Posted on 06/24/2005 4:54:35 AM PDT by bornacatholic
It's a bit late but I just didn't have time to respond last weekend.
I agree with Mark! (Shea) MY point is not and never has been "Everything was bad before the Council, now things are great! Good heavens, I spent my first 13 years as a Catholic in Seattle.
And I’m not arguing against the traditional Mass. Frankly, I’d be happy if every parish had a wide spectrum of rites: NO, T, Anglican Use, Byzantine. In my parish in Seattle, people receive communion on the tongue while kneeling and on the hand while standing and no one looked askance at one another. I thought it was both normal and great. We routinely sang the Agnus Dei and chanting a Byzantine Our Father and I loved it. I will probably never understand the Catholic insistence that the gestures of every participant at Mass must be “en mass”, that is, absolutely identical or you are somehow destroying the unity of the community. Kneel away as far as I’m concerned.
What is simply not true is the working assumption so widely shared in the Trad/conservative community that the Church was vastly more healthy in 1950 than it is today in all the ways that matter most and that the Council and the NO are the direct causes of unprecedented disaster and institutional collapse. I have had traditionalists tell me directly: “If the whole Church just went back to the Tridentine Mass, all the other problems in the Church - vocations, faithfulness to magisterial teaching, Mass attendance, catechesis - would resolve.” That’s magical thinking plain and simple. And it is terrible history.
First, the 4 centuries between Trent and Vatican II, during which the Mass of the Council of Trent flourished, contain some of the lowest spiritual lows in the entire history of Christianity. Most of us don’t know as much about them because they weren’t as colorful as say, the Borgia popes, but the late 18th century/early 19th century was simply dismal.
The fire of the Counter-Reformation had burned out, the Jesuits has been suppressed, once dynamic orders like the Dominicans were at a really low ebb, Gallicanism and Josephitism (movements by the French and Austria-Hungarian states to control the Church) had sapped the life of the Church and then Revolution destroyed the Church in France. Napoleon added insult to injury by capturing the Papal states. When Pius VII excommunicated him, Napoleon simply marched in and took the Pope captive. Pius didn’t see Rome again for 14 years.
By any standards, spiritually or institutionally, the Church was in terrible shape and no spirited reformation movement emerged as had happened in the 16th century.
Second. Newsflash: the Council/NO didn’t cause the 60’s. Jack’s Kennedy’s famous “I won’t let my faith interfere with my judgment as President” promise, which had paved the way for John Kerry and his ilk, was made in 1960 at what Traditionalists often refer to as the high point of Catholic institutional fortunes. The Catholic ghetto in the US had already broken down before the Council ever started its deliberations.
The collapse of the old pieties before the cultural whirlwind of the 60’s show that the foundations of a seemingly “triumphant” traditional Catholicism can be exceedingly shallow and very dependent upon support from the culture about it. Dietrich von Hildebrand noted this, to his dismay, in beautiful, Catholic, 1930’s Munich where very few Catholics (including priests and bishops) saw clearly that Nazism was absolute opposed to the faith.
“Christendom” presumes a central role for the Church in society and that the structures of society, family, culture, government, would fundamentally support the faith and the institutional Church. The 60’s changed all that but we weren’t able to cope. 1300 years of cultural supremacy in large parts of Europe had severed our corporate memory of how to survive and flourish while being fundamentally at odds with the culture about us.
That’s why pre-Vatican II racism is relevant to the discussion. American Catholicism, even at the height of its prosperity before the Council, couldn’t see and judge the culture in light of the Tradition. One poster said that the whole American culture was deeply racist so Catholics weren’t any different from other Christians in this respect. Actually that isn’t true. American Catholics, as a group, have one of the worst records in this area. American Quakers, as a body, renounced slavery as incompatible with Christianity and freed their slaves (many paid back wages) before the Revolutionary War. Both liberal and evangelical Protestants in Britain and the US were campaigning for an end to the slave trade by the end of the 18th century (William Wilberforce, etc.) and were at the center of the 19th century abolitionist movement in this country. Abolitionism was a deeply Christian movement but almost entirely Protestant.
