I also come from the Northeast and in what was then the very Catholic State of Connecticut and City of New Haven. I am probably somewhat older than you are and that may give me some additional perspective on the pre-Vatican II Church and particularly during the time of Pope Pius XII who died a year before I graduated grammar school. In those days, Rhode Island was quite Catholic as was Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire, and much of Maine and Vermont. New York, New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania were also rather Catholic. It was the Catholicism not only of Pope Pius XII but also Francis Cardinal Spellman and Richard Cardinal Cushing who were giants compared to many of their successors. Harder line than even they were was James Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles. It was also the time of Bishop Fulton Sheen whose Catholic religious lectures weekly in prime time on NBC were the most watched series on TV for all three years.
In those times, many of us confessed our sins weekly and attended Mass and received the Eucharist at least weekly. A lot of the fervor of 1950s Catholicism fell victim to the "spirit of" Second Vatican Council, an eruption of subterranean Church radicalism that had been suppressed for about five decades. The radicals waited for Pius XII to die (1958), elected the aged Angelo Cardinal Roncalli as Pope John XXIII, brought about that council and confused the Faithful beyond imagination. When, as expected, Pope John XXIII died after a short reign (1963), Giovanni Cardinal Montini was elected as Paul VI and was a singularly ineffective pope in many ways during his fifteen year term. He did come down hard against artificial birth control in Humanae Vitae but was unable to cause compliance among the Faithful. Those two popes and twenty years nearly drove me from the Church to Russian Orthodoxy. At the end of year twenty, John Paul I and then John Paul II were elected.
Your experiences and mine differ greatly and I could really only attempt to "sell" you on my Church and Catholicism face to face which is not likely to happen given my age and health. I note the message of your last paragraph in the post to which I am responding. I grieve for at least some of what you have experienced and I pray that those experiences will, by whatever route, lead you to heaven and to the eternal embrace of our Heavenly Father.
God bless you and yours!
Yes, I’m younger, in my 40’s, but whether the Catholic Church is traditional or Vatican II doesn’t make a significant difference to me. As someone born in 1970, I came to a knowledge of Jesus Christ over time through hearing about Him here and there and from God’s Word. And all the worldly grandeur, ritualism and ceremony of the CC contradicts the portraits of Jesus and the Church in the Gospels and the New Testament. I had a simple but strong belief in Jesus as a young girl with my family here and there going to a Lutheran Church, where we learned little but the Golden rule, and about forgiveness, and about Jesus’ time on earth, and even though I never heard negatives about the CC, just what I saw of the Pope on TV struck me as all wrong, although I’ve only realized that and thought of it recently. Passover was also an intimate family meal, and Jesus had it with His new family, and again, the thought that all sorts of rules on it, like having a cup in a wrong place will displease Dad, is sorely (Cont’d)
mistaken. It’s religion once again, and if religion was what the Lord wanted, He couldn’t be surpassed with the religion of Israel. A New Year, followed by a day of Atonement, a living in booths to show their life here was temporary and dependent on the Lord, etc., and then a temple with an outer court, and then inside the temple a holy place, and then a curtain further separating the Holy of Holies, where only the High Priest could go once a year, in a heavily dictated fashion, to offer atonement for the peoples’ sins. All of that and more was only a shadow and given by God to bring us to Christ. What the Lord is interested in before all else is hearts, not outward actions. Before Him we are like hardened criminals who society rightly hopes to keep in prison, unless there is a conversion. If there is that conversion to God, through Jesus, then we are born again, and it is not actions separate from our hearts that the Lord looks at. Two people might tell a lie, but while the unbeliever might justify (Cont’d)
it, the Christian is deeply in pain over it. The unbeliever doesn’t care what God says or wants, what He loves and what He hates, but the Christian loves the Lord and His ways and does what he or she knows to do to keep away from sin, yet has now caved to pressure and told a lie. It’s similar to what Peter and the other apostles did when they abandoned Jesus and denied Him. But this is where being the Lord’s comes in. We can still have peace and joy amidst our frailty because we’re told to rejoice at all times and that what we’re going through is God’s will for us at the time. When our frailty is exposed, God is working to strengthen us, even though it will likely hurt for a time. That’s for those who are the Lord’s. But sometimes some people are in the church and see from their failures or from examining themselves that they’ve never surrendered themselves to Jesus Christ. So looking at ourselves can be another of God’s mercies. All in all, it’s the “sinner who repents” which causes celebration in (CONT’D)