"Bad News, Indeed — Playboy Opened the Floodgates and Now the Culture is Drowning" (AlbertMohler.com, October 14, 2015)."Of course, there is not too much hope for clarity in the Franciscan era, when a most celebrated [theology-of-the-body] apologist we remember feels no compunction offering such lines as 'I love Hugh Hefner.' A pope could not have said it better, right?
Matt C. Abbott, "Christopher West, Hugh Hefner, and the 'Theology of the Body' controversy" (Renew America, May 9, 2009).
Ratzinger in Principles of Catholic Theology, cited too many years after he coulda/shoulda heeded the advice:"To tell the truth, I am convinced that every assembly of bishops is to be avoided, for I have never experienced a happy ending to any council; not even the abolition of abuses..." –St. Gregory Nazienzen
This week my public speaking students have to choose an informative speech topic. The parameters are the topic must be someone or something commemorated on a U.S. Postage Stamp, because, well, you have to be dead and significant to land yourself on a stamp, right?
Wrong, apparently, since 2011.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/us/postal-service-will-begin-honoring-living-people-on-stamps.html
Because "Having really nice, relevant, interesting, fun stamps might make a difference in people’s decisions to mail a letter,” said Stephen Kearney, the Postal Service’s manager of stamp services. “This is such a sea change.”
One point one, he was wrong: letter-sending continues to drop, even with Michael Jordan (and Harry Potter, a Brit!) now on envelopes. On point two, he’s right: we continue to tread water in a cultural sea change that has elapsed in the last 61 years.
61? Yes, that is how old I am. And when I was born, Vatican II was just convening. Even when I was 12, the old-school Catholic vibe prevailed to such an extent that my Catholic best friend was not allowed to follow me to a Methodist potluck (though his mother let me take communion with them once at Mass).
All of which makes me think of Vatican II on its anniversary:
'https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-marks-60th-anniversary-of-second-vatican-council/2022/10/11/9f8507f0-4937-11ed-8153-96ee97b218d2_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-marks-60th-anniversary-of-second-vatican-council/2022/10/11/9f8507f0-4937-11ed-8153-96ee97b218d2_story.html>
As the dust finally begins to settle, despite the current and last few popes’ determined propaganda campaigns to keep the Council’s relevance alive, some surprising counter-verdicts are in:
Blogger Amy Welborn muses, "It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to label the Second Vatican Council as a failure.” How very different from the genial attempts in the 1980s by guys like Steubenville charismatic Alan Schrenk to claim it as part of glorious arc.
Read all of Welborn’s thoughts:
https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/expression-formulated/>
And her remembrance of the all-but-forgotten pop icon Jonathan Livingston Seagull.
https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/12/jesus-livingston-seagull/>
Or hear the NYT’s Ross Douthat also flatly declaring. "The council was a failure.” His concluding note is a bit depressing, sort of like saying even when you regain civility with an ex-wife, damage done remains. That’s nice.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/opinion/catholic-church-second-vatican-council.html>
At National Review, MBD says this:"Catholic theologians and bishops have been turned into sponges, soaked in metaphors that have no precise theological content but which retain an acid-wash quality, an iconoclasm aimed at a church and a theology of the past that is half understood, at best. So modernists such as Hans Kung could say that Vatican II promoted a “communio model of the church” over and against an “absolutist pyramidal model.
None of this was meant with any real conviction. It was an ad hoc theology developed for the sole purpose of legitimating dissent on moral issues touching sexuality. In Kung’s model, if the pew sitters could be shown to not be following this teaching, then the teaching itself should be jettisoned. But this has lately been junked for more papal primacy, because the current pope is seen as more progressive than some of the pew sitters.
The church has thus proceeded from slogan to slogan, as if theological reflection or — more ominously — the development of doctrine were mere rumination on the latest sets of buzzwords, usually coming from bishops or the pope. The people of God in transit, the listening church, the new evangelization, the field hospital. The synodal church. Catholics used to be known by their distinctive devotional life — prayers to the saints, rosaries, abstaining from meat on Fridays. Now, devoted Catholics spend their time reading papal encyclicals and mastering this pseudo-theological jargon."
https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/60-years-since-vatican-ii/>
Rod Dreher provides illustration of those thoughts by sharing a painfully crass but on-point video (at least the fictional priest avoids mentioning the ‘evidential power of beauty’).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUeShUhnZnk&t=126s
Part of me wonders if we could ever have a pope or council again who flatly declares anything dogmatic to be true. There seems to be a lack of confidence in dogma as even a possibility if it attempts to narrow the confines of belief. We know something has to be true, but what that something is, well ... ‘Love and let live!’ In all of this, today’s American Church has become just like the mainlines, the faded guardian of a tradition that remains in dusty volumes no one reads, but not much in parishes people attend. Everyone manifests strong symptoms reflecting Unitarianism and Quakerism, and endures settings animated by American Idol- and YoungLife-like liturgics.
