Do traditionalists need to "Take a Deep Breath and ... Calm Down?"
A reader writes:
"I have always respected Palau, so this was encouraging at least for me: "Luis Palau: Why It Matters that Pope Francis Drinks Mate with Evangelicals" (Christianity Today, March 14, 2013) [cf. "Secret Life of a Fool" by Andrew Palau, Louis Palau's son].
"I continue to think Traditionalists hurt their own cause by being to rigidly wed to the one hundred percent clause. The opposition to Catholic Tradition is discouraging, and yet even in the Old Testament the Lord remained faithful to the Jewish system while he went outside it as well to bless. The over-hostility to anything remotely questionable is understandable given the mess of Vatican II, but it is also wrong. I mean, should we trash Bouyer's book on Protestantism, encouraging conversion, because he was Küng's doctoral advisor? When this new Pope told a friend the Anglican Ordinariate was unnecessary, that could easily mean God can work inside the Anglican Church without also meaning no one should convert. Some will, inevitably stay: others we are pleased come on in, of course. That is simply matter of fact. Etc.
"Anyway, the proof is in the pudding. It killed me how newsheads all opined, 'The first few days define the papacy....' and everyone nods. Only in Facebook nation does initial PR define things. In reality it blurs things. Only actions, as they unfold, define. Even Paul VI, for all his baggage, had a fistful of happily resonant teaching moments on transubstantiation and birth control, of all things!!
"Hence I thought this was very spot on: Taylor Marshell, "Traditionalists and Pope Francis: Can We Take a Deep Breath and Please Calm Down?" (Canterbury Tales, March 14, 2013)."
Related:[Hat tip to J.M.]
Saint Teresa of Avila:
ReplyDeleteKnow this: it is by very little breaches of regularity that the devil succeeds in introducing the greatest abuses. May you never end up saying: 'This is nothing, this is an exaggeration.
For those with eyes to see; for those with ears that hear, the tocsin ought have been sounded long ago.
The inertia into Indifferentism is visible in many forms and in many ways but invisible is that puissant Prelate who embodies Tradition and whose influence and actions could be a force applied to our ineluctable inertia into Indifferentism.
The conservatives will awaken to the smell of myrrh after it is way too late and they will say, Why didn't anyone tell us?
Even now their silence is deafening as the Totalitarian Humility of Pope Francis is being applied to Holy Thursday; he will not offer Mass at his Cathedral Church, Saint John Lateran, but at some crummy lil' detention center and the conservatives - and their objective allies, the media - will swoon with wonder at this humble man serving the poor.
It is with such identifying with the poor that the inertia into Indifferentism will be not only be preserved in its continuity, but it will increase in intensity and speed.
Before the Totalitarian Humility of Pope Francis all of Tradition and traditional ecclesiastical praxis must submit and surrender - and we can count on the conservatives to be his biggest defenders in all that he does.
Ray Davies rightly observed -
ReplyDeleteGirls will be boys and boys will be girls
It's a mixed up muddled up, shook up world
and so we read conservative men writing like the epicene ecumenists they are (assuring us all that what has happened these past fifty years is no big deal) and we have women rightly judging and producing polemics that harken back to a time when Catholic Traditionalist polemics produced by men were masculine:
http://tinyurl.com/aumcsdk
http://romancatholicworld.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/is-pope-francis-really-humble/