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THE CHURCH MILITANT - BELEAGUERED BY BERGOGLIANISM

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13/01/2019 04:53

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Utente Gold

From Phil Lawler’s recent book

January 12, 2019

I have now read Philip Lawler’s recent book. Here is an excerpt from Chapter 6: 'A Patrimony Squandered'. Lawler seems from afar to be channeling my own thinking. This chapter deals a great deal with liturgical practice, church architecture, music, etc. He is dead on right.

One of the points he makes at the beginning of the chapter comes from an experience he had of entering St. Peter’s Basilica. As he gazed at the amazing space, he had the reaction, “This is all mine!”. EXACTLY.
- Our tradition is our patrimony.
- Stories of the saints are our family history.
- Our liturgy is our very flesh and bone: we are our rites.
- When we squander our inheritance, we do terrible damage to our identity.
- Recovering our patrimony is an urgent task pressing on us all.
- We all have a role in this mission.

Anyway, here is the excerpt from the end of Chapter 6. My emphases and comments.

Parish closings are commonplace in America today, and prelates are praised for their smooth handling of what is seen as an “inevitable” contraction of the Church. A question for the bishops who subscribe to such a defeatist view. Why is it inevitable?

The closing of a parish is an admission of defeat.
- If the faithful could support a parish on this site at one time, why can they not support a parish today?
- American cities are dotted with magnificent church structures, built with the nickels and dimes that hard-pressed immigrant families could barely afford to donate.
- Today the affluent grandchildren of those immigrants are unwilling to keep current with the parish fuel bills and, more to the point, to encourage their sons to consider a life of priestly ministry. [See the connection? That’s why the vocation prayer I have promoted is so important.]

There are times, admittedly, when parishes are doomed by demographic shifts. There are city neighborhoods in which two Catholic churches were built, literally across the street from one another: one for the benefit of French-speaking families, the other for their German-speaking neighbors. Such cases, however, account for only a small proportion of the parish closings that we see in the US today.

More typically, the parish slated for closing is located in a comfortable, populous neighborhood, with no other Catholic church particularly close at hand and no special reason why the community that supported a thriving parish in 1960 cannot maintain the same parish now, fifty years later. No reason, that is, except the decline of the Catholic faith. Parishes close because Catholic families don’t care enough about the Faith to keep them open.
- Why don’t families care enough?
- Why is there such a widespread indifference to the treasures of the Catholic faith?
- At least one powerful factor is surely the attitude that lay Catholics have observed in their priests and their bishops.
- If the clergy, the stewards of the patrimony, are content to act as bystanders as the Catholic patrimony is degraded, their indifference becomes infectious.

In other instances, the parishes close because although the neighborhood is still populous, the Catholic families have moved out and the new residents come from different religious backgrounds or come without religious beliefs. In such cases, we are told, the Church must accept the new reality and realize that the neighborhood cannot support a parish. B
- But why make such a concession?
- Why should we admit that it is impossible to convert the new residents to our faith?
- A Catholic fired with apostolic zeal, discovering a neighborhood in which the population is mostly non-Catholic, should set out to convert the people, not to close the church.

In at least a few cases with which I am personally familiar, parishioners have asked their bishop to leave the parish open for a few years to give them an opportunity to build up a new model of evangelical outreach, to bring new converts into the parish and make it financially viable once again. When those appeals have been rejected, the parishioners have concluded, not illogically, that their bishop does not share their trust in the winning power of the Gospel.

When St. Patrick, having escaped slavery in Ireland, arrived again as a missionary, the country was pagan. By the time he died, the country was Catholic.
- He came into a “neighborhood” — an entire nation — that could not support a parish.
- But he did not accept what lesser souls might have considered inevitable.
- Instead, he changed the conditions of the neighborhood, and soon a parish was created. And another and another and another.
- During his years of ministry in the once-pagan country, he is said to have consecrated over three hundred bishops.
- In Ireland today there are seven dioceses — not parishes, dioceses — that trace their foundation to St. Patrick’s missionary work.

