Posted on 04/08/2010 10:02:25 AM PDT by NYer
Good Catholics get what they pray for.
Catholics who are indifferent, CINO, and fallen away, get what they desire, AS A PUNISHMENT. We have bad clergy today because that is what the majority of baptized Catholics wanted. They wanted priest that act like any lax Catholic layman, that are “birth control, no confession, no rosaries, you are all good and going to heaven” priests. That is what they got! A CHATISEMENT from God.
And that begins with bad bishops. Thanks for the post and ping. I needed just that tonight.
It’s okay ... Danny can post on this thread. Thank you, Danny, for the insights and the conversation.
I like that!
I’m very much of the opinion that we are in the tail end of the “purging”, if you will. Those of us who are left are the more devout. Just being around my high school class tells that story. I’d say maybe a quarter of us are actually faithful, if that many.
Th Church is not as “top down” as you think. The papacy itself was developed as the result of a push from below, as the major survivor of the “great” patriarchies of the Roman world, as the rest were submerged by first a German and then a rising Muslim sea. In the West, Rome served as a focus for the evangelization of the Germans, as Constantinople was for the evangelization of the Rus and other Slavs in the east. At times Rome itself was almost submerged by barbarism by survived in large part by its union with the monastic orders. other bishops as often as not under the thumbs of the nobility. Rome rose with the re-emerge of civilization but had to contest the kings and the emperor for control. At its height, the medieval papacy was the virtual head of Europe, but during the “Babylonian Captivity” of the popes in Avignon, when it reached the peak of bureaucratic efficiency. it lost its spiritual edge. It had led the Crusades but they had failed, and as the Turkish menace increased, its failure to mount another ended with the papacy immersed in petty Italian politics, more concerned about its land and the building of memorial churches than its spiritual mission. The Reformation stripped away even the support of half the people and princes of Europe, and even the “Catholic” one tended to treat the pope as more a figure head than one to be heeded. There was a Catholic Reformation, but the end of corruption was accompanied by horrific wars that discredited Christianity
itself in the eyes of many of the educated. The Scientific Revolution gave rise to a new view of the world known as the Enlightenment, which looked upon the papacy as a bastion of superstition. As a consequence, the French revolutionaries saw it as no more than just another medieval survival to be overthrown. Napoleon’s defeat found the papacy more in control of the local churches than before, but it was not until after Vatican I, and the end of the papacy as a territorial sovereign that the pope began to gain administrative control of the whole Church. Even today, the papacy seems more powerful than it is. Vatican II weakened the pope’s hold on the Church in many ways. Religious orders such as the Society of Jesus are in virtual rebellion.
Without the pope's approval and cooperation, nothing new moves, - no Vatican II, no new mass, no admittance of effeminate men into the clergy, no Catholic Pentecostalism and other non-Catholic practices, no ad-libbed changes (mass facing the people, biased ideology incorporated into vernacular translations of mass, communion in the hand,etc)
Of course not. Paul VI was the most liberal pope we have ever had. Like Louis XVI, he was a major player in his own tragedy. But we must take care in assigning blame. Look at the rejection of Humanae Vitae by virtually the whole Western Church. Look at the spread of liberation theology, the sudden collapse of traditionalist church such as in Quebec. At bottom, it was the victory of modernism.
The people get the popes that they desire.
If you think that Benedict is a “progressive,” then you and I do not share the same meaning of the term. To me the progressive is someone for whom politics is the end and religion is the means, someone like Father Pfleger, or Mrs. Steinfels, the editor of Commonweal.
No,they don’t. They get the popes that God provides.
That goes without saying.
My point is also valid, as God provides the popes that the people desire. If they are prayerful, faithful, living the faith, Catholics, God provides like kind popes. If Catholics are like our times, CINO, contracepting, divorcing, annulments, no confessions, watching Desperate Housewives in their death bed, "Catholics", as the majority of Catholics are today, God sends them clergy that let them do as they want and even legitimize the people such behavior.
St. Pius X qualified Modernism as the synthesis of all heresies. To call someone a Modernist is to qualify him as a pernicious heretic.
Progressivism is even worse than Modernism, since it took Modernism to further consequences than were possible at the beginning of the 20th century.
I'm not using the common language, which qualify the liberal or the leftist as progressive. I use Progressivism, progressivist to refer to a particular school of thought inside the Catholic Church, which follows the same errors of Modernism surpassing this heresy in its broader and deeper consequences.
Benedict XVI was a progressivist periti at Vatican II along with Karl Rahner. He has never to this day written anything that hints of his having erred in his “past” beliefs.
There are worse progressivists than Benedict XVI, and scarcely any Catholic clergy that are not infected by progressivism, therefore, B16 might “appear” to be orthodox,, compared to say the likes of Card. Mahoney of LA.
A Catholic has to compare popes with all the past popes, and clergy with all the past clergy. B16 compared to Pius IX, Leo XII, Pius X, is what he truly is, a progressivist, just like Paul VI, and JPII.
I’d sure like to know where you are getting all your “expertise” from.
And as for this broadbrush evaluation of all these popes—is that something that you can source and claim to be true, or is it your own personal opinion?
Also, how can you say with such certainty that Catholics get the pope they desire? From your point of view on this, it would seem that God is not interested or in control of His own Church.
You write that Progessivism is a worse heresy than Modernism, and that a Modernist is a “pernicious heretic”.
So, according to your opinion, Pope Bendict XVI, whom you call a Progressivist, is worse than a Modernist—and is also a “pernicious heretic”.
That’s a stunning condemnation.
What are your credentials for making it?
Newman defined liberalism in religion as “the anti-dogmatic principle,” which is the same as relativism, doubt as to the possibility of the basic claims of Christianity. Modernism incorporates scientism: the belief that all that men really know is through the scientific method. One aspect is the belief that evolution is itself progressive, ala Teilhard. In general terms it is, IMHO, gnosticism.
Have you read Pascendi Domini Gregis, Encyclical of Pius X on the doctrines of modernists?
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