Which is why Robert Barron’s interview with Shia LeBouf was like an episode of Quantum Leap.
Years ago I tried to reason with John Heard, aka Dreadnought, a young Australian lawyer, who used his terrific eloquence influentially to block the progress of legislation tending to gay marriage in Australia. http://josephsoleary.typepad.com/my_weblog/2008/02/fisking-dreadno.html I am happy that he has now changed his mind, and even thanks those who disagreed with him in the past. He has issued the following remarkable statement: http://ymlp.com/zr0KSh
One of the more persistent annoyances in the contemporary Catholic world is the proud declaration that now we finally know that we’re supposed to evangelize and go forth and go out and not sit smugly inside the church walls! Finally!Thus begins a recent post by Amy Welborn, who, in the context of discussing a book called The Blind Sisters of St. Paul, nails to the wall one of our own pet peeves of this era of the "New Evangelization" ... She continues:
It’s not all the fault of the Francis Moment. Since the Second Vatican Council, that idea: that the pre-Vatican II Church was closed-off, and we’re all about the openness, energy and evangelization now – exists in the Catholic Atmosphere somewhere between assumption and dogma.Guy Noir, who sent us this linked article, highlighted Wellborn's frank observation:
But how odd, then, that when we dig out examples to inspire us in our current efforts to take the Gospel into the world, to be energetic and creative and engaged, we tell each other that we need to be more like…
Francis de Sales!
Catherine of Siena!
Frederic Ozanam!
Maximilian Kolbe!
Alphonsus Liguori!
Francis of Assisi!
Dominic!
or today’s saint: Blessed Marie-Rose Durocher!
Who all, it seems, managed to understand Jesus’ call pretty well, despite having to live rigidly with access only to the ©TLM.
Just think what they could have accomplished with more freedom and the right to actively participate!
(My take has always been that what Vatican II unleashed, even as it was called in order to enable the Church to offer the Gospel to the world with more vigor and understanding, was mostly decades and decades of self-involved naval-gazing and infighting as the energy to go out was redirected into endless meetings trying to figure out new structures and mission statements and what we’re all about and for, a massive waste of time and misdirection that we’re seeing reach its natural climax in #Synod15.)Whether you wish to take that cum grano salis (or not), I think you will agree that there are a growing number of pretty frustrated people out there. God bless! -- Catholic and enjoying it, +PP
What Nazi-Fascism and Communism were in the 20th century, Western homosexual and abortion Ideologies and Islamic Fanaticism are today.
Thus, Card. Sarah.
Robert Card. Sarah is Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and an amazing fellow. Read his great new book length interview.
God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith by Robert Card. Sarah UK HERE
Edward Pentin of the National Catholic Register (not to be confused with the National Schismatic Reporter) writes about the intervention (speech) made by His Eminence Card. Sarah at the Synod.
Cardinal Sarah: ISIS and Gender Ideology Are Like ‘Apocalyptic Beasts’
Full text of synod intervention reveals the cardinal spoke of need to proclaim beauty of monogamy and family and called for more respect and transparency among synod fathers.
[… skipping LOTS of good analysis…]
Speaking to the Register and Aleteia at the end of a meeting of African bishops on Saturday, Cardinal Sarah said that by retaining the three controversial paragraphs in the instrumentum laboris, he believes “there is an agenda they are trying to impose.”
And now Card. Sarah’s own words [My emphases and comments]:
Intervention of Robert Cardinal Sarah, Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments
Ordinary Synod on the Family, October 2015 [emphases his]
Your Holiness, Your Eminences, Your Excellencies, participants of the Synod,
I propose these three thoughts:
1. More transparency and respect among us
I feel a strong need to invoke the Spirit of Truth and Love, the source of parrhesia in speaking and humility in listening, who alone is capable of creating true harmony in plurality.
I say frankly that in the previous Synod, on various issues one sensed the temptation to yield to the mentality of the secularized world and individualistic West. Recognizing the so-called “realities of life” as a locus theologicus means giving up hope in the transforming power of faith and the Gospel. [“realities of life” is code used to slither into the Kasperite position, which subjects theology to polls and fads and shifting mores, which in theology replaces philosophy with politics.] The Gospel that once transformed cultures is now in danger of being transformed by them. Furthermore, some of the procedures used did not seem aimed at enriching discussion and communion as much as they did to promote a way of seeing typical of certain fringe groups of the wealthiest churches. [read: Germany] This is contrary to a poor Church, a joyously evangelical and prophetic sign of contradiction to worldliness. Nor does one understand why some statements that are not shared by the qualified majority of the last Synod still ended up in the Relatio and then in the Lineamenta and the Instrumentum laboris when other pressing and very current issues (such as gender ideology) are instead ignored. [Because the rules were changed to obtain a rigged outcome.]
