion. They assert that the popes & the Church as a whole are guilty, because they seek to follow Christ, and they reject as prejudice St. Paul's chastening words about the practices which bar the soul from the redemption of Christ & entrance into the kingdom of Heaven. For years, they have sought to slowly uncover those practices in the name of true ideals; and now that they've blunted & blinded many to the innate evil of those practices, and have won the approval of many for doing so, they look to take the next steps, to deafen souls to the appeal of Christ & to drag those who formerly would have renounced sin into temporal & eternal pits of misery & loss.
We've seen how readily dry souls respond to incitements to violence; the kindling among anti-Catholics is even drier, and the eagerness for violence, even among those who profess to be wanting peace, is greater.
The final part of the Lord's Prayer has never been as applicable in my lifetime as it is now: "Lead us not in the time of testing, and deliver us from evil."
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)