II. ONE TWO THREE, HERE COMES EVERYBODY: The last post started off with mention of the decentralization process occurrent in the Church over the last five decades. Power transference from pope to bishops then to laity. In terms of ecclesiological models of organization, soonafter the Second Vatican Council ended the framework transformed from a vertically-inclined hierarchical structure, with the pope at the pinnacle, transcendent in aspect (focussed first on God), to one that is horizontally-orientated, immanent in its comportment (engrossed by things of "the world"). Anyone who tells you that the resourcement and aggiornamento have been in perfect balance since 1965, or that today the so-called "seamless garment" remains sturdy and strong, is either lying, deluded or has been smoking too much crack. As such, over the last fifty years the modus operandi in Catholic affairs has involved a combination of democratization and collectivization. Leanings thereto occur in varying degrees, depending on how much successive prelates in your diocese have succumbed to, or been persuaded by, Modernist imperatives. Yes, the laity have played an overextended role in the Catholic Church since Vatican II. Justification coming from, for example, the Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People, wherein, breathtakingly, Jack and Jill Catholic were authorized to have "an apostolate infinitely broader and more intense".[1] Ever wonder why at Mass the number of "Eucharistic Ministers" at the altar greatly exceeds the number of parishioners in the pews? Well, now you know.
III. COLLEGIALITY: However, because they are heirs to the Apostles, it is the bishops who wield ultimate authority over whatever deconstructed hub of Church activity. At least in theory, but not always in practice. This, due to both laymen-run and religious-run fiefdoms, countless, and therefore difficult to administer (a problem intensified by pervasive ignorance and disobedience), reigning either at the chancery office, at our numerous Catholic institutions, or at your parish down the road. The buzz word for this post-Conciliar fragmentation, the term used most in characterizing this dispersion of power, is "collegiality". Meaning, bishops around the globe "teach, govern and sanctify" as an indistinct, ever-shifting aggregate, with a working assumption that degrades the pope merely to "the first among equals". This minimizing coefficient, implicit to the collegial equation, is regularly disavowed, only admitted as "true" (according to opinion) seldom and usually privately. Though, if Ambition is your name and Gallicanism is the game, inevitably you're going have to appease the forces of liberal democracy prevailing outside Church walls - forces already presuming a hierarchic-operating Church in a scenario right out of a Dan Brown novel. Brutal authoritarianism, albino monk assassins, torture chambers inside the Vatican, gnostic cryptography, historical revisionism (made worse by free association), amateur hour theology, and all the rest of it. So you put on a happy face, grovel before whomever secular dignitary you desire as a "friend", then tell him, "Yes, Caesar, we bow unto you. There is no distinction between us. The Catholic Church really is democratically disposed. Liberté, égalité, fraternité, we say - and the pope is merely an esteemed member of our compassionate community of believers". A certain media cleric, mouthpiece of the Canadian bishops, and lackey for our State Broadcaster, recently did the dirty deed for the debonair Peter Mansbridge in a televised interview. Compounding the disgrace, this act of submission to the CBC, orchestrated to be sure, was showcased in a basilica, right in the middle aisle, with the altar distinctly, symbolically observable in the background. Hark!, the herald angels sing, glory to the secular king.
IV. TYPES: Collegiality manifests in various forms. In its strictest designation appertaining to bishops, it appears as synods or, more influentially, as episcopal conferences, which are better categorized as self-ruling, insubordinate "national churches", in that directives issuing from Rome are mostly laughed off as the antiquated expostulations of some raving lunatic. This subject was methodically addressed in Ominous Signs. Scaling down and now incorporating the laity (we must as bishops today invariably have a retinue in tow), collegiality also functions at the diocesan level, in more localized "municipal churches", if a term may be invented. Think of the bishop and his entourage of advisors, consultants, assistants, attendants. Think of the profusion of employees, "partners" and departments at the chancery. Especially that most necessary of animals in the Information Age, viz. the Office of Public Relations and Communications. Collegiality can be extended even further to the point of absurdity when you consider the explosion of effectively autonomous "singularity churches", so to speak. These, mainly commandeered by agenda-driven careerists and assorted ignoramus' who desperately want to "get involved". We see this materialize in that menagerie of commissions, committees, subcommittees, councils, panels, boards, working groups. Peopled by "facilitators", "coordinators", "directors", "leaders" and "greeters"- right down to that dynamic duo of babyboomer female busybodies managing the parish office: bossing Father around, recruiting an armada of "Eucharistic Ministers" and altar girls, ensuring New Age music plays continuously in the Adoration Chapel, planning Tai Chi retreats for the kids, ordering vats of tofu and reams of bean sprout sandwiches - on whole wheat bread! - for the parish picnic. You get the idea (hello ladies).
V. COLLEGIALITY=DEMOCRACY: Collegiality is the party line and, really, it's code for a democratic church in most quarters, notwithstanding what your hear from official channels, whereof statements are regularly issued to draw minds away from the paradigm change. For example, earlier this year Cardinal Camillo Ruini spoke the following in an interview [TH2 bolds/insertions hereafter]:
There is a structural problem, already addressed by Vatican Council II, but which has not yet found a satisfying and stable solution: that of the relationship between the primacy of the pope and the college of the bishops... Then there is the problem of the relationship of the curia with the pope, and also with the bishops of the whole world.[2]
The "structural problem", i.e. effects of collegiality, is properly identified, acknowledged. Yet to claim the Council "addressed" this problem is another instance of avoidance whereby the arrow is intentionally shot to a mark just shy of the bulls-eye. Pope Francis' preference for being called the "Bishop of Rome" isn't helping matters either. In reality, Vatican II - helped by vague wording in its documents - instigated and facilitated this "structural problem", perpetuating it to the present day. For to admit the cause would be to cast suspicion on the credibility of the Council, upon which so much do the Modernist vampires suck their lifeblood. Purportedly, collegiality represents and fosters more freedom, candidness, tolerance, charity, creativity, commonality. It's the "new collective consciousness", as Professor Clifford would argue. It's groovy, it gets with the yoof, its hip, its suave, the new-fangled cognition, it's how us whiz kids swing down at the Casbah. Collegiality is crackerjack, superfly! FULL STOP.
VI. CONSEQUENCES: It's forever abnegated, and a lot of misinformation is levied about to conceal a bleak actuality: Collegiality, especially with the emergence of the "bishops' conference", deracinates the authority of an individual bishop, setting up an ecclesiological arrangement which very potentially makes him subject to a coercing, irrational, apostatic mob. Or, to speak more delicately, cede to majority rule of whatever bishop cooperative. Not only is this bishops' independence subverted, if not squelched out altogether, de facto the pope's supreme authority is equally debased as well, so there's no ultimate recourse. Here's some confirmatory data originating from the highest authority, regarding an occurrence at Castel Gondolfo in August 2005:
So there ya go. The consequences of collegiality five decades running. Free for all, flattened management, zero answerability. What do you do, then, when societal circumstances become dire? When politics intrudes upon religion? When the psychopathic State gets it jollies by clubbing the Church over the head? What happens when, as history attests, liberal democracy inexorably devolves into a totalitarian regime, be it hard or soft? You're screwed. Dogma is not democratic, it's no friend of the modern State. Church organization and discipline is not based in Egalitarianism. Relativism is the enemy of Catholic morality. If, say, you have an Arian crisis type situation, where, in the Colosseum, there's a singularly loyal St. Athanasius battling the throng of remaining politically-motivated prelates, who are in agreement as to their denial of Christ's divinity, chances are high that this individual bishop will be subsumed by heretical consensus. Eventually, a critical threshold is surpassed whereupon the distinction between Church and State disappears, the two meld into one. Then, on Caesar's whim, traditional Catholics, now criminalized as retrograde renegades, will be fated to years of exile and persecution. It's that simple.
VII. OMNIPRESENT "STRUCTURES": Perhaps I've extrapolated the effects of collegiality, i.e. "democratic Catholicism", too far into the future. Well, maybe not that far, considering current cultural tendencies and a "diabolical disorientation" exhibited in the words, actions and inactions by members of the establishment church. Speaking of which, Professor Clifford is evidently gaga for collegiality:
Indeed, collegiality is chuck full of "intermediate structures", which is the swanky Modernist way of saying gigantic bureaucracy. As above: laity overflow, redundancies galore, committees ad infinitum, a nuclear detonation of "reports", anodyne, prolix, inutile, diverting, delaying, denying. You name it. Collegiality and bureaucracy go hand-in-hand, made for one another, a perfect match. Like Beavis and Butthead, like Donny and Marie or, even, like the Captain and Tennille. More democracy, more personnel, more paper shuffling. More careerists, more collectivity, less personal responsibility. And all these wedded to equivocal language. Like this: "synodality of the whole Church". Or, elsewhere, this beauty on ecumenism: "the apostolicity of diversity in the expression of faith and the ecclesiality of other confessional churches".[5] Now that's just craptastic stuff. Aw shucks, Professor, please stoop to my Neanderthal level and spare me this... this... highfalutinality. Golly, where be my pork rinds, NASCAR iz startin soon. Yet, according to Clifford, it is an actuality, at least to a considerable proportionality, that collegiality begets "a more effective exercise of episcopal ministry"?! That's hilarious. Really, "more effective"?
VIII. BUREAUCRATIC INERTIA: Ever wonder why no decisive action is ever taken after writing a letter of vital concern to the Chancery office or a diocesan newspaper editor? Ever wonder why dubious postings at the CCCB website exclude the author's name? Ever wonder why the Development and Peace scandal has continued for three years and counting? Ever wonder why nothing is ever done about that pro-abort lesbian RCIA director who's just a tad too enthusiastic about animal rights and veganism? Ever wonder why nothing significant ever came of the petition sent to Canada's nuncio regarding the SPU/V2 conference? These sins of omission are spawned and flourish in a runaway bureaucracy. Logistically, impossible to oversee, unless these "intermediate structures" are scaled down drastically by a housecleaning type episcopacy with no predisposition to collegiality - a species gone extinct circa 1965, unfortunately. In the final analysis, collegiality or, more properly, democratic Catholicism, is a means for lukewarm and apostatic Catholics, bishops, religious and laymen - be they wannabe game-changers or wheeler-dealer careerists, to assert to the world their self-appointed importance. To their advantage, an attendant collectivist bureaucracy shields them from personal responsibility for the trickle-down effects of their heresies and the failures/irrelevancies of their petty agendas. Heresies and agendas horizontalized, immanentized, so as to be in conformity with the "spirit of the world". Said Franz Kafka: "The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy".[6] The workings of the post-Conciliar church in a nutshell.
