Here is a delayed post about a problem that is both chronic and pandemic in the Catholic Church today, and a more timely if only partial and unwarrrantedly biased rejoinder to it...
A pastoral crisis the Church
cannot (yet does) ignore
By Phil Lawler
April 28, 2017
The Archdiocese of Boston has opened a new church. That news drew headline coverage, in a city that has become more accustomed to stories about church closings.
To be perfectly honest, the news stories are a bit misleading. There have been a few new churches opened in Boston in the past 60 years, but they have been new buildings rather than new parishes: new churches that were constructed to replace buildings that had been destroyed by fire or by the wrecking ball. As a matter of fact, that’s also the case with the latest building, the church of Our Lady of Good Voyage.
So unless I’m mistaken, the overall count remains unchanged: in the past 50 years, the Archdiocese of Boston has opened zero new parish churches. Over the same span, roughly 125 parishes have been shut down or merged into “cluster” units.
This might be understandable, if the Boston’s Catholic population had disappeared. But it hasn’t — at least not according to the official statistics. On paper, it has grown. There were about 1.8 million Catholics registered in the area covered by the Boston archdiocese 50 years ago; today the official figure is 1.9 million.
The trouble, of course, is that most of those 1.9 million Catholics aren’t practicing the faith. Consequently it should be no surprise that their sons don’t aspire to the priesthood.
There were just over 2,500 priests working in the archdiocese 50 years ago; now there are fewer than 300. That’s right; nearly 90% of the priests are gone. If you can’t replace the priests, you can’t keep open the parishes.
[Yet Boston has been under the care of one of the Pope’s most trusted men, Cardinal Sean O’Malley, since 2003, succeeding Cardinal Law who resigned because of his abject failure to deal with sex abuses by his priests. What does it say that under O'Malley, the situation of the Church in Boston has only gone from bad to worse, obviously not helped in any way since Bergoglio became pope? Of course, Boston is not the only diocese afflicted with this Church-wide worsening of the crisis in the faith, but still… Has O'Malley been too tied up with his duties as a member of the pope's Crown Council and as Bergoglio's point man for the continuing fight against priestly sex abuses to attend to his pastoral duties at home?
Let’s be frank. These figures are not a cause for concern; they are a cause for horror. Panic is never useful, but something close to panic is appropriate here. Things have gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Our Lord commissioned us to “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” We’re not doing that. We aren’t even holding onto the people who were baptized into the faith. We should be bringing more people into the Church, not congratulating ourselves on minimizing the losses.
Although the situation in Boston is unusually bad, it is not unique. All around us, the same sad trends are in evidence. Parish closings and wholesale diocesan retrenchment programs have become familiar. How should we respond?
Here are two possible responses:
A) “This is a disaster! Stop everything. Drop what you’re doing. “Business as usual” makes no sense; this is a pastoral emergency. We don’t just need another “renewal” program, offered by the same people who have led us into this debacle. We need to figure out what has gone wrong. More than that. We know that the Gospel has the power to bring people to Christ; therefore it follows that we have failed to proclaim the Gospel. The fault lies with us. We should begin with repentance for our failures.”
B) “Don’t worry. Times change, and we have to change with them. Religion isn’t popular in today’s culture, but the faith will make a comeback sooner or later. We just need to keep plugging away, to have confidence, to remember God’s promise that the Church will endure forever.”
You see what’s wrong with argument B, don’t you?
Yes, the Lord promised that the Church would last through the end of time. But he did not promise that the Archdiocese of Boston (or your own diocese) would last forever. The faith can disappear, indeed has disappeared, from large geographical areas — northern Africa, for instance
[which, however, is predominantly Muslim and has been since the 8th century and has never looked back].
Moreover, it’s both presumptuous and illogical to assume that the faith will make a comeback in another generation or two. The young adults who today don’t bother to marry in the Church are not likely to bring their children there for Baptism (if they have children). Those children, years later, aren’t likely to feel the urge to go back to their parish church (if it still stands), since they were never there in the first place.
The Catholic faith is passed down from generation to generation. If parents stop teaching their children, those children have nothing to teach the grandchildren. In two generations, a thoroughly Catholic society can become mission territory. Look at Boston. Look at Quebec. Look at Ireland.
Finally, even if we could safely assume that the faith will recover in another 10 or 20 or 50 years, that would not absolve us, in this current generation, of our responsibility to evangelize. Right now, people are going without the benefit of the sacraments, because of our failure and our complacency. Lives are being lost; souls are being lost. We are accountable.
So between the two responses, A) and B), there is no comparison. One might sound extreme, but the other is just plain wrong.
