... at the height of the Iraq War the Army was expending less than 6 million rounds a month. Therefore 1.6 billion rounds would be enough to sustain a hot war for 20+ years. In America. (emphasis mine)It's finally getting a little hard for the mainstream media to ignore this now. It's time for a NATIONAL CONVERSATION indeed.
(Loreto Publications, 2012), has written a review of Mattei's book, "History's View of Vatican II: The Who, What, Where, When, and Why of the Council" (The Catholic World Report, October 12, 2012), which is worth reading:The famous black-and-white photograph of the Second Vatican Council in session, taken from a high balcony at the back of Saint Peter’s Basilica, shows more than 2,000 Council Fathers standing at their places in slanted stalls that line the nave, with more than a dozen rows on either side. It resembles nothing so much as a gargantuan monastic choir—unless it puts you in mind of the British Parliament with the dimensions quadrupled.
Contemporary perceptions of the Council varied widely, partly because of the extensive media coverage. Although it promulgated a dogmatic constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, Vatican II was not a “constitutional convention.” An ecumenical council can teach about the Church but cannot modify a divine institution, any more than a pope can invent a new doctrine or change one of the Ten Commandments.
Professor de Mattei outlines the two main schools of thought in that discussion. The first and more theological approach presupposes an “uninterrupted ecclesial Tradition” and therefore expects the documents of Vatican II to be interpreted in a way consistent with authoritative Church teaching in the past. This is the “hermeneutic of continuity” emphasized by Pope Benedict XVI.
A second, more historical approach advocated by Professor Giuseppe Alberigo and the “School of Bologna” maintains that the Council “was in the first place an historical ‘event’ which, as such, meant an undeniable discontinuity with the past: it raised hopes, started polemics and debates, and in the final analysis inaugurated a new era.” The “event-dimension” of the Council is Exhibit A in making the case for the elusive “spirit of Vatican II” that looks beyond the actual words of the conciliar documents to the momentum that they supposedly generated.
Professor de Mattei counters such tendentiousness by making a clear distinction: “The theologian reads and discusses the documents in their doctrinal import. The historian reconstructs the events…understands occurrences in their cultural and ideological roots and consequences... so as to arrive at an ‘integral’ understanding of the events.”
Drawing on the work of two Catholic historians and the director of a Catholic news service, this article highlights features in the historical background to the Second Vatican Council by asking the basic questions of journalism: who, what, where, when and why.
DETROIT — Supporters of wider availability of the Tridentine Latin Mass — the Extraordinary Form of the Latin Rite — hail Pope Benedict XVI’s pontificate as a godsend.
“Pope Benedict was the answer to the prayers of many people who prefer the Extraordinary Form. It’s hard to imagine that any other pope could have accomplished as much,” said Alex Begin, who has served as coordinator of the Tridentine Masses offered at a number of churches in Metro Detroit and across the river in Windsor, Ontario.
While a strictly limited availability of the Tridentine Mass became possible under the pontificate of Blessed John Paul II, subject to the local bishop’s approval, Pope Benedict not only made it clear that any priest, anywhere, should be able to celebrate Mass in the Extraordinary Form, he also said it ought to be made available for lay people who wish it.
Fr. Eduard Perrone, "A Pastor's Descant" (Assumption Grotto Church, March 3, 2013), raises a number of questions that made me sit up and take stock. Can members of opposing sides in the current 'Culture Wars' still meaningfully communicate at all? While one cannot discount the role of God's grace, the implications are staggering, for they raise questions about the very possibility of things like the "New Evangelization," which are close to the heart of many in the Church today.
You have no doubt noticed the difficulty, even with your relatives of a more freewheeling kind. As our culture (a euphemism here) becomes ever more unmoored from the Christian faith and even from the norms of right reason, we find ourselves confronted by people whose only creed is their own opinion. Discussions with them on topics such as abortion, contraception, cohabitation, assisted suicide and gay marriage on the one hand, and on religion, especially the Catholic Church, on the other, tend to become fruitless exercises, no matter how civil, how irenic the adopted tone. The thought occurs to us, Why can’t they see what’s so obviously reasonable? The problem is this: liberals have now actually got to thinking of themselves as conservatives. In their minds those who uphold moral norms, who pledge adherence to religious faith and Church, these are the dangerous ones, the radicals, while they are traditionalists. You protest this reversal instinctively. The ‘author’ of this grand deception can be none other than the Archdemon, the one our Lord referred to as the Deceiver.One thing I remember from my debates about "presuppositionalism" back at Westminster many years ago, is the insight that even where epistemological common ground fails with those who do not share our faith, ontological common ground persists insofar as all of us share a common human nature and are created by God in His own image. While that has to count for something, it's slim pickings for 'dialogue.'