IX. TRUTH UNLEASHED: Today, a major vicissitude to the Modernists - which is driving them bonkers, inflicting sleepless nights and, incidentally, filling yours truly with indescribable elation, is the recent arrival of the internet. A clear and present danger it is to Magic Circle dwellers, be they Modernist liberals or even Neo-Catholic "conservatives". This, for two principal reasons. First, elements of the Magisterium, unredacted, in the form of an "original source", the Deposit of the Faith in its authenticity and totality, is freely available and easily accessible for study, catechesis, enquiry, investigation, edification, referencing. Clickety-click... Barba-trick. Second, the internet gives voice to the once Catholic voiceless. Shut out, ostracized, insulted, excoriated for decades they have been, by bishops, clerics, careerists, straight and sodomitic. Not as unqualified, unknowledgeable and inexperienced as the upper echelon puppet masters presuppose, these once suppressed Catholics (orthodox Catholics, that is), beforehand and still banned by so-called Canadian Catholic publishers/periodicals, now wield "social media" for expression. Most efficaciously through blogs, upstart news sites and aggregators. Thanks to fiber optic cables, cell towers and geostationary satellites, dissemination is worldwide and near-instantaneous. Hence, official channels have been by-passed. Silence no more. The Age of Reefer Madness has, mercifully, come to its termination. Ignored letters of concern to the chancery office or to the diocesan newspaper editor (really, the same entity) can now be uploaded online for everyone to peruse. Moreover, com boxes allow for additional input and, oftentimes, more interesting discussion, debate and revelation arise therein than in the original posting. Now you can respond to the widely-syndicated Ron Rolheiser whenever he sublimates his frustrated effeminate libido. Now you can expose those nature worshipping vulgarians who litter and louche up the liturgy at St. Gaia parish. Man stuff - cigars and pipes, beer and whiskey, steak and pizza, argumentation, retaliation, divisiveness, courage, steadfastness, acuity, clarity, honesty. Factuality and reality. Resultantly, eventually, after the dust settles, Catholic truths bubble to surface... to the utter horror of those who populate the apostatic offices of the establishment church, from coast to coast. And, lo!, multipacks of Depends underwear doth vanish from the shelves at grocery stores everywhere. It's fantastic!
X. DEMOCRACY OF DATA: The internet bolsters "free speech" or, more appropriately, it allows for a Collegiality of Information, if you will. Yet, ironically, the heretofore comptrollers of Catholic information flow regularly impart their displeasure with this new populist configuration of the mediascape. Well, not ironic. Actually, it's hypocritical because superstars of the Nu-Church, particularly attendees at the SPU/V2 conference and those of like mind, ceaselessly extol on about openness, fairness, sincerity, liberty, transparency, accountability, including the laity's greater role in the Church. This has been proclaimed from the mid-1960s onward. It's fabulous for all of us, they joyously holler to we Citizens of the World... unless you're a Catholic with traditional inclinations. It's the standard "Liberals are tolerant so along as you don't disagree with them" thing. They're worried, they feel threatened, trapped in a corner like a wild animal, which can be unpredictable and vicious if approached. Hence, Professor Clifford, who is on record as stating theologians supplant Magisterial teaching, conveys her distress:
That, presently, Vatican II teachings are "altogether ignored" is laughable. The audacity of these people has no bounds. Decrypted, that we require an "informed understanding" means she looks negatively upon opposing viewpoints of (implied) plebeians as they contradict hers and those of her sophisticated, Perrier-sipping colleagues inside the Magic Circle. That the Council has been "dangerously interpreted" indicates Clifford is rather uncomfortable with the fact that Modernism, especially when articulated as the "dawn of a new age" in Christian history, is starting to lose its steely grip on the post-Conciliar narrative. Questions and critiques of the "the documents" and interpretations of Vatican II, devastatingly convincing and certainly justified given the post-Conciliar collapse of Catholicism, are now popping up everywhere, transmitted everywhere via the internet. Concisely, Clifford and company are being challenged and they don't like it. Catholic productions extra Circulum Magicae, mainly facilitated by the internet (of which they have no control), has the semblance of an onslaught issuing in from all directions. Strange that us outsiders are so impactful. We're such a small minority, a "creative minority", as Pope Benedict characterized.
XI. NEO-CATHOLICISM EXPLAINED: Accordingly, let's now consider matters in a wider context so as to explain the Rosica-like-conniption reactions to this Collegiality of Information. Or, even, to explain the cartwheels that surely eventuate after CCCB personnel and chancery employees check out what hapnen in the Catholic blogosphere. From the mid-1960s to the 1970s commentary and analysis on Church affairs were under Modernist dominion. No dispute. Presently, they still do dominate to a hefty degree, of course. Although, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s - still prior to the internet, another kind of Catholic narrative arose into prominence, partnering the forefront with Modernism, in the English-speaking world at least. Namely, "conservative" Neo-Catholicism. It was and is a reaction to Modernism that hopes and attempts to recapture a lost Catholic orthodoxy robbed by the Modernists. However, Neo-Catholicism is in some aspects a form of Modernism, albeit mitigated, since its proponents downplay Church teachings prior to the Council, prioritizing those afterward. Neo-Catholics are unambivalent about celebrating Vatican II, seeing nothing at all problematic in its promulgations. Neo-Catholicism is American rooted, inspired, fixated, with a heavy duty political impulse. There is trustworthiness, devotion, way too much, to America's "Founding Fathers" and their religious/political principles, as if these are entirely commensurate with Catholic doctrine, or can be refashioned as such. These governing principles are undergirded by the thought of Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, a Calvinist. Locke's notion of tabula rasa said the humans are born as a "blank slate", ideas are not innate, that we are rather determined by our external surroundings. The implication of this explanation of man was, thus, a tendency to the equalization of people, a "levelling out" of humanity. How, then, could there be an instilled "divine right" of kings? How, then, could the king legitimately head the government?[8] The tabula rasa was outlined in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. In the preceding year, he anonymously published Two Treatises on Government, which many scholars say comprises the fountainhead of American governance. Man, Locke wrote:
From a purely orthodox Catholic standpoint, Ven. Bishop Fulton Sheen identified the precarious linchpins in Locke's system, now in twenty-first-century Amerika exhibiting signs of fragility and breakdown: "The first is the substitution of an economic for a spiritual basis of government; the second is the emphasis on property rights rather than personal rights".[10] Entertaining and sad at the same time it is whenever I read Catholic commentators dancing and darting around these unnerving facts. Understandable, however, given the explosive conclusion involved, as these go to the very core of America's make-up as a country. For the record, I'm not anti-America. I love the American people, travelled throughout, lived in the U.S. for a while myself. There is also that proudly used portrayal capturing the essence of the American spirit: the "regular guy", outfitted with high technology and a Southern drawl, who pops out of nowhere in the midst of a crisis and nonchalantly "saves the day", winks to the amassed crowd, then hops on his horse and rides into the sunset. Ya, I like that. Still, as a Catholic first and foremost before everything, including love of country, harsh reality must be confronted and dealt with head-on, in the raw. Otherwise national exigencies/dilemmas, regardless of country, will compound, remain unresolved, continuing in a downward spiral until it finally hits Lucifer's paydirt of anarchy and all-out nihilism.
XII. FREEMASONRY: Neo-Catholics shower praise on America's esteemed ancestors in spite of the fact that several were deistic Freemasons. They disregard the Church's condemnation of Freemasonry and its satanic hand in international upheavals, especially since from the years leading up to the French Revolution, when scores of religious were slaughtered and exiled.[11] Just mention the word Freemason and you're castigated as a "conspiracy theory nut job" (see my essay on conspiracy theories here). If Freemasonry is just an innocuous, uninfluential organization, why would the Chair of Peter, undoubtedly the greatest "listening post" of global affairs (with its perdurable and worldwide network of nuncios, missionaries, religious orders, dioceses, institutes, etc.), reprimand it, do so regularly, insistently, vehemently, over these last few centuries? Must be something there, yes? Why would the supreme pontiffs compose texts addressing the matter? Clement XII (In Eminenti, 1738), Benedict XIV (Providas, 1751), Leo XII (Quo Graviora, 1825), Leo XIII (Humanum Genus, 1884) - and these are just a scant collection. As the motto goes: "The Catholic Church, outlasting oppressive governments since 33 AD". Methinks the popes knew a little more about Freemasonic machinations than some uptight culture pundit who merely dabbles on the subject during his coffee break. In addition to the Freemasons, Marxists and Sodomites have also infiltrated the Church over these last decades. It has happened and is happening. Readers, don't be fooled by the spinmeisters or the Canadian Catholic MSM, the latter completely ignoring or snubbing this triple-pronged malevolence.
