Dale Price at Dyspeptic Mutterings dishes out truth with the bark on:
Royal Air Force pilots during the Second World War reported that ingesting bilberries improved their night vision.
It’s not often that I offer health advice here, but I think it’s relevant now, what with the bombshell news that Pope Francis appointed Blase Joseph Cupich as the next Archbishop of Chicago.
Now, if you processed that news and are still the proud owner of a foam finger that says “Francis #1!” I don’t think this post is for you. In fact, it’s really not. In fact, if I post your comment, it will probably be as a sign of how far gone you are.
For those of you taken aback by the appointment of a certified hater of TLM massgoers and pro-lifers–and even Al Kresta!–to one of the most important sees in North America, this post is for you.
An eclipse is at hand, and things are about to get unpleasant for people who think being Catholic has some supernatural value. The bottom lines are four:
- First: B.J. Cupich is the man the post-Burke shake-up in the Congregation of Bishops came up with. *This* is the man the Pope wanted to run one of the top three sees on the continent.
*This* is the Pope’s vision of the ideal bishop for American Catholics. From that, all else follows.
The nausea you feel is quite understandable. All the wrong suspects are celebrating his alleged inclusiveness (Disclaimer: “Inclusiveness” and “pastoral” are void with respect to Those People Who Still Believe That S–t). Cupich’s public record confirms that he’s yet another Dad more popular with other people’s children. He’s Edward Egan, only with pretensions to intellectualism and sans the charm.
Sing a new church. Actually, an old church. That 70s Church, in fact.
2. Second, the Pope just sent a big signal to careerist clerics: picking public fights with pro-lifers and traditionalists is no obstacle a-tall! In fact, it’s your ticket to the top.
Get ready for some unpleasant displays from priests and bishops, alas. Fallen human nature being what it is.
3. If you like your bishop, storm heaven for him.
Pray God he’s not retiring soon, or otherwise the Wuerlwind is going to deposit yet another touchy, iron-fisted “pastoral” dialoguer on your doorstep.
4. The hermeneutic of continuity is dead, dead, deadski.
If the Pope was really in tune with his predecessors not named “Paul VI,” Bishop Cupich would hit age 75 as the Bishop of Spokane. Pope Francis is a Reformer, and sees himself as one. Unlike Benedict, he’s just fine with everything Vatican II did. He’s never uttered a cross word about the 21st ecumenical council. Not a one. I’d love to see anything like Benedict’s criticisms about V2 (no, not that one…) from him, but they simply do not exist. It was a break with the past, and that’s a good thing in his book. To the contrary–the people dwelling in the past are the problem, as he has scolded constantly. And as BJC affirms in this love-fest interview with the National Catholic Reporter (indirect link). This part stands out.
Go here to read the rest. I have seen all this before in the chaos after Vatican II. I rather suspect that is precisely what we are heading for again unless clergy and laity start growing spines. Every Catholic has a duty, not a right, to defend the orthodox teaching of the Church. When the clergy are not doing so, or even deviating from that teaching, it is time for the laity to speak out loud and clear in protest. Time to stand.
I’m not going back to those bad, bad days in the past. I cannot and I will not. I’ve seen and learned too much. The Savior has been too good to me to go back there again. How could I betray His mercy and kindness to me so? Too many souls have entrusted themselves to me. I am a Priest of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church. By the grace of God I, a poor sinner, offer the Unbloody Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ for the living and for the dead, and by His authority I absolve the sins of all who are repentant. I do not preside over the “community celebration of the assembly.” I celebrate the Holy Mysteries in the congregation of the Faithful. I am not a community organizer dedicated to “speaking the truth to power.” I, by the grace of Jesus, my Lord, am a father who is both authorized and graced to speak and to bestow healing to the broken, freedom to the captives, ransom to those who are enslaved, and redemption to other sinners like me. I will never, ever go back. I will continue to be what Jesus, through the hands of my bishop, ordained me to be: a priest of the One True Catholic Church of Jesus Christ.
