Posted on 04/26/2015 10:04:43 AM PDT by ebb tide
There is an amusing investing term called a ‘dead cat bounce.’ It follows from the idea that "even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height." A dead cat bounce refers to a temporary recovery from a prolonged decline followed by a continuation of the downtrend. The dead cat bounce is a sucker’s bet. Suckers, thinking that the worst is over and that things have reached bottom, start buying up stock. In reality, the temporary rally is caused by investors shorting the stock purchasing the worthless stock to cover long-term bets against the company creating short-term buying pressure.
In short, the suckers buy up worthless stock thinking the worst is over and the stock is on the uptrend despite the fact that all the fundamental measures should tell them otherwise.
I am a sucker who got fooled by the dead cat bounce.
In 2005 the Catholic Church elected Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI and created a short term rally. In 2007, Pope Benedict XVI issued motu proprio Summorum Pontificum freeing up the Old Mass. As a beleaguered Catholic heavily invested in the Church, I allowed myself to believe that perhaps the worst was over. Even though none of the fundamentals had changed, I bought into the foolish notion that we had hit bottom and that it was all uphill from there. It might be slow, it might be painful at times, but the progressives who had systematically sought to destroy the Church for forty years were getting old and would soon die off. Young people seemed to increasingly embrace tradition. Time was now on the side of tradition.
Boy was I ever wrong. I bought into the Catholic version of the dead cat bounce.
In reality, the Church was thoroughly infiltrated and infested with progressives from top to bottom. Their quiescence during the early years of the Benedictine pontificate did not signify that they knew they were defeated, quite the opposite in fact. It was merely a tactic of the moment by a nefarious group of modernists that had been playing the long game since some fifty years before Joseph Ratzinger was even born.
Within a few short years, they had effectively ground Pope Benedict’s papacy into nothingness and ultimately Pope Benedict just gave up. The dead cat bounced. The decline continues unabated and in many ways has picked up speed, progressive gravity working its freefall magic.
The Church is experiencing a great crisis, what Bishop Athanasius Schneider calls the fourth great crisis of the Church. Many well-meaning Catholics want to exclusively focus their attention on the culture at large ignoring what is happening in the Church. But this is first and foremost a crisis of faith, a crisis of the Church. I have come to the conclusion that it is impossible for the Church as a whole to effectively engage the culture with the purpose of saving souls when the Church, in large part, ignores the need for souls to be saved. Moreover, Catholics themselves are lost to sin because the Church has given up on them. Many Catholics who have only attended the Novus Ordo simply have no idea of what has been lost and what is necessary to truly engage the culture as the Church did successfully for two millennia.
The Catholics who generally sense that things are headed in the wrong direction in the Church but that have yet to fully understand or acknowledge the depth of the crisis are not the enemy. In many ways they are the future. They are the folks that cannot imagine that the October Synod will undermine marriage. Focusing on the internal crisis of the Church makes many Catholics uncomfortable, some angrily rejecting the truth or its messengers. They don’t want to believe it is true. I understand. I was like you.
For me, the turning point was the closing years of Pope Benedict’s papacy when I realized that in many dioceses the Pope’s signature achievement, Summorum Pontificum, was simply a dead letter, like it never even happened. That modernist progressivism was much more entrenched in the Church than I had assumed. My opening eyes moved to Japanese Manga cartoon size during the first two years of Pope Francis’s pontificate. Modernists, sensing their moment, have come out of the woodwork. Even some prelates I thought mostly reliable have firmly established their modernist bona fides. We now have Cardinals openly opposing Cardinals, Bishops openly opposing Bishops. We have the top hierarchy of the Church, with a few notable exceptions, openly and publicly debating how to get around the very words of Jesus Christ so that they can institutionalize the sexual revolution in the Church that has only tacitly accepted it the past fifty years.
The depth of the crisis makes itself more manifest every day and I don’t think it will get better any time soon. I don’t know how far our heavenly Father will allow His Church to go down this road, but I suspect it is a ways more. But as Catholics, our supreme focus should be on saving souls by preaching the Gospel. But we must face the fact that much of the new navel–gazing anthropocentric Church is no longer interested in doing that. To change that, it is necessary to support all those Catholics in the middle as they grow in their unease and understanding of the nature of this crisis and that its only solution lies in tradition and the restoration of all things in Christ.
When did they bring in the Mary worship?
Late 1800’s?