If as a bishop and missionary St. Patrick could convert an entire nation, why can’t his successors at least strive to match his success?
- We have material advantages that would have left St. Patrick gasping: the ability to travel hundreds of miles in a day, the capacity for instant communication across the globe.
- Is the content of the Catholic faith less viable today than it was in the fifth century?
- Is the guidance of the Holy Spirit less valuable?
I know how St. Patrick would answer those questions.

In another section, Lawler makes an excellent point that I had not thought of: that the Church’s pastors started squandering and destroying our patrimony right around the time that the birth rate began to drop with the rise of the sexual revolution, contraception and abortion. Here’s how he puts it.

Incidentally, the general appreciation of our Catholic heritage began to lag at roughly the same time that the American birth rate went into a steep decline, eventually dipping below the “replacement rate” at which population would hold steady without immigration.

Is it surprising that we, as a people, stopped thinking so much about what we would pass along to our children, during the same years that we stopped having so many children — that we turned our attention away from our heritage, as we chose not to have so many heirs?

Speaking of tradition and heritage, here is an unusual reflection on the use of the veil in Catholic practice:

Veil, vernacular, and culture
by Dan Millette

January 10, 2019

You will often hear from people who lived through the “great” post-Vatican II reform of the Mass that, despite the loss of reverence and sharp drop in attendance, it was good to have the Mass in the vernacular. Surely, understanding what goes on in the Mass is important.

Yet, surprisingly to some, understanding every prayer uttered is not the actual purpose of the Mass. Sacrificial worship is directed to God, not man. Why has the vernacular been seen as monumentally important to the Mass, even when the Church undergoes a veritable dumpster fire? The answer can, in large part, be explained by the loss of culture in our society.

We do not have a true culture. We have worship of sports and celebrities, horrendous “music,” scandalous movies, illiteracy in all things classic, smartphones for porn and games, and overall insanity. The loss of culture was gradual.
- In the United States, John Dewey’s educational theory, one greatly pushed in my teacher’s college experience, was perhaps the beginning of the end of education.
- Communism was a destroyer of the polis.
- Patriarchal “do what I say, not what I do” parenting was perhaps a key igniter of the sexual revolution.
- And vague Vatican II and post-conciliar documents induced the beginning of the end of worship.

That Latin was totally replaced with the vernacular in the New Mass [even if the Vatican II constitution of the liturgy authorized it only for some readings] - in a form of speech reduced to Grade-4 level, was a perversion in the actual purpose of the Mass.

Culture was not always this way. Once upon a time, William Shakespeare wrote plays on Julius Caesar and the philosopher Timon because his culture reveled in his wit and the depth of these stories. Truth be told, I went to a production of The Tempest in my undergraduate years, without pre-reading the play, and subsequently left the drama house with great frustration.
- I had no idea what was going on.
- The language was too difficult.
- references to ancient themes were far beyond my comprehension. - Surely, I could justly expect Shakespeare’s works to be simplified to fit my needs and abilities!

It took many years for me to rediscover that the problem was not with Shakespeare, but rather with me.
- Undergraduate that I was, I could not keep up with those seventeenth-century viewers deemed illiterate by today’s standards. - Sophocles, Shakespeare, Jonson, Marlowe, etc - they produced great works because they worked within a true culture.
- The masses of “illiterates” they created their works for were steeped in centuries of human achievements.
- The cultus, or tending of the garden, was alive and well.
- The dramas, paintings, music, buildings, and thoughts of the day were recognized as profound and worthy of immersing oneself in.
- It was not simple, but it was worth it. It still is worth it.

Fast-forwarding to today, there is perhaps less knowledge and wisdom now than at any other age of modern human history.
- Ease and instant understanding are the current crowning achievement of life.
- Evidently, depth and beauty are their casualties.

What is missing is the veil – the veil of mystery.
- The curtain separating instant results and laborious enlightenments.
- The sacred mystically withheld from the profane.
- If what we undertake must be instantly understood, then by definition, this undertaking will be utterly void of depth and profundity.
- The grade four vernacular Mass translation is what we are left with.