[…] Bishop Cupich Is Contemptuous of TLMers, […]
Fr Frank wrote, “I’m not going back to those bad, bad days in the past. I cannot and I will not.”
I assume you are referring to the dreadful period between Lamentabili and Pascandi and the Second Vatican Council. The “bad, bad days” described by Maurice Blondel, when he wrote, in 1907, “[U]nprecedented perhaps in depth and extent–for it is at the same time scientific, metaphysical, moral, social and political–[the crisis] is not a “dissolution” [for the spirit of faith does not die], nor even an “evolution” [for the spirit of faith does not change], it is a purification of the religious sense, and an integration of Catholic truth.” He also wrote, “With every day that passes, the conflict between tendencies that set Catholic against Catholic in every order–social, political, philosophical–is revealed as sharper and more general. One could almost say that there are now two quite incompatible “Catholic mentalities,” particularly in France. And that is manifestly abnormal, since there cannot be two Catholicisms.”
Bravo Father Frank!
“I assume you are referring to the dreadful period between Lamentabili and Pascandi and the Second Vatican Council.”
Ah, yes MPS those dreadful days when the pews and confessionals were full, priests preached the unvarnished truth of Christ and clown masses would have been regarded as a poor attempt at humor. Condemning that portion of Church history, considering what we are currently living through, I will assume is your attempt at a bad joke.
Donald R McClarey
A nodding acquaintance with the careers of theologians like Henri Bremond, Joseph Maréchal, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, Cardinal Yves Congar, Cardinal Jean Daniélou, Claude Mondésert and Louis Bouyer hardly supports your rosy picture of the period.
Writing of Blondel, Cardinal Henri de Lubac declared, “Latin theology’s return to a more authentic tradition has taken place–not without some jolts, of course–in the course of the last century. We must admit that the main impulse for this return came from a philosopher, Maurice Blondel. His thinking was not primarily exercised in the areas proper to the professional theologians, nor did it base itself on a renewed history of tradition. Still, he is the one who launched the decisive attack on the dualist theory that was destroying Christian thought.”
“Destroying Christian thought” hardly points to a golden age.
“Henri Bremond, Joseph Maréchal, Marie-Dominique Chenu, Cardinal Henri de Lubac, Cardinal Yves Congar, Cardinal Jean Daniélou, Claude Mondésert and Louis Bouyer hardly supports your rosy picture of the period.”
Who helped construct the modern Church which has witnessed a virtual collapse of the Faith in France and other countries. Thanks for calling those helpful witnesses for my case Counselor.
Donald R McClarey
It is clear that St John Paul the Great would not have conferred the red hat on Congar, Daniélou and Lubac, if he had considered them heterodox, or even of doubtful orthodoxy. It was in the nature of a rehabilitation. This also holds of Hans Urs von Balthasar, whose death alone prevented his elevation.
“It is clear that St John Paul the Great would not have conferred the red hat on Congar, Daniélou and Lubac, if he had considered them heterodox, or even of doubtful orthodoxy.”
Such formulations from authority are worthless. One might just as well say, for example, that Congar was of doubtful orthodoxy or else Pope Pius XII would not have forbidden his True and False Reform of the Church (1950) in 1952. In regard to Congar, he thought that Vatican II did not go far enough and John Paul II clearly did not agree.
The spirit of Mr McClarey’s golden age is perhaps best summarised in Blonde’s rebuke of, Pedro Descoqs, the Jesuit defender of Charles Maurras and his Action Française
“A Catholicism without Christianity, submissiveness without thought, an authority without love, a Church that would rejoice at the insulting tributes paid to the virtuosity of her interpretative and repressive system… To accept all from God except God, all from Christ except His Spirit, to preserve in Catholicism only a residue that is aristocratic and soothing for the privileged and beguiling or threatening for the lower classes—is not all this, under the pretext perhaps of thinking only about religion, really a matter of pursuing only politics?”