XIII. REVOLUTIONARY CORRELATIONS: Not only do Neo-Catholics acquiescence to the un-Catholic concept of "Nature's God", they overlook unpleasant connections and causations existent between the American Revolution of 1775-1783 and the fervently anti-Catholic French Revolution of 1789 (a sensitive subject, tread carefully). Pace my American friends, recall that Auguste Barthold's creation known as the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the US, was inspired by Eugène Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple, a painting celebrating the 1830 Revolution which overthrew the Orleans monarchy. Surely, that image is archetypal of the rejection and toppling of the Ancien Régime. Specifically, a negation of a long and distant Catholic past, not the more recent and shorter Protestant past. Where Modernists reject the Church's past/tradition wholesale, Neo-Catholics de-emphasize or omit particular doctrinal elements of the pre-Conciliar Church. Sometimes because of innocence and ignorance (many are converts from Protestantism, a combinatorial corollary of being born in Protestant America while being educated/catechized in a post-Conciliar theological circumstance manoeuvred by Modernists, characteristically disdainful of Church history/tradition). Other times because of an irritating, tension-inducing, but vital tidbit of the historical record that doesn't jive with the central thesis in a book otherwise sure to be a bestseller. And don't you dare criticize any statement or gesture made by the post-Conciliar popes. Else the Neo-Catholics will gang up on you like a cackle of hyenas, slice you open, rip out your heart and entrails, then feast and party like its 1999.
XIV. AMERICANISM: Neo-Catholicism is also tainted by the Americanism heresy, tackled long ago by Pope Leo XIII in his 1899 encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae. Directed specifically to James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, Maryland, it focussed on the American notions of the "separation of Church and State", civil liberties, individualism, of how these pose hazards to Catholicism as traditionally understood. Think of the exclusionary particularism inherent to the popularized phrase "Shining City on a Hill". That has a quasi-utopian twang to it, an "American Church" placed on pedestal, above the Holy See even, singled out by God for a specialized purpose. As Pope Leo wrote: such an attitude "would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world". Leo's encyclical did work to restrain Americanism for a time, but only until Vatican II. By then the chains were broken, by a particular priest, of whom we shall return to momentarily. In the meantime, it is important to remember that, for the post-Conciliar era, Neo-Catholicism is/was fronted by a triumvirate: Michael Novak (philosopher, diplomat, formerly affiliated with the Rockefeller Foundation), George Weigel (educated at St. Michael's College, Toronto), and the Canadian-born Lutheran convert Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (d. 2009), founder/editor of the influential First Things magazine - intellectuals with several acquaintances inside the Washington Beltway.
XV. IT'S SHOWTIME: Marketing, profit-making and self-promotion, personified in the guise of a "Salesman Apologist" with a cheezy moustache or a cowboy hat or as a smiley face "nice guy", is also part of the movement's impetus. The lecture circuit, books sales, very "clubby", hobnobbing, backslapping, "Have I gotta deal for you!", and so forth. Here we see tracers of the much lauded American salesmanship frequently pushed outside the bounds of normal secular commerce. Almost to levels of ridiculousness on par with bellowing, money-grubbing Fundamentalist preachers with their loud suits and sculptured hairdos. On the internet it manifests with celebrity bloggers, well-intentioned, sometimes likeable, but dilettantish, USCCB-deferring, way "too hip", often boorish, saccharin, attention-seeking and self-absorbed. Prime examples are to be found at the National Catholic Register and Patheos. Mark Shea, a histrionic diva obsessed with attacking Michael Voris, is the first name coming to mind. Also, there is Jimmy Akin with his gnostic tinged "Secret Information Club". Nifty, do I get a secret decoder ring if I become a member? Elsewhere there is Scott Hahn, peddler extraordinarius, who to me comes off more as a motivational speaker than apologist. An unsolved mystery associated with many of the male types of this breed is that they have a predilection for growing scruffy beards. Maybe they want to look like Jesus. Who knows? Anyway, very much image-driven, it helps more if you're a pretty boy, the laaaaadies like that. Or if you're a delicious little honey pot with a sassy attitude, prompting the guys to give their undivided attention whilst they drool onto their keyboards. Publicly or formally presented, you will see avatars/photographs of them with an enigmatic smirk, a quirky smile, head tilted, peeking at you above their lowered sunglasses, or in a thoughtful stance, staring at the sky, ruminating in a luxuriantly vegetated mountain setting. It's the whole gamut of "Look at ME" phenomenology. To get an idea just open up your Sears catalogue to the fashion modelling section. I'm also thinking of Catholic Answers and EWTN. The latter, incepted by the wonderful and longsuffering Mother Angelica, has, unfortunately, been overtaken by establishment hacks, chiefly in its news and current affairs programming. And there certainly was a rationale for Christopher Ferrara's book EWTN: A Network Gone Wrong. Just think of the former crowd pleasing Fr. John Corapi, with his Just For Men coloured beard, pathetically garbed in a Harley Davidson leather jacket after his downfall. Things were better when it was only Mother Angelica Live!, the Rosary with the Nuns of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery and the occasional documentary. But that's a fleeting memory now.
XVI. CANADIAN/BRITISH EXAMPLES: On the Canadian side, there is Fr. Raymond de Souza, EWTN commentator and First Things contributor coincidentally, also columnist for both the Catholic Register and National Post. A nice comfortable balance between the establishment church and the secular world. Here, we can also throw CR columnists Peter Stockland and Michael Coren into the mix. There is also popular blogger Kathy Shaidle, very perceptive to leftist hypocrisy, a superb polemicist. Albeit her Neo-Catholic style is punk-anarchist with a pop culture focus enlivened by proletarian humour and its attending excessive use of profanity. Hence she writes for the libertarian "conservative" Taki's magazine. It's the "Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld" shtick. Cool, slick, trendy, witty, funny, edgy, intelligent, entertaining, kinda weird, pro-Rush Limbaugh, anti-Obama, anti-Islamic - not so bad in themselves to a degree. But certainly in a stall mode in terms of approaching/embracing the "fullness of the Faith" with all of its difficult aspects, which is an apt descriptor for Neo-Catholicism as such. Across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom, the closest comparison to Neo-Catholicism, or at least a hybrid of it, would be the people and programs associated with Catholic Voices. Principally, it's represented by Jack Valero and Austen Ivereigh. The latter is European correspondent for the Manhattan-based America, that magazine run by limp-wristed Jesuit princesses. These two personages and Catholic Voices in general have been skillfully critiqued, unexpectedly enough and seemingly in favour of a more "orthodox" Catholic position, by Irish leftist blogger Splintered Sunrise (at various posts, see here, here, here and here for samples in sequence). Orthodox Catholics in Britain tend to be on the left side of the political spectrum, bordering on Fabianism sometimes, a strange brew indeed. Hard and complex to explain. I mean, these are the people who brought to the world Downton Abbey and Lark Rise to Candleford (throws hands up). But, then again, this blogger enjoys old Bollywood films. So I guess all us Catholics are permitted quirks.
XVII. UNSPOKEN DILEMMA: Anyhow, if you were a revert in North America during the 1980s or 1990s, already dismally catechized as a Gen-X youth, and correspondingly needing to really learn about the Faith, to delve in and scrutinize the riches of a Catholic Church hijacked by the Modernists, the dissemination of contemporary "Catholic Orthodoxy" mainly came via magazines, periodicals and books published by Neo-Cat/Neo-Con outlets, distributed out of America. You would read Neuhaus, Weigel, Dinesh D'Souza, their colleagues at Crisis magazine, National Review and the American Enterprise Institute. Yet, there was always something pricking your conscious in those quiet moments. "Something's not right, here", I repeatedly said to myself. Why this superelevation of politics and economics? Why so many hagiographies and shout outs for Ronald Reagan? Before being "rehabilitated" in old age, it was always bothersome that William F. Buckley, a popular Catholic libertarian who acted as a kind of intellectual nexus where Neo-Catholics would gather and discuss the affairs of the day, was given third-rail treatment when it came to his dissent against the Church's position on contraception.[13] A polished persona and knowing the right people does have its benefits, it seems. Why be automatically branded as an anti-Semite for pinpointing facets of Jewish history/philosophy in those instances when they clearly differ with the Catholic worldview? Why be labelled as antediluvian if you deemed suspicious any person or group endeavouring to achieve some sort of consensus between Catholic and Protestant theology? Why the assertion, megalomaniacal at times, of the "separation of Church and State"? That's not Catholic, the popes have condemned that notion, and it's inconsistent with what you read in that book purchased from TAN Publishers. That's raising secular nationalism above the Church. Jesus Christ is the Lord of History. Period. All authority, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the Redeemer of Humanity. Period. One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Period. Not a plurality of churches and perspectives. Despite Fr. Neuhaus' prolific writings on the role of religion in the "naked public square", why is the Neo-Catholic intelligentsia so adamant on something that, in the final analysis, after those spin doctors fade away into the night when the cocktail party ends, dispenses with Christ altogether from politics? It both counters and effaces the "Social Reign of Christ the King", as expounded by Pope Pius XI in his 1925 encyclical Quas primas. This is done from the "Right". On the "Left", the same is effected by Marxist Modernists, except they employ a contorted form of "social justice", substituting a "this world"-vectored State disassociated from a transcendent-pointing Catholic Church.
XVIII. RELIGIOUS LIBERTY/LICENSE: Where, then, do Neo-Catholics get their justification for this Church/State segregation? Why do they talk endlessly, with an ideological thrust, about "religious liberty", pluralism and liberal democracy, as if these are unassailable absolutes? Then you come across Dignitatis humanae, the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Liberty, wherein no avowal of the Kingship of Christ is to be found. Instead, it reads like the American Constitution, it sounds like the Declaration of Independence. Then you learn that the American contingent of bishops at the Second Vatican Council effectively had full say in drafting up Dignitatis humanae,[12] with the brains behind the operation being - here he comes... Fr. John Courtney Murray. He was an American Jesuit, who made the cover of TIME magazine on December 12, 1960. The reason he became a media darling was his essay compilation book We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Reportedly, upon returning to the U.S. after the Council closed, he announced the following to some colleagues:
That was where Neuhaus, Weigel and Novak took their cues, latterly prominent, thereby corroborating the arrogant grandiosity in Murray's remark. Not often alluded to is that Fr. Murray was silenced by his Order in 1954, impelled by the Vatican, because of his endorsement of religious liberty and the separation of Church and State. Another Jesuit troublemaker, evolutionary pantheist and pseudo-scientist Fr. Teilhard de Chardin, was, a year later in 1955 (the last year of his life), forbidden by his Order from attending the International Conference on Paleontology.[15] Remember the "Piltdown Man" hoax? The dissidence of especially these two famed, oft-read Jesuits - in the years just leading up the Council, portended of what was to come after 1965, something wicked methinks... The abovementioned, I venture to say, is what Professor Clifford would call Vatican II "dangerously interpreted".
