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Thus the "conservative" position has several major failings, all of which we will explore in these pages. The one on which we will focus the most attention is the conservative's dogged insistence on ignoring or explaining away glaring differences between preconciliar and postconciliar practice and ecclesial attitudes, and even common teachings below the level of Catholic dogma. Novelties that were condemned as intolerable threats to the Faith are suddenly recommended as the work of the Holy Ghost. (As we will discuss, while these new practices ecumenism, for instance - are not in themselves strictly matters of Catholic doctrine, in the traditionalist view they tend materially to undermine doctrines to which the Catholic is absolutely bound.) That there is absolutely no parallel for this in all of Church history should go without saying. The conservative position, however, has generally been to accept the novelties without question, regardless of the warnings of previous Popes and of the terrible trials these novelties have visited upon the Church.

The Great Facade

In sum, neo-Catholics gladly defend and practice a form of Catholicism that would have horrified any Pope before 1960. To appreciate this, one need only imagine Pope St. Pius X attending what today's neo-Catholic would consider a "reverent Novus Ordo Mass," with women, their heads uncovered, serving as "lectors," altar girls assisting the priest and handling the sacred vessels, the priest facing the people over a table, horrendous and doctrinally suspect vernacular translations proclaimed entirely in a loud voice, ecumenically oriented "Eucharistic prayers" that omit every reference to the Mass as propitiatory sacrifice, banal hymns and even pop music, the handshake (or hug) of peace, Communion in the hand, and lay men and women distributing the Sacred Host and Precious Blood to standing communicants. How would St. Pius X react to this spectacle? Obviously, he would react as traditionalists do; and, as Pope, he would order it to cease immediately. But for the neo-Catholic, the same spectacle poses no problem whatever, and in his view of the situation calls only for" obedience" to the ruinous innovations that produced it.
Whether he knows it or not, therefore, the neo-Catholic has broken with Tradition. This is not just a question of the appearance of the Church as a visible commonwealth in her worship and other praxis, but also of novel orientations, attitudes and liberal tendencies never been before seen in Catholics who considered themselves faithful.

A prime example is the "Catholic charismatic renewal," an "ecc1esial movement" of babbling, "Spirit-filled," interdenominational congregations, who gather in sports arenas and other large venues to be thrilled by raucous music and the exhortations of "anointed" preachers, many of them Protestant ministers. The movement is founded on a dearly heterodox pneumatological conception of the Church, which regards the institution of the Catholic Church as but a visible manifestation, however admirable, of a preexistent pan-denominational "union in the Holy Spirit" with objective heretics. This grotesquerie has penetrated nearly every diocese in North America, and is vigorously promoted by the decidedly neoCatholic Franciscan University of Steubenville and Mother Angelica's Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN), the media flagship of neo-Catholicism. (That EWTN's strange brew of traditional devotions and appalling novelties is considered rock-solid Catholicism today only indicates the depth of the current crisis.)

The Great Facade