There are, sad to say, two other responses:
C) “It doesn’t really matter whether or not people go to church on Sunday. As long as we’re all nice people, God in his mercy will bring us all to heaven.”
D) “Don’t bother me with your statistics. Actually the faith is stronger than ever. Our parish/diocese is vibrant! You’re only seeing the negative.
Response C) is not Catholic. Response D) is—how shall I put this gently?—not rational. Unfortunately, I hear B), C), and D) much more often than A). Don’t you?
The Archdiocese of Boston:
Microcosm of ecclesial disaster
by Christopher A. Ferrara
May 1, 2017
In a recent column, Phil Lawler writes that over the past fifty years — meaning since the end of the Second Vatican Council, 52 years ago — not a single new parish has opened in the Archdiocese of Boston, but on the contrary some 125 parishes have either closed or been consolidated with other parishes.
During the same period, he further notes, the number of Catholic priests has fallen from 2,500 to 300 — a staggering drop of 90%! And most of those, I would add, are probably over the age of 60. Yet the Catholic population of the Archdiocese has increased — minimally — from 1.8 million to 1.9 million, which in itself is a sobering indication of ecclesial decline, given the overall population growth in the United States since the 1960s.
Lawler states the only reasonable conclusion: "Let's be frank. These figures are not a cause for concern; they are a cause for horror. Panic is never useful, but something close to panic is appropriate here. Things have gone terribly, terribly wrong." Indeed, he adds, the situation in Boston "is not unique. All around us, the same sad trends are in evidence. Parish closings and wholesale diocesan retrenchment programs have become familiar."
Lawler, however, never puts his finger on exactly why things have "gone terribly, terribly wrong." He merely observes the widespread post-conciliar failure of the human element of the Church to carry out our Lord's commission to make disciples of all nations, and he laments that "We aren't even holding onto the people who were baptized into the faith."
True, of course, but this is just another way of saying that things have gone terribly wrong in the Church. But why have they gone terribly wrong? Certainly, cultural factors emerging in the 1960s, including the "sexual revolution," were involved in this sudden and calamitous ecclesial decline.
But the proximate cause arose within the Church itself as the generality of the hierarchy, after the close of the Second Vatican Council, inexplicably surrendered to the spirit of the age instead of resisting it as the Church had always done before — even in the years immediately preceding Vatican II as one can see during the reign of Pius XII.
That surrender has taken the following forms:
• a truly fatuous optimism about, and "opening to," the never-adequately-defined "modern world" — supposedly inspired by the conciliar document
Gaudium et spes;
• a disastrous "liturgical reform," initiated by the conciliar document
Sacrosanctum Concilium, that would supposedly make the Catholic liturgy more meaningful to the faithful and more attractive to non-Catholics, when precisely the opposite has happened as Mass attendance and conversions immediately plummeted;
• an "ecumenical" and "inter-religious" venture launched by the conciliar documents
Unitatis Redintegratio and
Nostra Aetate, which has ended by
de facto placing the Catholic Church on the level of Protestant sects and indeed all other religions for the sake of "ecumenical dialogue" and "inter-religious dialogue," giving rise to the general impression that all religions are more or less good and that the Catholic religion has no unique claim to validity [While this may be the position of Bergoglio and his fellow progressivists, it is not at all the official position of the Church, reaffirmed very firmly and unequivocally in DOMINUS IESUS issued to mark the start of the Church's third millennium, to make it very clear that against all other Christian professions and all other non-Christian faiths, only the Catholic Church founded by Jesus himself is the one true Church of Christ.]
• an abandonment of the Social Kingship of Christ, emanating from the post-conciliar implementation of the conciliar document
Dignitatis Humanae, which introduced an unprecedented endorsement of "religious liberty" whose exact significance is still being debated while the original teaching on the necessity of some form of Church-State alliance for sound social order has effectively (but not officially) been negated;
[It is difficult to understand any opposition to the idea of 'religious liberty' in its most obvious sense - that anyone is totally free to profess whatever religion or lack thereof, a freedom as fundamental as the right to life. 'Religious liberty' only means that the Church respects other religions, or even non-belief, but not that she would thereby desist from Christ's mandate to "Go and make disciples of all nations... baptizing in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit", the Church's missionary mandate which anti-Catholic Bergoglio and company have chosen to ignore in favor of their flagrant religious indifferentism, which is their anti-Christian interpretation of Dignitatis humanae]
•
a general refusal to teach, and a consequent loss of the conviction, that the Catholic Church is necessary for salvation.