From the very first, when the earliest Jesuits and Carmelites in Maryland owned slaves, right through the Civil War, the Church was simply not involved in the struggle for abolition in any significant way. 80 years later when Catherine Doherty faced off with the Jesuits, not much had changed. Our desire to just “get along” and our inability to seriously critique our culture in light of our faith compromised us in serious ways just as it did many German Catholics in the 1930’s. The struggle of the past 40 years has broken through that naivete and laid the foundation for better discernment and the recognition that our situation today vis a vis western culture is much closer to that of the early persecuted Church than of the medieval Church.
I think that a comprehensive compare and contrast between our situation and the *American* Church in 1960 would say it was doing much better in certain things than we are (priestly vocations and basic catechesis for instance) and considerably worse in others. Based upon what I’ve heard from many Catholics who were there (I wasn’t), I do think that there are a number of issues, which the Church now does better than before the Council but “conservative” Catholics don’t tend to focus on:
2) Personal Discipleship: If I had a dime for every intelligent older Catholic who has told me “ I thought being Catholic was all about rules, I didn’t know it was a relationship with God”, I would never have to raise money for the Institute again. What’s fascinating is that I hear this mostly from ones who were seriously practicing before the Council, the never miss Mass on Sunday,-daily prayer - went to 12 years of Catholic school - Catholic college- kind of Catholics. They were “well-catechized”, serious, faithful, and they still didn’t get this most foundational concept. Then at 60 or 70, the possibility that it is first and foremost about *relationship with God* hits them like a ton of bricks.
My point: Human beings were intended to love God with their whole heart, body, will and mind. Many (not all, of course) ordinary Catholics prior to the Council somehow got the impression that faith was a matter of rule and duty, a matter of the mind and will only, and the heart and experiential relationship had very little to do with it. I don’t know how or why it happened but it did for many. In reaction to the previous overemphasis on mind and will, many after the Council put all their eggs in the heart and body basket – with, as we know, disastrous results. The JP II generation, following the lead of their mentor, is already doing a much more better job of challenging people to whole person discipleship than did their parents or grand-parents.
3) Scripture: I know that there has been a partial indulgence for reading the Bible since the turn of the 20th century. But despite the much talked about superiority of catechesis before the Council, the average Catholic in the pew didn’t get the news. Over and over, one of the biggest Post-Vatican II changes that lay Catholics mention to me is Bible reading and study. I’ve had a large number of older Catholics all over the country tell me that they thought it was Protestant and therefore, wrong for Catholics to read the Bible before Vatican II. One sharp, elderly lady told me that she actually went to Confession to confess that she had read the New Testament! Something was amiss with a catechesis that didn’t convey that “ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ.”
4) Marriage and sexuality/Theology of the Body. In the 1930’s, when devout convert philosopher Dietrich von Hildrebrand wrote a book extolling the unitive power of sex in marriage, it was widely regarded as dangerous and potentially heretical. Twenty years later, the Dominicans at the University of Salamanica were still referring to him as the man “who wrote that immoral book”.
We now take for granted that idea that there are two ends to marital sexuality: unitive and procreative. JPII’s Theology of the Body is an absolutely ground-breaking development in Catholic thought in this area and is a critical foundation for the pro-life movement, and the renewal of marriage and of intentional celibacy, that we are beginning to see. Even though we are live in a ferociously anti-marriage/anti-life culture, this time, US Catholics haven’t just capitulated but are fighting intelligently and are slowly making real headway in the abortion wars.
4 The centrality of Evangelization in the Church’s mission: Avery Cardinal Dulles wrote a fascinating piece in John Paul II and the New Evangelization about the tremendous emphasis that the Council placed on understanding of evangelization as the greatest service it can offer to individuals and to the world and what a change this represented in ecclesiology. If we know ourselves to be no longer living in Christendom but in a world clearly in need of evangelization, everything changes. Hundreds of schools of evangelism like the great Emmanuel School of Missions in Rome where young adults get a year of terrific personal and missionary formation before being sent out are the fruit.
end of quote
* here is another excellent example from Weddell
Traditionalism seems to presume some kind of catechetical/liturgical/devotional nirvana before 1962 which when you read - oh the experiences of some of the great lay apostles of that era, for instance, - does not seem to been the case.
