Tuesday, March 19, AD 2024 1:57am

1968: Back to the Future

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1968 is on the line and it wants its chaos back:

 

There is a whole world of expectations behind Pope Francis. It’s as if the Church of 1968 has broken out again. With one difference. The Church’s ’68 was characterized by the publication of the controversial Dutch catechism and by post-Vatican II theological drifts. Paul VI responded to this crisis by issuing the encyclical “Humanae Vitae” and by proclaiming the Year of Faith that culminated with the Creed of the People of God. This time Pope Francis began his pontificate with the Year of Faith and in the end faces the typical hot button issues of the post-conciliar period that are now in vogue again.

And so outdated topics of debate have returned to center stage in the Church. The need for the Church to be less centralized formed the agenda of many progressive theologians after the Second Vatican Council. Decades later a dossier with the reforms needed to achieve this goal was compiled by the Bologna School, a group of scholars that interprets the Second Vatican Council as a rupture with the Church’s tradition, and this file was sent on at least three occasions to the Cardinals before they gathered for the conclave that elected Francis.

Other current topics that can be traced back to the debates immediately following Vatican II include the need for a more merciful opening to homosexual couples and a more compassionate application of the doctrine of marriage.

These – and many other – doctrinal leaps forward were halted by Blessed Paul VI. St. John Paul II blocked them with the enthusiasm of one who loved the Church’s teachings but who, at the same time, was able to be close to people. Benedict XVI elevated doctrine to a higher level, with the energy of one who loves the truth and thinks that the greatest mercy possible is to equip people with the truth.

Three Popes were not enough to shelve a whole generation of post-conciliar theology intended to foster a non-Roman Church – despite the fact that it bears the title of the Apostolic Roman Catholic Church.

Go here to read the rest by Andrea Gagliarducci at Monday Vatican.  For those of us of a certain vintage, the current pontificate is so disheartening because we have sat through this all before.  The attempt during the sixties and early seventies to modernize, make the Church more relevant and “pastoral”, and what crimes have been committed in the name of that word, was a flat disaster with the emptying of pews, plummeting ordinations and the sacrifice of the mass celebrated in many places with all the awe and ceremony of a Tupperware party.  We do not want to repeat that performance again and Pope Francis gives every sign of assuming, just like the advocates of socialism, this time we will get it right.  No, you will not.  You will merely neuter the Church for a time, spread chaos and destroy the faith of hundreds of millions.  In my practice of Law I ever tell my clients that one of the secrets of life is to learn from our mistakes.  Those who have no learning curve are doomed to ever repeating their folly.  I am beginning to suspect that many of our higher level clergy either have no learning curve or they wish to dramatically reshape the Church into a parody of herself.

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Dennis Larkin
Dennis Larkin
Tuesday, February 24, AD 2015 8:05am

Belloc wote of the Church as “an institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.”

Mary De Voe
Tuesday, February 24, AD 2015 8:59am

“We, the people, the Triumphant in heaven, the Militant faithful one earth and the Suffering souls in purgatory are the Catholic Church” and the gates of hell shall not, because the gates of hell cannot prevail against the Triumphant saints in heaven who have eternal life with God in heaven because their eternity if forever fixed and unchangeable, nor can the gates of hell prevail against the Suffering souls in purgatory because their destiny is eternally fixed for their destiny with God in heaven. Only the militant and it is the devil, the flesh and the world that the faithful struggle against in their military action against evil to attain and maintain their innocence and truth before God.
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It is you and me, not our bodies, but only our souls, who the devil wants in hell to perpetuate that division, our division from God for eternity. Man is created in body and soul, immediately, at procreation by God. The devil wants to separate man’s body from his soul by casting man’s soul into hell and leaving man’s holy and sacred body to destruction (to rot).
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The devil is a murderer. Death is the separation of man’s body from man’s soul.
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Jesus Christ came for man, body and soul, and wants man, as mankind is created, in heaven…body and soul.

Mary De Voe
Tuesday, February 24, AD 2015 9:13am

“Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”
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Pope Francis must choose and Judge (who am I to judge?) very carefully. Pope Francis brings Jesus Christ to all persons on earth. If the person does not will to accept Jesus Christ, there is absolutely nothing the Pope can do about it.

Michael Paterson-Seymour
Michael Paterson-Seymour
Tuesday, February 24, AD 2015 9:38am

The School of Bologna has become more bizarre over time.

Just before VII, in 1962, they issued their magnum opus, Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Decreta [Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils] the general editor being Giuseppe Alberigo. It was a work of considerable scholarship and became a standard source.
In 2007, the School of Bologna began a new edition Conciliorum Oecumenicorum Generaliumque Decreta [Decrees of the Ecuemenical and General Councils] The implication is that there is a distinction to be drawn between the councils of the pre-1054 undivided Church and those which followed the Great Schism. No explanation was offered and it remains to be seen whether this was more than a curtsey to the Eastern Churches

Of course, the Assyrian Church of the East recognises only the first two councils as ecumenical, the Armenians, Copts and Ethiopians recognize three and the Orthodox seven.

Alberigo died in 2006, just after presenting the first three volumes to BXVI

Anzlyne
Anzlyne
Tuesday, February 24, AD 2015 9:45am

Hi Michael P-S your use of “more than a curtsey to the Eastern Churches” instead of “bow to the Eastern Churches”… a statement on the feminization of the Church 🙂 ?

Philip
Philip
Tuesday, February 24, AD 2015 5:48pm

Anzlyne..good catch. Could be the seeds of radical feminism germinating..NOT.
MPS. Your references are incredible.
I enjoy learning and reading your comments. The same can be said of you and many of the participants on tac, Anzlyne.

Michael Dowd
Michael Dowd
Wednesday, February 25, AD 2015 4:37am

One has to wonder what is up those, who for well over 100 years, have wished to remake the Catholic Church in the fashion of Modernism, Materialism, Communism, Socialism. Look what this thinking has wrought in the secular world: millions slaughtered, welfarism, abortion, suicide, poverty and other such ‘benefits’. Somehow the devil has obscured the thinking of many in Church leadership who want to “immanentize the eschaton” by adapting the same materialist thinking. Utter madness for sure. God help us all!

Rick
Rick
Wednesday, February 25, AD 2015 6:06am

What is up…? The drivers of dissent at Vatican II included John Courtney Murray and Malachi Martin. These two were inside agents for a group that dearly wanted, and still wants today, to destroy the Church. Instead of success, they have enabled a slow poison to be released into the clergy. When the faithful stop looking for a bogeyman and start looking at facts we will turn the corner and be on our way to real reform. Here is the plan. Identify the enemy and eliminate it.

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