[The litany of ills attributed to specific Vatican-II documents is all-too-familiar. However, it would take another ecumenical council to remedy the probable 'errors' and imperfections of said documents - a pope by himself cannot overturn an ecumenical council. Which is why both John Paul II and Benedict XVI insisted that the Church can and should live with the documents as they are, with the caveat that they should be interpreted in the hermeneutic of continuity with the Church's entire Tradition and Magisterium. Concrete progress was made with Summorum Pontificum in regard to questionable liturgical reforms after Vatican-II. And the Church, starting with the pope and her bishops, must interpret the other three questioned documents as John Paul II and Benedict XVI taught. Yes, the widespread damage wrought by the Bergoglian apostasy is grave and already profound, but the one true Church should and will prevail.]
In sum, as incredible as it may seem, over the past fifty years the institutional Church has largely been stripped of her liturgical, doctrinal and pastoral distinctiveness — the things that make her most visibly and impressively Catholic — gradually dissolving at the human level into
a kind of glorified social service agency, keen to offer its services to the globalist political establishment. [That is certainly not what she was under John Paul II and Benedict XVI - and it is both wrong and unfair of Mr. Ferrara and his fellow more-popish-than-Pius XII traditionalists to lump their pontificates with the current one.] That is what has gone terribly wrong in the Church since Vatican II.
This trend seems to have reached its farthest extremity with Pope Bergoglio, as evidenced by his monumentally embarrassing TED talk, where we read such Forrest Gump-like gems of pop wisdom as the following:
"A single individual is enough for hope to exist, and that individual can be you. And then there will be another 'you,' and another 'you,' and it turns into an 'us.' And so, does hope begin when we have an 'us?' No. Hope began with one 'you.' When there is an 'us,' there begins a revolution."
Catholics used to be taught that hope is a theological virtue, inspired by divine grace, which is the confident expectation of life eternal when this short life on earth has ended. But that was then, and this is now: the human element of the Church after more than fifty years of the imaginary "springtime" of Vatican II.
The only solution to what has "gone terribly, terribly, wrong" in the Church is to restore the very things that made her attractive to souls and produced a rising tide of conversions in America right up to the Council's commencement: that is, her bimillenial liturgical, doctrinal and pastoral integrity.
Need proof? Then look no further than the priestly orders that offer a traditional priestly formation and liturgy. There you will find everything that once characterized the Church at large: a flourishing of vocations, full seminaries and convents, large families, adherence to the doctrines on faith and morals and, in general, renewal and growth - instead of
the decay and slow death now seen in the Archdiocese of Boston and in every other place where the conciliar "springtime" has actually produced a long, dark winter for the Faith.
The Church will ultimately be restored, as the "Church of Vatican II" dies the long and painful death of its own infirmities. And that restoration will inevitably be accelerated by the long overdue consecration of Russia to the Immaculate Heart of Mary./colore]
[I truly do not understand exactly what form this consecration should take, as many popes have done just that!
Pope Pius XII (1942), Pope John Paul II (1984), Pope Benedict XVI (2010) and Pope Francis(2013) consecrated the world to the Immaculate Heart, with Pius XII also specifically consecrating "the peoples of Russia" in 1952, sometimes worded as "acts of entrustment". Though Sister Lúcia Santos publicly declared that the consecrations of both 1942 and 1984 were accepted in Heaven, certain pious devotees to the cause of Fátima, especially Traditionalist Catholics, dispute that a valid consecration of Russia, fulfilling the specific requirements of the Marian apparition at Tuy, that were carried out since has never been performed in union with all the Catholic bishops of the world as was requested, nor that the specific mandate "Consecration of Russia" is expressed in wording verbatim by the reigning Pope.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consecration_of_Russia
Besides, the return of the faith to Russia’s largely Orthodox population has been one of the great phenomena of the post-Soviet world. However, the Russian Orthodox object to such a consecration on the ground that (1) Russia was already Christian at the time of the Fátima apparitions and had a long history of devotion to the Theotokos, and (2) the concept contains what appears to be an implicit proselytism of Russian Orthodox Christians to the Catholic Faith.
The second objection is a reflex reaction from the Russian Orthodox. As to the first objection, Catholis have generally interpreted the Fatima message about Russia – given on the eve of the Communist revolution that began the Communist regime of the Soviet Union – referred to the official atheism that did reign in the USSR during the seven decades of Communism. So, in answer to Mr. Ferrara and others who continue to insist on this ‘consecration’, the massive return of faith to Russia after 1989 would seem to make it any such new formality unnecessary, and makes their complaint seem like mere technical quibbling.]
We can only hope and pray, however, that the restoration does not take place in a world devastated by the divine chastisement depicted in the post-apocalyptic vision that pertains to the Third Secret of Fatima.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 03/05/2017 17:50]