“crassest megachurch and emergent varieties”
The author needs to get out more. You can easily (can’t avoid?) find all this and worse in today’s Catholic church. Thanks, Vatican II.
“What can I say about the shows of devotion and veneration which I witnessed around these cadaverous morsels?”
Yet more ignorance on display.
Folk religion is an attempt to bring a distant God into the lives of people. But God is not distant, if one approaches Him by faith through The Atonement, as a little child.
People of the middle ages lived in Faith. Those who were holy were recognized as having great Grace, and were venerated for that.
We may know a slight bit more about science and “reason” than they did (although what we know amounts to almost nothing in the grand sum of things) but even worse, that makes us PROUD. As such, we have also lost our faith.
I apologize for not commenting directly to the topic, but from my experience from comments made about the Reformation, I would like to note the distinctions between these various and divergent theological movements. There is this view that Martin Luther is to blame for everything that is wrong with Protestantism. Luther was not the first Protestant reformer, and there were many reformers before, during, and after Luther that had no connection with Luther’s reformation. In fact, the Lutheran Confessions denounce the beliefs and practices of the Anabaptists and Calvinists. Do not confuse Lutheranism with Calvinism or Arminianism. They are profoundly different.
His conclusion:
I close with three thoughts. First, my trip to Rome reminded me once again of how inadequate evangelical Protestant literature on contemporary Catholicism is. It tends to be either of the `Vatican II changed nothing and the Pope is still Antichrist' variety, or the equally unhelpful and inaccurate 'Vatican II changed everything and, frankly, I cannot remember why I am still a Protestant' kind. We need some good Protestant writing on this subject which will help future pastors, elders, and church members engage thoughtfully, respectfully, and in an informed manner, with Catholicism and Catholic friends.
Second, I was challenged by a Catholic friend, when I raised the issues of Padre Pio and St Anthony's tongue, to consider whether my own reaction was conditioned in part by my being more a son of David Hume and the Enlightenment than I care to admit. Easy to dismiss this point, but it perhaps deserves more reflection than I have given it. There is a fine line between credulity and skepticism; and I am mindful of that statement by Newman in his work on the Arian controversy: `[H]e who believes a little, but encompasses that little with the inventions of men, is undeniably in a better condition than he who blots out from his mind both the human inventions, and that portion of truth which was concealed in them.' A biblical balance is needed; and I am not sure that I have necessarily found it myself.
Finally, it seems that it is very easy for American Catholic intellectuals, and those evangelicals who are attracted by Rome, to ignore the tongues, the jaws, the bits of the real cross, the stigmatics, the folk religion. But American pick-n-mix consumerism applied to Catholicism is just one more manifestation of, dare I say it?, the modern Western aesthetic of choice; it is emphatically not the same as Catholicism as it works itself out in the very backyard of the Roman See; and it will not do simply to say that the practices of such are not significant; they are significant, at least for anyone who takes seriously their Catholicism. The picture in Rome, in Padua, in San Giovanni Rotondo, is more complicated than ECT, and those evangelicals and would-be-converts who would put down the Codex Sinaiticus and step outside the precincts of the Vatican to observe what goes on in Italy in the name of the Church might find their excitement at meeting with a cardinal or two somewhat tempered by silent tongues that have long since ceased wagging but which continue to speak eloquently about certain priorities in Catholicism.