XIX. CANADIAN WASTELAND: So, that was the haute couture matériel you were spoon fed if making a resolute attempt at returning to orthodox Catholicism during the 1980s or 1990s. Yet in the secret depths of my heart it always left me spiritually malnourished, yearning for something more, more along the lines of meat and potatoes Catholicism. Murray, Neuhaus, Weigel and cohorts, cozying up with Vatican II to abnormal extents, were serving up Americentric buffets. Quite unlike the international banquets hosted by Sheen, Jaki, Gilson, Grisar, Belloc, Dawson and Kuehnelt-Leddihn. These men setting their scopes back two millennia to the Crucifixion and eras previous. If a Canadian, and wondering at the time what CanChurch was promoting... well, you were pretty much shafted. Left to wander in a desert wasteland of Leftism, Progressivism, Marxism, "social justice", liberation theology, where Christ was consigned to but a protest rally afterthought. Homely, depressing, politicized, fourth-rate, feminized, infantile, uninspiring and so boring that you may have even considered becoming a Moonie just to get a modicum of excitement in your life. The Catholic Register, Prairie Messenger, Western Catholic Reporter, Catholic New Times, Novalis Publishers, CCCB reports, habitless lesbian nuns over here, lisping Jesuit queens over there, Mary Jo Leddy, Ted Schmidt, Michael Swan, Remi de Roo, Ron Rolheiser, Gregory Baum - oh man, what a bloody nightmare! Still is today. Just go to the Salt+Light website or watch this interview. At least from the early 1990s onward there was Fr. Alphonse de Valk and his team at Catholic Insight to relieve some of the heat exhaustion. When residing in Canada in 1997, historian Preston Jones penned the following in New Oxford Review:
Bingo! There was nothing there. Becoming Catholic in 1983, NOR was the precursor to the "snarky" Catholic blogs of today, particularly and uproariously as manifested in the obviousness of its cartoon advertisements (check out and enjoy the NOR Ad Gallery here). It was also one of the first U.S. Catholic periodicals to swerve away from the Neo-Catholic narrative before 2000.
XX. SHIFTING AND DRIFTING: Thing is, post-2000 we have the internet, providentially, I contend. Accordingly, the conversation has now gone global, so much larger. Academics and institutionalists - well connected with the establishment church, many of them having bromances with bishops - aren't lording over the Catholic conversation anymore. Also promising, "Professional Catholics", especially business savvy Neo-Catholics (early on making sure to acquire key "social media" positions, thus presuming they rule this conversation with papal authority), are beginning to be confronted by unaffiliated faithful laymen and priests equipped with blogs, podcasts, online radio programs, video channels - all armoured with virtual warehouses of data and information. Most importantly, there was a definite signal of a course correction, the commencement of a drift back to traditional Catholicism (just Catholicism, that is), after Pope Benedict took the helm in 2005. Summorum Pontificum, lifting of the SSPX excoms plus negotiations therewith, return to liturgical reverence, and so forth. The conversation, then, is becoming not just about Catholicism predominantly communicated from America, i.e. provincialized Neo-Catholicism broadcasted from a few mainstream facilities. Neither, in general, is it being reigned over as much by the Modernists. Aging and Luddite-prone, they trail behind new waves in high technology, therefore lagging in terms of taking advantage of telecommunication progress. Deliberation is now on Catholicism as such, and the word "Catholic", let us recall, means "universal". So the focus has definitely shifted, taking on a global paradigm.
XXI. DEMOGRAPHICS/ECONOMICS: Correspondingly, careerists in their once serene bubbleworlds are presently feeling the heat, intimidated without really understanding the underlying cause and purpose of the shift in Catholic conversation. Thus we get reactions of contempt and anger from members of the establishment church. Let them sweat for a little while, I say. See what it's like. Gladly, these are the death convulsions of a faltering and waning Modernism/Neo-Catholicism. In the long run, the Modernists can't recover since all they have done is to cultivate generations of "cafeteria Catholics" and "practical atheists". Pro-contraception, pro-abortion, anti-nuclear family, pro-sodomy - they've already sterilized themselves and thus will be unable to reproduce at "sustainable levels". The population pyramid becomes top-heavy, flips and fossilizes, where the aged population significantly outweighs the younger population. Soonafter the "biological solution" does it's indifferent handiwork, then say hello to Mr. G. Reaper. Thus, gradually, there will be reduced numbers in progeny, fewer and fewer attending Mass. Hence parish closings, diocesan mergers, diminished pewsitter donations. Consequently, no funding for heretical programs or initiatives. People, it's basic demographics, Economics 101. Also working against the post-Conciliar Catholic population is this bizarre mania with "Theology of the Body" à la the Manicheanism of Christopher West. Moreover, increasing reports of NFP misuse, where some parents appear to be a little too selective, engendering an almost "boutique kids" type situation, isn't helping either. "Be fruitful and multiply", says the Lord. Factoring in all these, it will probably be a long, slow death for these internal enemies of the Church. So, fire up a smoke, grab your favourite beverage, put your feet up, and enjoy the show. And don't forget to watch those Muffins! They're deeeeelicious. Mmm... mmm... mmmmmm.
XXII.HOUSTON BUENOS AIRES, WE'VE GOT A PROBLEM: Yes, we've hit a roadblock with Pope Francis, obviously. Four months into his pontificate and it's still impossible to get a "fix" on him in terms of where His Holiness wishes to direct the Church. He's all over the place, a wildcard. His maundering, unprepared, disorganized, imprecise, off-the-cuff, often incoherent speeches and remarks are unsettling. Offensive, too, like his mockery of "restorationist groups" who offered him a "spiritual bouquet" of 3525 Rosaries. Quoted: "it is not to laugh at it", as if a silly, puerile act. He even classified them as "Pelagians"! What? It's just been a cornucopia of uncertainty and disappointment: washing of women's feet on Holy Thursday, overboard "humility", poverty overemphasized as a material concern, living outside the papal apartments (incongruously costing more money for the accommodation), shunning of papal protocol, 70's style liturgy (poor Monsignor Marini!). A typical South American Jesuit in the post-Conciliar era. There have been speckles of positive development, especially the forthrightness on life issues, as when the Holy Father surprisingly participated in the March for Life in Rome. Pope Francis has acknowledged a "gay lobby" inside the Church, yet there never appears to be any "follow through" signals or actions of a impending, necessitous reform. After the roller coaster ride upon Bergoglio's installment as Pope, and now that the honeymoon is over, I've noticed cheerleaders are becoming lesser in number. Not as vocal, a few lapsing into a condition of "radio silence". More people are coming to the realization that we've got a real doozy on our hands here, perhaps foreshadowing the Church is near to the cusp of some meta-historical event. Racking my brains out, I can't accurately determine what's going on except to summarize my overall deduction in one word: confusion. It could be, as a monk blogger stated, Francis is the "Pope of our Punishment". We must unceasingly pray for His Holiness.
XXIII. SIFTING AND RIFTING: Thankfully, the Holy Spirit bars the Pope from advocating heresy ex cathedra. As such, the trending return to orthodox Catholicism will continue, be it in fits and starts, though that's the general trend if the aforementioned "global paradigm" is considered. Likely, it will be a prolonged duration before some parity with Tradition is reached, pending a divine intervention ordaining an immediate restoration, which, most terribly, could arrive in the form an apocalyptic-type judgement. Still, bolstered by hope and holding fast to the Victorious Cross, it is possible to see that pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together, and authentic Catholicism waves to you from the distance. For the interim, this current state of heightened confusion and instability indicates to me that Our Blessed Lord is undertaking to sift the wheat away from the chaff in a manner more discriminating than in times past. As the Catholic conversation is now aptly reflected by presentations and exchanges on the internet, so the internet does represent this wheat/chaff separation process... Please bear with me for a little more as I'm trying to zero-in on something... Surf the Catholic internet and you will find all kinds of overlap, from person to person, group to group, commenter to commenter, website to website, blog to blog. You'll be informed and take pleasure in a site one day, then on the following day you'll be startled and off-put by what you read at this same site. Sometimes Neo-Catholic sites will concur with Modernist sites. This Traditionalist site over here will seem to border on sedevacantism at times. That Catholic MSM site over there will glory in heresy. Blogger battles, internecine warfare in the com boxes, and a whole host of uppity, battle-averse know-it-alls telling everyone to "calm down" and be "charitable". All this overlap and street fighting is a blatant sign of this confusion, of course. But it is also a good thing, I argue. Because, taking a birds-eye view of the battleground and looking down range to end results, you may notice that distinctions, then divisions, between enemies of the Church and those loyal to the Magisterium are becoming increasingly pronounced as time passes. A tendency away from multiplicity and a movement toward a straightforward Yes or No to the Church. It would have to be this way in that Christ is preparing us for ever-escalating impositions by the State upon the Catholic Church. What we are witnessing Caesar doing now is just the vanguard. Western democracies are rapidly morphing into totalitarian regimes. And it will be the "creative minority", "The Remnant", who will be left to do the work of restoration. It's going to be a long haul. Not to worry, however. We have Our Blessed Mother as a guiding light.
Well, it seems I've made another tangent in this post. Still, it's all V2/Canada-related. More on the media subsequently, plus final commentary on Professor Clifford, then continuing onto the remainder. See you next time.