I suppose it fits well with our “liturgical” “Sing a Church into Being” ditties, which in turn provide great opportunities to daydream at Mass on how much money to place on the Bears for the Monday-Nighter. And the non-cultural wheel of misfortune repeats itself.

What is a veil? A veil is a covering. Its use is a rich occurrence seen throughout Scripture.
- The Holy of Holies and the Ark of the Covenant are hidden.
- A veiling essentially is a revealing.
- To veil something is to reveal it as altogether important, sacred, and worthy.

Consider some veils that still exist in the Tridentine Latin Mass and Divine Liturgy, or to a far lesser degree in the Novus Ordo – the chalice veil, the tabernacle veil, the tabernacle itself, incense, the humeral veil, the iconostasis in Orthodox churches, narthex doors, and ad orientem worship.
- These postures and components reveal a sacred mystery.
- They demonstrate that the Mass touches the Divine.
- It is not human and earthly. It leads us to heaven.
- If there is no veil, there is nothing to say. There is nothing to be revealed.

To retranslate Shakespeare into grade four speech for the sake of a lazy undergraduate student, and remove all references to antiquity or virtue, is to make Shakespeare inconsequential. The same danger applies to the Mass.

Latin is a veil. Yes, it is much more than this, such as a foretaste of heavenly praise, but it still is a veil.
- Latin is not our mater lingua.
- You will not understand Latin at first listen. Nor fiftieth listen.
- It takes long and laborious work to understand Latin fluently.
- One can follow along with a pocket missal, but even that is too much work for some.

No, what is lost on today’s Church is the truth that Latin is a veil, too – a veil that reveals heavenly mysteries. The profound German writer Martin Mosebach explains one such instance: [qote]“How amazed I was the first time I heard a Latin Te Deum. It was a lengthy piece, hovering to and fro, with its feather-light questioning and answering, a mixture of psalm, litany, and profession of faith… The Latin Te Deum takes both listener and singer gently by the hand and leads them to a high mountain, where an unlimited vista opens out before them.” (Heresy of Formlessness, p. 24)

An unlimited vista. Grade-four speech where every amplified breath of the priest cannot be missed does not evoke an unlimited vista. Indeed, Latin is a veil.
- It is a language for worship.
- We do not speak the common tongue to worship the heavenly God.
- We rather sing with the cherubim and seraphim.
- Did it matter to the Irish that St. Patrick said the Mass in Latin? Was this a barrier?
- Or maybe, just maybe, they recognized that Patrick was performing a ritual sacrifice, that he was communicating with the Divine.
- Did they understand this? Not fully. There is a veil – a paradoxical veil that is necessary to reveal.

As instant gratification and factual demands weaned out the great depth of Western culture, the Mass was not spared.
- Indeed, because of the need to understand everything, we understand less than ever.
- The veil of Latin revealed the sacred purpose of the Mass. Removing Latin from Mass did not make the Mass more understandable; it simply lowered Mass to the level of uncultured banality.

Ratzinger says, “Whenever people talk about inculturation, they almost always think only of the liturgy, which then has to undergo often quite dismal distortions. The worshippers usually groan at this, though it is happening for their sake” (Spirit of the Liturgy, pp. 200-201). The groaning is due to an absence of culture by which to inculturate.

- I question the proud stance taken against Latin in the Mass, or further the desire to hear every amplified breath the priest utters. - I question the advantage of newly created Eucharistic prayers, arising mysteriously like the dewfall, in simplified vernacular language for the ostensible purpose of convenience and brevity.
- And I question the forfeiture of a chanted Gospel, done in an act and language of worship, in exchange for storytelling-like Gospel readings proclaimed at a podium from a priest who is always facing you, always telling you exactly what he thinks is going on, usually with affirmations and accompaniment.

We can sing a new Church into being yet not understand a sacred thing. How utterly easy. How utterly insipid.