“The spirit of Mr McClarey’s golden age”
Only a golden age in comparison with our own. In regard to your quotation from Blondel, I think Pius X had his number quite accurately. The atheism of Charles Maurras, who in his last days returned to Catholicism, has had no impact on Catholicism long term. I wish I could say the same for the Modernists, especially the French branch of that enterprise. Your love of the diseased, and obviously dying, form of Catholicism spawned by these French intellectuals is as perplexing as your infatuation with Robespierre.
Michael Paterson-Seymour: ““A Catholicism without Christianity, submissiveness without thought, an authority without love, a Church that would rejoice at the insulting tributes paid to the virtuosity of her interpretative and repressive system… To accept all from God except God, all from Christ except His Spirit, to preserve in Catholicism only a residue that is aristocratic and soothing for the privileged and beguiling or threatening for the lower classes—is not all this, under the pretext perhaps of thinking only about religion, really a matter of pursuing only politics?””
.
Each and every person, as individual human beings, brings with him a philosophy of his own when he comes to Catholicism. Some are grand and some are humble. Only the Pope, speaking with the Magisterium “ex cathedra”, speaks and teaches the Catholic Faith infallibly. Theologians and “prophetic critics” of Catholicism must all be open to the Vicar of Christ on earth.
A collapse which came after cataclysmic world wars and a global depression. It wouldn’t be the first time there was great irreligious sentiment after a period of disaster and prolonged turmoil. Children aren’t stupid, and they will work out and develop the genuine beliefs of their parents and discard what was merely supported as wrong or extraneous. How many baby boomer children quietly understood, even if it was not articulated, that their parents truly believed God or the Church or both were discredited after such a period? In Europe, we have a post-war generation that only seems to believe in exhaustion; in the United States, we have a church who became increasingly irrelevant to a majority of Catholics who were, by this time, third or fourth generation immigrants. We had a Church built upon immigrants (marginalized to varying degrees) rallying around a Catholic identity for political reasons as much as spiritual. What I suspect a majority of them passed down was not a love of God but an identity that became less coherent with greater integration.
Hummmmm wrote; “What I suspect a majority of them passed down was not love of God but an identity that became less coherent with greater integration.”
This vacuum and loss of identity was, in my very humble opinion, due to misrepresentation of V2, and subsequent errors. Love of God was replaced with love of relativism.
Example; All religions are equal. God is larger than one religious institution.
The importance of Jesus’ establishment of His Church took back seat, and to date 30,000 protestant churches muddy the once clear living waters. Less cohesion indeed.
Fr. Frank.
God bless you son of Mary ever Virgin.
Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament takes great JOY in your fidelity.
Peace and blessings.
St. Maximilian Kolbe, a beautiful role model for priests, will be hearing from me tonight on your account. May he deliver your prayers with Our Lady to the throne of Jesus.
Hmmmmm
Excellent summation.
I would only add that, in Europe, too, there was often a strong political component to Catholic identity, not least in France. The spiritual mission of the Church was gravely hampered, during the 70 years, beginning in 1870, by the open hostility of most Catholics to the Republic, which neatly matched the anti-clericalism of the bouffeurs de curé. Leo XIII had exhorted Catholic to “rally to the Republic,” explaining that a distinction must be drawn between the form of government, which ought to be accepted, and its laws which ought to be improved, only to be accused by the Catholic press of “kissing the feet of their executioners.”
I recommend to Michael Paterson-Seymour the enlightening work of Giuseppe Siri, “Gethsemane” (http://www.amazon.com/Gethsemane-Reflections-Contemporary-Theological-Movement/dp/0819908258) wherein he ably explains how the neo-Modernist conflation of grace with nature has lead to countless errors. The luminaries mentioned by Paterson are the vanguard of this neo-Modernist movement and that is why they were (rightly) under a cloud of suspicion in the years before the Revolution of Vatican II.
Donald .. Michael Voris best watch out, is there a new sheriff in town?