VI. CONSEQUENCES: It's forever abnegated, and a lot of misinformation is levied about to conceal a bleak actuality: Collegiality, especially with the emergence of the "bishops' conference", deracinates the authority of an individual bishop, setting up an ecclesiological arrangement which very potentially makes him subject to a coercing, irrational, apostatic mob. Or, to speak more delicately, cede to majority rule of whatever bishop cooperative. Not only is this bishops' independence subverted, if not squelched out altogether, de facto the pope's supreme authority is equally debased as well, so there's no ultimate recourse. Here's some confirmatory data originating from the highest authority, regarding an occurrence at Castel Gondolfo in August 2005:
During an audience with the Pope [Benedict], Bishop [Bernard] Fellay [SSPX Superior General] found himself alone with the Pope for a moment. His Excellency seized the opportunity to remind the Pope that he is the Vicar of Christ, possessed of the authority to take immediate measures to end the crisis in the Church on all fronts. The Pope replied thus: "My authority ends at that door".[3]
VII. OMNIPRESENT "STRUCTURES": Perhaps I've extrapolated the effects of collegiality, i.e. "democratic Catholicism", too far into the future. Well, maybe not that far, considering current cultural tendencies and a "diabolical disorientation" exhibited in the words, actions and inactions by members of the establishment church. Speaking of which, Professor Clifford is evidently gaga for collegiality:
...collegiality is not merely an expression of the communion of local churches on a universal scale, but that it is a present and active in a variety of intermediate structures that foster a more effective exercise of episcopal ministry and witness to the synodality of the whole Church.[4]
VIII. BUREAUCRATIC INERTIA: Ever wonder why no decisive action is ever taken after writing a letter of vital concern to the Chancery office or a diocesan newspaper editor? Ever wonder why dubious postings at the CCCB website exclude the author's name? Ever wonder why the Development and Peace scandal has continued for three years and counting? Ever wonder why nothing is ever done about that pro-abort lesbian RCIA director who's just a tad too enthusiastic about animal rights and veganism? Ever wonder why nothing significant ever came of the petition sent to Canada's nuncio regarding the SPU/V2 conference? These sins of omission are spawned and flourish in a runaway bureaucracy. Logistically, impossible to oversee, unless these "intermediate structures" are scaled down drastically by a housecleaning type episcopacy with no predisposition to collegiality - a species gone extinct circa 1965, unfortunately. In the final analysis, collegiality or, more properly, democratic Catholicism, is a means for lukewarm and apostatic Catholics, bishops, religious and laymen - be they wannabe game-changers or wheeler-dealer careerists, to assert to the world their self-appointed importance. To their advantage, an attendant collectivist bureaucracy shields them from personal responsibility for the trickle-down effects of their heresies and the failures/irrelevancies of their petty agendas. Heresies and agendas horizontalized, immanentized, so as to be in conformity with the "spirit of the world". Said Franz Kafka: "The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy".[6] The workings of the post-Conciliar church in a nutshell.
IX. TRUTH UNLEASHED: Today, a major vicissitude to the Modernists - which is driving them bonkers, inflicting sleepless nights and, incidentally, filling yours truly with indescribable elation, is the recent arrival of the internet. A clear and present danger it is to Magic Circle dwellers, be they Modernist liberals or even Neo-Catholic "conservatives". This, for two principal reasons. First, elements of the Magisterium, unredacted, in the form of an "original source", the Deposit of the Faith in its authenticity and totality, is freely available and easily accessible for study, catechesis, enquiry, investigation, edification, referencing. Clickety-click... Barba-trick. Second, the internet gives voice to the once Catholic voiceless. Shut out, ostracized, insulted, excoriated for decades they have been, by bishops, clerics, careerists, straight and sodomitic. Not as unqualified, unknowledgeable and inexperienced as the upper echelon puppet masters presuppose, these once suppressed Catholics (orthodox Catholics, that is), beforehand and still banned by so-called Canadian Catholic publishers/periodicals, now wield "social media" for expression. Most efficaciously through blogs, upstart news sites and aggregators. Thanks to fiber optic cables, cell towers and geostationary satellites, dissemination is worldwide and near-instantaneous. Hence, official channels have been by-passed. Silence no more. The Age of Reefer Madness has, mercifully, come to its termination. Ignored letters of concern to the chancery office or to the diocesan newspaper editor (really, the same entity) can now be uploaded online for everyone to peruse. Moreover, com boxes allow for additional input and, oftentimes, more interesting discussion, debate and revelation arise therein than in the original posting. Now you can respond to the widely-syndicated Ron Rolheiser whenever he sublimates his frustrated effeminate libido. Now you can expose those nature worshipping vulgarians who litter and louche up the liturgy at St. Gaia parish. Man stuff - cigars and pipes, beer and whiskey, steak and pizza, argumentation, retaliation, divisiveness, courage, steadfastness, acuity, clarity, honesty. Factuality and reality. Resultantly, eventually, after the dust settles, Catholic truths bubble to surface... to the utter horror of those who populate the apostatic offices of the establishment church, from coast to coast. And, lo!, multipacks of Depends underwear doth vanish from the shelves at grocery stores everywhere. It's fantastic!
X. DEMOCRACY OF DATA: The internet bolsters "free speech" or, more appropriately, it allows for a Collegiality of Information, if you will. Yet, ironically, the heretofore comptrollers of Catholic information flow regularly impart their displeasure with this new populist configuration of the mediascape. Well, not ironic. Actually, it's hypocritical because superstars of the Nu-Church, particularly attendees at the SPU/V2 conference and those of like mind, ceaselessly extol on about openness, fairness, sincerity, liberty, transparency, accountability, including the laity's greater role in the Church. This has been proclaimed from the mid-1960s onward. It's fabulous for all of us, they joyously holler to we Citizens of the World... unless you're a Catholic with traditional inclinations. It's the standard "Liberals are tolerant so along as you don't disagree with them" thing. They're worried, they feel threatened, trapped in a corner like a wild animal, which can be unpredictable and vicious if approached. Hence, Professor Clifford, who is on record as stating theologians supplant Magisterial teaching, conveys her distress:
At a time in our church when much of the council's teaching is being minimized, dangerously interpreted, or altogether ignored, an authentic and informed understanding of the council is more important than ever.[7]
XI. NEO-CATHOLICISM EXPLAINED: Accordingly, let's now consider matters in a wider context so as to explain the Rosica-like-conniption reactions to this Collegiality of Information. Or, even, to explain the cartwheels that surely eventuate after CCCB personnel and chancery employees check out what hapnen in the Catholic blogosphere. From the mid-1960s to the 1970s commentary and analysis on Church affairs were under Modernist dominion. No dispute. Presently, they still do dominate to a hefty degree, of course. Although, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s - still prior to the internet, another kind of Catholic narrative arose into prominence, partnering the forefront with Modernism, in the English-speaking world at least. Namely, "conservative" Neo-Catholicism. It was and is a reaction to Modernism that hopes and attempts to recapture a lost Catholic orthodoxy robbed by the Modernists. However, Neo-Catholicism is in some aspects a form of Modernism, albeit mitigated, since its proponents downplay Church teachings prior to the Council, prioritizing those afterward. Neo-Catholics are unambivalent about celebrating Vatican II, seeing nothing at all problematic in its promulgations. Neo-Catholicism is American rooted, inspired, fixated, with a heavy duty political impulse. There is trustworthiness, devotion, way too much, to America's "Founding Fathers" and their religious/political principles, as if these are entirely commensurate with Catholic doctrine, or can be refashioned as such. These governing principles are undergirded by the thought of Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, a Calvinist. Locke's notion of tabula rasa said the humans are born as a "blank slate", ideas are not innate, that we are rather determined by our external surroundings. The implication of this explanation of man was, thus, a tendency to the equalization of people, a "levelling out" of humanity. How, then, could there be an instilled "divine right" of kings? How, then, could the king legitimately head the government?[8] The tabula rasa was outlined in Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690. In the preceding year, he anonymously published Two Treatises on Government, which many scholars say comprises the fountainhead of American governance. Man, Locke wrote:
...seeks out, and is willing to joyn in Society with others who are already united, or have a mind to unite for mutual Preservation of their Lives, Liberties and Estates, which I call by the general Name, property. The great and chief end therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.[9]
XII. FREEMASONRY: Neo-Catholics shower praise on America's esteemed ancestors in spite of the fact that several were deistic Freemasons. They disregard the Church's condemnation of Freemasonry and its satanic hand in international upheavals, especially since from the years leading up to the French Revolution, when scores of religious were slaughtered and exiled.[11] Just mention the word Freemason and you're castigated as a "conspiracy theory nut job" (see my essay on conspiracy theories here). If Freemasonry is just an innocuous, uninfluential organization, why would the Chair of Peter, undoubtedly the greatest "listening post" of global affairs (with its perdurable and worldwide network of nuncios, missionaries, religious orders, dioceses, institutes, etc.), reprimand it, do so regularly, insistently, vehemently, over these last few centuries? Must be something there, yes? Why would the supreme pontiffs compose texts addressing the matter? Clement XII (In Eminenti, 1738), Benedict XIV (Providas, 1751), Leo XII (Quo Graviora, 1825), Leo XIII (Humanum Genus, 1884) - and these are just a scant collection. As the motto goes: "The Catholic Church, outlasting oppressive governments since 33 AD". Methinks the popes knew a little more about Freemasonic machinations than some uptight culture pundit who merely dabbles on the subject during his coffee break. In addition to the Freemasons, Marxists and Sodomites have also infiltrated the Church over these last decades. It has happened and is happening. Readers, don't be fooled by the spinmeisters or the Canadian Catholic MSM, the latter completely ignoring or snubbing this triple-pronged malevolence.