Unless we come to realize that there has been this seismic shift of thought in many minds and thus in culture, efforts to win over those on the opposing side are going to be useless. They will not get it because ‘it’ cannot be comprehended by them. To such persons, it is we who are the radicals, the oppressors, the cause of human suffering, the intolerant ones, the unreasonable, the inhibitors of a happy and free society–we, the religious types, the moralists, who insist on Church, family, marriage, discipline, restraint, received rules and regulations. For liberals, life is whatever they wish it to be, and the meaning of life is determined solely by their passions and desires.
You may recall the early words of Pope Benedict’s pontificate to the effect that there is a growing “dictatorship of relativism” in world consensus. The formation of this new governance over life means that relativism has now the status of dogma. The result is that for liberals this new thinking is the right and ‘traditional’ one, a pragmaticism that’s irrefutable. The only recognized value for them is no value other than the limitless freedom to do anything at all that one pleases and by whatever means will ‘work.’ You say, “It’s like talking to a wall,” referring to your frustrating experience in dealing with such folks. You can’t really talk sense with them precisely because there is no ‘sense,’ that is to say that reasons or truth for them do not make for right. Now that’s a formidable, if not insurmountable problem in trying to ‘dialogue’ or discuss differences with people on the left. It’s a doomed enterprise.
I know this last statement is bleak, hopeless, but I don’t know a way out for such closed minds apart from a special illumination from above. But, come to think of it, there might yet be another way, though I tremble to mention it. The way back to sanity and faith may have to come through suffering. Acute suffering alone may be able to reawaken reason. There is a danger in this, however, that if suffering be not rightly bourne, it may quickly lead to despair–and despair, when complete, leads to self-annihilation. Such is the logical end of meaninglessness leftism.
The culture of death is now entrenched in our politics and we seem poorly able to change it. When people of faith and traditional morality become the enemy of the political powers, we know that we’re in serious trouble. If one asks, What can be done about this? I have no better answer than ask you to pray perseveringly for our country. Certainly it would be ironic for us to despair since that’s the very same final outcome of those committed to the left.
How much we need your rosaries, your holy hours in church, and the witness of your good lives in public. God is not through with us. Neither then should we be hopeless. I wrote for you what is here only to motivate you so much the more to fruitful spiritual action and to try to explain to you why you may have been having such rotten luck in your efforts to evangelize and reason with your wrong-headed friends.
Massimo Franco writes in the “Corriere della Sera” of February 27, 2013, that, “inside Vatican City a model of government and a conception of the Papacy is coming to an end” and he compares the difficulties that the Church is going through today to the final phase of the crisis in the Soviet Kremlin. “The decline of the Vatican Empire – he writes – accompanies that of the USA and the European Union [both] in economic and demographic crisis. It shows a model of Papacy and of centralized ecclesiastical government, challenged by a fragmented and decentralized reality.” The crisis of the Vatican Empire is presented as a crisis of a model of Papacy and of ecclesiastical government which is inadequate for the world in the 21st century....Difficult as it may seem, each of us has the burden of bearing his part of the weight of the present challenge facing the Church, by means of prayer, fasting, and any other means at his disposal. One cannot sail on the Titanic and expect the Holy Spirit to save the ship from a collision course with an ice berg. The mystery is that God is sovereign and His purposes cannot be thwarted, yet particular outcomes still depend on our doing our part by conforming to His grace. Let us make a good Lent.
In reality, that which is in crisis is not the “monocratic” government, which conforms to the Tradition of the Church, but the system of government born of the post-conciliar reforms, which in the last fifty years have expropriated the Papacy of its sovereign authority, redistributing the power among the Episcopal Conferences and an omnipotent Secretariat of State....
.... Was it the Holy Ghost Who prompted the election of Alexander VI, a Pope who conducted a profoundly immoral life before and after his election? No theologian, nor any Catholic for that matter, would be able to sustain that the 23 cardinals who elected the Borgia Pope were illuminated by the Holy Ghost. And if it did not happen in that election, you can envision that it did not happen in other elections and conclaves, which saw the election of weak Popes, unworthy and inadequate to their lofty mission, all this without prejudicing in any way the greatness of the Papacy.
The Church is great precisely because She endures the smallness of men. So, an immoral and inadequate Pope can be elected. It can happen that the Cardinals in Conclave refuse the influence of the Holy Ghost and that the Holy Ghost Who assists the Pope in the accomplishment of his mission, be refused. This does not mean that the Holy Ghost is defeated by men and the demon. God, and only God, is capable of drawing good from evil and thus Providence guides every event in history....