Remove the veil. Reveal a dead culture.

The following is a very moving account by an Australian Catholic who is a member of the FSSPX:

'Granny leads prayer', Norman Rockwell.

50 years later: An Everyman reflection
on the revolution of Vatican-II
by Anthony Massey

January 12, 2019

“Given constant exposure to the new mass, a family’s faith would be largely extinguished within two generations.”
- A faithful priest's prediction many years ago

Millions of words have been written and spoken for and against the revolution within the Catholic Church called Vatican Council 2. The Council was such a stark break with tradition, a hermeneutic of rupture as they say, that it demands a choice of every Catholic.
- Nothing was left unchanged following the Council, but most significantly the liturgy was progressively changed beyond recognition both intrinsically and in outward appearance.
- It is an incontestable fact that since that Council the Church worldwide has been in catastrophic decline by all measures.

I am not qualified to discuss any of this as a theologian or philosopher or church historian or canon lawyer or even as someone with an opinion that deserves to be heard.
- I am just someone who has lived right through this revolution, who has seen it develop, who has watched the tragedy unfold right up to the disastrous pontificate of Pope Francis.
- I have seen and experienced it from within and in a sense have regarded it from without. Not in the sense of being outside the Church but in the sense of comprehending to a degree the bigger picture as the plot unfolded.
- I am an eye itness who is at least entitled to reflect on the tragedy I have lived through as a child, a youth and an adult, as a father and grandfather.

A priest said to my family many years ago that, given constant exposure to the new mass, a family’s faith would be largely extinguished within two generations. This little vignette bears those prophetic words out, but it is not all doom and gloom.

I was five years old when Vatican 2 commenced in 1962. Obviously I was completely unaware of what it was let alone its possible ramifications. As I grew I went to the local parish primary school and became an altar boy serving Novus Ordo Masses. However from my earliest memories I recall Dad having animated conversations and sometimes arguments with relatives and friends, and even Mum, about things happening in our Catholic Church. It was only over the course of years that I began to understand what was being discussed and what was at stake. I developed this awareness by osmosis rather than by lectures and study.

In the early 70s my parents began driving from parish church to parish church on Sundays in the hope of finding a Mass that didn’t contain gross novelties and a priest who still appeared to believe all the tenets of the Faith.
- I recall a priest at one of these churches saying in his sermon: “Not that Jesus is really present in this bread and wine…”
- That was red rag to the bull for my father and equally repugnant to me, even as a teenager.
- Another time the priest refused communion to us because we were kneeling at the rails. He insisted on us standing to receive holy communion, which we refused to do.
- Those parishes were crossed off our list.

It was incidents like these that kindled in my heart a sharp awareness that there was a “good versus bad” battle raging within the Church, even though I was still largely unaware of the details. Like Dad, I just knew there was something terribly wrong and like him I had enough fire in my belly to be irritated.

Following the Council, a prince of the Church by the name of Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre was making headlines around the world by resisting the Vatican 2 zeitgeist.
- He came to Australia around this time (late 70s) and Dad was understandably eager to hear what this man had to say, since other bishops here in Australia whom he had approached were ‘understanding’ but at the same time unsupportive and inert, and that is how they remained.
- I met the archbishop, genuflected on the wrong knee and kissed his episcopal ring. Looking at that benign smile of his, I was simultaneously keenly aware of his sanctity and my sinfulness.

In the 70s I was a fairly typical teenager; I wasn’t floating around with my eyes and hands raised to heaven. I was attending modernist diocesan schools, obsessed with sport, growing my hair too long, enjoying the music and (regrettably) the fashions of the day, enjoying a relatively early introduction to alcohol and, not surprisingly, developing an interest in girls, fanned by proximity to the magnificent surf beaches of Sydney’s north shore where we lived at that time. The world was making some pretty convincing overtures and I, like most people my age, was listening.