For instance, I have never heard those hankering after the pre-Vatican II Church talk about the profoundly institutionalized racism in early 20th century Catholicism which made even the devotional lives of black Catholics extraordinarily difficult. For every Katherine Drexel or Josephite priest, there were 20 Irish priests who wouldn't let their children into his school or black converts to do the stations of the cross in his church. One of the most vivid stories that Catherine Doherty tells is of facing a whole roomful of elegantly cassocked Jesuits (including then President Gannon, SJ) with her 25 cent Bible and trying for two hours to convince them to let an outstanding black Catholic student into Fordham University. Latin Masses and Cassocks aren't miracles, moral disinfectants, or a guarantee that you won't miss entrenched sin right under your nose. Nor did theological orthodoxy turn these guys into saints or heroes. They kept telling Catherine: "It's too soon, our southern students would never understand, there's nothing we can do,." Hmmm - why, they sound a lot like a lot of clergy today.
And even Bishops who supported Catherine's work didn't bust the asses of the hordes of openly racist priests and sisters (much less lay Catholics). They would intervene to correct specific situations of injustice that she brought to their attention, they would roll their eyes and sigh, they would ask her to pray for them, etc. They behaved remarkably like, well, post-Vatican American bishops. It is possible that it has almost always be thus and bishops who do otherwise have always been the exception. Celebrating the Tridentine Mass on a regular basis didn't seem to foster larger amounts of episcopal backbone than does the Novus Ordo.
The question is, is our situation today unprecedentedly abnormal - a inexplicable and complete break with the Catholic past or are we simply dealing with a heightened version of a perennial problem? My knowledge of history makes me vote "perennial problem." As long as the Church and the world is made of human beings, heroes and saints will remain the exception, not the rule.
Knowing that makes it, well less personal, less outrageous, and much more "well, that's life outside the garden". This is our equivalent of what all generations have faced with in different guises.
If they became saints and heroes by trusting God and ultimately, His Church in the midst of (you name it, Thomas More standing alone in the England of 1534, Ireland under Cromwell, Japan in the 17th century, France in the late 18th century with huge numbers of priests siding with the revolutionaries and Goddess of Reason enthroned in Notre Dame, a Catholic women of mixed race trying to found the first inter-racial order in New Orleans in 1835, Spain during the civil war, a Jewish-convert Carmelite watching the Catholic Nazi movement take shape in 1930's Germany, Rwanda in 1994 anyone?) we can try to respond with some faith, hope, charity and creativity to a mere 4 decades of liturgical chaos and lousy catechesis.
Absolutely correct! How many catholic women whose husbands divorced them were told they could not return to the Sacraments because of the "divorce".
In the contemporary version of the TLM, there are catholics who expect their children to behave in a less than childlike manner in church (no ... I'm not conceding that kids should be playing with toys in church or munching on Cheerios). American Colleen can relate a first hand experience that shocked her and her own children so much that they never returned to that church.
Extremes - both left and right - are morally wrong.
Y'know, these interminable debates about whether the liturgical changes of Vatican II were right, wrong or indifferent rarely give consideration as to how Vatican II affected the eastern churches.
Be that as it may, it saddens me to see latin rite Catholics cast about brickbats over NO masses versus TLM. In most good sized metropolitan areas of the U.S., either option is available.
My post was spot on.
Only later did I become a Christian and begin a relationship with Jesus.
Actually, that sounds Protestant. Until the past few decades, Catholics usually said "Christ" and Protestants were far more likely to say "Jesus." I don't know if there's any particular reason (the "Jesus" of history and the "Christ" of faith?). Non-Christian sensibilities, of course, are less likely to be offended by "Jesus" than by "Christ."