When Christ was on the Cross and addressing St. John. Is that early enough for you?
They began to worship Mary when Christ was on the cross?
Mary is venerated, not worshipped by Catholics. Look up hyperdulia.
When did the sola scriptura folks decide that Christ’s clear teaching of divorce only in the case of marital infidelity also meant divorce for irreconcilable differences?
For later.
Nobody in the Catholic Church worships Mary.
Are you even on the right thread? Your question has nothing to do with the posted article.
The reason Benedict retired was due to health reasons, and maybe even the financial scandal that erupted from the Vatican Bank (and the betrayal of his butler. That probably took a personal mental toll).
The progressives in the Church don’t have some kind of grand master plan in place, pulling all the strings and manipulating even Popes, as this article implies. That’s just conspiracy theory nonsense on par with the likes of Alex Jones. Might as well call up the crazy haired Ancient Aliens guy if we are going down that road.
There are any number of “Sayings” in the investment world that could be applied to life in general.
“A rising tide lifts all boats”.......
........except the vessels with giant holes in them.
You don't seem to understand: the progressives have already pulled all the strings in the last conclave. Pope Francis himself is a progressive. He's one of "them" and he's the one with the "master plan". Look at his speeches, sermons, and his SinNods.
What other Pope has discouraged a Protestant bishop from converting to Catholicism for the supposed excuse of "building bridges". What good is a bridge if no one crosses it?
“Are you even on the right thread? Your question has nothing to do with the posted article.”
Yes.
My question was in response to this section of the article:
“In reality, the Church was thoroughly infiltrated and infested with progressives from top to bottom. Their quiescence during the early years of the Benedictine pontificate did not signify that they knew they were defeated, quite the opposite in fact. It was merely a tactic of the moment by a nefarious group of modernists that had been playing the long game since some fifty years before Joseph Ratzinger was even born.”
Ratzinger was born in 1927. And the writer posits that the Modernists had begun 50 years before Ratzinger was ever born. That would be 1877.
I was wondering when the Mary worship began, which is not that far off from 1877, if I am not mistaken.
Any apostasy or heresy weakens a church of denomination. We see that in protestant denominations.
I wonder if a similar dynamic has taken place in the Catholic denomination. Apostasy makes a denomination rife for the sort of decline the author of his piece is lamenting.
“Nobody in the Catholic Church worships Mary.”
That’s a relief!
This is a perfect opportunity for me to clarify some things:
I’m not a fan of Francis but I don’t believe he’s a “progressive” in so much as he doesn’t believe birth control is a sin, and/or he doesn’t think abortion is a sin. Nor does he support gay “marriage”. He does appear to have some leftist political leanings but I don’t believe they contaminate his social beliefs as described above.
There was talk shortly after his election (and I believe this may be correct) that he was almost elected before (then) Ratzinger. So it’s no surprise he was elected after Benedict stepped down. It’s not a grand master conspiracy.
It’s as the author of this piece said before: the progressives in the Church are dying off and all this garbage will slowly die off with them. Francis is a result of their dying influence not strengthened influence.
I see no reason to believe in conspiracy theories. It’s pretty plain to me: in 30-50 years when all the hippies are dead so will talk of allowing the divorced and remarried access to the Eucharist, as well as all the other hand-wringing we hear now from those who hate all things Francis.
Was it not Francis who allowed a Muslim to lead a prayer to Allah in the Vatican?
The various dulia simply point to a type of pantheistic theology not unsimilar to Buddhism.
It is interesting that you get it. Your comments about the current Pope and his place in these modernists, as the author called them.
I am looking broader long term to see how this evolved.
I do see that the Immaculate Conception was made dogma in 1854.
The Sola Scriptura people have never accepted divorce, and will not allow pastors to be divorced either. Most PROTESTANT churches have went away from Sola Scriptura. Try a Fundamental Baptist church to see what Sola Scriptura actually means.
“The various dulia simply point to a type of pantheistic theology not unsimilar to Buddhism.”
Except that classic Buddhism has no theology at all since it doesn’t believe in God. Also, veneration of saints cannot be viewed as “pantheistic” because it is predicated upon the same communion with God that all Christians share in - just that saints, being in heaven, and perfected by Christ’s grace, share in that communion to a greater degree.
Who could effect the next papal conclave more than the Pope who appoints the Cardinals?
It's not much different than Obama and the Supreme Court.
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