Ironically, the Marist and Christian brothers running the schools I attended were giving out the same worldly messages.
- They were downplaying sin, even those unspeakable ones that have gripped society so tightly in recent years, showing immoral movies to upper high school students on Friday evenings at the school, talking up the “positives” of other religions while attacking the tenets of our own Catholic faith. Is it any wonder my peers developed doubts?

Most assuredly this was not all the brothers; many were holy men, but the radical ones were free to do as they pleased. Where two religion lessons finished the day at school I took the opportunity to leave early and catch the express bus. “Wagging school” was the term. Arriving home early Dad would make the obvious enquiry. “Double religion” was the short response, and all that was needed for his approval.

There are so many moments in those years that I have long regretted, so many times when things could have gone horribly wrong, where loss of life would have spelt eternal disaster.
- Despite all this, neither I nor any of my four brothers rebelled and said “I’m not going to mass this Sunday”, like the majority of our peers did.
- I was a sinner but I had not participated in the mass apostasy that characterised my generation.
- I put this down to the prayers and sacrifices of our parents. In the end, who really knows why.

We went along to out-of-the-way places where a good old priest was still offering the sacrifice rather than inviting us to a meal.
- In these years a relatively small congregation of faithful in Sydney was spiritually nourished by a Vincentian priest by the name of Fr Fox who chose never to celebrate the Novus Ordo Mass.
- As an aside, a young man about my age by the name of Mel Gibson was attending these Masses with his parents Hutton and Anne and his siblings. Mad Max himself was attending Fr Fox’s Mass. No wonder he was able to defeat the bad guys.

Anyway, fast forward a few years and our family moved bit by bit to Brisbane where we all settled into our adult lives.
- Here masses for a faithful few were celebrated in homes, halls and even an office building by a diocesan priest, Fr. Buckley.
- Fathers Fox and Buckley sacrificed everything to provide the mass of all time to a small unworthy Catholic remnant.
- They endured censure, threats, ridicule, ostracism, calumny, you name it.
- As it turned out, what they were doing was heroically holding the fort for Archbishop Lefebvre who visited again in the early 80s and promised FSSPX priests for Australia.

The next bit of the story I am sure has been repeated often throughout the world.
- The laity get together, buy a church or a property for conversion, an FSSPX priest is assigned to that place, a parish is born and flourishes beyond all expectations.
- While some people come, experience the liturgy and the Catholic culture and then at some point disappear, as no doubt has happened throughout the history of the Church, the vast majority are deeply thankful for the privilege they have been offered.

Today there are many hundreds of people in the parish and I can safely say more than half of them are under 30 years of age.
- The excesses and scandals of the current pontificate are pushing more and more people to tradition.
- More than 200 children, including some of my grandchildren, are learning the ancient faith and attending the Tridentine Mass in an FSSPX school independent of the Archdiocese and bulging at the seams (the school is achieving exceptional academic results as well).
- The school’s motto is ‘Sine Deo Nihil’ – ‘Without God there is Nothing’. How true.
- All this is what you can expect when lives are centered on the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass of all time.
- Remember too, this is all happening within a raging sea of apostasy and militant secularism.

As I indicated earlier, Dad and Mum had five sons. Four of the five married. One married an already tradition-minded Catholic, one married a convert from agnosticism, and two married girls brought up in the post Vatican-2 church, but who embraced tradition once exposed to it.

From there, 25 grandchildren (7 married) and to date 18 great grand-children – 61 people in a growing family counting Dad who has passed on. All but two of the grandchildren have embraced the faith with enthusiasm, and prayers are constantly offered up for those two. Family get-togethers are common, rowdy and joyful affairs. God will not be outdone in generosity.