And "relationship" is such a "60s word" in that sense, probably from the world of therapy! It existed before then, of course, but it usually referred to consanguinity or logical connection. The change is something like the way "marriage" has taken on a life of its own: people used to have husbands or wives: they loved them (or sometimes hated them), argued with them, laughed at and with them, got along or not, but they talked about a husband or wife, not about their "marriage."
For 2000 years millions of Catholics have had deep and profound relationships with Jesus.
They didn't call it that though: they loved Christ, they strove to imitate Him, they fell short and begged His forgiveness, they asked for His help in all things, they meditated on His life and death and "offered up" their own suffering. But they didn't talke about a "relationship," as if they were on a therapist's couch! (OK, I admit the word has the effect on me of squeaky chalk!)
What is wrong with the world? The Church established by Jesus. That's love, baby. At least it is what passes for love for too many of those who call themselves traditionalists
Eventually, when the John Paul the Great generation ascends to authority we will see less and less of these battles. In fact, outside of these threads, I never hear about them. My Parish is huge, diverse, multi-ethnic, populated by happy Christians (many of whom are converts-including roughly a dozen Jews) who are engaged in a an amazing number of ministries helping to build up the Body of Christ and helping to heal a broken world.
Yesterday, I was volunteering (my wife and I run the local SHARE program) and worked with Christians from 24 different churcches (only 2 of which are Catholic). Within this fellowship and service to the poor, we have cordial and loving relationships, speak openly and freely about how Jesus is the source of our lives, about the Holy Spirit working in our lives, about God our Father, and I get to explain to them what it is the Catholic Chuch believes about thus and such and they begin to grasp that Catholics are Christians. (Most were taught we aren't)
In the "golden age" I grew up in, these sorts of contacts and cooperation were non-existent.
"Imitation of Christ" not "Relating to Christ"
Sometimes even Catholics have lost or never had the chance to experience Christ personally: not Christ as a mere ‘paradigm’ or ‘value’, but as the living Lord, ‘the way, and the truth, and the life’ (Jn 14:6).”
Pope John Paul II, speech to bishops of Southern Germany, Dec. 4, 1992.
“It is necessary to awaken again in believers a full relationship with Christ, mankind’s only Savior. Only from a personal relationship with Jesus can an effective evangelization develop.”
I don't deny the word has "infiltrated." It just didn't used to be used that way. And I'm set in my ways (LOL!) and still not comfortable with that usage; it makes me cringe. And it did play more into a Protestant mindset. Catholics never came up with a hymn like "He walks with me and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own" ("In the Garden").
I think that's because some of us (me, anyway) are a veritable tabula rasa in that regard. But we'd be willing to learn! ;-)
I'd be interested in your take on my #44.
"I think that's because some of us (me, anyway) are a veritable tabula rasa in that regard. But we'd be willing to learn! ;-)"
Well, I like to give people the raw information, then add my own comments. So here's a link to Orientalium Ecclesiarum:
http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_decree_19641121_orientalium-ecclesiarum_en.html
My personal opinion is that the most significant impact was contained in the following paragraph:
"All members of the Eastern Rite should know and be convinced that they can and should always preserve their legitimate liturgical rite and their established way of life, and that these may not be altered except to obtain for themselves an organic improvement. All these, then, must be observed by the members of the Eastern rites themselves. Besides, they should attain to on ever greater knowledge and a more exact use of them, and, if in their regard they have fallen short owing to contingencies of times and persons, they should take steps to return to their ancestral traditions."
And that's why I smile a bit when I hear folks talk about "in the spirit of Vatican II".
Although, the Gospels are, to me, all about a personal relationship - what with all the eating His Body, and drinking His Blood, and letting Him live in us, and speaking with Him, and letting Him carry our Cross etc.
IN THE GARDEN
I come to the garden alone
While the dew is still on the roses
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses
........................
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known
..........................
He speaks and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing
..........................
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known
...........................
I'd stay in the garden with Him
'Tho the night around me be falling
But He bids me go; through the voice of woe
His voice to me is calling
.......................
