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.
Has St. Michael the Archangel sinned? We know Lucifer and Luther did.
I don’t educate insolent students. I don’t have time for them.
Oh.
I don’t think there is a reason for you to be nasty.
I appreciated this article, as did you, and I thought I would present my thoughts.
The same sort of thing I am saying about apostasy and heresy hurting churches in true of other and any denomination.
I found it interestingly coincidental that the author pointed to 50 years before Ratzinger’s birth that the “infiltration” (his term) began.
That corresponds well to shortly after making Mary’s sinless state an official theology as per the Pope’s decree in 1854.
Only Christ was sinless and this represents something that when propagated in this official manner can only harm a church.
So it may not be coincidental that the problems this author sees began shortly after this change.
I am not singling out the Catholic church as the only Christian denomination that has cultivated these sort of problems.
Today, for example, the Presbyterian church is weakening itself with their same sex marriage endorsement.
What’s the difference from jumping to your feet, hollering at the top of your lungs and buying Tom Brady jerseys and framing them in your home?
Ummm... Where did you get THAT from? I’m more into hockey; but I don’t have any sports memorabilia. I do have plaques and mementos from the military units I served in but again, I don’t burn incense to them nor bow to them.
The only “cheering” I do is when my Cadets compete in drill competitions (after they complete their performance) and that is simply part of being a mentor.
In my office I have a glass cabinet filled with notes, letters, pictures, etc given to me by cadets (current and former). Again, I don’t light incense or bow to them. They’re simply man made objects without power. I don’t speak to them because those who gifted them to me can’t hear through them.
My keepsakes are completely different from the pagan practice of bowing to figurines of “ancestors.” Why do Catholics need the rest of us to accept their profane practices?
Thanks. You've proved my point.
Only if you are completely ignoring the part where I don’t bow to them nor burn incense to them. They are simply objects.
Do you kneel to images of “saints” or to “relics?”
I don’t do that with my mementos.
Your behavior connotes worship; mine does not.
Enjoy your paganism but at least be honest about it.
Do you stand up, take off you hat and put your right hand on your heart during the National Anthem, all while looking at a cloth flag?
The prayer “Sub tuum praesiduum” (”We fly to thy protection, O Holy Mother of God” ...) is extant in a Coptic papyrus dated to AD 250.
I pledge my allegiance to the ideals represented.
Then I boil some relic bones to make soup. Have you ever tried saint soup? It’s quite tasty.
There are no "dead saints". God, the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob, is not the God of the dead, but of the living. It's in your Bible.
People don't "light candles to saints". The candles are symbolic of prayers offered to God; they aren't any kind of sacrifice to a saint. There are candle stands in my parish church that are in front of pews, not statues; are they sacrifices to wooden benches?
Images are incensed by both Catholics and Orthodox. The connotation is respect, not sacrifice. (The ministers, the people, and the altar are also incensed; I assume you don't think we're worshipping them.)
You see... the flag is a collection of thread and dye. It has no power. No sane person would kneel before a man made, inanimate object, burn candles in it’s honor nor offer incense.
The pledge is simply recalling concepts represented by a dead piece of cloth. I’ve taught cadets how to dispose of flags in a ceremony in which they are burned.
Perhaps you ought to do that with your pagan statues and relics.
The decree in question didn't change anything that wasn't believed before. Belief in Mary's sinlessness was standard fare in the west for 1500 years or more before, and to some extent in the East as well.
Only Christ was sinless
The Bible nowhere says that. Adam and Eve were certainly sinless before the Fall. You end up with serious errors if you try to say that their sin was inevitable or necessary "because they were human".
Why don't you invest some time and effort uprooting the paganism and idolatry from your own life, and leave us alone. I'm certain you can find some. Did you put God first in your life today?
IF — Have you ready any of the early Fathers of the Church?
You may want to educate yourself along the way.
Just like Protestants.
They also bitterly reject making pictures of anything sacred, because they think it's idolatry.
Just like Protestants.
Just because something looks similar, doesn't mean it is similar.
So, are you could do away with the “relics,” actually body parts from corpses (often gilded and decorated) and statuary?
The Pope welcomed an Imam into the Vatican to pray to Allah. Obviously your Church has no problem with Islam.
BTW, caww, in your second picture, that looks like a Mass to me. There happens to be a statue of Mary in the niche over the altar, but they aren’t praying to the statue, or even to Mary. The Mass barely mentions Mary, or any other saint.
He's also welcomed Protestants and prayed with them, and even asked them to bless him.
I don't agree with that either. Does that mean that the church "has no problem" with Protestants?
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