Posted on 03/21/2018 10:49:58 AM PDT by GoldenState_Rose
As history demonstrates, in France as elsewhere, the Church is always rising from the dead because the gates of Hell cannot prevail against her...
It’s not that secularism is dead...It isn’t (like the poor it is always with us). It is simply that it does not have the power to defeat the forces of Christendom...
“A few years ago,” Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, “I started to realize something. Whenever I was less than five minutes early for Mass, I had to go to the overflow room, and I would typically have to step over people sitting on the floor to get there. The church was filled to the gills every Sunday, with young families and children most of the time.”
Mr. Gobry, who lives in Paris, experienced the same thing when he moved to a different part of the city. The church was packed. There were wealthy and elderly Parisians but also many immigrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and Indian Ocean countries, as well as “the kinds of hipsters you might not expect to be religious.” Also, and significantly, Mr. Gobry tells us that “there are children everywhere.”
Mr. Gobry makes a point of attending other, random parishes on Sundays, “just to see if this is a real trend” and has found that Sunday high Mass is packed in most parishes in Paris and that the same is true in Lyon, the second largest city in France.
Surprisingly perhaps, at least for those of a neo-atheist persuasion who consider religion the preserve of the ignorant, the Catholic revival in France is a phenomenon most marked among the “highly educated” in the large cities. It is not the remnant of a disappearing past or a disappearing peasantry but the manifestation of a revitalized present promising a revivalist future.
(Excerpt) Read more at theimaginativeconservative.org ...
The Son rises in the West.
Amen and SECOND IT.
Good news a few days before the start of the Week called Holy.
If these people are true believers, this is great; if they dissent from the Church on major positions, it is meaningless. I’m shocked at how many self-professed “Catholics” openly and publicly disagree with the Church on divorce/remarriage, artificial birth control, even the concepts of mortal sin/Hell. Nobody’s perfect, but I find it odd they wear their religion on their sleeve while this dissent spills from their lips.
France has been known as the elder daughter of the Church. This is why France doesn’t have a law allowing the killing of just-born babies or for “euthanasia.” There is hope for France.
Now if we could just get Macron to strengthen the borders, we’d be OK.
Traditionalism reigns in today’s French Catholicism...and the new Archbishop of Paris, Michel Aupetit is a former medical doctor who has authored several intensely pro-life bioethics books touching on euthanasia, abortion, cloning etc...
Pope Francis has actually made *few* good appointments, to God’s credit of course.
That's a truly new thing in history. There have been bad popes in (almost) every century, but the bad ones did not mess with doctrine. It simply did not interest them. They were into individual vice: gambling or liquor, women or boys, castles in France, money (always money) or the comeuppance of their personal rivals.
The pope opposing the Church on doctrine: that's the new thing. It's causing unprecedented disorientation and planting a thousand half-hidden explosive and incendiary devices in our walls and under our floors.
The pope, and all his political NGO - EU - UN - URI allies.
However, Pearce is speaking of young Catholics, convert Catholics, Catholics with kids, La Manif Pour Tous. That's the encouraging part.
The smallest living thing is more powerful than the most powerful dying thin. So: keep your eyes on those young, young Catholics. These Pierres Vivantes will build the Church.
“...if they dissent from the Church on major positions, it is meaningless.”
Dissenting and sinning are not the same thing. Every practicing Catholic I know is a miserable sinner, but many fewer practicing Catholics I know obnoxiously claim they know better than the Church about what is objectively right and wrong. I find that most Catholics who go to Mass every Sunday and are making the sacrifice to send their children to Catholic schools are doing the best they can to be good Catholics. If they happen to be practicing birth control — and I don’t know how many of them are — they at least aren’t claiming that they are “right” and that the Church is benighted. I am not going to say that Catholics like these may as well not go to church at all. Perhaps it would be better if the priests actually, you know, preached.
“Mr. Gobry makes a point of attending other, random parishes on Sundays, “just to see if this is a real trend” and has found that Sunday high Mass is packed in most parishes in Paris and that the same is true in Lyon, the second largest city in France. “
Protestant here but in no way opposed to the RCC - and very happy to hear of the full churches in France (I actually attend a Catholic church, which is full of a healthy mix of young and old).
Yes! Amen. Holy Week is upon us and there is so much to think about, pray about. Exciting times indeed.
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