And He walks with me
And He talks with me
And He tells me I am His own
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known
- Words and Music by Charles Austin Miles, 1913
Miles gave the background to this beautiful hymn in his own words:
"I read the story of the greatest morn in history. The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalene early, while it was yet very dark, unto the sepulcher. Instantly, completely, there unfolded in my mind the scenes of the garden, where out of the mists comes a form, halting, hesitating, tearful, seeking, turning from side to side in bewildering amazement.
"Falteringly, bearing grief in every accent, with tear-dimmed eyes, she whispers, 'If Thou has borne Him hence.' "He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing. He said to her "Mary!" "Just one word and forgotten are the heartaches, the long dreary hours, all the past blotted out in His presence."
I love that hymn. It is profoundly Christian
How did it turn out in practice?
Not to say that O'Connell wasn't an ecumenist in his own way. When my mother was a young teenager, a Baptist church in South Boston burned down. (My mother lived next door, and my grandmother was up all night, preparing food and coffee for the firefighters. Apparently, it was spectacular.)
O'Connell announced that, of course, Catholics could in no way contribute to the building of a Protestant church. However, he saw no reason they couldn't contribute to tearing one down. So he ordered a collection, and the proceeds were donated toward the demolition and site clean-up.
I like him for that. I still don't like his hymns though.
Maybe Pope John Paul the Great was a protestant plant meant to pollute Christian Catholicism by speaking about a personal relationship with Jesus.
And maybe he was hoping to appeal to Protestants by speaking their language. Not a bad idea. A lot of Protestant-Catholic hostility on FR threads strikes me as in many ways at least as much linguistic as doctrinal.
"It sounds as if the document is four-square behind the "ancient" and venerable traditions, liturgy, practices, etc."
That's my read as well. The history of the eastern church has been much different than that of the western church. The eastern church makes up maybe 2-3% of the whole. The tendency over time has been for dominant western church influences to creep into the eastern liturgy and practices. Sometimes those "latinizations" have been quite literally forced on the eastern churches.
The upshot is that in my opinion, the eastern churches did well at Vatican II.
"How did it turn out in practice?"
In my opinion, pretty well. The current status of the eastern churches is something of a mixed bag, but I think optimistic on balance. The biggest impacts to the eastern churches in the last 100 years (again my opinion) have been external factors, e.g. the rise and fall of communism. In the mideastern churches, islam and war have been the significant impacts.
As has so often happened in the history of the church, the places where the church is most viciously repressed in the past are the places where the church springs back later in most beautiful bloom.
The story of the eastern churches the U.S. is a mixed bag as well. The eastern churches are ethnic and the US is the great melting pot. Once the immigration peters out, the churches have something of a challenge in retaining both their traditions and parishioners. I think that's changing though as more latin rite Catholics are willing to look at something different, and as the existence of the eastern Catholic churches becomes better known to the public at large.
Yes, you are correct - though I don't belive I suggested otherwise. In any event, the obverse to your statement above would be equally valid.
I have to confess, though, I'm curious as to why you chose to select one of my comments ( and I made it in a global context, rather than directed at the USA example ) and then failed to address the point. We appear to be of the same generation. Can you recall when here was such "widespread heresy and apostacy we have experienced in the last 40 years.?
Does my memory fail me or was that not a contributory factor in your fleeing the NO to the "orthodoxy" of the Maronite Rite? ;-)
Thomas à Kempis
BOOK TWO
THE INTERIOR LIFE Christ will come to you offering His consolation, if you prepare a fit dwelling for Him in your heart, whose beauty and glory, wherein He takes delight, are all from within. His visits with the inward man are frequent, His communion sweet and full of consolation, His peace great, and His intimacy wonderful indeed.
Therefore, faithful soul, prepare your heart for this Bridegroom that He may come and dwell within you; He Himself says: "If any one love Me, he will keep My word, and My Father will love him, and We will come to him, and will make Our abode with him."[9]
Give place, then, to Christ, but deny entrance to all others, for when you have Christ you are rich and He is sufficient for you. He will provide for you. He will supply your every want, so that you need not trust in frail, changeable men. Christ remains forever, standing firmly with us to the end.
