I made a comment further up the chain that yesterday's keepers of the vanguard in their suits and mitres could see the radicals of the 1960s-1990s from a mile away, be it from their long hair, spiked hair, new wave hair, or flannel shirts, respectively.
Today's radicals are the ones in suits and mitres. They effectively infiltrated the vanguard ranks and wiped them out from within...almost like Order 66 from Star Wars. In turn, the remaining Normals sometimes wear suits but they tend to wear jeans. And as Mrs Don-O said a few post back, it sure seems like we're are being herded like cattle into a homogenized church where tradition is bad rigidity and progressivism is saving grace.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Fulton Sheen called this a long time ago:
"The modern world, which denies personal guilt and admits only social crimes, which has no place for personal repentance but only public reforms, has divorced Christ from His Cross; the Bridegroom and Bride have been pulled apart. What God hath joined together, men have torn asunder. As a result, to the left is the Cross; to the right is the Christ”. […] Communism comes along and picks up the meaningless Cross; Western post-Christian civilization chooses the unscarred Christ.”
“Communism has chosen the Cross in the sense that it has brought back to an egotistic world a sense of discipline, self-abnegation, surrender, hard work, study, and dedication to supraindividual goals. But the Cross without Christ is sacrifice without love. Hence, Communism has produced a society that is authoritarian, cruel, oppressive of human freedom, filled with concentrantion camps, firing squads, and brain-washings”
“The Western post-Christian civilization has picked up the Christ without His Cross. But a Christ without a sacrifice that reconciles the world to God is a cheap, feminized, colorless, itinerant preacher who deserves to be popular for His great Sermon on the Mount, but also merits unpopularity for what He said about His Divinity on the one hand, and divorce, judgment, and hell on the other. This sentimental Christ is patched together with a thousand commonplaces. […] Without His Cross, He becomes nothing more than a sultry precursor of democracy or a humanitarian who taught brotherhood without tears”.
A similar situation overtook America from 1989-2016. We went down this long, crazy path...from American Exceptionalism and JPII helping to save the world from communism, to a kinder and gentler nation, to It Takes a Village, to compassionate conservatism, to hopey-changey tyranny. The Church today sure feels a lot like America in the summer of 2015.
We came within 76k votes of a fresh hell that may have done us in. Trump may not be perfect, but neither was St Peter or pretty much any of the Apostles. God works in mysterious ways, and He often lets us twist in the wind before helping, And without getting too deep into a "Trump was sent by God" discussion, it was reported that Kellyanne Conway reportedly took Donald Trump to meet Father George Rutler, the Anglican convert priest in NYC (I've attended his masses - he is spectacular), who blessed the future president just days before his election.
I am just another simple member of the Catholic faithful, but it seems to me that absent a Cardinal Trump who becomes the Pope when this Pontificate ends, it is up to the laity to let those few, those happy few Band of Brothers still loyal to Christ in the clergy...to let them know that we have their backs, that we will NOT GO willingly into the darkness, and that if there is something WE can do (after all, these men don't like being publicly ridiculed...)
we are there.