There are other families within this parish and I am sure around the world with similar or more impressive stories to tell. I mention all this not to brag but to make a point.
- The point is we are rational creatures and we have to make choices.
- This story simply illustrates the importance of the choices we have to make as Catholics and the consequences of those choices even in this life.

o A choice between the faith of all time and the counterfeit dross served up as something catholic;
o A choice to pray or not to pray (especially the rosary);
o A choice between children and worldly possessions;
o A choice between the real men being formed into priests of God in traditional seminaries, and the often effeminate (or worse) social workers trickling from Novus Ordo seminaries who can offer nothing but worldly platitudes to their ever-diminishing flocks (with apologies to those holy seminarians with genuine vocations and priests of the Novus Ordo who are wearing themselves out with the best spiritual interests of their flocks at heart).
o Most importantly a choice between the beautiful ancient liturgy, the central act of worship in the Church and the greatest source of grace, and the new liturgy stripped as it is of its sacrificial character and even of good taste.

There is nothing extraordinary about the families I just described. - They were the norm when the Tridentine Mass was the norm, when it was not ‘extraordinary’.
- They only look extraordinary now because the Novus Ordo Mass is the norm.
- The contrast between the fecundity of the sacrifice of the Mass that Jesus Christ, God Himself, instituted, and the sterility of the Novus Ordo meal, the work of a committee, could not be more stark. - - This is the greatest choice we have to make. Proximity to the Tridentine Mass has been a prime consideration in our deciding where to live and even where and when to holiday/vacation.

Now a quick look at those who did not choose as my parents chose. I look at our aunties and uncles of Mum’s and Dad’s generation who were brought up with the ancient culture and the Mass of all time but who chose to drift with the tide; who accepted the novelties, sometimes with grieving hearts; who continued to pray and attend the Novus Ordo Mass on Sundays, but who deep down knew that something was terribly wrong.

In their twilight years some look at their often fragmented families and sadly lament while others try to convince themselves that all is good with the world, that God will understand their ‘concrete’ circumstances.
- They have eagerly swallowed the poison of subjectivism.
- Their children, my cousins, many of whom I happily spent my childhood and youth with, are by and large naturally good people who have known nothing but the sterile Novus Ordo and who, it could be argued, have hardly been given a choice in this respect.
- Some attempt to practice their faith, some don’t.
- Their children by and large have nothing because they had by and large nothing to pass on to them beyond natural virtues.
- For their children’s generation the faith does not come into their reckoning. They blend seamlessly into our secular, anti-Christian society.

Two generations and the faith is extinguished. The prophesy has come to pass.

The results of these choices are sadness, regret, self deception, denial of uncomfortable dogmas, feelings of helplessness and sometimes hopelessness; in some cases apostasy. These are the very fruits of modernism which is the motivating principle, the essence of the Council.

I say again, I have nothing to brag about. The above is not in any way self congratulation. I didn’t earn or deserve the happy life I have and I have everything for which to be thankful. What I have learnt without too much pain is that every choice we make has ramifications for both our temporal and spiritual lives.

Looking back over nearly 60 years of Vatican II, I have concluded that
- firstly the world and the Church are as they are now because the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass has been largely replaced by a man-centred communal meal.
- The principal source of grace for the world has been all but cut off.
- That is the ultimate aim and the primary crime of the revolution. - Neither the Church nor this world will be fixed until the Mass of all time is restored.

On a cheerier note, allowing for individual situations and speaking generally,
- Choose tradition and you will be exposed to the beauty of Catholic liturgy and culture in all its forms including a clear connection to 2000 years of church history – you won’t be drifting aimlessly;
- You will know why you are Catholic and you will love and value your faith above all things;
- The world will never be able to serve up anything to make you despair;
- You will always have serenity within the depths of your soul;
- You will very likely have many happy and well adjusted children and grand children, and your life will always have purpose and joy even in tough times.

I acknowledge times will get tougher for our children and their children but as mentioned above, God will not be outdone in generosity.

I thank God that I was guided to chose wisely, not having any idea what the rewards would be in this life, let alone in the life to come if I persevere. I thank my parents, those heroic isolated priests ,and Archbishop Lefebvre and his Society of St Pius X for being the instruments to bring about such a happy and fortunate life in this world of apostasy and despair.

There is still hope and joy on offer for people who choose wisely.

[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 13/01/2019 05:54]