... When Christ was in the world, He was despised by men; in the hour of need He was forsaken by acquaintances and left by friends to the depths of scorn. He was willing to suffer and to be despised; do you dare to complain of anything? He had enemies and defamers; do you want everyone to be your friend, your benefactor? How can your patience be rewarded if no adversity test it? How can you be a friend of Christ if you are not willing to suffer any hardship? Suffer with Christ and for Christ if you wish to reign with Him.
Had you but once entered into perfect communion with Jesus or tasted a little of His ardent love, you would care nothing at all for your own comfort or discomfort but would rejoice in the reproach you suffer; for love of Him makes a man despise himself.
Now, all our peace in this miserable life is found in humbly enduring suffering rather than in being free from it. He who knows best how to suffer will enjoy the greater peace, because he is the conqueror of himself, the master of the world, a friend of Christ, and an heir of heaven. ... To walk with God interiorly, to be free from any external affection -- this is the state of the inward man. The Seventh Chapter
Loving Jesus Above All Things
... He who clings to a creature will fall with its frailty, but he who gives himself to Jesus will ever be strengthened.
Love Him, then; keep Him as a friend. He will not leave you as others do, or let you suffer lasting death. Sometime, whether you will or not, you will have to part with everything. Cling, therefore, to Jesus in life and death; trust yourself to the glory of Him who alone can help you when all others fail. Your Beloved is such that He will not accept what belongs to another -- He wants your heart for Himself alone, to be enthroned therein as King in His own right. If you but knew how to free yourself entirely from all creatures, Jesus would gladly dwell within you.
The Eighth Chapter
THE INTIMATE FRIENDSHIP OF JESUS
WHEN Jesus is near, all is well and nothing seems difficult. When He is absent, all is hard. When Jesus does not speak within, all other comfort is empty, but if He says only a word, it brings great consolation.
Did not Mary Magdalen rise at once from her weeping when Martha said to her: "The Master is come, and calleth for thee"?[13] Happy is the hour when Jesus calls one from tears to joy of spirit.
How dry and hard you are without Jesus! How foolish and vain if you desire anything but Him! Is it not a greater loss than losing the whole world? For what, without Jesus, can the world give you? Life without Him is a relentless hell, but living with Him is a sweet paradise. If Jesus be with you, no enemy can harm you.
He who finds Jesus finds a rare treasure, indeed, a good above every good, whereas he who loses Him loses more than the whole world. The man who lives without Jesus is the poorest of the poor, whereas no one is so rich as the man who lives in His grace.
It is a great art to know how to converse with Jesus, and great wisdom to know how to keep Him. Be humble and peaceful, and Jesus will be with you. Be devout and calm, and He will remain with you. You may quickly drive Him away and lose His grace, if you turn back to the outside world. And, if you drive Him away and lose Him, to whom will you go and whom will you then seek as a friend? You cannot live well without a friend, and if Jesus be not your friend above all else, you will be very sad and desolate. Thus, you are acting foolishly if you trust or rejoice in any other. Choose the opposition of the whole world rather than offend Jesus. Of all those who are dear to you, let Him be your special love. Let all things be loved for the sake of Jesus, but Jesus for His own sake.
end of quotes
*That's a personal relationship with Jesus. That is the Catholic Truth. Because protestants, rightly, speak about a personal relationship with Jesus doesn't mean that phrase is suspect. It means we, me and thee, don't use it enough. We Christian Catholics have the fullest personal relationship with Jesus - beginnning with our Baptism in which we are buried with Him
For we are buried together with him by baptism into death: that, as Christ is risen from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we also may walk in newness of life.
Illuminating -- thanks!
As I stated, I find the modern usage of the word "relationship" irking, because it comes from the therapeutic culture. For me, it gets in the way. If you like it, use it. You seem to trying to prove yourself right in a doctrinal disagreement, when my whole point was linguistic and stylistic, merely noting pre-VII habits of word usage.
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