.... Each man, each nation, each ecclesiastical assembly, must correspond to Grace, which in order to be efficacious, needs human cooperation. Confronted with this auto-demolition of the Church, which Paul VI spoke of, we cannot remain with our arms folded in a state of pseudo-mystical optimism. We need to pray and act, each one according to their possibilities, so that this crisis is brought to an end and the Church may show visibly that holiness and beauty which She has never lost, and will never lose until the end of time.
"Blessed are they who can laugh at themselves, for they shall never cease to be amused!" - Author Unknown
Very soon all eyes will turn to Rome and mainstream media will have dissident “Catholics” bloviating away on the boob tube. They will be “very very disappointed” when the cry “Habemus Papam!” is heard and will dejectedly say, “This selection has put the Church back hundreds of years.”[Hat tip to C.B.]
I can’t wait.
The Church is in a state of sloth from suckling on the state’s teat because most Catholic charities around the world are funded by grants, not the faithful. Priests have disappeared from their confessionals and rectories to hang out in louche leather bars. Lawsuits and inner-city decay have bankrupted dioceses around the world. Folks in Europe don’t even pretend the Church exists anymore. So we do not need a black pope, we do not need a pastoral pope, we do not need a friendly pope, and we do not need some smiling old forgettable jackass. We need a son of a bitch pope. We need an unsmiling grumpy old man who says things such as “Get your ass to work on corporal works of mercy or you’ll go to hell” and “Now, therefore, we declare, say, define, and pronounce that for every human creature it is altogether necessary for salvation to be subject to the authority of the Roman pontiff.” If talking-head media libtard gasbags squawk, he can always use the papal form of the old F.U.: “I shall remember you in my intentions at Mass.” (emphasis added)
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I love this guy! He doesn’t mince words.
Card. Arinze (Cardinal Bishop of Velletri-Segni! HURRAY!) dismantles the notion that people can’t really commit a mortal sin unless they do something over and over again with the intent to separate from the God blah blah blah… the so-called “fundamental option” approach to sin.
He lays it down on the line about mortal sin.
By the way, let people who think that there isn’t really anyone in Hell – except maybe Hitler – reflect on the Cardinal’s words about mortal sin. MORTAL sin, right? It kills the like of grace in the soul. No sanctifying grace at the time of death? Then what happens?
When I hear some liberals say that they would like to have a Cardinal from Africa… heh heh… okay! They are pretty much like Card. Arinze when it comes to faith and morals.
Cardinal Kurt Koch, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, recently made the following statements about the theological positions of the SSPX:It is only the group of Lefebvrists that doesn't accept... ecumenical dialogue, relations with the Jews and religious liberty... One must ask how it can present itself as Catholic...Cardinal Koch has also made a broader criticism of traditionalists as a whole:
These are central points of the teaching of the Holy Father, and if [there is] a group that does not accept a council and does not accept a teaching, one must ask how they see each other as Catholic... This is the fundamental problem...The progressives profess a hermeneutics of discontinuity and break. The traditionalists profess a hermeneutics of pure continuity: only that which is already noticeable in the Tradition can be Catholic doctrine, therefore, practically, there cannot be a renewal.These criticisms of traditionalists are often made. Cardinal Koch’s high curial post, and the fact that he was one of the members of the Vatican committee that ruled that the Society’s proposed doctrinal preamble was unacceptable, makes it desirable to offer a response to them. As a traditionalist and a theologian myself, although not one affiliated with the SSPX, I will attempt to do so.
We can distinguish three main criticisms in his remarks:
a) the criticism that the SSPX is not Catholic because it does not accept the Second Vatican Council and the teachings of the current pope,
b) the criticism that traditionalists accept a false ‘hermeneutics of pure continuity’, and
c) the criticism that it is only the SSPX that does not accept ecumenical dialogue, relations with the Jews, and religious liberty.
The expressions ‘ecumenical dialogue’, ‘relations with the Jews’, and ‘religious liberty’ are rather vague in themselves, but in the context it is clear that Cardinal Koch is using these expressions in the sense in which the SSPX denies that they are true.
Beyond this great vision of the suffering of the Pope ... are indicated future realities of the Church which are little by little developing and revealing themselves.... Thus it is true beyond the moment indicated in the vision, it is spoken, it is seen, the necessity of a passion of the Church that naturally is reflected in the person of the Pope; but the Pope is in the Church, and therefore the sufferings of the Church are what is announced...
As for the novelty that we can discover today in this message, it is that attacks on the Pope and the Church do not come only from outside, but the sufferings of the Church come precisely from within the Church, from sins that exist in the Church. This has always been known, but today we see it in a really terrifying way: that the greatest persecution of the Church does not come from enemies outside, but arises from sin in the Church. (emphasis added in original quote)