The first hope is therefore that, in our work, there by more freedom, transparency and objectivity. For this, it would be beneficial to publish the summaries of the interventions, to facilitate discussion and avoid any prejudice or discrimination in accepting the pronouncements of the synod Fathers.
2. Discernment of history and of spirits
A second hope: that the Synod honor its historic mission and not limit itself to speaking only about certain pastoral issues (such as the possible communion for divorced and remarried) but help the Holy Father to enunciate clearly truths and real guidance on a global level. For there are new challenges with respect to the synod celebrated in 1980. A theological discernment enables us to see in our time two unexpected threats (almost like two “apocalyptic beasts”) located on opposite poles: on the one hand, the idolatry of Western freedom; on the other, Islamic fundamentalism: atheistic secularism versus religious fanaticism. [If I remember correctly Benedict XVI used a similar approach in his first Message for the World Day for Peace.] To use a slogan, we find ourselves between “gender ideology and ISIS”.
As intriguing as The 13 Cardinals Letter™ is we have to leave it be now.
The Letter is a tar baby. Go for it and it entraps you, sticks you in one place. The more you struggle with it, the more stuck you get.
The Letter the Cardinals wrote (or didn’t write or signed or didn’t sign) doesn’t matter. One day, months from now, Edward Pentin will piece together the truth. We can wait.
What does matter is the Danneels thing (the fact that he is at the Synod).
Isn’t it interesting that both Austin Ivereigh and the writers of the Danneels biography backed off from their stories about how Pope Francis was elected? And what do you think would be the story in the press had Benedict XVI personally invited to the Synod a man beyond 80 who had protected pedophile priests?
If the Letter is the journalistic tar baby, the Danneels thing is the journalistic briar patch.
So, to Catholic journalists out there… forget the Letter.
The Letter is a distraction.
I am sure that that is what the progressivist liberals want the the focus to be on right now.
What does matter is the possibility of the devolution of some functions of the Holy See to regional bishops conferences (The Nightmare Scenario). As Gagliarducci puts it, “every episcopal conference will adopt its own guidelines to meet doctrinal challenges.” HERE
That’s one that makes me lose sleep. That’s another journalistic briar patch.
Buried within the article published today in the Catholic German newspaper Die Tagespost is the incredible news that helps to explain both the amazing way in which rules are changed by the hour at the 2015 Synod, and the constant leaks of threats and papal opinions. Every day a kind of miniature Shadow Synod meets at the Domus Sanctae Marthae with the Pope (including some Synod Fathers and some outside guests) to decide what steps should be taken at the Synod.The translated excerpts from Die Tagespost end with this clincher:
Maybe not even the author realized how explosive the revelation he included nonchalantly in his piece below is: there is no method, rules, or roadmap in the Synod of Bishops, just a will to reach a specific end, no matter what means are used.
In any event, for this Synod, the Message of the Synod Fathers to the People of God has already been deleted; and an approved drafting committee did not even need to have been elected – which points to the fact that the attention of the world's public and beyond shall be fully directed to the papal final document. Some rumors – according to which this final document even lies, already fully prepared, in a drawer, or that it is just now in the middle of its being written by a working group – do not lack a certain malice, because that would mean that the work of the ongoing synodal process has been a sham consultation. And it was especially Pope Francis who started his pontificate with the wish that the synodal processes shall become more important with regard to the leadership of the Church. [emphasis added][hat tip to JM]
An eccentric priest, a single mother and French vineyards offered Roger Scruton ‘a glowing exit sign’ from the Church of England to Rome. So why did he never take it?Sad. He's written very many things which I have found exceptionally insightful. His primer on modern philosophy is exceptional; his essay on beauty remarkable. A very bright, perceptive mind, almost like C.S. Lewis, whose reasons for not converting were probably more cultural than anything (although he had some issues he didn't quite fathom, like the B.V.M.).
Roger Scruton is not a Catholic. But he might have been. “I’ve always been drawn to the Catholic Church because of its respect for tradition, for the apostolic continuity it represents and for its attempts to imbue ordinary life with sacraments,” he told me when we spoke last week. “All of this came across very strongly to me with the Church as I came to know it in the south of France and Italy when I was a young man. It’s not quite the same now, I know.”
...
He told me: “There are two reasons why I held back from joining the Catholic Church. One is that it requires a bigger leap of faith than I’ve been able to achieve. And the other is that, because I’m divorced, I couldn’t possibly get married a second time in the Catholic Church.
“But I could get a blessing for my second marriage from the Church of England. I was brought up as an Anglican and I’ve always liked the idea of the kind of compromises on which the Anglican Church has thrived.”