XIII. REVOLUTIONARY CORRELATIONS: Not only do Neo-Catholics acquiescence to the un-Catholic concept of "Nature's God", they overlook unpleasant connections and causations existent between the American Revolution of 1775-1783 and the fervently anti-Catholic French Revolution of 1789 (a sensitive subject, tread carefully). Pace my American friends, recall that Auguste Barthold's creation known as the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the US, was inspired by Eugène Delacroix's La Liberté guidant le peuple, a painting celebrating the 1830 Revolution which overthrew the Orleans monarchy. Surely, that image is archetypal of the rejection and toppling of the Ancien Régime. Specifically, a negation of a long and distant Catholic past, not the more recent and shorter Protestant past. Where Modernists reject the Church's past/tradition wholesale, Neo-Catholics de-emphasize or omit particular doctrinal elements of the pre-Conciliar Church. Sometimes because of innocence and ignorance (many are converts from Protestantism, a combinatorial corollary of being born in Protestant America while being educated/catechized in a post-Conciliar theological circumstance manoeuvred by Modernists, characteristically disdainful of Church history/tradition). Other times because of an irritating, tension-inducing, but vital tidbit of the historical record that doesn't jive with the central thesis in a book otherwise sure to be a bestseller. And don't you dare criticize any statement or gesture made by the post-Conciliar popes. Else the Neo-Catholics will gang up on you like a cackle of hyenas, slice you open, rip out your heart and entrails, then feast and party like its 1999.
XIV. AMERICANISM: Neo-Catholicism is also tainted by the Americanism heresy, tackled long ago by Pope Leo XIII in his 1899 encyclical Testem Benevolentiae Nostrae. Directed specifically to James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, Maryland, it focussed on the American notions of the "separation of Church and State", civil liberties, individualism, of how these pose hazards to Catholicism as traditionally understood. Think of the exclusionary particularism inherent to the popularized phrase "Shining City on a Hill". That has a quasi-utopian twang to it, an "American Church" placed on pedestal, above the Holy See even, singled out by God for a specialized purpose. As Pope Leo wrote: such an attitude "would give rise to the suspicion that there are among you some who conceive and would have the Church in America to be different from what it is in the rest of the world". Leo's encyclical did work to restrain Americanism for a time, but only until Vatican II. By then the chains were broken, by a particular priest, of whom we shall return to momentarily. In the meantime, it is important to remember that, for the post-Conciliar era, Neo-Catholicism is/was fronted by a triumvirate: Michael Novak (philosopher, diplomat, formerly affiliated with the Rockefeller Foundation), George Weigel (educated at St. Michael's College, Toronto), and the Canadian-born Lutheran convert Fr. Richard John Neuhaus (d. 2009), founder/editor of the influential First Things magazine - intellectuals with several acquaintances inside the Washington Beltway.
XV. IT'S SHOWTIME: Marketing, profit-making and self-promotion, personified in the guise of a "Salesman Apologist" with a cheezy moustache or a cowboy hat or as a smiley face "nice guy", is also part of the movement's impetus. The lecture circuit, books sales, very "clubby", hobnobbing, backslapping, "Have I gotta deal for you!", and so forth. Here we see tracers of the much lauded American salesmanship frequently pushed outside the bounds of normal secular commerce. Almost to levels of ridiculousness on par with bellowing, money-grubbing Fundamentalist preachers with their loud suits and sculptured hairdos. On the internet it manifests with celebrity bloggers, well-intentioned, sometimes likeable, but dilettantish, USCCB-deferring, way "too hip", often boorish, saccharin, attention-seeking and self-absorbed. Prime examples are to be found at the National Catholic Register and Patheos. Mark Shea, a histrionic diva obsessed with attacking Michael Voris, is the first name coming to mind. Also, there is Jimmy Akin with his gnostic tinged "Secret Information Club". Nifty, do I get a secret decoder ring if I become a member? Elsewhere there is Scott Hahn, peddler extraordinarius, who to me comes off more as a motivational speaker than apologist. An unsolved mystery associated with many of the male types of this breed is that they have a predilection for growing scruffy beards. Maybe they want to look like Jesus. Who knows? Anyway, very much image-driven, it helps more if you're a pretty boy, the laaaaadies like that. Or if you're a delicious little honey pot with a sassy attitude, prompting the guys to give their undivided attention whilst they drool onto their keyboards. Publicly or formally presented, you will see avatars/photographs of them with an enigmatic smirk, a quirky smile, head tilted, peeking at you above their lowered sunglasses, or in a thoughtful stance, staring at the sky, ruminating in a luxuriantly vegetated mountain setting. It's the whole gamut of "Look at ME" phenomenology. To get an idea just open up your Sears catalogue to the fashion modelling section. I'm also thinking of Catholic Answers and EWTN. The latter, incepted by the wonderful and longsuffering Mother Angelica, has, unfortunately, been overtaken by establishment hacks, chiefly in its news and current affairs programming. And there certainly was a rationale for Christopher Ferrara's book EWTN: A Network Gone Wrong. Just think of the former crowd pleasing Fr. John Corapi, with his Just For Men coloured beard, pathetically garbed in a Harley Davidson leather jacket after his downfall. Things were better when it was only Mother Angelica Live!, the Rosary with the Nuns of Our Lady of the Angels Monastery and the occasional documentary. But that's a fleeting memory now.
XVI. CANADIAN/BRITISH EXAMPLES: On the Canadian side, there is Fr. Raymond de Souza, EWTN commentator and First Things contributor coincidentally, also columnist for both the Catholic Register and National Post. A nice comfortable balance between the establishment church and the secular world. Here, we can also throw CR columnists Peter Stockland and Michael Coren into the mix. There is also popular blogger Kathy Shaidle, very perceptive to leftist hypocrisy, a superb polemicist. Albeit her Neo-Catholic style is punk-anarchist with a pop culture focus enlivened by proletarian humour and its attending excessive use of profanity. Hence she writes for the libertarian "conservative" Taki's magazine. It's the "Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld" shtick. Cool, slick, trendy, witty, funny, edgy, intelligent, entertaining, kinda weird, pro-Rush Limbaugh, anti-Obama, anti-Islamic - not so bad in themselves to a degree. But certainly in a stall mode in terms of approaching/embracing the "fullness of the Faith" with all of its difficult aspects, which is an apt descriptor for Neo-Catholicism as such. Across the Atlantic in the United Kingdom, the closest comparison to Neo-Catholicism, or at least a hybrid of it, would be the people and programs associated with Catholic Voices. Principally, it's represented by Jack Valero and Austen Ivereigh. The latter is European correspondent for the Manhattan-based America, that magazine run by limp-wristed Jesuit princesses. These two personages and Catholic Voices in general have been skillfully critiqued, unexpectedly enough and seemingly in favour of a more "orthodox" Catholic position, by Irish leftist blogger Splintered Sunrise (at various posts, see here, here, here and here for samples in sequence). Orthodox Catholics in Britain tend to be on the left side of the political spectrum, bordering on Fabianism sometimes, a strange brew indeed. Hard and complex to explain. I mean, these are the people who brought to the world Downton Abbey and Lark Rise to Candleford (throws hands up). But, then again, this blogger enjoys old Bollywood films. So I guess all us Catholics are permitted quirks.
XVII. UNSPOKEN DILEMMA: Anyhow, if you were a revert in North America during the 1980s or 1990s, already dismally catechized as a Gen-X youth, and correspondingly needing to really learn about the Faith, to delve in and scrutinize the riches of a Catholic Church hijacked by the Modernists, the dissemination of contemporary "Catholic Orthodoxy" mainly came via magazines, periodicals and books published by Neo-Cat/Neo-Con outlets, distributed out of America. You would read Neuhaus, Weigel, Dinesh D'Souza, their colleagues at Crisis magazine, National Review and the American Enterprise Institute. Yet, there was always something pricking your conscious in those quiet moments. "Something's not right, here", I repeatedly said to myself. Why this superelevation of politics and economics? Why so many hagiographies and shout outs for Ronald Reagan? Before being "rehabilitated" in old age, it was always bothersome that William F. Buckley, a popular Catholic libertarian who acted as a kind of intellectual nexus where Neo-Catholics would gather and discuss the affairs of the day, was given third-rail treatment when it came to his dissent against the Church's position on contraception.[13] A polished persona and knowing the right people does have its benefits, it seems. Why be automatically branded as an anti-Semite for pinpointing facets of Jewish history/philosophy in those instances when they clearly differ with the Catholic worldview? Why be labelled as antediluvian if you deemed suspicious any person or group endeavouring to achieve some sort of consensus between Catholic and Protestant theology? Why the assertion, megalomaniacal at times, of the "separation of Church and State"? That's not Catholic, the popes have condemned that notion, and it's inconsistent with what you read in that book purchased from TAN Publishers. That's raising secular nationalism above the Church. Jesus Christ is the Lord of History. Period. All authority, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the Redeemer of Humanity. Period. One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. Period. Not a plurality of churches and perspectives. Despite Fr. Neuhaus' prolific writings on the role of religion in the "naked public square", why is the Neo-Catholic intelligentsia so adamant on something that, in the final analysis, after those spin doctors fade away into the night when the cocktail party ends, dispenses with Christ altogether from politics? It both counters and effaces the "Social Reign of Christ the King", as expounded by Pope Pius XI in his 1925 encyclical Quas primas. This is done from the "Right". On the "Left", the same is effected by Marxist Modernists, except they employ a contorted form of "social justice", substituting a "this world"-vectored State disassociated from a transcendent-pointing Catholic Church.
XVIII. RELIGIOUS LIBERTY/LICENSE: Where, then, do Neo-Catholics get their justification for this Church/State segregation? Why do they talk endlessly, with an ideological thrust, about "religious liberty", pluralism and liberal democracy, as if these are unassailable absolutes? Then you come across Dignitatis humanae, the Vatican II Declaration on Religious Liberty, wherein no avowal of the Kingship of Christ is to be found. Instead, it reads like the American Constitution, it sounds like the Declaration of Independence. Then you learn that the American contingent of bishops at the Second Vatican Council effectively had full say in drafting up Dignitatis humanae,[12] with the brains behind the operation being - here he comes... Fr. John Courtney Murray. He was an American Jesuit, who made the cover of TIME magazine on December 12, 1960. The reason he became a media darling was his essay compilation book We Hold These Truths: Catholic Reflections on the American Proposition. Reportedly, upon returning to the U.S. after the Council closed, he announced the following to some colleagues:
Gentlemen, we have just cleared the church's decks of certain nineteenth-century business. We have not even begun to deal with the issues of the twentieth century.[14]
XIX. CANADIAN WASTELAND: So, that was the haute couture matériel you were spoon fed if making a resolute attempt at returning to orthodox Catholicism during the 1980s or 1990s. Yet in the secret depths of my heart it always left me spiritually malnourished, yearning for something more, more along the lines of meat and potatoes Catholicism. Murray, Neuhaus, Weigel and cohorts, cozying up with Vatican II to abnormal extents, were serving up Americentric buffets. Quite unlike the international banquets hosted by Sheen, Jaki, Gilson, Grisar, Belloc, Dawson and Kuehnelt-Leddihn. These men setting their scopes back two millennia to the Crucifixion and eras previous. If a Canadian, and wondering at the time what CanChurch was promoting... well, you were pretty much shafted. Left to wander in a desert wasteland of Leftism, Progressivism, Marxism, "social justice", liberation theology, where Christ was consigned to but a protest rally afterthought. Homely, depressing, politicized, fourth-rate, feminized, infantile, uninspiring and so boring that you may have even considered becoming a Moonie just to get a modicum of excitement in your life. The Catholic Register, Prairie Messenger, Western Catholic Reporter, Catholic New Times, Novalis Publishers, CCCB reports, habitless lesbian nuns over here, lisping Jesuit queens over there, Mary Jo Leddy, Ted Schmidt, Michael Swan, Remi de Roo, Ron Rolheiser, Gregory Baum - oh man, what a bloody nightmare! Still is today. Just go to the Salt+Light website or watch this interview. At least from the early 1990s onward there was Fr. Alphonse de Valk and his team at Catholic Insight to relieve some of the heat exhaustion. When residing in Canada in 1997, historian Preston Jones penned the following in New Oxford Review:
At least in America there's some cultural debate. Put it this way: The essay you are now reading could probably not get published in Canada. Canadian cultural conservatives and orthodox Christians must look south for intellectual sustenance. Canada's indigenous media, with a few noble and small exceptions, sing in nihilistic unison.[16]
XX. SHIFTING AND DRIFTING: Thing is, post-2000 we have the internet, providentially, I contend. Accordingly, the conversation has now gone global, so much larger. Academics and institutionalists - well connected with the establishment church, many of them having bromances with bishops - aren't lording over the Catholic conversation anymore. Also promising, "Professional Catholics", especially business savvy Neo-Catholics (early on making sure to acquire key "social media" positions, thus presuming they rule this conversation with papal authority), are beginning to be confronted by unaffiliated faithful laymen and priests equipped with blogs, podcasts, online radio programs, video channels - all armoured with virtual warehouses of data and information. Most importantly, there was a definite signal of a course correction, the commencement of a drift back to traditional Catholicism (just Catholicism, that is), after Pope Benedict took the helm in 2005. Summorum Pontificum, lifting of the SSPX excoms plus negotiations therewith, return to liturgical reverence, and so forth. The conversation, then, is becoming not just about Catholicism predominantly communicated from America, i.e. provincialized Neo-Catholicism broadcasted from a few mainstream facilities. Neither, in general, is it being reigned over as much by the Modernists. Aging and Luddite-prone, they trail behind new waves in high technology, therefore lagging in terms of taking advantage of telecommunication progress. Deliberation is now on Catholicism as such, and the word "Catholic", let us recall, means "universal". So the focus has definitely shifted, taking on a global paradigm.
XXI. DEMOGRAPHICS/ECONOMICS: Correspondingly, careerists in their once serene bubbleworlds are presently feeling the heat, intimidated without really understanding the underlying cause and purpose of the shift in Catholic conversation. Thus we get reactions of contempt and anger from members of the establishment church. Let them sweat for a little while, I say. See what it's like. Gladly, these are the death convulsions of a faltering and waning Modernism/Neo-Catholicism. In the long run, the Modernists can't recover since all they have done is to cultivate generations of "cafeteria Catholics" and "practical atheists". Pro-contraception, pro-abortion, anti-nuclear family, pro-sodomy - they've already sterilized themselves and thus will be unable to reproduce at "sustainable levels". The population pyramid becomes top-heavy, flips and fossilizes, where the aged population significantly outweighs the younger population. Soonafter the "biological solution" does it's indifferent handiwork, then say hello to Mr. G. Reaper. Thus, gradually, there will be reduced numbers in progeny, fewer and fewer attending Mass. Hence parish closings, diocesan mergers, diminished pewsitter donations. Consequently, no funding for heretical programs or initiatives. People, it's basic demographics, Economics 101. Also working against the post-Conciliar Catholic population is this bizarre mania with "Theology of the Body" à la the Manicheanism of Christopher West. Moreover, increasing reports of NFP misuse, where some parents appear to be a little too selective, engendering an almost "boutique kids" type situation, isn't helping either. "Be fruitful and multiply", says the Lord. Factoring in all these, it will probably be a long, slow death for these internal enemies of the Church. So, fire up a smoke, grab your favourite beverage, put your feet up, and enjoy the show. And don't forget to watch those Muffins! They're deeeeelicious. Mmm... mmm... mmmmmm.
XXII.
XXIII. SIFTING AND RIFTING: Thankfully, the Holy Spirit bars the Pope from advocating heresy ex cathedra. As such, the trending return to orthodox Catholicism will continue, be it in fits and starts, though that's the general trend if the aforementioned "global paradigm" is considered. Likely, it will be a prolonged duration before some parity with Tradition is reached, pending a divine intervention ordaining an immediate restoration, which, most terribly, could arrive in the form an apocalyptic-type judgement. Still, bolstered by hope and holding fast to the Victorious Cross, it is possible to see that pieces of the puzzle are starting to come together, and authentic Catholicism waves to you from the distance. For the interim, this current state of heightened confusion and instability indicates to me that Our Blessed Lord is undertaking to sift the wheat away from the chaff in a manner more discriminating than in times past. As the Catholic conversation is now aptly reflected by presentations and exchanges on the internet, so the internet does represent this wheat/chaff separation process... Please bear with me for a little more as I'm trying to zero-in on something... Surf the Catholic internet and you will find all kinds of overlap, from person to person, group to group, commenter to commenter, website to website, blog to blog. You'll be informed and take pleasure in a site one day, then on the following day you'll be startled and off-put by what you read at this same site. Sometimes Neo-Catholic sites will concur with Modernist sites. This Traditionalist site over here will seem to border on sedevacantism at times. That Catholic MSM site over there will glory in heresy. Blogger battles, internecine warfare in the com boxes, and a whole host of uppity, battle-averse know-it-alls telling everyone to "calm down" and be "charitable". All this overlap and street fighting is a blatant sign of this confusion, of course. But it is also a good thing, I argue. Because, taking a birds-eye view of the battleground and looking down range to end results, you may notice that distinctions, then divisions, between enemies of the Church and those loyal to the Magisterium are becoming increasingly pronounced as time passes. A tendency away from multiplicity and a movement toward a straightforward Yes or No to the Church. It would have to be this way in that Christ is preparing us for ever-escalating impositions by the State upon the Catholic Church. What we are witnessing Caesar doing now is just the vanguard. Western democracies are rapidly morphing into totalitarian regimes. And it will be the "creative minority", "The Remnant", who will be left to do the work of restoration. It's going to be a long haul. Not to worry, however. We have Our Blessed Mother as a guiding light.
Well, it seems I've made another tangent in this post. Still, it's all V2/Canada-related. More on the media subsequently, plus final commentary on Professor Clifford, then continuing onto the remainder. See you next time.
NOTES / REFERENCES
1. Apostolicam Actuositatem, ch. I, para. 2, In: (gen. ed. A. Flannery) Vatican Council II, The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (Boston: St. Paul & Books Media, 1992 new revised edition), Vatican Collection, vol. 1, p. 766. Promulgated on November 18, 1965.
2. Quoted in S. Magister, "Collegiality yes, democracy no", Chiesa, April 16, 2013.
3. Quoted in C. Ferrara, "My authority ends at that door...", The Remnant, June 11, 2012.
4. C.E. Clifford, "Emerging Consensus on Collegiality and Catholic Ecumenical Responsibility", The Jurist, 2004, vol. 64, no. 2, pp. 332-360.
5. C.E. Clifford, "Lorelei F. Fuchs, Koinonia and the Quest for an Ecumenical Ecclesiology: From Foundations through Dialogue to Symbolic Competence for Communionality", The Ecumenical Review, October 2009, vol. 61, no. 3 pp. 357-359. Book review.
6. Quoted in G. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. G. Rees (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1971), p. 120.
7. C.E. Clifford, "Vatican II: Revisiting the Council", Scarborough Missions Magazine, January/February 2012.
8. Recall: Locke was competing with the political philosophy popularized by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, published in 1651. Hobbes, of Protestant patrimony, advocated for absolutism for the monarch. Hobbes statecraft should considered in the context of a Protestant sovereign, distinct from a pre-Reformation Catholic king.
9. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London: The New English Library Limited), p. 395 (bk. II, ch. IX, paras. 123-124). Original full title: Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, The False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, And His Followers, are Detected and Overthrown. The Latter is an Essay Concerning The True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government.
10. F.J. Sheen, Philosophy of Religion, The Impact of Modern Knowledge on Religion (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Incorporated, 1948), p. 18.
11. See Abbé Augustin Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. R. Clifford (Fraser, MI: Real-View-Books, 1995). Originally published in 1798, it provides abundant documentation showing the French Revolution to be a combinatorial anti-Christian, anti-monarchical and anti-social plot, a conspiracy, detailed and pre-planned, by the philosophes (Voltaire, D'Alembert), the French Masonic Lodges and the German Illuminists. Also, it is essential to read the introduction to the book by Fr. Stanley Jaki in the Real-View-Books edition. Anti-Catholic historians score off this work, a bestseller at the time of publication (in various languages). Freemasons themselves, recognizing the importance of the Memoirs, will go out of their way to denounce Abbé Barruel. For example, see W.K. Firminger, "The Romances of Robison and Barruel", In: Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, Transactions of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076 (Margate: W.J. Parrett Limited Printers, 1940), vol. I, pp. 31-69.
12. Cf. M. Davies, The Reign of Christ the King, In Both Public and Private Life (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1992).
13. Cf. P. Kengor, "Buckley, Rehabilitated", National Catholic Register, October 1, 2010.
14. Quoted in P. McDonough, "Clenched Fist or Open Palm? Five Jesuit Perspectives on Pluralism", Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, Summer 2005, vol. 37, no. 2, p. 8.
15. See V. Foy, "Teilhard de Chardin: Arch-Heretic", Catholic Insight, June 2013, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 7-8.
16. P. Jones, "Canada: No Longer Morally Superior to the U.S.", New Oxford Review, July-August 1997, vol. LXIV, no. 6, p. 24.
1. Apostolicam Actuositatem, ch. I, para. 2, In: (gen. ed. A. Flannery) Vatican Council II, The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents (Boston: St. Paul & Books Media, 1992 new revised edition), Vatican Collection, vol. 1, p. 766. Promulgated on November 18, 1965.
2. Quoted in S. Magister, "Collegiality yes, democracy no", Chiesa, April 16, 2013.
3. Quoted in C. Ferrara, "My authority ends at that door...", The Remnant, June 11, 2012.
4. C.E. Clifford, "Emerging Consensus on Collegiality and Catholic Ecumenical Responsibility", The Jurist, 2004, vol. 64, no. 2, pp. 332-360.
5. C.E. Clifford, "Lorelei F. Fuchs, Koinonia and the Quest for an Ecumenical Ecclesiology: From Foundations through Dialogue to Symbolic Competence for Communionality", The Ecumenical Review, October 2009, vol. 61, no. 3 pp. 357-359. Book review.
6. Quoted in G. Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. G. Rees (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1971), p. 120.
7. C.E. Clifford, "Vatican II: Revisiting the Council", Scarborough Missions Magazine, January/February 2012.
8. Recall: Locke was competing with the political philosophy popularized by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, published in 1651. Hobbes, of Protestant patrimony, advocated for absolutism for the monarch. Hobbes statecraft should considered in the context of a Protestant sovereign, distinct from a pre-Reformation Catholic king.
9. J. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (London: The New English Library Limited), p. 395 (bk. II, ch. IX, paras. 123-124). Original full title: Two Treatises of Government: In the Former, The False Principles and Foundation of Sir Robert Filmer, And His Followers, are Detected and Overthrown. The Latter is an Essay Concerning The True Original, Extent, and End of Civil-Government.
10. F.J. Sheen, Philosophy of Religion, The Impact of Modern Knowledge on Religion (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Incorporated, 1948), p. 18.
11. See Abbé Augustin Barruel's Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, trans. R. Clifford (Fraser, MI: Real-View-Books, 1995). Originally published in 1798, it provides abundant documentation showing the French Revolution to be a combinatorial anti-Christian, anti-monarchical and anti-social plot, a conspiracy, detailed and pre-planned, by the philosophes (Voltaire, D'Alembert), the French Masonic Lodges and the German Illuminists. Also, it is essential to read the introduction to the book by Fr. Stanley Jaki in the Real-View-Books edition. Anti-Catholic historians score off this work, a bestseller at the time of publication (in various languages). Freemasons themselves, recognizing the importance of the Memoirs, will go out of their way to denounce Abbé Barruel. For example, see W.K. Firminger, "The Romances of Robison and Barruel", In: Ars Quatuor Coronatorum, Transactions of the Quatuor Coronati Lodge No. 2076 (Margate: W.J. Parrett Limited Printers, 1940), vol. I, pp. 31-69.
12. Cf. M. Davies, The Reign of Christ the King, In Both Public and Private Life (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1992).
13. Cf. P. Kengor, "Buckley, Rehabilitated", National Catholic Register, October 1, 2010.
14. Quoted in P. McDonough, "Clenched Fist or Open Palm? Five Jesuit Perspectives on Pluralism", Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, Summer 2005, vol. 37, no. 2, p. 8.
15. See V. Foy, "Teilhard de Chardin: Arch-Heretic", Catholic Insight, June 2013, vol. 21, no. 6, pp. 7-8.
16. P. Jones, "Canada: No Longer Morally Superior to the U.S.", New Oxford Review, July-August 1997, vol. LXIV, no. 6, p. 24.
11 comments:
Dear Heresy Hunter: Thank you for a superlative post, in itself justifying optimism about the Internet as a rallying point for faithful Catholics. Michael Voris recently observed that lay Catholics have freedom to speak out precisely because of their lack of canonical status. What a relief to see some of the names you name as examples of this bizarre new church, which has been superimposed on the Catholic Church, for our sins. You are too kind to call Scott Hahn a motivational speaker: how about a protestant disguised as a Catholic, laughing all the way to the bank? The new church is awash with fake converts and they all rush towards leadership roles. Thank you also for at least raising an eyebrow about “NFP,” the new-church way of preventing children. As to “theology of the body” and its obscene chief spokesperson, what is it but pornography lite for new church members who want a little thrill without guilt? By the way, have you seen what Novalis did to the Divine Praises (Sunday Missal 2012-2013, p. 597)? “The most holy Sacrament of the Altar” has become “the sacrament of the altar.” “The great Mother of God, Mary most holy” has become “the Mother of God, Mary most holy.” Who needs Martin Luther when we have Novalis to blasphemously downgrade the holiness of the Blessed Sacrament and the greatness of the Mother of God? Thanks again, Heresy Hunter. You are the best.
You're too kind, marylise. I don't mind criticism as well, you know :) Things are dished out roughly around here, so I deserve a good whack across the head every once in a while.
No, haven't seen the most recent Novalis Missal. Nor do I want to see it. What you quote once again corroborates that Novalis is not to be trusted, and that the never-ending river of anti-Catholic, soul-jeopardizing garbage it prints and distributes should be call out on a regular basis.
Who can imagine the scene? Novalis employees sit around a table together, slurping coffee, and deliberately decide – this is a conscious decision – that the great Mother of God Mary most holy is no longer “great” (Latin: excelsa) and that Catholics in Canada, by edict of Novalis, should not be allowed to call her great. To enforce this decision, they alter the printed version of the Divine Praises in the Sunday missal. There is no reaction from the bishops. The Novalis time-servers then notice that some fool from the past (e.g., Pope Pius VII in 1801) has called the Blessed Sacrament “most holy” (Latin: sanctissimo). They snicker as they delete the phrase, relieved to have caught it in time. That’ll re-educate those peasants in the pew. There is no reaction from the bishops.
Why would the bishops react? They're on board. Canadian bishops do have books published by Novalis, including an ex-bishop sodomite child porn afficionado from the Atlantic.
Novalis could have mutilated the Divine Praises in a number of ways. However, it deliberately chose degradation of the Holy Eucharist and the Blessed Virgin Mary. This is significant. It shows that Novalis has an agenda. It is not just a publishing house full of bunglers who don't know the faith. On the contrary, they know what needs to be destroyed before the modernist stronghold on Catholic parishes can be considered safe.
TH2, great post. Thank God for exercising the charism of magnificence. To do great things. Chapters I, VI and IX are awesome, among others, of course. It's as miserable here as there, and being too cheap to put in central air, we offer it up... I'm with the whiskey and cigars, and there are a few others of us on this side of the St. Lawrence, but some time you'll have to direct us to the hangout... we'd very much like to have a sit down. Shall I email you? I haven't figured out what tweeting is... Do you trust the citation of Pope Benedict to Bishop Fellay? I have to say that would appear to be uncharacteristic, considering the truly great work he did in building upon the groundwork he and Pope JPII laid for the new disciplinary codes in Canon Law. However, being a humble man, he could have been expressing his view of how any attempt to "reign" would have been taken by much of the hierarchy.
Yes, the French expression "louche" definitely fits much of the nonsense we're treated to. Nousautres Anglo-Saxons aren't supposed to use the corresponding English words in polite conversation... Mais, ou assister a la Messe de Dimanche au tout pres de Kingston? Thanks, brother. God bless you and your apostolate.
Just a quick read of a few blogs revealed the US Catholic Health Association to support the smoke and mirrors HHS mandate "accomodation". There is evidently a culture of heterodox policy and practice at the CHA, as reported by the NCRegister. Then there's the support of the supreme court's decisions on sodomitic "marriage by the National Federation of Catholic Youth Ministries, as reported by Mr. Ruse at Crisis. Then of course, the North American Forum on the Catechumenate is continuing to deform much of the continent on the RCIA process. And then there was the public permission by the Jesuit president of McQuaid Jesuit High School in Rochester NY, an all boy school and my alma mater, for two seniors to attend the senior ball as a couple. Yes, there needs to be a muckin' of the byre of Augean proportions. I hasten to add that I will be going to confession this afternoon to confess my sins because I'm still a sinner, but I'm fighting with the grace of God to convert and repent! But good things are happening. The retreat of lay Carmelites in this diocese last week was excellent, with a young, holy diocesan priest as the retreat master. God bless you.
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting again. Cathlite blows ever thither and yon. I've had to change blog service -- I'm now at http://jonahintheheartofnineveh.blogspot.ca/ -- and linking you as shamelessly as before.
Vice versa.
The other day I noticed your blog wasn't coming up when visiting. You've switched from WordPress to Blogger... Logistical issues or did your site get a complaint?
Your new http on my sidebar has been updated.
Thanks, Maximillian.
Tweeting used to be very simple, but it has turned rather complex in the last year or so. Give it a try, with the basics you can get by.
Yes, I trust the citation. It came via Christopher Ferrara, a writer, researcher and lawyer I respect greatly. It could be "uncharacteristic" of the Pope Emeritus, though this can be counterbalanced with one of the possible reasons for his abdication, i.e. enemies within the Church were too overwhelming to handle, given his age, fading energy etc.
Actually, I believe they took him off their lists.
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